Role Models Without Guarantees: The Cultural Politics of Latino Male Teacher Representation

• In Event: 42.064 - Race Theory and Educational Research: The Power of "Representations"

Abstract

A Cultural Studies approach to race scholarship reveals the importance of representation, and the constant struggle for racial signification in a racially unequal society. Within the cultural politics of race relations, racial categories are made real through discursive representation, rather than physical traits and biological determinants (Hall, 1997). This is not to say that race becomes a fabricated identity to be ignored, but rather to demonstrate the instability of racial identity, and the continuous discursive struggle for signification. For boys of color, symbolic vilification and degradation are the popular images of Black and Latino boys in schools (Harper & Williams Jr., 2014). Research documents the ways racially prejudice school structures, policies, and attitudes are quick to categorize Black and Latino boys as rebellious and socially deviant (Ferguson, 2001; Malagon, 2010; Noguera, Hurtado, & Fergus, 2011; Noguera, 2009). One response to the “failing” brown boy, has been a popular cry for the recruitment and retention of more male teachers of color (Vilson, 2015). However, this broader call for more male teachers at a national and international level has been criticized as an attempt to re-masculinize education and perpetuate essentialized notions of race and gender (Brockenbrough, 2015; Martino & Rezai-Rashti, 2012; Martino, 2008).

This paper employs a Cultural Studies of race framework to understand how discourses of the “positive Latino male figure” function within the cultural politics of Latino male identity in a San Francisco Bay Area middle school. This research project was constructed as an ethnographic case study of a middle school program for Latino boys called Latinos United, and data was collected over the course of 12 months. Methods of data collection included participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Latinos United is headed by Mr. Vera, a third year Latino male teacher. By exploring the ways Mr. Vera’s presence in Latinos United enters a preexisting and complex cultural politics of Latino maleness, this study’s preliminary findings identify two key cultural representations Mr. Vera is asks to embody as Latino male role model: 1) The adult Latino male as authoritarian/disciplinarian, and 2) The adult Latino male as productive, on task, and serious pedagogue. Both these cultural expectations of Mr. Vera were prevalent among faculty, staff and students, and these expectations often demonstrated an assumed deficit of Latino boys, representing the children of the program as out of control, undisciplined, emotional, disinterested and slow. Despite these cultural expectations, my data finds Mr. Vera’s presence and actions as serving as a counter-representation, demonstrating the instability of the Latino male identity and creating space for cultural resistance. This paper argues for critical reflection by male of color educators, and a consciousness of the cultural work their presence as “role models” performs within a larger cultural arena. Furthermore, through an analyzing the counter-representational practices employed by Mr. Vera, this chapter argues for a cultural politics of the borderlands, drawing on Chicana feminist thought (Anzaldúa, 2012; Villenas, 2010) to envision new forms of critical self-representation within dominant cultural representations of Latino males.

Author

• Michael Singh, Berkeley University of California