"Here Being in School Is Worse": How Latinx Teachers Navigate Hostile Spaces in the U.S. South

• In Event: Division K Section 7: Identity Roundtable

Abstract

This qualitative investigation about Latinx K-12 in South Carolina fills a gap in the academic literature because there is a dearth of research examining Latinx teachers (micro) experiences in the U.S. South. Centering an explicitly spatial frame, I map out three broad relations to what many participants described as “hostile spaces.” First, participants described living and working with/in spatialized relations that were explicitly prohibitive, racialized, and/or exploitative. Second, I sketched the blurry boundaries of relations that resulted from efforts to (re)make, negotiate, and improve such hostile spaces for themselves as teachers, but often for their students (of color). Third, I mapped a set of instances when teachers refused normative spatial practices, zig-zagged, and purposely sought to create hostile spaces.

Author

• Timothy Monreal, California State University - Bakersfield