"Instead of Being Racist, Just Say 'M' for Mexican": Children Exploring Race and Immigration

• In Event: 32.063 - Undertaking and Remaking Identity Politics in Educational Institutional Practice

Abstract

In spite of the significance of racial identity and processes of racialization for the schooling experiences of children of color, explicit talk about race and other forms of difference such as immigration status are often silenced at school (see Cuevas & Chung, 2015; Milner, 2015). At the same time, children are active self- and sense-makers who perform and co-construct dynamic self- and other positionings and collaboratively explore group membership, processes that include talk about race and other forms of difference (Corsaro, 2005).

Based on long-term ethnographic research in a U.S. community with large and growing numbers of Mexican immigrants, in this paper I discuss how a group of African American, Mexican, and Mexican American fourth graders explored notions of difference through talk about race and immigration in their play and conversation with each other outside of daily classroom instruction. Following Reyes’ (2011) work on “racist cries” by Asian American youth, I explore how children experimented with identity categories through explicit metapragmatic activity around race in which they linked mention or public labeling of peers as “African American,” “Black,” or “Mexican” to racist discourse. To do so I draw from linguistic anthropological frameworks that highlight the interactional and ideological processes involved in how young people make use of identity markers as they respond to and take up broader circulating discourses such about race and immigration. Using ethnographic data collected through field notes and recorded conversations among fourth graders, I employ discourse analytic methods to look at how, in their interactions, race became conflated with ethnicity and nationality, which had the effect of silencing conversation about immigration and interethnic relations, much like how these topics were silenced during classroom instruction. However, when children had opportunities to openly discuss how they understood what it meant to be “racist,” they engaged in difficult, but critical conversations about these topics.

Through my analyses I show how children actively engage in processes of social identification as they make sense of difference, and how their conversations around race and immigration build on, complicate, and contribute to the formation of racial ideologies. I argue that in schooling contexts where the majority of teachers are white, the majority of students are of color, and interethnic tensions underlie daily interactions, more attention to how children explore and experiment with difference through talk about racial, ethnic, and national identity could provide insight into how to develop more race-conscious pedagogies and educational policies (Leonardo, 2013).

Author

• Holly Link, Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Eduación (CCATE)