Feeling the stress and strain – race, economics, and the educational experiences of Latinx emergent bilinguals in a ‘new’ destination school

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ABSTRACT This article uses ethnographic data to examine the schooling experiences of Latinx emergent bilinguals and the educators who worked with them at a mid-size high school in a small Wisconsin city. Using Critical Race Theory, I argue that as tensions have increased in recent years from school funding cuts, deindustrialization, and demographic shifts, the community’s white residents have repeated long-standing patterns of white supremacy to assert economic and cultural dominance over Communities of Color. I examine the manifestation of these dynamics in the schooling experiences of my participants through a racially hostile schooling environment and a general lack of investment in their education. This work offers important insights on the sociohistorical intersections of race and class within predominantly white, rural and suburban ‘new destination’ communities and problematizes the very notion of ‘new’ in such locals by questioning assumptions about who is ‘native’ and who is ‘new’ to a particular community