Refusing the Performance: Disrupting Popular Discourses Surrounding Latino Male Teachers and the Possibility of Disidentification

Abstract

Popular discourses surrounding male teachers of color can serve to reify confining and problematic notions of masculinity in schools. Taking a critical approach to the study of gender and race, this article highlights the ways schools reproduce specifically Latino male identity through the cultural expectations of Latino male educators, as well as the gender performance of Latino male teachers themselves. Through an ethnographic case study of a middle school Latino boys’ program in the San Francisco Bay Area, I explore the ways one Latino male teacher navigates cultural pressures surrounding the enactment of Latino masculinity. This study uncovers the ways the scarcity of Latino male educators creates a pressure to perform specified notions of masculinity; particularly that of the domineering, hypermasculine disciplinarian. Furthermore, this study looks at embodied resistance to dominant discourses of Latino masculinity through deviant gendered performances, locating the body as a key site of struggle.

Notes

1 In this study, Latino is the masculine variation of Latinx. The term Latinx will be used as the gender-neutral term to describe persons of Latin American origin or descent.

2 Pseudonyms have been assigned for all research participants, the name of the program, and the school where this study took place.

3 When reviewing the literature regarding boys of color, I attempt to use the terminology specified by the study or report I am referencing, for example, Black males, Black and Latino males, Latino males, and boys of color in general. It should be noted that although all share similar experiences in schools, it should not be assumed that all experience educational marginalization in the same way. Future research must disentangle the category boys of color to explore more nuanced particularities among Native boys, Black boys, Latino boys, and Asian boys; as well as intersectional specificities within these larger ethno-racial groupings.

4 This interaction also speaks to the notion of hidden curriculum and the ways in which straight male teachers might teach a curriculum against homophobia, but perform a masculinity that still normalizes heteropatriarchal values and subtly distances itself homosexuality.