“Ain’t no white people have to be cultural ambassadors, right?” How a Latinx teacher in the US South resists ephemeral multiculturalism for political praxis

ABSTRACT

In this article, we expand the geographic narratives of Latinx teachers by first outlining how such teachers are desired to be a certain type of “cultural ambassador” in the US South, and second, how one teacher eschews this construction to instead center political agency and a democratic praxis toward racial justice. Whereas cultural ambassadorship privileges an ephemeral discourse of diversity and post-racism that positions Latinx teachers as objects tasked to model and replicate “safe” multiculturalism, we share how one Afro-Latina teacher in South Carolina uses her power to teach students how to interrogate racist systems and to practice political resistance.

Acknowledgments

Tim would like to acknowledge the following financial support in supporting the research and writing of this article, The Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and the Southern Regional Educational Board Doctoral Writing Fellowship. We would also like to thank the editors of this special issue for all the work that it takes to create a space for our work.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional resources

1. LatinxED (2021). LatinxED Fellowship. https://latinxed.org/fellowship/

LatinxED is a North Carolina based nonprofit with a mission to develop “Latinx leadership and expand educational equity and opportunity in North Carolina.” LatinxED recently created a 6-month fellowship aimed at creating a network of Latinx educational leaders in North Carolina to build the skills and knowledge necessary to participate in education advocacy and gain leadership experience as practitioners.

2. Colomer, S. (2018). Understanding racial literacy through acts of (un)masking: Latinx teachers in a new Latinx diaspora community. Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1468749.

Colomer uses the theoretical frame of “máscaras” (process of masking through makeup) to demonstrate how Latinx teachers (re)invent themselves (mask/unmask) to negotiate oppressive and racialized local (Southern) contexts. She points to the need for all members of school communities to intentionally develop racial literacy skills to create space where Latinx teachers no longer worry about being “unmasked” (p. 15).

3. Singh, M. (2018). Role models without guarantees: Corrective representations and the cultural politics of a Latino male teacher in the borderlands. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21, 288–305.

Singh argues teachers of color are discursively formed to be a certain type of role model, a corrective representation and neoliberal multicultural embodiment of what (deviant) students are not but should aim to be. This notion is fundamentally rooted in deficit and racist ideas about students of color. He writes corrective representations are “discursive formations [that] seek to homogenize and propagate an essentialist notion [of Latinx teachers], framing the cultural work done in the classroom as always in relation to the imagined deficits in the boys of color he is delegated to control and discipline (p. 291).

Notes

1. “El Sur Latinx” describes the impact of demographic shifts that make the South home to the fastest growing Latinx population in the U.S. Often referred to as “The New Latinx South,” Monreal and Tirado (Monreal and Tirado, forthcoming) problematize the Othering function of (perpetual) “Newness,” arguing “El Sur Latinx” points to Latinx as part of the people, stories, and interactions of the South itself.

2. SCforEd is a grassroots teacher group like organizations in several states that emerged as part of a larger RedforEd movement. In May 2019 SCforED organized a teacher rally/walkout which led to more than 10,000 participants congregating at the state Capitol.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Southern Regional Education Board and Spencer Foundation.