Handbook of Latinos and Education

Theory, Research, and Practice

Enrique G. Murillo Jr., Sofia Villenas, Ruth Trinidad Galván, Juan Sánchez Muñoz, Corinne Martínez, Margarita Machado-Casas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135236687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Providing a comprehensive review of rigorous, innovative, and critical scholarship relevant to educational issues which impact Latinos, this Handbook captures the field at this point in time. Its unique purpose and function is to profile the scope and terrain of academic inquiry on Latinos and education. Presenting the most significant and potentially influential work in the field in terms of its contributions to research, to professional practice, and to the emergence of related interdisciplinary studies and theory, the volume is organized around five themes:

• history, theory, and methodology
• policies and politics
• language and culture
• teaching and learning
• resources and information.

The Handbook of Latinos and Education is a must-have resource for educational researchers, graduate students, teacher educators, and the broad spectrum of individuals, groups, agencies, organizations and institutions sharing a common interest in and commitment to the educational issues that impact Latinos.

Part I
History, Theory, and Methodology

Part Editors: Sofia A. Villenas and Douglas E. Foley

1
History, Theory, and Methodology

An Introduction

Sofia A. Villenas
Cornell University, Ithaca

Douglas E. Foley
University of Texas at Austin

Latina/o youths along with their families, communities, and advocate scholars have long experienced and tried to explain the challenges of education and schooling in the United States. They have told stories, created songs, provided consejos (advice), and conducted research with narratives and numbers to explain how they have succeeded and how schools have failed them. Recently, the field of Latino education emerged from an impressive accumulation of over half a century of research addressing Latinos/as’ diverse histories and experiences of education and schooling (San Miguel & Donato, this section). Researchers, scholars, and practitioners have addressed and continue to address with great urgency what has become a crisis in Latino educational attainment and achievement (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). They have worked to interrogate educational inequities, to challenge deficit-oriented perspectives about language and culture, and to propose new ways for thinking about school reform and pedagogical practices. For such a task, researchers have contributed to and made great use of all the theoretical and methodological tools at their disposal including developments in critical and cultural studies, Mexican American studies, Puerto Rican and Latino/a studies, women of color and Chicana/ Latina feminisms, linguistics and second language acquisition, critical race theory, ethnography, and narrative methodologies to name a few. The chapters in this section demonstrate how the field has merged these tools in unique ways to develop new understandings of Latino educational history and produce innovative conceptual frameworks and methodologies for naming and addressing the critical state of Latino education (Zarate & Conchas, this section; Elenes & Delgado Bernal, this section; Irizarry & Nieto, this section).

The chapters in this section collectively tell a story about research in Latino education. In a broader sense, it is a story about a community of scholars, Latino/a and non-Latino/a, who reflect on the questions we have pursued as a field of study, the body of knowledge we have created and the racially volatile contexts in which we have worked. This collective story concerns how we have come to explain educational inequities and school persistence and attainment in great part through a vision of hope for a more just world. Certainly, this community of scholars has believed in educational praxis as part and parcel of a process of community uplift. Finally, this collective story addresses how the field of Latino education has developed its hybrid concepts, theories and methodologies to produce what might now constitute a wealth of knowledge to influence educational practice and policy.

We refer to a “community” of scholars/educators because it is remarkable how the field’s scholars/educators have engaged and built on each others’ research findings and new explorations in theory. Due in large part to the urgency of the crisis in Latino educational achievement and the shared goals for collective community empowerment, the field is marked by productive and critical engagement rather than conflict or non-engagement. For example, both qualitative and quantitative research has been central in documenting the strengths of bilingualism and language socialization in order to make the case for bilingual education (Zarate & Conchas, this section). The same is true for mixed methods research documenting the Latino educational pipeline and Latinos/as’ college attainment and persistence, among other very important research concerns. However, the chapters in this handbook do lean towards qualitative methodologies. This is reflective of the co-editors’ and chapter authors’ selective rather than exhaustive interpretations. It is also true that as qualitative research has moved from out of the shadows in the last decades towards more prominence in educational research, scholars in Latino education have taken advantage of research methodologies such as narrative and participant observation to center youth, parent, and teacher voices and perspectives, and to describe the complex forms of Latino cultural, literacy, and language practices (Zarate & Conchas, this section). Indeed, an important thread running through the five chapters in this section is how we go about construyendo puentes or building bridges (Irizarry & Nieto, this section), and creating affi nities between qualitative and quantitative methodologies, theory and practice, community activism and scholarship, and between disciplines, ethnic studies, and subalternized knowledge (Elenes & Delgado Bernal, this section).

