Lilia D. Monzó

Alienated advocacy: Perspectives of Latina mothers of young adults with developmental disabilities on service systems

Although collaborative partnership between parents and professionals is a cornerstone of the special education and service systems, this relationship exists more as an ideal, especially when low-income, culturally diverse families are involved. Through three focus groups, we examined the beliefs of 16 low-income Latina mothers of young adults with developmental disabilities about their relationships with the educational and service delivery systems. Primary concerns identified were (a) poor communication, (b) low effort in providing services, (c) negative attitudes of professionals toward the client-children, (d) negative treatment of parents by professionals, and (e) the mothers role as central to the well-being of her child. Mothers tended to adopt a posture of alienated advocacy in relation to their childs educational and service needs.

Appropriating the Sociocultural Resources of Latino Paraeducators for Effective Instruction with Latino Students: Promise and Problems.

This article examines the sociocultural scaffolding practices of 24 Latino paraeducators and 8 former Latino paraeducators (who had recently become teachers) as they worked with Latino students in two large urban schools. Instances were observed in which participants used important funds of knowledge in their interactions with students during instruction, in informal contexts, and in the case of the current paraeducators to inform the teachers with whom they worked in the community. Unfortunately, use of sociocultural scaffolding was scarce, nonstrategic, and not directly tied to instruction. We argue that under ideal instructional conditions, this knowledge should be fostered, used strategically, and appropriated more systematically.

Ethnography in charting paths toward personal and social liberation: using my Latina cultural intuition

Drawing on a Chicana feminist epistemology, the author, a Latina immigrant, presents how she used her cultural intuition to engage in a two-year ethnography with Latino immigrant families. She argues that for her engaging in ethnography with her “own community” is an endeavor that calls to the fore her homegrown epistemologies and her positioning as a Latina immigrant. The themes of doing ethnography en familia, using collective remembering and sense-making, and developing a libratory pedagogy point to an ethnography that strays from traditional, presumed “objective” data sources. Further, she argues that in these contexts of ethnography she was able to reclaim and integrate her various knowledges and identities toward a potential process of liberation.

Critical Pedagogy and the Decolonial Option: Challenges to the Inevitability of Capitalism

The demise of capitalism was theoretically prophesied by Marx who posited that the world would come to such a state of destruction and human suffering that no amount of coercion or concessions would suffice to stop the massive uprisings that would lead us into a new socialist alternative. Although the downfall of world capitalism may seem ludicrous, we are seeing multiple examples of uprisings across the world and must seize this moment of possibility. Drawing on revolutionary critical pedagogy and decolonial theory, the authors argue that we must look to the subalterns whose geopolitical position of oppression and their experiences with class struggle may provide important models from which we may build future socialist movements. Specifically, the authors discuss briefly some of the successes of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions.

The complexity of Spivak’s project: a Marxist interpretation

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to engage some of the central themes of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak? (CSS)” In particular, her criticisms of post-structuralism’s treatment of the “subject” as well as its privileging of “discourse” and micrological analyses of power vis-a-vis her discussion of Foucault and Deleuze. Design/methodology/approach The paper also draws on a historical materialist approach to examine how Spivak’s own work often reinscribes the discursive and politically pusillanimous tendencies of both post-structuralist and post-colonialist thought. Findings This lends itself to the “complexification” of capitalism – a bourgeois form of mystification of capital’s essential workings and the underlying class structure of the globalized economy, inclusive of “postcolonial” societies. Originality/value The authors conclude that CSS – while an important question – is ultimately a misdirected one that, in effect, mistakes discursive empowerment for social and economic enablement.

Deploying Guns to Expendable Communities: Bloodshed in Mexico, U.S. Imperialism, and Transnational Capital—A Call for Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

This article argues that the gun industry, as part of the broader military industrial complex, serves a specific function of both producing and securing capital interests, U.S. imperialism, and racism and that these work together to support the capital accumulation of the transnational capitalist class. The U.S.–Mexican border and the War on Drugs are discussed as a case in point in which Mexican communities are made expendable in the service of capital. A revolutionary critical pedagogy is advanced to support the mass mobilization of a people worldwide who are fed up with having our labor and our dignity extorted and who are ready to imagine and create a socialist alternative.