On Loss, Gain, Acceptance and Belonging: Spanish in the Midwest

In this article, the authors analyze the creation of a performance piece in both English and Spanish with undergraduate students to creatively combine Latina/o/x oral histories and performance artists’ personal experiences as Spanish speakers. Each performer selected an oral history collected by one of the authors in the digital and publicly available archive, Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio. Through a Latino Critical Race Theory framework, and an analysis of the undergraduate student performers’ and audience’s reactions, the authors demonstrate how this kind of performance can be used as a pedagogical tool to strengthen Spanish as a heritage language learners’ sense of belonging in predominantly white educational spaces by contesting epistemic violence and forging Latina/o/x networks of solidarity. Linguistic and cultural maintenance in the face of racialization is conceptualized as a tool for place-making and social justice, particularly in the Midwestern communities that have experienced backlash to growing Latino presence. The performance provides a model for future artistic work that harnesses the power of community cultural wealth as conceptualized by education and Latina/o studies scholar Tara Yosso (2005). Crucially, rather than insist on cultural and linguistic conformity for the sake of social and political unity, this work critically attends to the diversity among Latina/o/x experiences represented across the performance.

Southwest Borderland Voices and Stories: Community Cultural Wealth as Living Literacies

This study qualitatively examines the literacy experiences of three Southwest Borderland Latinos who left high school before graduating. Addressing a gap in the literature that reveals the limited attention paid to how students who left high school before graduating generate and use community cultural wealth (Burciaga & Erbstein, 2012), this investigation explores the vibrant role and contribution of community cultural wealth in literacy development. Through the frameworks of New Literacy Studies (NLS) and family literacy within the context of the Southwest Borderlands, and employing the tool of counternarratives through a Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) lens, this study provides a platform for validating and affirming the voices, stories, experiences, and knowledges of the research participants. Utilizing portraiture as the methodology illuminates the living literacies that transpired when the participants read their world and the word (Freire, 2006).

Critical Race Media Projects

This article maps out two critical race media projects – a documentary and a Chicana/o-centric student newspaper – developed by Chicana/o scholars seeking to fulfilll the promise of praxis hailed by critical race theorists. Fortified and guided by the quintessential tenets of critical race theory and Latino critical race theory, these critical race media projects not only apply, but also extend these principles to seek educational and community transformation. As such, the production process for both documentary and student newspaper merge research and activism in order to cultivate figurative and literal spaces that encourage and allow for the recuperation of memory, archiving forgotten history, and the self-determination of contemporary identities and belonging. By harnessing critical race theory’s counter story-telling focus, these projects cultivate the voices of resistance and reclamation in Latina/o communities, transcending the Black/White paradigm that bounds a majority of critical race scholarship. In addition, both the film and quarterly newspaper uniquely sharpen the theoretical framework’s analytic critique of language, discourse and representation, exemplifying the inimitable power of words to both heal and wound.

Resisting Negative Images and Stereotypes: One Latina Prospective Teacher’s Story

This article focuses on one Latina prospective teacher’s act of resisting negative stereotypes regarding attire imposed upon her by a white female principal. The event is embedded within a larger life history study that explores the experiences of bilingual Latino prospective teachers in the elementary education program of a large Midwestern university. The selected narrative is contextualized in relation to resistance narratives. Patricia Morales tells about her experiences in U.S. schools. It explores how Patricia’s life history is marked by experiences of discrimination, yet how her constructions of these events represent “counterstories” (Delgado, 2000; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) through which she “talks back” (hooks, 1989) to distorted images and stereotypes. Patricia’s narratives are shown to constitute creative acts of resistance through which she negotiates a positive and affirming identity (Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2001) as a Latina prospective teacher. Keywords: preservice teachers; teacher education; Latino critical race theory; narrative inquiry