"Ain't No White People Have to Be Cultural Ambassadors, Right?" How a Latinx Teacher in the United States Resists Ephemeral Multiculturalism for Political Praxis

• In Event: Education and the Political: The Possibilities of Civic Education in an (Un)Democratic World

Abstract

In this paper, we expand the geographic narratives of Latinx teachers by first outlining how such teachers are desired to be a certain type of “cultural ambassador” in the US South, and second, how one teacher eschews this construction to instead center political agency and a democratic praxis toward racial justice. The construction of cultural ambassadorship results from the neoliberal and racialized production of Latinx teachers that privilege an ephemeral discourse of diversity and post-racism that positions Latinx teachers as depoliticized objects tasked with the hidden labor of educating others within a system of “safe” multiculturalism (Smithers & Eaton, 2019). Such expectations are rooted in efforts to commodify, and extract value from, Latinx diversity and representation while simultaneously divorcing political agency from teacher praxis (Flores, 2019). Whereas cultural ambassadorship privileges an ephemeral discourse of diversity and post-racism that positions Latinx teachers as objects tasked to model and replicate “safe” multiculturalism, we share how one Afro-Latina teacher in South Carolina uses her power to teach students how to interrogate racist systems and to practice political resistance.

Authors

• Timothy Monreal, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Reina Floyd, School District 5 of Lexington and Richland Counties