Culturally Contested Literacies

America's "Rainbow Underclass" and Urban Schools

Guofang Li

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135915124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Culturally Contested Literacies is a vivid ethnographic account of the everyday cross-cultural living and schooling experiences of six culturally-diverse families in urban America. Documenting the ways in which these families learn about literacies and their meanings in relation to schools, inner city environments, and other ethnic groups, Guofang Li's incisive analysis reveals the unique experiences of fractured urban America.

Unlike prior research that fragments various social categories, Culturally Contested Literacies explores the rich complexity within each family as they make sense of their daily relations in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. It then juxtaposes the productions of such familial relations across and within cultural groups with the context of the larger socio-political and socio-economic formations. By presenting a realistic picture of the varying ways that America's "rainbow underclass" might encounter schooling, Li argues that urban education must be understood in relation to not only the individual's cultural and familial milieu, but also to the interactive context between the individual and schools.

1
Introduction: America’s “Rainbow Underclass” and Inner City Schooling

Reality as it is thought does not correspond to the reality being lived objectively, but rather to the reality in which alienated man imagines himself to be.

—Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom (1975)

It’s a hot sunny summer afternoon in Buffalo,¹ a middle-sized city in western New York. Music is playing loudly on one of the front porches of West Lane Street in the heartland of the city’s impoverished West Side. Accompanying the music, one can occasionally hear laughter amidst someone’s teasing, men yelling, and kids screaming. It is too hot to stay inside. Many people sit around on deserted car seats on the front porches of their unkempt houses, either trying to enjoy the music while watching the cars pass by, or trying to ignore it.

A thirteen-year-old Sudanese refugee, Nina Torkeri, and her two younger sisters are tired of listening to the loud music the whole afternoon and they try to ignore it by playing with each other’s hair while their eleven-year-old brother, Fred, is cruising up and down the street on his bicycle trying to see what’s happening around the block. He is waiting for his older brother, Owen, to come home so that they can go play basketball. Upstairs in their two-bedroom apartment their mother Anne is preparing dinner with their eight-month-old baby sister strapped on her back, crying. She is sweating, rushing to get everything ready. It’s too hot inside and the ear-pounding music makes her feel even hotter. She hopes that the music will stop soon. The unbearable noise that she has to endure daily makes her wish she could move to another area. However, she knows that this is an impossibility, for the rent is good here and she will not find any cheaper living accommodations for a family of eight.

Only several houses down, you will find the front porch of the Ton family is empty. The Ton family is the only Vietnamese family on this block. Twelve-year-old Mien sits intently in front of the computer in his room playing video games, while two of his Vietnamese buddies crouch beside him cheering and exclaiming as he moves the mouse. Downstairs in the big living room on the left side of the entrance, six-year-old Dan lies on the floor, eyes glued to the big 57-inch TV screen. He is playing the Asian Empire video game, while his ten-year-old sister, Nyen, watches him play and tries to play along, helping him as he cannot read or speak English. Excited by the game, he kicks, giggles, and shouts in Vietnamese to his sister, who tries hard to get him to listen to her. She is bored and thinks of going outside to look for her friend Mimi, a Lebanese girl attending the same school, to play. In the back, their grandmother, who can speak only Vietnamese, quietly prepares dinner. Their father, Lo, has just left for work in a factory in the south town for his second shift and their mother, Cam, will come home in a couple of hours from the same factory.

Two streets away, parallel to West Lane, the loud music can no longer be heard and the street is rather strangely quiet and empty. The house of another Sudanese refugee family, the Myers, is extremely quiet. A couple of family members watch TV just to stay occupied, while the others play in the backyard. Mother, Gloria, has not come back from her factory job, but all seven other family members are at home. They have to remain relatively quiet as their father, Mahdi, is taking a nap. He usually comes home early in the morning from his night shift at his meat-slicing job, catching sleep for a couple of hours before he drives his children to school during the school year. Now he can sleep one hour longer in the morning, as it is summer and the children do not go to school. He then attends classes at a local community college. In the afternoon after his classes are over, he tries to get a few more hours of sleep before he goes back to work again.

A few minutes away, another Vietnamese household, the Phan house, is equally quiet. The Phan parents are at work. The mother, Lynne, works in a nail salon and the father, Dao Phan, works as a mechanic. They will not come home until nearly 9:00 p.m. Sixteen-year-old Hanh sits in their dark living room trying to read, but she keeps thinking about the house chores she needs to do and the bills she must remind her parents to pay. Even on a beautiful day like this, she cannot go out of the house or talk to her friends over the phone because she is Vietnamese, and as a girl she is not allowed to do so. The living room curtain is tightly closed so that passers-by will think no one is at home. She can hear her brother, Chinh, shouting, chasing, and running with a group of boys outside the house. They are having a great time scourging the neighborhood. She hopes that he will soon come in and study English so that he can improve his reading and writing skills over the summer.

