Singing and dreaming in xenophobic times: Latinx immigrant youth in a community cultural arts program

• In Event: Cultivating Peace through Resistance: Teaching for Justice Across Borders and Histories

Proposal

What does the renewed anti-immigrant climate mean for education? It has layered xenophobia and racism onto disproportionately low achievement, the pervasiveness of deficit thinking, and unequal access to high quality schooling (Gándara & Ee, 2022; Gist & Bristol, 2022; Kohli, 2021; Valencia, 2020). In response, we must center our cultural knowledge, historical memory, and collective resistance for education that can meet and expand beyond the present moment.

To cultivate a safe, joyous, culturally responsive learning environment for Latinx immigrant youth, we developed The Sueños Program - a community-based summer program focused on serving Latinx farmworking communities with the arts, cultural identity, and belonging. This is an ethnographic study centered on humanizing pedagogies and critical literacies (Freire, 1970). This study draws upon critical and sociocultural pedagogies (Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Muhammad, 2020) that center the lived experiences of youth, their cultural heritages (Delgado Bernal et al, 2016; Lopez, 2021) funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2005), linguistic practices (Ortiz, Franquiz & Lara, 2023), and community cultural wealth (CCW) (Yosso 2006). Aligned with Culturally Relevant/Sustaining Pedagogies (Ladson Billings, 2021; Paris & Alim, 2017), this community engaged study documents the voices and experiences of Latinx immigrant youth in a cultural arts summer program, and highlights the lessons we might learn for teaching and in-school TK-12 settings.

Author

• ROSA M JIMENEZ, University of San Francisco