Foreword: understanding Latina/o resilience

Latinas and other minorities are often resilient in silence. While working on this collaborative special issue, the world and its people’s resilience was tested by the coronavirus pandemic. While keeping socially distant, communities and countries were called to come together in solidarity. Their charge to bravery, strength, and faith in the face of uncertainty is not unlike the daily charge shared by Latinas/os in the United States. Particularly for those in the academy, both faculty and students, this charge was a well-rehearsed hymn. Connecting with Yosso’s (2005) concept of community cultural wealth (CCW), we planned this edited issue as a way to bring to light the structural and social resilience that Latina/o community members rely on when navigating what is often a complicated reality. The authors in this issue recognize the value and power of CCW in the lives and legacies of Latinas/os, shining light on the dark and quiet spaces where the resilient Latina/o is often found. While tragic, the pandemic that became the context for this collaboration provided a backdrop to understand and engage with a broader notion of resilience. In stark relief we can see the pointed and perennial resiliency of Latinas inside and outside of the activities of the epoch.

This special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, ‘Understanding Latina/o Resilience,’ is proof of resilience among Latinx colleagues who find community and co-creative spaces in the spirit of colegas Latinos. It is here, within conversations and within these pages that we are able to find a space to grow together, challenge one another, and make our claims. This conversation, like this issue, echoes the underlying questions why, how, and what makes Latinas/os resilient. We seek answers not to prove what we already know. We seek answers in order to apply it as a cultural response to our work, our professions, and our communities. We seek answers to equip a new generation of Latina/o resilience.

As context for the papers in this issue, we want to use this forward to introduce a model of Latina/o resilience. The Latina/o resilience model introduces a resilience element that individuals use in challenging contexts, not only as students but also as they move through their professions and different scenarios in life. The model embraces and continues the idea of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) becoming a model of contextual, lifelong resilience that is found in the Latina/o culture (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Latina/o resilience model.

As a backdrop for this issue-long conversation, we propose that as scholars, we should create or promote the conditions that Latinas/os need to employ resilience now and tomorrow. Both difficult to define and difficult to identify, these conditions often escape the Latina/os who could use them to fuel resilience. The suggested negotiates and juxtaposes the many contexts where Latina/os are called to be resilient. The five included contexts (home, school, college, community, and workplace) offer both a linear and nonlinear model of how culture shapes resilience in these contexts as Latina/os grow and as they experience multiple contexts at once.

If we look around, two decades into the 21^st century, we see Latina/o individuals in schools, colleges and the workplace. However, the internal demographics and dynamics of this group are shifting. Many Latina/os are second- and third generation Americans. Though more adept at navigating the political and social landscape where White males still hold power, Latina/os still experience racism and sexism from grade school through retirement. For many of these people, their lives are not wholly foreign or wholly domestic; they live at what Anzaldúa (1987) called the ‘borderlands’ or la frontera. In this liminal space, Latina/os both engage and disengage in the world as it is. The intersection they feel is an amalgamation of accepted and rejected, and in this new space, Latina/os are finding the tools to persist and be resilient.

Fifteen years ago, Yosso’s (2005) model of community cultural wealth (CCW) placed unique value in the lived experiences of students of color. Recognizing the wealth and capital of their communities and connections, Yosso confronted the traditional deficit-based approach to students of color with an asset-based approach. The proposed Latina/o resilience model carries on Yosso’s work by exploring how resilience works through multiple contexts: at home and school (Chlup et al., 2019), college (several articles in this issue), the workforce (including academia), and their community. The model both reinforces and depends on a resilient Latina/o. It challenges this population to be ever-aware and ever-moving towards resilience. Tenets of the resilience model include the values, behaviors, and knowledge of the Latinx culture. Moreover, the model suggests the important ways that these values, behaviors, and knowledge constitute cultural wealth and how that wealth is perceived and used by the Latina/o community.

Ruiz (2013) suggested that ‘due to traditional values, Latinas often feel responsible for their family at a very young age; many are expected to do housework and take care of their elders and/or siblings’ (p. 35). According to the Pew Hispanic Center (2009), Latina/o students feel forced to drop out of school to start working because they need to meet these familial told and/or untold demands. This phenomenon sometimes deters Latina/o students from degree completion because family comes first. For example, ‘students experienced separation anxiety as they made efforts to stay connected to family and friends who chose not to leave their home communities’ (Rendón, Nora, & Kanagala, 2014, p. 11). The primacy of family is instilled at a very young age and can create yet another hurdle for these students, but at the same time, a source of strength. In the suggested model, Latina/o resilience precisely emphasizes that these culture-connected college experiences, if met with resilience, will help students to be successful now and in future contexts. As students learn and realize that resilience comes from their own culture and not in spite of their culture, they will become aware of their power and efficacy.

Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth (CCW) model emphasizes the talents, strengths, and experiences that students of color bring with them to their college environment. This asset-based model presents a framework that can be used to understand how students of color access and experience college from a strengths-based perspective. Recognizing that Latina/o resilience is not only limited to traditional student outcomes like retention and academic success at college and school, this model considers notions of success before, during, and after the academic experience. Yosso’s CCW model offers six types of capital: aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, resistant, and navigational. This model directs purposeful conversations about how those forms of capital apply to Latina/o individuals. While its application is certainly appropriate in the field of higher education, we hope that the model finds use and value as scholars track the ways Latina/os are resilient into, throughout, and after their professional lives as well, particularly in those moments when their professional lives draw them back to the academy.

