“No me dejaran ir porque they needed me here”: spatializing corrective representatives by critiquing latinx teacher role model discourse

ABSTRACT

This article examines the formations and tensions of Latinx teacher role model subject positions in spaces with relatively few Latinx teachers. To address the under theorization of space and Latinx teacher subjectivity, I insert a relational space frame to previous literature that critiques neoliberal attempts to place both the blame and solution for racialized educational injustice on the shoulders of individual (student/teacher) Latinx bodies. I use discursive ‘moments’ to illustrate how and where a certain type of Latinx teacher role model emerges while also extending Singh’s idea of corrective representations by accounting for the role relational geographies (spaces) play in producing ‘rational/normal,’ neoliberal, and racialized subject positions for Latinx teachers. I close with concluding thoughts about space, subjectification, and representation, suggesting that teacher education offers an underutilized area to center the politics of such.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher Representation
• latinx teachers
• latinx education
• U.S. South
• critical geographies
• postructuralism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, the term U.S. South references a collection of states, sometimes referred to as the ‘Lower South’ or ‘Deep South’ (Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana). These states have populations that have traditionally viewed race within a Black/white binary and have more recent, although not exclusively new, patterns of Latinx growth.

2. This is an important ontological understanding about space that influences the literature I draw upon. Massey communicates her view of space as relational, emergent, and open-ended, a clear break from Marxist conceptualizations that undergird space with temporal and structural determinism. While the constellations of meeting points that produce space are never equal, and always already influenced by myriad racial, gender, and class injustices, they are never closed and bounded, a view that some frameworks might suggest. Thus, for theoretical consistency, I steer away from more structural approaches to race and space like Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA). In no way do I seek to minimize the importance and significance of CRSA (and similar frameworks).

3. In addition to Dumas’ (2016) description of ‘moments’, Gamez (2023) outlines a similar process of using ethnographic ‘examples’ to illuminate and think with specific concepts.

4. The rise of anti-immigrant legislation in many Southern areas correlates to increased Latinx populations. In particular, during the 2000s, many state and local politicians in the U.S. South used words like ‘invasion’, ‘flood’, and ‘alien’ when referencing the need to ‘battle’ illegal immigration at the U.S./Mexico border. In lieu of national immigration law changes, many states, counties, and municipalities throughout the U.S. South passed laws, policies, and local ordinances to restrict housing, driving, policing, education, and access to resources; thus, targeting and materially limiting the lives of Latinx. Many participants in my larger study described racial profiling in relation to such laws such as being ‘asked for my green card’ by police and the denial of, or increased barriers to, public services like the DMV.

5. Singh (2022, pers. comm.) draws upon Jose Estaban Muñoz’s 1999 theory of disidentification. Thus, while this article focuses on laying the foundation for spatializing corrective representations more broadly, Muñoz’s (1999) theorization opens up the specific intersection with gender and sexual respectability that I only discuss briefly.