The neighborhood is composed not just of immigrants and refugees; several blocks away on Haven Street, the Claytons are one of the few white families in this area. Twenty-nine-year-old Pauline is a mother of three—two older children from a previous relationship and a baby son from her current boyfriend. She is pregnant with her fourth child, who is due in six months. As a single mother without a car, Pauline relies on welfare to get by. The family’s current apartment is subsidized housing from the government. On a hot day like this, it is hard to stay inside. The Claytons’ house is not quiet like some of the other houses. The phone is ringing. The baby is crying. Three-year-old Judd cannot stay still even for a second and is banging on the tables and chairs, running around and throwing things, while ten-year-old Kate runs after him to calm him down. Having a hard time talking on the phone, Pauline yells for her boyfriend, who is upstairs in their bedroom, to do something with the baby or with Judd.

On the outskirts of the neighborhood, the house of another white family, the Sassanos, is peaceful and quiet. Everyone is busy attending to their own matters. Ten-year-old Rod sits on the porch reading a new book he just borrowed from the public library, while his twelve-year-old brother Scott (who does not like books) hides himself in his room playing computer games. Their grandmother, who is hearing-impaired, lives upstairs and is always very quiet. Their father is a local jeweler and is still at work. Their mother, Loraine, happens to be at home after her shift at a local grocery store. She is busy organizing the upcoming Boy Scouts’ camping activities for the next weekend. Their dining table is covered with charts, papers, and labels. She is pleased to see Rod reading, but is not happy with Scott, who dislikes reading books. However, since she has no time to think more about the children, she quickly ignores these thoughts and immerses herself in the tasks on hand. She needs to finish them soon, for her class at the local community college will be beginning soon, and she is studying to become a nurse.

All the families introduced above have two things in common in addition to living in the same neighborhood. They all have children who attend the nearby public school, Rainbow Elementary, and they all are committed to their children’s schooling. The seemingly peaceful picture painted above, though a superficial sketch of their daily lives, reveals some serious undercurrents that run through these families’ pathways to success in the inner-city neighborhood. As their stories will demonstrate in this book, despite their best efforts, many of these children are struggling in school, and only a few of them have achieved success. Even among the few success stories, serious socio-emotional stress seems to have masked the sense of pride and joy among the children.

These six different urban families are part of America’s expanding “rainbow underclass,” who are culturally diverse (hence the name “rainbow”) and economically disadvantaged and who are often caught in downward social mobility (hence the term “underclass”) (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Zuckerman, 2002). They, together with the poor and working-class African Americans remaining in inner cities, are part of a new class fraction in urban America that is often misunderstood and ignored in social science research and in the general public consciousness (Fine & Weis, 1998; Weis, 1990, 2004). Sitting at the bottom of the richest country in the world, they are often depicted as “the cause of national problems” and “the reason for the rise in urban crime, as embodying the necessity for welfare reform, and of sitting at the heart of moral decay” (Fine & Weis, 1998, p. 1, italics original). Yet, this group, especially the foreign-born immigrants and refugees, are often excluded in national conversations and ignored in the policy-making processes—their voices are often not heard and their experiences remain foreign to their middle-class neighbors and to the general public (Fine & Weis, 1998).

The intention of this book, therefore, is to bring the voices and experiences of this group, especially the foreign born, from the margin to the center. Extending prior research (e.g., Fine & Weis, 1998; Weis, 1990, 2004) that argues for the forging of this distinct social class under the new globalized economy, I explore literacy practices in this new class fraction as its members raise the next generation. That is, I examine the multifaceted literacies of this new class in their everyday cross-cultural living in an urban neighborhood as these literacies intersect with their schooling experiences. Specifically, I look at the multiple aspects of their daily literacy practices, as they cross the national, cultural, racial, and educational borders between their home countries and the US inner city and between their home and the school.

In this book, literacy means “an identity kit”—a discourse characterized by socially accepted ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting (Gee, 1991, p. 3). By literacies, I conceive that literacy discourses are intrinsically diverse, historically and culturally viable social practices (Collins & Blot, 2003). This book is about the “maps of meaning” (Hall & Jefferson, 1990) as experienced and understood by the six families—their “values and beliefs, dreams and struggles, newly discovered expectations and misunderstandings” (Valdés, 1996, p. 5). Like many other disadvantaged families, these families are also “consistently thwarted by institutional practices” (Rogers, 2003, p. 2). Therefore, I also analyze how the intricate institutional discourses (e.g., schooled literacy and educational policies) shape these families’ everyday living and their children’s schooling experiences. By bringing the everyday worlds of the families to the center stage, this book documents how culturally embedded literacies in the families are practiced, negotiated, and contested in the fabric of their urban living and schooling.

