Suburban schools as sites of inspection: Understanding Latinx youth’s sense of belonging in a suburban high school

ABSTRACT

Through a critical ethnographic approach, this study examines how Latinx youth made sense of race, space, and place at a predominantly white, well-resourced suburban high school outside of Chicago, Illinois. Employing spatial theory and borderland theory, I analyze the experiences of 19 Latinx youth to learn how they understood and navigated the racialized borders of their school and how that, in turn, shaped how they built a sense of belonging for themselves. The findings focus on how whiteness and white youth set the stage for how Latinx youth take up space and build community. Moreover, despite the constraints they endure, Latinx youth enact their agency in ways that can help schools reimagine how to create more inclusive student communities.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Iván Arenas, Benjamin Bernard-Herman, James Castillo, Mónica González Ybarra, Linn Posey-Maddox, Eujin Park, Abigail Simon, and Anjale Welton for their feedback throughout the different iterations of this article as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Rodriguez

Gabriel Rodriguez is an assistant professor at Iowa State University in the School of Education. His interdisciplinary research explores the relationship between educational inequality and race, specifically the interplay between the academic achievement, equality of opportunity, and the identities of Latinx youth and other youth of color in the context of demographically changing schools and communities.