Handbook of Latinos and Education

Theory, Research, and Practice

Enrique G. Murillo, Jr, Dolores Delgado Bernal, Socorro Morales, Luis Urrieta, Jr, Eric Ruiz Bybee, Juan Sánchez Muñoz, Victor B. Saenz, Daniel Villanueva, Margarita Machado-Casas, Katherine Espinoza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399967
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, this Handbook offers a comprehensive review of rigorous, innovative, and critical scholarship profiling 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 now organized around four tighter key themes of history, theory, and methodology; policies and politics; language and culture; teaching and learning. New chapters broaden the scope of theoretical lenses to include intersectionality, as well as coverage of dual language education, discussion around the Latinx, and other recent updates to the field.

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 that share a common interest in and commitment to the educational issues that impact Latinos.

SECTION III
Language and Culture

15
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

An Introduction

Juan Sánchez Muñoz, Victor Sáenz, and Daniel Villanueva

The unprecedented success of the first edition of the Handbook of Latinos and Education made abundantly clear the need for a first definitive anthology of significant research that reflected areas of emergence as well as reestablished lines of research that directly targeted the learning interests of Latinos in the United States. The conspicuous underperformance of Latino/as across the continuum of education demanded that a greater degree of attention, methodological nuance, and empirical reliability be committed to the service of understanding the various phenomena that significantly impact Latino/as educational efficacy. To those engaged and invested in this work, the importance and relevance of language and culture cannot be understated. There are literally hundreds of volumes that affirm the determinant role of language and culture across groups and societies. Latinx communities are no different with respect to the importance of their language and culture, however increasingly the similarities among Latino and Hispanic subgroups is being complemented by growing differences in terms of how they see themselves, how they see one another, and how they aspire to be identified in the broader social and political milieu of our country.

Over the past decade since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook, scholars and their scholarship continued to evolve and reexamine many of the established underpinnings of Latina/o language and cultural research used to explain education efficacy. For example, issues of identity, naming, affinity, politics, language, and other methods of expression are being newly problematized by an emerging generation of disruptive scholars who are exceedingly comfortable challenging – in the way that earlier scholars of color have – the orthodoxy of research pertaining to their particular constituents of concerns, in the case here the educational outcomes of Latino/as.

Language and culture play an indispensable role in the current and future development of the Latinx community. Literature and scholarship must capture and reflect the nuanced difference among subpopulations and identities that comprise Latino/as community. The chapters within this section give credence to the complexity of the Latino/as community and re-establish that our language and culture are not monolithic but rather very diverse. As scholars, it is essential to produce relevant literature that chronicles our language and culture to provide opportunity and leadership to future generations to understand, appreciate, and represent. In the following chapters Latinx/a/o scholars contributed to this anthology by providing insightful, provocative, and intentional scholarship to help the society better understand the role of culture and language within our community.

As Latino scholars, we are proud to showcase the diversity of epistemology not only among the scholars that provided chapters within this section, but also among the three of us as editors. We come from three different generations and attended a variety of local, regional, state, and national colleges and universities shaping our values, beliefs, and understanding of the world around us. Throughout the editing process, we challenged conventional thought, methodologies, and assessment of culture and language derived from our intergenerational diversity. The intersectionality of these discussions including intergenerational perspectives was eerily synonymous to that of the intersection of the “X” within Latinx. This intersectionality serves as a metaphor describing the crossing of intergenerational perspective and scholarship. Although cultural perspectives have gradually evolved over the course of the last 50 years, there are new phenomenon facing Latinos/as and our goal was to include diverse scholarship to reflect the development of our culture.

While some phenomenons included in this section are widely understood and well recognized, we’ve included new ethnographies that may not be widely understood and appreciated. Our goal is to provide new iterations and inflexions regarding language and culture to continue to shape the scholarly literature defining Latinx/a/os. There are a new generation of Latinx/a/o scholars and scholarship that is much more intersectional, and these chapters reflect new impulses in how we understand, explicate, and move research further with respect to Latinos in education.

Laura Chávez-Moreno describes the importance of racialization of Latinxs in the first chapter within this section. The author argues that Latinxs’ racialization is founded on the Spanish language and Spanish/English bilingualism. She shares her personal experience as an immigrant adolescent and how she believes bilingualism helped her to preserve her culture. The author argues that bilingualism can strengthen familial ties with an individual’s heritage. She provides personal examples of how society and educational research continue to lack understanding and attention of the Latinxs community and points to the importance of racializing our culture. The author clearly presents a strong argument that Latinxs’ is a very distinct race impacted by multiple colonialisms – original colonialism and modern colonialism. She sheds light on how learning specifically about Latinxs’ will contribute to the greater society having a better understanding of our race separate and apart from the White population.