The families’ everyday worlds of literacies are analyzed from a dialectical view of schooling that investigates the problems of minority experiences not just as isolated events of individuals or deficiencies in the social structure but more as part of the interactive context between the individual and the society (McLaren, 1988, 2003). I follow what Weis and Fine (2004) theorize as “a relational method” or “a compositional study” to understand how each family makes sense of its everyday literacy and living, and how the family members situate themselves in relation to a constructed Other (e.g., the African Americans). Unlike prior research that either essentializes or fragments various social categories, I examine not only the rich complexity within each family as they make sense of their daily relations in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, but also the productions of such relations across cultural groups and within the context of the larger socio-political and socioeconomic formations. Such a perspective allows me to examine not only the individual families’ experiences but also the contradictions and asymmetries of power and privilege that both shape and problematize the meaning of these experiences. This dialectical thought will function to bring the power of human activity and knowledge to the surface and unmask the connections between the individual experiences and the cultural norms, values, and standards of the more powerful cultural sites such as the schools (Darder, 1995).

In this sense, this book is a study about discursive conditions surrounding the six families’ literacy practices and their efforts to construct or take up their particular positions within and across various socio-cultural discourses. According to Foucault (1978), a discourse is not just a language system; it also constitutes power relations and invokes particular notions of truth and thus defines what is acceptable and unacceptable in a given context. As such, power is executed less through physical instruments than through discursive formations, especially in modern societies (Foucault, 1972). Foucault further argues that power relations in discourses are not unilateral or top-down, but dynamic and interactional:

To be more precise, we must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one, but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies…. We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposed strategy.

(1978, pp. 100–101)

Thus, this book is also about the six families’ dynamic and interactive experiences as they construct cultural/racial identities, make sense of their inner-city environments, and negotiate power relationships with more powerful institutions such as schools. As their stories will demonstrate, at times, these families accept/resign to the dominant discourses in literacy, culture, race, class, and gender prevalent in the inner city and in the wider society. Other times, they choose to reject them and try to create counter-narratives, alternative ways of speaking of and about themselves and their worlds. This book attempts to document their journeys and the complexities in their journeys as they take up particular and often contradictory positions in new and sometimes hard circumstances—the dynamics of how and in what conditions they connect/disconnect or double/split themselves within and across various discourses and boundaries.

In the chapters that follow, I will provide detailed accounts of the six culturally diverse families’ experiences with literacies and schooling as they struggle to adjust and understand the American urban education system and/or to survive in an economically depressed, post-industrial city. I will describe the dynamics and complexities of each family’s struggles and identity formations within an increasingly intricate situation in which literacy, culture, race, gender, and social class intertwine to make an impact on daily survival and the children’s schooling experiences. I pay particular attention to the discursive elements that shape the families’ contradictory social positioning characterized by both conformity and resistance to the dominant discourses and the consequences of such positioning—how they are both an effect of power and a hindrance in their everyday literacy practices and schooling.

Through a descriptive account of the culturally different literacy practices within the different households and of their symbolic struggles against institutional practices, I argue in this book that experiences in urban schooling must be understood as products of dialectical interaction in relation to not only the individual’s cultural and familial milieu but also the interactive context between the individual and the more powerful cultural sites such as schools. In the current climate, minority school failure is often charged to the deficits of the disadvantaged families (and their children) (Whitehouse & Colvin, 2001) and the parenting practices that induce school failure (e.g., working-class parents believe in accomplishment of natural growth, in which a child’s development unfolds spontaneously—as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided) (Lareau, 2003). This study, in contrast, demonstrates that these inner-city working-class or underclass families are highly literate, committed to their children’s success and capable of concerted cultivation that generates cultural capital. Yet, despite ample commitment, persistence, and cultural capital, “the sticky web of institutional discourses” (Rogers, 2003, p. 2) as well as the contradictions both within and between home and school cultural sites (Giroux, 2001) hold them in place ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: America’s “Rainbow Underclass” and Inner City Schooling
• 2 Where the Stories Began: The City and its Schools
• 3 Being Vietnamese, Becoming Somebody
• 4 Being Sudanese, Being Black
• 5 Being White, Being the Majority in the Minority
• 6 Multicultural Families and Multiliteracies: Tensions, Conformity, and Resistance to Urban Schooling
• 7 Culturally Contested Literacies and the Education of America’s “Rainbow Underclass”
• Notes
• References
• Index