The Color of Education: Discriminación Y Comportamientos

ABSTRACT

Discrimination is overwhelming immigrant communities across the U.S.A. and impacting educational outcomes and the fragmentation of families. This article employs intersectionality and Latina/o critical theory (LatCrit) as its theoretical framework to analyze education and the institution of familismo as a counterweight to anti-Latinx discrimination. Specifically, we investigate the relative importance of feeling discriminated against, family composition (dual-parent), and demographic variables (family composition, urbanicity – whether or not the student attends school in a city – region, SES, nativity) affect academic behavior for a national sample of Latinx students. Utilizing the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), we employed hierarchical regression modeling and found (1) that for females two-parent households had no effect on academic behavior when demographic variables were held constant; and (2) for males, those in households with more children possessed less positive academic behavior. Differences between female and male student groups speak to, among other things, the importance of educators employing more advanced theoretical frameworks and nuanced methodologies to fully understand the academic behaviors of Latinx students. Practice and policy recommendations that follow data findings are offered.

KEYWORDS:

• Latinx students
• academic behavior
• intersectionality
• Latina/o critical theory (Latcrit)
• discrimination
• family composition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Concerning race, some may prefer the term Latino, which, while referring to all the countries in Latin America, including Brazil and Haiti, also ties certain people together through a history of colonization. Here, however, to include all gender identities, the term Latinx is employed. It is similar to Latino, but the “x” erases gender, making the category inclusive of men, women, agendered, trans*, gender nonconforming, gender-queer, and gender-fluid people. Finally, it bears noting that most Latinx people do not use racial terms assigned to them after their arrival in the U.S.A. Instead, most Latinx people around the world refer to themselves based on whichever country or indigenous population they belong to (e.g., Honduran, Mexican, Peruvian, etc.). As a social construct – something that changes over time and within different contexts – identity labels are neither static nor universal (i.e., Santos, 2017).

² The significance of incorporating Spanish terms into English words is to emphasize Latino/a worldview.