Resisting the Orthodox Smart Label: High School Latinas and the Redefinition of Smartness on the Western Frontier

ABSTRACT

Drawing from Chicana feminist epistemology and counter-storytelling, this article argues that Latina high school students’ refusal to attach the culturally constructed and hegemonically imposed label of smartness to themselves, while easily identifying that label within others, stems from a resistance to associate themselves with traditional notions of smartness, a label they often frame as exclusive, inappropriate, and/or incongruous within their experiential contexts. This article suggests that the participants in this study agentically embrace their own constructions of smartness to include alternative funds of knowledge and, in this way, coopt smartness in a culturally relevant and specific way.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• diaspora
• English language learners
• Latino/a children and families
• qualitative research
• race/racialization