Bienvenidos!
Welcome to Volume 18, Number 3 of the Journal of Latinos and Education. With your support, the journal has continued to increase its stature and influence as the premier research publication that examines the educational conditions of Latina/o communities in and outside of the United States. In this issue, we have 6 FEATURE ARTICLES, and 1 contribution in the ESSAY REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS section.
In the first of the FEATURE ARTICLES, Christopher Busey writes to the dearth of curriculum and literature on Afro-Latin@s in both the US as in Latin America, despite a significant historical and demographic presence throughout our hemisphere. Employing Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as a theoretical framework, the author examined how Afro-Latin@s are represented in U.S. world history textbooks alongside global narratives of race and anti-Black systemic racism, that would be fundamental to students’ understanding of historical and contemporary lived experiences. Findings expose how world history textbooks continue to confine Afro-Latin@s’ lived experiences and histories within reductionist narratives.
The second article by Alejandro Zamora, Heidi Curtis, and Lawanna Lancasater, offers a mixed-methods approach exploring the development of racial and ethnic identity in Latino youth utilizing a culturally responsive school intervention, cuento (story) group work. The authors argue that as Latinos disproportionately face societal and educational hardships, it is essential that education systems propose methods of support that remediate this inequitable reality, particularly from a Critical Race Theory perspective. Their findings showed an increase in racial and ethnic identity after the eight-week intervention.
In the next article, Idalia Nuñez and Katherine Espinoza demonstrate how a cohort of 16 bilingual pre-service teachers had begun to think about language(s) and the impact it has on their practice within their internship experiences. Their study seeks to better address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in U.S. schools, and how teacher preparation programs need to better prepare bilingual pre-service teachers to view and implement languages in supportive ways. Their findings reveal that when supportive practices and policies are implemented in the classroom, pre-service teachers adopt similar practices. Moreover, when there are negative language policies and practices, they become practicing, and language arbiters who make decisions that challenge normative practices.
Next, Tanya Gaxiola Serrano, Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, and Dolores Delgado Bernal utilize Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento to examine how two Latina undergraduates experienced critical consciousness within an ethnic studies course. The theory and its aspects, as they argue, is a fluid journey of reflection and knowledge production that is capable of disrupting dominant ideologies, systems of oppression, and coloniality, and thus allowing for transformative ruptures to occur. The authors challenge that critical consciousness is the “end-all, be-all” state by highlighting contradictions in thinking, internal shifts, body/mind/spirit, and actions that move to praxis, and offer conocimiento as a way to underscore the beauty of tensions and transformations.
In the next article, Huriya Jabbar, Carmen Serrata, Eliza Epstein, and Joanna Sanchez utilize asset-based theoretical frameworks, such as the community cultural wealth model, the funds of knowledge theory, the funds of identity theory, and familismo to explore the significance of family involvement in the transfer choice process of community college students in Texas. Their study explores how these students navigate the institutional context, and the roles that their social ties to the community, immediate family, and other relatives play in the decision-making process. As they assert, to the college choice process, Latino/a students bring their family’s needs, priorities, and sometimes, limitations; however, intrinsically Latino/a students also bring their family inspired values, beliefs, and supports–assets that serve to inform and drive their transfer choice sets.
In the last of this section, Julia Smith offers an ethnographic case study using a socio-cultural perspective, focusing on family members from Mexican migrant farmworker households, and their discussions around the education of their children and seasonal early childcare programs. Her work examines parental lessons in the home, views of institutionalized education and the role of beliefs, identity and life experience that contribute to the early years of a child’s education, and have added to the current dearth in the research as related to better addressing the needs of migrant farmworker families with young children.
This issue concludes with 1 contribution in the ESSAY REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS section. As David Martínez-Prieto writes, linguistic features reflect ideologies, perspectives, and ideas; and for this reason, some social movements adopt linguistic features that are distinguishable from others. He analyzes, in terms of macro and micro levels, some of the features that relate to the use of “x” (as in Latinx) in terms of eliminating the masculine inflection of “o” and the adoption of Nahuatl. The author also contextualizes these terms into its proper historical framework and questions if these linguistic practices actually enhance group identity and social justice, or if on the contrary, serve more to isolate a selective group of U.S. centered scholars and activists.
Continue to read ahead and enjoy the full value and complexity of the articles presented by Volume 18, Number 3 of the Journal of Latinos and Education. We want to extend our appreciation to the authors for their manuscript submissions and commend them for their contributions to the field of Latinos and Education. The editorial staff looks forward to supporting your continued research and practices that illuminate the myriad circumstances in which Latinas/os and their families continue to struggle for educational excellence and equity. Your support and this volume affirm the importance of scholarship and creative analysis that attempt to give voice to a community of learners that is silent no longer.
Thank You – muchísimas gracias.