Cultural Guardians

This chapter explains the concept of cultural guardians to elucidate the range of sanctioned and unsanctioned strategies Latina teachers consciously deploy in order to protect and help co-ethnic children. Latina teachers do not set out to become cultural guardians, but their interactions with poorer co-ethnic students and their families as well as their colleagues prompt them to adopt the role. Because of their own marginalization over the life course, including negative childhood experiences in K–12 schools and beyond, they soon realize how valuable they can be to their working-class Latino students and those students’ families. The process of serving as agents of ethnic mobility and giving back socially to the poor Latino families they serve, however, means they had to do so by stretching and bending institutional policies to provide “more-than-routine” service to Latino children as a result of school rules, policies, and administrative oversight that pervade their work. Latinas who grew up in English-speaking or middle-class families, are multiracial (Mexican and white), or of later generations can also play the role as well as Latinas from working-class backgrounds, especially in multiracial environments, because they all experience exclusion in spaces that privilege whiteness.

From “Americanization” to “Latinization”

While Mexican-origin children and other racial/ethnic and language-minority children were once forced to undergo Americanization programs that urged them to assimilate into a white mainstream, the remnants of these policies still influence the workplace culture that Latina teachers encounter daily, but “majority–minority” schools allow for a different scenario. This chapter situates the study in the literature from various disciplines, drawing from theories about workplace inequities and educational disenfranchisement. It relies on classical and contemporary educational theories to detail the history of segregation Latino youth faced in the U.S. educational system and in southern California schools. It connects cultural deficit and subtractive schooling theories to argue that these perspectives linger, influencing the measures Latina teachers take once in their jobs. It explains how Latino ethnic culture is a powerful asset that Latina teachers bring to their workplaces to promote educational attainment.

Conclusion and Epilogue

The book concludes with a summary of its main contributions. This workplace ethnography provides the reader with a gendered account of the racial dynamics in multiracial schools and finds that there are larger racial/ethnic stereotypes and hierarchies that emerge among racial/ethnic minority groups in the white-collar world and professions. The Conclusion explains that Latina teachers heavily guard Latino culture in schools and become ethnic mobility agents to deflect racism against their Latino students, but there is a cost to some students, especially African American children and those Latino students who do not fit the mold of deserving aid. While structural racism influences their jobs, culture is a vehicle to promote educational success. It describes whether Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies can be learned and implemented by non-Latina teachers and ends with a discussion of the possible negative repercussions of Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies in multiethnic metropolitan regions across the nation as Latino families settle in new immigrant gateways. It also provides policy implications for educational reform for students who attend schools in multiracial spaces.

“I Just Fell into It”

This chapter explains the forces that channel Latinas into the teaching profession. The changing opportunity structure of the economy, familial social networks, and social structural forces of racial, class, and gender inequalities creates a situation in which gender and race refracts working-class status, such that primary and secondary teaching has emerged as the top occupation drawing Latina college graduates. Many of these women are the first person in their families to graduate from college, and this chapter suggests that a strong obligation to help their families financially influences their choices. These forces, at work in their families and universities, both constrain and enable their pathways into teaching and influence the emergence of cultural guardianship. For this reason, “class ceilings” help to explain how Latina college graduates navigate their educational and career choices with collectively informed agency and filial obligations to family members.

Co-ethnic Cultural Guardianship

Chapter 4 provides a window into how Latina teachers navigate their professional lives with mostly African American and Asian colleagues, students, and parents. Controlling images of school district space—in this case the schools these Latina teachers work for—influence racial positioning between Latina teachers and non-Latinos because the context of reception disadvantages Latino students, hastening their predisposition toward them. Latina teachers working in Compton—a city consisting primarily of Latino immigrants—describe having been encouraged to leave for school districts and workplaces that are not associated with the “Black underclass.” Latina teachers in Rosemead, an ethnoburb consisting primarily of Latinos and Asians, on the other hand, enroll their children there and are able to access resources the more class-heterogeneous Asian population provides. Ultimately, Latina teachers perceive undocumented Latina/o immigrants to be below African Americans and Asian Americans in local racial hierarchies as a result of the political ostracism of the first group and the valorization of the second group. This process provides the impetus for co-ethnic cultural guardianship to develop. This chapter also provides an explanation for the absence of guardianship directed toward Black or Asian students.

Introduction

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already given and transmitted from the past. —Karl Marx, 18521 The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change....

Standardized Tests and Workplace Tensions

Chapter 6 offers an analysis of how California’s structural policies regarding high-stakes testing and the academic labels applied to language-minority children fuel interracial conflicts between Latina teachers and their African American and Asian co-workers. While Latina teachers explained that race relations with their co-workers were ostensibly civil on a daily basis, they use language labels to discuss racial/ethnic conflict between teachers and students on school grounds. The language labels (EO=English Only, ELL=English Language Learner) applied to students in schools result in a differential racialization process of children, with the children of Latino immigrants (ELLs) being preferred at Compton Elementary. Asian children and exceptional children of Latino immigrants are preferred at Goodwill Elementary. Latina cultural guardians resist this structural inequality.

Bicultural Myths, Rifts, and Shifts

This chapter illustrates how Latina teachers creatively exercise an alternative form of cultural capital termed Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies, a central component of cultural guardianship. The focus of this chapter is twofold. First, it illustrates how Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies are different from what we usually associate with Latino cultures, the symbolic forms that appear in schools occasionally. Although Latino culture is not monolithic, Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies are a set of practices Latina teachers use to subvert normative workplace rules regarding culture in teaching. Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies comprise immigrant narratives, communication codes, and alternative mathematical problem solving—cultural resources that many lower-status Latino children and their parents possess. Second, it elucidates how Latina cultural guardians faced resistance, especially at Compton Elementary, to their use of Latino cultural resources to facilitate Latino/a student progress. While informal in practice, Chicana/Latina cultural pedagogies were at times denigrated or challenged in specific ways by colleagues and administration.