Critical Race Theory and Ethnographies Challenging the Stereotypes: Latino Families, Schooling, Resilience and Resistance

Abstract

In this article, Villenas and Deyhle use the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine Latino schooling and family education as portrayed in seven recent ethnographic studies. They argue that CRT provides a powerful tool to understand how the subordination and marginalization of people of color is created and maintained in the United States. The ethnographic studies of Latino education are filled with the stories and voices of Latino parents and youth. These stories and voices are the rich data by which a CRT lens can unveil and explain how and why “raced” children are overwhelmingly the recipients of low teacher expectations and are consequently tracked, placed in low-level classes and receive “dull and boring” curriculum. The voices of Latino parents reveal how despite the school rhetoric of parent involvement, parents are really “kept out” of schools by the negative ways in which they are treated, by insensitive bureaucratic requirements, and by the ways in which school-conceived parent involvement programs disregard Latino knowledge and cultural bases. Together these studies offer an insight into the schooling success and failure of Latino/a students within the context of the social construction of Latino/Mexicano as Other, played out in the anti-immigrant, xenophobic ambience of this country. Yet these studies also give powerful testimony to the cultural strengths and assets of Latino family education as a base by which new ways of schooling can be conceived. It is in fact when communities act as a collective, firmly rooted in their own language and culture, and gain economic and political power that families are able to make concrete changes.