Framing Care, Education, and Latino Success in Community Based Spaces

Edgar Valles
 

I decided to return to Dallas, Texas, my childhood home, to find a site for data collection in the Fall of 2018. My Masters in Anthropology from Iowa State University had made it clear that I had to find a space where I could not only live alongside potential interlocutors, but also work in a capacity that would define me as an insider. My Masters’ thesis explored national belonging with South Sudanese refugees in the Midwest shortly after South Sudan had gained independence. As a doctoral student in Education Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my research focus shifted to explore southern Dallas Latino youths’ transitions into educational spaces. My own parents had arrived undocumented from Mexico in the early 1970s, and I was born in Chicago, Illinois, but we moved to Dallas when I was only a month old, and I grew up in a household that only spoke Spanish. Education institutions were locations of misunderstanding between my community and educators, and I wanted to explore those points of tension that had long been taken as markers of cultural deficits – problems considered socially inherent and opposed to assimilation into educational institutions (Solorzano and Yosso, 2001).

 My doctoral research underscores the ongoing difficulty in improving post-secondary persistence among low-income Latino communities in Dallas, Texas. I conducted in-person ethnographic fieldwork during the 2018-2019 academic year at a community organization operating an Upward Bound (UB) college-readiness program. The community organization ran under the auspices of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest Latino Civil Rights organization in the U.S. (founded in 1929). LULAC and UB intersected to create a space that valued Latino youth in the context of a scholastic environment that typically sent no more than 10% of its graduates to post-secondary institutions, according to UB leadership. My field site boasted sending around 40% of participants to post-secondary institutions, a significant upward trend in academic persistence for the area. However, my research found that the idealization of Latino success through a strategy of Americanization, as employed by LULAC and implicit in UB’s goal of academic achievement in high education, reduced youth to symbols of success or failure that risked fetishizing the youth as products of a long-fought civil rights effort. 

Design

I began in-person data collection in the summer of 2018 by approaching different community organizations about my desire to study youth from immigrant communities and their transition to adulthood. Post-secondary education persistence seemed like the ideal location to unpack contemporary manifestations of social and cultural belonging. The Trump administration’s rhetoric impacted my interlocuters’ confidence that any DACA recipients would be protected long-term from deportation (Anderson, 2020). Despite these anxieties, education was still championed as a route to community stability. The UB program within a southern Dallas community center served 140 high school students from three participating area schools. UB was staffed by four employees – two youth workers, one tutor coordinator, and one programs manager. I was able to assist UB staff in all aspects of the operation. I conducted site visits to participating high schools, tutored in the early evenings after school, worked on weekend events, and I helped with planning once firmly embedded in the program’s routines. The program academic cycle ended in the summer with a six-week intensive program culminating in a road trip to the LULAC National Convention. 

Collected data amounted to over 2,000 hours of in-person participant observation. Upon leaving the field, I remained in dialogue with 40 study participants through the spring of 2023, though numbers dwindled over the years. Nearly all the UB youth study participants were from mixed-status families with at least one household member undocumented. I refrained from taking photographs of the students as a layer of anonymity, though I did argue for naming the region of Dallas where I worked for clearer applicability of any research findings. 

Findings

After completing the academic year with the community center, I left Dallas to return to Madison, Wisconsin. Half a year later, the world was hit with the reality of Covid-19 and academic spaces were, like so many other institutions, reduced to online and hybrid approaches. Youth participants from my study who were still in high school had to work from home, and those that had entered their first years of university worked from isolated dorm rooms or were asked by families to come home to avoid the housing price tag. Covid-19 skewed the numbers of UB youth gaining admittance into four-year universities; many who were already in post-secondary schools and in high school dropped out, and grades fell across UB program participants.

Coding for Covid-19 impacts after my in-person data collection brought new light to my pre-Covid findings. Initially, my dissertation work uncovered the impacts of normalized, yet precarious, immigration bureaucracies that left families vulnerable to shifts in polices (DACA, TPS, etc.), all of which weighed on students’ minds and affected their performance in school. I then found that even when students had achieved the aims of UB by cultivating various post-secondary education opportunities, they encountered obstacles rooted in the home. Meanwhile, parents’ anxieties were far more complex than the long debunked cultural deficits that were once believed to limit minoritized youths’ academic achievement. Instead, I found the systems that parents experienced as informal labor in both Mexico and the U.S. made it difficult for youth to break away from networks of labor and care that had previously proven adaptive. Finally, I saw LULAC treating youth as symbols for the promotion of organization strategy. LULAC had long used its members’ assimilation—through, for example, the visible adoption of American cultural ideals and self-styling as intrepid entrepreneurs and proud patriots—to prove its embeddedness in the nation. Youth were asked to embody this group aesthetic, even if this meant ignoring UB program participants’ individuality. 

Covid-19 made salient the anxieties that already existed at the community center. At times of economic distress, anxiety about certain immigrants grows (Ngai, 2014). With less to go around, it is easy to stir people up into thinking that helping others with tenuous connections to society will not be beneficial to the citizenry that should be protected by the state. In southern Dallas, the effects of Covid-19 did not stifle economic growth as expected. Urban renewal increased and many housing developments entered the previously well-defined Latino neighborhoods. Youth who would have been considered high-achieving dropped out of school to work construction. Yet, they were reconstructing their own neighborhoods with houses that were out of the price range of its residents. The social mobility that is an inherent promise with higher-education achievement compounded in its abstraction, and families pressured their children to take advantage of immediate economic opportunities. The end of the 2022-2023 academic year showed the gulf between youth who were able to remain in school and those who left for economic need. 

Conclusion

Research with UB youth in southern Dallas continues to show the difficulty in changing academic achievement trajectories within my study population. Covid-19 exacerbated existing economic anxieties and derailed program progress with increased dropouts. My findings can be used to augment dialogue between community, UB, and LULAC members to construct new ways of drawing youth towards post-secondary institutions. Moreover, conversations that fully address the reasons for seeking out higher education can support a more sustainable transition into unfamiliar middle-class networks, such that they are not so easily disrupted or broken by economic distress. I feel confident that ethnographic work on education with immigrant communities can benefit from research that looks to build effective long-term communication between education programs and vulnerable communities. 

Works Cited

Anderson, S. (2020, August 26). A Review Of Trump Immigration Policy. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/26/fact-check-and-review-of-trump-immigration-policy/?sh=467f01c356c0

Ngai, M. M. (2014). Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press.

Solorzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2001). From racial stereotyping and deficit discourse toward a critical race theory in teacher education. Multicultural education, 9(1), 2.