An Educator’s Excess of Language Around Latinx Students of Uncertain Legal Status: Creating Visibility or Invisibility?

Abstract

This paper draws on data from a 2018 study that explored how K-12 educators in one rural Midwestern community were responding to the milieu of rapid changes in immigration policy and rhetoric. Participants’ discussion around immigration status commingled with other status-assigning labels or used labels that may be used to sort or categorize students (e.g., socioeconomic status). We theoretically examine an extended interview with one principal drawing on Derridian concepts of deconstruction and differánce. We question how the excess of an educator’s language around race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural and/or linguistic heritage of immigrants render Latinx students of varying legal status visible and invisible in school. We located signifiers such as country of origin, economic worth, and legal status that made visible Latinx persons through identity indicators, also rendering them invisible through reducing all Latinx persons in the community into a monolithic category.