A call to reshape our desires: contesting the “inevitable answer” of inclusion within empire

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile increased college access is widely celebrated for racialized peoples, the end goal of inclusion maintains engagement with and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. This paper examines a culturally relevant college preparation program designed primarily for Mexican-origin youth in California to consider the college-going competencies and desires the program socializes youth through and to. Drawing from educator and youth pláticas embedded within an ethnography of the Bridge Program, this scholarship argues that the competencies youth were socialized into for college-going purposes simultaneously prepared them to uphold the settler colonial state. Engaging language socialization and settler colonial studies perspectives, this paper finds that Bridge Program youth were socialized into understandings of better lives as only possible within U.S. empire by framing college as an almost singular pathway to wellbeing. This work calls for anticolonial desires, visions of and pathways to better lives beyond empire’s boundaries.