Gilberto Arriaza

Schools, Social Capital and Children of Color

This article examines the role that social networks and protective agents play in developing and accumulating social capital among children of color. The ethnographic study on which the article is based looks at the ways children write a narrative of resistance within contradictory cultural norms, which offer, on the one hand, a space for teachers to become protective agents who build students’ capacity to decode cultural signals, to develop a strong racial and cultural identity, and to cope with stressful borders and institutional barriers. On the other hand, schools offer this very same space that can be used to reproduce and perpetuate inequities and injustices. To explore this duality, I examine the social dynamics behind the discipline statistics provided by referrals issued to students when expelled from the classroom and sent to the counseling office. I first describe the social context that creates the educational environment where social capital is generated and/or denied. This dynamic usually starts with the application of detention as the initial step. If the offense is considered serious and merits the intervention of the school’s administration, a referral is issued. In most cases referrals are also considered the last resort available to adults in schools to address an out-of-control behavioral situation. The intent of most referral practices is corrective, not preventive. Second, I document the complexity of power, resistance and normalizing issues through the role that language, cultural discourses—expressed via standing up, and talking back, and reputation—and social networks play in the process. I look at these issues within the larger context of an institution that has reformed itself, and that shows many of the features characteristic of the new schools created throughout the USA over the last decade of the twentieth century. This article is divided in three major parts: the theoretical framework, the methodology, and the report.

Language and Reforming Schools: A Case for a Critical Approach to Language in Educational Leadership.

This article examines the potential of a critical approach to language as a new dimension of transforming school cultures and making them more coherent with purported equity and social justice goals. The literature review shows that the latest waves of school reform in the USA have done little to change patterns of student achievement based on ‘race’ and class because they have only tinkered with changing the cultures of schools. We suggest that one reason that school reforms have failed to achieve educational equity for all groups is that a critical approach to language has been absent from this process. This absence is due, among other reasons, to the fact that teachers and school leaders have not been formally educated on the subject of language and discourse as a medium for change. Our analysis of the literature leads us to suggest that a critical approach to language could offer a way for schools (or any human organization) to concretely analyse implicit beliefs and values and, thus, unpack institutionalized epistemologies of race, social class, and gender that might, in the last analysis, be hindering efforts to transform schools into equitable institutions.

Welcome to the Front Seat: Racial Identity and Mesoamerican Immigrants.

In this article, I argue that mestizo immigrants from the Mesoamerica region experience a low socioeconomic tracking compounded by a racialized subordinating discourse in the United States. These immigrants come over to the United States from a region where social stratification and racial prejudice are based more on cultural and linguistic differentiation than on pigmentation. Once in their new surroundings, mestizo immigrants live a reversal of power relations as well as a new cultural regime that places them in a secondary social role. Key words: diasporic studies, race theory, identity formation theory, identity and education, immigration, Latina/Latino/Chicano culture, people of color and socialization