Community Cultural Wealth in the Puerto Rican Rural Midwest?

• In Event: Of Archives, Unstably Housed Families, Languages, and the Chicago Young Lords: Community Cultural Wealth Connections

Abstract

How does removing a Puerto Rican migrant from a classroom for not daring to speak in English help a student believe a teacher and a school have his best interests? How does such action shape the student’s lack of desire to return to the school? How does a mother intervene and what are the possibilities of such intervention? The purpose of this talk is to explore these questions through the theoretical framework of Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) to illustrate how a Puerto Rican family employed varied forms of capital in the contexts of bilingualism and parent involvement in the rural Midwest. By focusing on multiple dimensions of Community Cultural Wealth, I show an example of Puerto Rican life in a small town in central Illinois, a region that despite continuously perceived as white and monolithic in the public imaginary, has witnessed shifting demographics and growing Latinx communities. Data for this talk draw from a larger research study that explored rural-to-rural migration between two towns in rural Puerto Rico and the rural Midwest. The study, guided by a qualitative mode of inquiry, encompassed methods such as participant observations, critical content and discourse analysis, and 34 interviews with 39 participants between 2016-2018 in the two locations. Specific data sources utilized in this paper focus on interviews with one teacher, one migrant youth, and the youth’s mother. Inspired by the word, cuchillo / knife, that was required to be translated aloud, I present findings as a lesson in three acts: the cut, the wound, and the repair. I find that because of the family’s Community Cultural Wealth and involvement in this act of injustice, there was an unexpected transformation that constructed an unimagined educational possibility: an established positive relationship between the migrant youth student and the teacher who displaced him from the classroom. Ultimately, I show the harms of equity in disguise as a microcosm of a larger Puerto Rican and Latinx migrant experience across schools in the United States and the astuteness of parents who dare to question school personnel. The broader scholarship on Latinx education and immigration has offered important justice-aimed considerations and policies (Gonzales 2015, Suárez-Orozco, C., Suárez-Orozco, M., & Todorova, 2008). Recent work is also expanding our knowledge in this regard (Lang & Garcia, 2022; López & Irizarry, 2019; López & Matos, 2018). Yet, other migration processes that assist with unveiling the structural inequities across (im)migrant experiences with U.S. schools are not fully represented, such as the case of Puerto Rican migration because of U.S. citizenship. This work joins Latinx migration and education conversations and the scholarship about U.S.-based Latinxs (Gándara, 2010; Irizarry, 2011; Pérez Huber et al., 2015). It also contributes to the scholarship on Puerto Rican education in general (Garcia 2019; Nieto, 2000; Rolón-Dow & Irizarry, 2014) and the Midwest in particular (Dávila, 2010; Pulido, Rivera, & Aviles, 2022; Velazquez, 2022, 2017, 2016) by exposing contemporary realities of Puerto Rican migrant youth in the rural Midwest.

Author

• Lisa Ortiz, University of Pittsburgh