A second important theme that marks this “community” of scholars/educators is the refusal to treat Latinos/as as non-agents and victims of their lives. Rather, the field marks Latinos/as as creative actors in their families and communities and as producers of knowledge. The chapter authors in this section describe the resilience and activism of a people who creatively survive, respond, and thrive in the face of racialized and gendered practices and policies of labor, immigration, and education. This thrust is evident in MacDonald and Carrillo’s historical overview of Latinos in the United States, “The United Status of Latinos.” Their purpose is to convey a nuanced portrait of Latinos/as as agents of their destinies in the United States and to illustrate how distinct histories and different factors shape their new identities on U.S. soil. San Miguel and Donato in their chapter “Latino Education in Twentieth-Century America: A Brief History” also argue that during the 20th century, education was both an instrument of reproduction and an important site of contestation [our emphasis]. For Elenes and Delgado Bernal in their chapter, “Latina/o Education and the Reciprocal Relationship between Theory and Practice: Four Theories Informed by the Experiential Knowledge of Marginalized Communities,” these forms of contestation and accommodation make up a community’s experiential knowledge. They argue for the centrality of Latinos/as’ knowledge production and its importance to theory-making, not only for addressing Latinos/as’ educational experiences but also as a contribution to educational thought in its own right. Similarly, Zarate and Conchas in their chapter, “Contemporary and Critical Methodological Shifts in Latino Educational Research,” focus on a community of scholars/educators who conduct research from a sense of commitment to the well-being and empowerment of Latino communities. In this way, the field of research in Latino education is marked by respectful treatment for the complexity of Latinos/as’ actions and responses to histories of inequality. Finally, Irizarry and Nieto’s chapter, “Latino/a Theoretical Contributions to Educational Praxis: Abriendo Caminos, Construyendo Puentes,” paints a vibrant picture of a dynamic community of scholars/educators who are actively working to document how education must build from Latinos/as’ strengths, knowledge, values, epistemologies and modes of resilience. As Maria de la Luz Reyes (2008) argues, we have a community of scholars and educators who are asserting their expertise and unapologetically continuing their advocacy as a way to build bridges between home and school.

Though collaboration and engagement mark the field in important ways, there are also critical differences and challenges. Latino diversity (MacDonald & Carrillo, this section), interethnic relations, and continued theorizing on the intersections of race, class, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship are all held in tension in this section’s chapters. For example, with respect to the question of Latino diversity, it is important to ask about the possibilities and limits of Southwest and Mexican American-oriented perspectives on the field of Latino education. This is especially important for understanding and documenting the educational experiences of indigenous Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadorian, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Ecuadorian, and Dominican heritage youths, parents, and adult learners in different parts of the United States (see MacDonald & Carrillo, this section). We might ask how research in distinct communities might contribute new understandings and conceptual frameworks to the overall field of Latino education and for studying education in diverse Latino communities. For example, how might we address the different and similar ways in which Latinos/as are racialized in the United States, specifi cally in schools, and how might we look at these processes from hemispheric and transnational perspectives? Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and Saldívar (2005) urge attention to how “colonial immigrants,” or those migrants coming from peripheral neocolonial locations in the capitalist world-economy, are “racialized” at the time of arrival in similar ways to the “colonial/racial subjects of empire”—Puerto Ricans, African Americans and Chicanas/os—who have been in the United States for a significant amount of time (2005, p. 9). Th ey refer here to the “Puertoricanization” of Dominicans in New York City, the “Chicanoization” of Salvadoreans in Los Angeles, and the “Africanamericanization” of Haitians and Afro-Cuban marielitos in Miami (Grosfoguel et al., 2005). Divergent and convergent processes of racialization certainly have great consequences for addressing differential school achievement, Latino identities and identifi cations, and for Latino interethnic relationships along the axis of class, gender, nationality, sexuality and citizenship (see Elenes & Delgado Bernal, this section; Lopez, 2005; Bejarano, 2005; Bettie, 2003; Valero, personal communication). Likewise, the authors here allude to a Latino pan-ethnicity with consequences and possibilities for education that have yet to be fully explored. In what follows, we offer an introduction to each of the chapters and how they individually contribute to history, theory, and methodology in the field of Latino education. Together, the chapters in this section constitute the field as an exploration of how scholars/educators, teachers, community leaders, youths and parents have currently and historically addressed the challenges of education for Latinos/as. This knowledge production and body of scholarship are not merely footprints in the sand, but rather an active presence of a people asserting their educational and human rights.

This section begins appropriately with Victoria-María MacDonald and Juan F. Carrillo’s chapter, “The United Status of Latinos.” They ask important questions central to the field of Latino education—mainly, who are Latinos and what are our distinct histories in the United States? Their play on words in their chapter title signals how Latinos/as have shaped the United States and their home countries, and how they have been shaped by the United States and the processes of transnationalism and globalization. As stated above, their purpose is to highlight Latinos as “agents of their destinies” and to illustrate how initial historical contact with the U.S., immigration patterns and policies, generational status, country of origin, political and legal status, language, geographical location, social class, gender, culture, and religion, among other factors, shape their new identities on U.S. soil. They go on to argue that Latinos/as have been dehistoricized. In bringing Latinos/as back into history, they point out how legacies of the Spanish colonial and nationalist eras, and how patterns of immigration and labor policies have shaped Latino populations i...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Consultants and Administrative Management
• Part I History, Theory, and Methodology
• Part II Policies and Politics
• Part III Language and Culture
• Part IV Teaching and Learning
• Part V Resources and Information
• Index