Black Lives Matter to Latinx Students: Exploring Social Practices of Latinx Youth as Activists in the Rural Midwest

• In Event: Reimagining Rural Education in the Times of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

In June 2020, in a small, rural, rust belt town in the Midwest, over one hundred residents stood on the grounds of the county courthouse and publicly protested for Black Lives Matter. Once middle and high school students began to arrive, the protest shifted. Latinx youth led chants, held signs, and stood in the front of the other protesters, moving the protest forward away from the courthouse and toward the busy street of passing cars. I knew these de facto protest leaders well—they were my former students. Rural students are stereotyped, and Latinx students are historically marginalized as well, bearing layers of cultural and social inequity. This critical discourse study of how rural Latinx students used their bodies and hand-made signs in this BLM protest disrupts the assumption of rural middle America as simple, homogenous, and conservative and, using a geosemiotics research approach, seeks to explore the intersectional ways in which Latinx youth position and identify themselves as activists. My study expands current conceptualizations of rurality and critical literacy while examining how Black Lives matter to Latinx youth.

Author

• Amy Walker, Kent State University