The author provides examples of how Latinxs are impacted by misidentification as a race. She points to the U.S. census and the potential impact to the community by considering Latinxs’ as an ethnic group rather than a race. The importance of race being incommensurable is presented as an argument as to why Latinxs’ should be considered a race now and in the future. Laura argues that race is a social construct in that is negotiated and contested and shares how other groups have asserted their individual designation and challenges the reader to think critically about how Latinxs’ should continue to engage in the social construct of our race. Certainly, language plays a vital role in how society categorizes Latinxs and there are limitations to isolating Spanish language as the sole identifier that solidifies an ethnicity. The complexity of language is ever so important and in this chapter the author provides context for how language is a function of ethnic identity but also can be viewed as a method of assimilation or dissimilation. In the end, the author concludes that Latinxs’ should be constructed as a racial group based on common experiences, lived and historical, of Spanish and U.S. colonial racial orders.

Authors Margarita Huerta and Tiberio Garza contributed by providing practical implications derived from empirical findings and sharing innovative directions for research as it relates to content-area instructions for English Learners from kindergarten to higher education. The research on English Learners is important, as statistics and demographics shift within the educational realm. The authors provided data supporting the growing number of English Learner student enrollment in public schools and higher education. In their chapter, Huerta and Garza highlight three distinct areas of intervention and investigative research: (1) EL content-area instruction in K–12, specifically in science; (2) EL K–12 content-area instructional training for preservice and in-service teachers; and (3) EL factors in higher education, focused on language minority students in community colleges.

The authors educate readers about the importance of effective instruction that is critically language focused across multiple content areas. Huerta and Garza provide strong evidence that specific English Learner instructional support is needed for multiple sub-populations of English Learners ranging from kindergarten to higher education. In closing, the authors challenge the reader to consider their own innovative ideas and how they might incorporate them to impact student success as English Learners navigate the educational spectrum from kindergarten to higher education.

Perhaps the most provocative chapter within this section is presented by Nolan Cabrera as he describes demographobia, a new phenomenon caused by a changing racial demographic where White people are going to be the minority and they feel they might be oppressed as people of color were. The chapter is titled Fear of a Brown Planet, which explicitly outlines the theme of the chapter as it presents four topics that impact the education of minorities. The topics discussed are (1) the English only movement, (2) Tucson and the Mexican American Studies curriculum, (3) affirmative action in higher education, and (4) the DREAM Act. Cabrera provides coded interpretations of each of the topics just mentioned as he presents counter perspectives often argued by White people in contradiction to supporting these initiatives.

The author challenges philosophical arguments for each of the four topics and provides details on how, and why, the education of minority students has been cast as illegal, unfair, and un-American. Cabrera provides examples of how adversaries opposed to the four topics use strategic political framing to help attack initiatives and programs designed to promote education of minorities students by providing misinformation, claiming reverse racism, and creating false narratives that call to question equality for all. The author concludes that the education of minorities being a societal responsibility and benefits holds little sway today. As the demographics continue to shift toward a growing number of Latina/os, legislatures will continue to apply pressure although there should not be any uncertainly about, if, but rather when the planet will turn Brown.

To continue the theme of advocacy, the next chapter within this section focuses on how Mexican American Studies scholar-activists performed a decolonial act of citizenship in their testimony against a racist textbook presented to the Texas State Board of Education for statewide adoption in 2016. Authors Angela Valenzuela, Eliza Epstein, and María Del Carmen Unda employed a Chicana feminist framework, among others, to describe how 12 scholar-activists from the most prestigious universities addressed specific rhetorical enunciative during their testimonies using years of Mexican American scholarship and their personal lived experiences. The scholars were able to provide a collective voice sharing their experience of oppression, renaming, rewriting, and “represent’n’.”

This moving and important chapter provides a glimpse into the future of Mexican American Studies within Texas and encourages scholars to seek to bridge research, community, and policy together in an effort to overcome the colonial policy making process that impacts Latino/as today. The authors encourage scholars, students, and activists to exploit written, oral, and invited testimony to ensure that effective and accurate scholarship is rooted in the curriculum of Mexican American Studies for the future. The documentation provided within this chapter is inspirational as it displays the power of testimony and the role of the powerful voice of the oppression.

The next chapter, by Ryu, Burmicky, and Sáenz, explores educational and workforce data trends on Latino boys and men through the use of various national longitudinal census and survey data. Although Latino men are enrolling in postsecondary education at higher rates than ever before, availability of national educational and workforce data on this subpopulation is limited. Nonetheless, the authors are able to provide a detailed overview on the educational and workforce trajectories of Latino boys and men, including high school completion, postsecondary enrollment, degree attainment, and workforce patterns and earnings. They conclude this chapter by leveraging data specific to Latino men to provide implications for research and practice, with a special emphasis on chal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I History, Theory, and Methodology
• Section II Policies and Politics
• Section III Language and Culture
• Section IV Teaching and Learning
• Index