Got Cultural Citizenship? A Place-Based and Socio-Historical Analysis of Postsecondary Students’ Cultural Logics and Values at a Land Grant Institution in Southern New Mexico

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using data from a 2013 Student Diversity Survey, this place-based analysis examines the cultural values, beliefs, and logics of postsecondary students from an Hispanic Land Grant Institution in southern New Mexico. The analysis explores the diverse social profiles of the students in the sample and how race, gender, and class statuses shape student’s cultural logics related to educational democracy. Relying on the concepts of cultural citizenship and settler colonialism, the author imagines a post-assimilationist education trajectory that celebrates the cultural wealth of working-class, students of color, and women students as they diversify US higher education. The findings show that these postsecondary students embrace cultural logics centering on interdependence and collectivism and reject cultural logics centering on individualism and independence. The author makes a case for expanding neoliberal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion approaches in US higher education to grapple with the foundational violences of Indigenous land dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism that maintains systemic inequities and exclusions in US public education.