An Educator’s Excess of Language Around Latinx Students of Uncertain Legal Status: Creating Visibility or Invisibility?

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a 2018 study that explored how K-12 educators in one rural Midwestern community were responding to the milieu of rapid changes in immigration policy and rhetoric. Participants’ discussion around immigration status commingled with other status-assigning labels or used labels that may be used to sort or categorize students (e.g., socioeconomic status). We theoretically examine an extended interview with one principal drawing on Derridian concepts of deconstruction and differánce. We question how the excess of an educator’s language around race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural and/or linguistic heritage of immigrants render Latinx students of varying legal status visible and invisible in school. We located signifiers such as country of origin, economic worth, and legal status that made visible Latinx persons through identity indicators, also rendering them invisible through reducing all Latinx persons in the community into a monolithic category.

Notes

1 Though participants in the study chose to use the term “Hispanics” when speaking of groups and individuals with cultural and linguistic ties to Latin America and/or Spain, we use the term Latinx throughout this paper to remain inclusive of people who identify as gender neutral and those who claim pan-ethnic cultural roots and identities (Noe-Bustamante, Mora, & Lopez, 2020).

2 All names in this paper are pseudonyms to protect participant, school, and community anonymity.

3 DACA gave young undocumented immigrants legal opportunity to work for two years and relief from deportation fears (Gonzalez-Barrera & Krogstad, 2019).

4 The resources we cite in this paper use “Hispanic”. We use this label with some discomfort, acknowledging that Latinx is more gender-inclusive of individuals from Latin America. Elsewhere we use Latinx.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the University of Missouri Research Council Grant.