This Latina/o resilience model considers a continuous acknowledgment of resilience throughout life and awakens and supports a non-deficit, asset-based approach. The resilience model focuses on Latina/o individuals and their unique experiences. The model allows for the complexities of Latina/os—a group whose race and gender intersect with one another and a ‘borderland’ space that is both and neither. Finally, the model recognizes and reconciles the process of resilience as a long-term strategy and not as a victory in itself.

Contribution of this special issue

The authors of the articles in this special issue on understanding Latina/o resilience focus in specific moments and contexts of resilience. Each article offers a different vantage point from which to observe and understand Latina/o resilience. Topics include: (a) how Latinx college prospective students find assistance from parental support (Palomin, 2020); (b) how Latinx students in STEM can find in cultural wealth a way to succeed (Rincón, Fernández, & Dueñas, 2020); (c) how mentoring programs implemented in a college support Latina resilience group (López et al., 2020), (d) how Latinx students find the meaning of serving in Hispanic-serving Institutions (HSIs; Gonzalez, Contreras Aguirre, & Myers, 2020); (e) how HSIs navigate as institutions with particular challenges external pressures and become resilient (Fernandez & Burnett, 2020); (f) how Latinas can be successful in STEM fields in regional HSIs in the south of Texas (Contreras Aguirre, Gonzalez, & Banda, 2020); and (g) how to increase Latina representation in engineering (Banda, 2020).

In ‘The Missing Piece in Education: Latina/o/x Parent Involvement in the Pre-College Preparation Process from the South Texas Border Region,’ Leticia Palomin addresses resilience in the home context. Here she examines how parents are involved and contribute to their children’s success.

Rincón, Fernández and Dueñas find in ‘Anchoring Comunidad: How First- and Continuing-Generation Latinx Students in STEM Engage Community Cultural Wealth’ a presence of resilience as students understand community cultural wealth as they get involved in acts of resistance in college. Another example of resilience in higher education is introduced by López, Valdez, Pacheco, Honey and Jones in ‘Bridging silos in higher education: using Chicana Feminist Participatory Action Research to foster Latina resilience,’ explaining a college mentoring program that provides a space to better serve Latinas in higher education, between the mentors and mentees. Gonzalez, Ortega, Molina, and Lizalde’s piece focuses in a particular serving institution, an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), where students exercise their voices in a resilient manner, where it is possible to identify an asset-based approach in ‘What Does it Mean to Be a Hispanic-Serving Institution? Listening to the Latina/o/x Voices of Students.’

Fernandez and Burnett in their piece, ‘Considering the Need for Organizational Resilience at Hispanic Serving Institutions: A Study of How Administrators Navigate Institutional Accreditation in Southern States,’ introduce organizational resilience as an additional context to consider in organizations, particularly when we talk about Hispanic Serving Institutions, and its implication for theory and practice. Additionally, in ‘Latina College Students’ Experiences in STEM at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Framed within Latino Critical Race Theory’; Contreras, Gonzalez, and Banda bring the resilience approach to also the HSI context, where students in STEM are able to demonstrate that they can succeed if they engage those elements of resilience in a male-dominated discipline.

In the last article, Banda provides examples of the presence of resilience in a specific context as it is, the engineering department of a college. In the ‘From the Inside Looking Out: Latinas Intersectionality and their Engineering Departments,’ Banda addresses policy makers and administrators to consider new ways to increase meaningful experiences to support increasing the representation of Latinas.

The readership

This special issue on understanding Latina/o resilience is built, in part, on Freire’s (1972) notion of praxis. The thought cannot stop at thought; it must be made manifest as action to shape researchers, teachers, faculty, administrators, practitioners, and policy makers. The articles within this issue speak to the lived experiences of Latina/o life. To understand the undercurrent of resilience within our community and the cultural wealth from which their strength is drawn is to simultaneously critique deficit-model approaches which have been historically applied to Latina/o individuals and to embrace asset-based models of thinking.

This special issue seeks to join and continue the conversation on how higher education and the workplace can be remade and reshaped with a resilient Latina/o in mind. We discuss Latina/o resilience across a spectrum of experiences particularly in HSIs, as we see understand also the happenings and realities in these organizations. The goal of these authors is to stretch the possibilities of Latina/o students because what is expected to happen, outside our communities, is unexpected.

Finally, this special issue argues that equity is an echo of resilience, and it must ricochet off both office buildings in higher education and the ivory tower. We encourage Latinas/os to practice and breath resilience in a variety of diverse contexts, pushing ever forward to classrooms, through classrooms, and beyond classrooms. We are a Latina/o community, we are a resilient community.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the QSE Special Issue: Understanding Latina/o Resilience is a reality. The idea started early at AERA 2019, and despite several challenges, the special issue is a finished product, thanks to the support of friends and colleagues.This special issue would not be possible without the support, guidance, and thoughtful advice of the editorial team in QSE: Jim Scheurich, Berenice Sanchez, and Josh Manlove. Jim welcomed and supported the idea from the beginning, and Berenice guided us step by step to complete this process, she kindly supported our work during uncounted hours of advise in the middle of a special and busy time in her professional and academic career.

We would also like to thank the contributors of this special issue for getting everything across the finish line during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Our contributors respected deadlines while balancing their many responsibilities and were strongly committed to this project. A special thanks to Angela Valenzuela who provided her expertise and thoughtfulness in her Reflection piece, a very special and fundamental part of this issue. And finally, our gratitude to all the scholars who anonymously served, in a very challenging time, as peer reviewers for the manuscripts of this special issue. Thank you, we all became together a resilient community of Latino scholars!