“Welcome to Holyoke!”: Performing Pride, Shame, Pedagogy, and Resistance in Middle School

Abstract

This manuscript looks at opportunities for resistance and the construction of community and pride with and in a primarily Puerto Rican middle school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Theoretically, we borrow from work on shame, pride, resistance, and Latinidad from scholars in critical pedagogy and performance. For our methodological framework, we use Foucault's discussion of discipline (1979) and the internalization of technologies of practice (1988) in the structuring of performances of admission, and extend this analysis with a focus on tactical responses (de Certeau 1972) to the institutional and relational structuring of shame in performances of orality, operations, and the ordinary among participants in a community-based learning program.