Nathalia E. Jaramillo

Critical Pedagogy, Latino/a Education, and the Politics of Class Struggle

Due to the fact that critical pedagogy constitutes a narrative of universal emancipation (at least those versions that have escaped attempts by postmodernists and neoliberals to domesticate them), critics on both the political left and the right not only have dismissed its politics as yet another example of the colonizing incarnations of the Western educational canon but also have rejected it as a valid means for social transformation. They have accused it of possessing, among other toxic attributes, an outdated and historically discredited working-class tri-umphalism premised on vulgar economic reductionism that should have been abandoned long before Fukuyama2 famously announced that the teething pains of capitalism were over and that liberal capitalist democracy had finally ascended to the zenith of humankind’s ideological achievements through its ultimate victory over its conquered rival ideologies of hereditary monarchy, fascism, and more recently communism.3 Of course, the primary object of attack is Marxist theory itself, which has been making some significant inroads of late within the critical pedagogy literature, more specifically as the central theoretical armature of the critique of the globalization of capitalism and the pauperization of the working masses in the wake of recent “free trade” agreements and the economic and military imperialism of the Bush Jr. administration.

Katrina and the Banshee's Wail: The Racialization of Class Exploitation

In this article, the authors examine Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on the people of New Orleans from a historical materialist perspective. In their analysis, the authors discuss Katrina in relation to capitalisms overall devastating consequences for the ecosphere as well as the global division of labor and its racialized social relations. They further suggest that the racialization of Hurricane Katrina needs to be situated within the disciplinary practices of capital and its process of valorization through unsustainable capital-fueled growth and development, overproduction, resource depletion, and ecosystem destabilization and destruction.

A Moveable Fascism: Fear and Loathing in the Empire of Sand

This article discusses the political and cultural fallout following the illegal war and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military and its allies, focusing on the lies, deceptions, and hypocrisy of the Bush Jr. regime and the media.

Arizona, Hannibal's Cowboys, and the Modern Day Tie-Down

cowboy capitalism works as a tactic of coloniality. Denise Taliaferro Baszile reminds us in her article in this issue that throughout U.S. history, invader classes have vied for control, garnering power with the promise of security while the dispossessed are drawn into laboring to amass private capital for invaders. The work for curriculum scholars is in finding and teaching the interrelationships between seemingly disparate and unrelated realities, to give histories of the present to the present.