Racial identity exploration and academic belonging: LatinX faculty navigating the counters of Latinidad

ABSTRACT

U.S. higher education institutions have traditionally centeredwhite Eurocentric norms and practices that work to diminish and racialize minoritized and marginalized populations. In this manuscript, we venture to disrupt the LatinX monolith myth that has been imposed upon LatinXs by education scholars. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we critique the safeguards of power that regulate conceptualizations of Latinidad – mainly through the social investment in socially constructed racial and ethnic categories, surveillance of language, and normative boundaries of exclusion/inclusion. Through a phenomenological approach, we assessed the narratives of seven LatinX faculty who navigate the politics of academia and identity simultaneously. Three major findings emerged: Spanish language is used as a marker of LatinX identity; gatekeeping to Latinidad is upheld by institutional policies; and LatinX faculty utilize their own negative schooling experiences to create spaces of advocacy, self-awareness, and representation within their classrooms for marginalized students. We conclude by underscoring how study findings helped illuminate the ways socio-political structures coalesce on college campuses in ways that perpetrates the LatinX monolith myth.

KEYWORDS:

• LatinX racial heterogeneity
• LatinX faculty
• racialization
• Latinidad
• mestizaje
• Spanglish
• Monolith

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The signifier of LatinX, is utilized as opposed to Latina/o, Latin@, and even Latinx. The incorporation of capital X was informed by Milian’s (2019) analysis; ‘X, which complicates and makes space for discussions that do not solely rely on binary configurations’ (p. 2). It accounts for the experience in the labor force, geographic crossings placing emphasis on an X represents the liminality of LatinX in the US, ‘…moving underground…in a space of unknowability, of transitions, of crossings: the ultimate X’ which includes political, geographic, and hemispheric realities of colonized peoples (p. 2).