A call to reshape our desires: contesting the “inevitable answer” of inclusion within empire

ABSTRACT

While increased college access is widely celebrated for racialized peoples, the end goal of inclusion maintains engagement with and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. This paper examines a culturally relevant college preparation program designed primarily for Mexican-origin youth in California to consider the college-going competencies and desires the program socializes youth through and to. Drawing from educator and youth pláticas embedded within an ethnography of the Bridge Program, this scholarship argues that the competencies youth were socialized into for college-going purposes simultaneously prepared them to uphold the settler colonial state. Engaging language socialization and settler colonial studies perspectives, this paper finds that Bridge Program youth were socialized into understandings of better lives as only possible within U.S. empire by framing college as an almost singular pathway to wellbeing. This work calls for anticolonial desires, visions of and pathways to better lives beyond empire’s boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusion
• settler colonialism
• white supremacy
• Latinx youth
• language socialization
• college pathways

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to extend gratitude to Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Bayley J. Marquez, Juliet Kunkel, Renee M. Moreno, Leigh Patel, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful critique and generous feedback on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We, as the authors, are racialized, non-Black and non-Indigenous Latines of Mexican-origin, and write from recognition of that structural position.

2. We use this description to think structurally within the troubled category of Latinx, pointing to the different racialization and dispossession of Black and/or Indigenous ‘Latine’ peoples within and across U.S. borders, contrasted with Latinx peoples whose negative racialization is based on language, culture, class, color, migration status, origin, etc., without reinscribing the violence of mestizaje and ‘brownness as a monolith’ (Busey and Silva 2021). As gender-inclusive forms, ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ are used interchangeably throughout.

3. One of these colonialities is the brief Mexican colonial rule of what is currently California; see Field (with Levanthal and Cambra) (2013), Nájera and Maldonado (2017), and Burruel Stone (2022) for the ways this coloniality continues into the present.

4. ‘Cedarville’ and ‘Bridge’ are pseudonyms, as are the names of participants.

5. This study was approved by the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects at University of California, Berkeley, 2017-06 10,038, including informed consent for all participants.

6. For example, the widespread community responses to the L.A. city council’s October 2022 audio leak.

7. Byrd (2011) borrows this term from Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite.

8. For discussion of inclusion in the settler state of Australia, see Rudolph and Thomas (2023).

9. Subordinated (vs. subordinate). Based on feedback from Theresa Ambo at AERA 2022.

10. A-G are the minimum admission requirements for acceptance to the UC and CSU college systems in California.

11. This points to how youth on college-going pathways under colonial racial capitalism prove college competency by providing their labor for free.

12. For expanded structural critiques on volunteering and charity, see Rodríguez (2009) and Spade (2020).

13. Based on feedback from Lauren Leigh Kelly at the NCTE Cultivating New Voices Spring Institute 2023.

14. Critiques of Anzaldúa’s uptake of ‘la raza cósmica’ are necessary responses to her work, for example, Contreras (2009). The insights we draw upon here point to aspects of Anzaldúa’s thinking important for Mexican-origin people in this moment: ‘No hay más que cambiar’ (Anzaldúa 1987, 71).