Rene Galindo

What Is Critical Whiteness Doing in Our Nice Field Like Critical Race Theory? Applying CRT and CWS to Understand the White Imaginations of White Teacher Candidates.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) revolutionized how we investigate race in education. Centralizing counter-stories from people of color becomes essential for decentralizing white normative discourse—a process we refer to as realities within the Black imagination. Yet, few studies examine how whites respond to centering the Black imagination, especially since their white imagination goes unrecognized. We propose utilizing Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) to support CRT to aid in deconstructing the dimensions of white imaginations. Our findings describe how the white imagination operates inside the minds of white teacher candidates, namely through their (a) emotional disinvestment, (b) lack of critical understanding of race, (c) resurgence of white guilt, and (d) recycling of hegemonic whiteness, all of which negatively impact their role in anti-racist teaching in urban schools.

Language Wars: The Ideological Dimensions of the Debates on Bilingual Education

Abstract The debates over the future of bilingual education call for conceptual frameworks that can illuminate the variety of issues that are implicated in those debates. Building from the fields of sociology of language, language policy, and language ideology, a conceptual framework is presented and employed in the analysis of the ideological debates, ocurring in Colorado and California. The analysis is concerned with the identification of different ideological positions regarding the value of bilingualism and bilingual education, the Spanish language, and the linguistic capital of working-class Latinoimmigrant families. The debates are seen as competition for value between different constituencies that take place through the manipulation of symbolic assets such as language(s), and in which Latino parents are displaced from their position as legitimate participants in their children’s education through the devaluing of their linguistic capital.The debates over the future of bilingual education call for c...

A Biographical Perspective on Chicano Educational Success.

The lack of educational success among Latinos has been the focus of much research concerned with identifying factors contributing to school failure. However, some Latinos do achieve educational success and receive college degrees. Their lives can serve as case studies of minority educational success. This study used autobiographical and interview data to construct the life histories of two Chicanos in order to examine their interpretations of their educational experiences and the sociocultural factors which they identified as influencing those experiences. An additional purpose was to provide detailed biographical information which is currently not available on educationally successful Chicanos. A biographical perspective provides a counterbalance to perceptions of the role of sociocultural factors such as ethnicity in the education of minorities which view them as static or unproblematic. When examined within the contexts of lives that undergo transitions across biographical time, the influence of sociocultural factors such as ethnicity is shown to vary and to require an examination of their impact that shifts across educational careers.

The Nativistic Legacy of the Americanization Era in the Education of Mexican Immigrant Students

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also characterized by a strong nativist agenda and harsh restrictionistic policies. Developments from the Americanization period continue to influence immigration and education policies in the current era and are visible in the attacks against bilingual education, in mandated English-only laws, in locating struggles over national identity in the schools, and in the narrow focus on the acquisition of English in immigrant education. Identifying nativist themes from the Americanization era that have been reinvigorated in todays anti-immigrant climate makes visible a type of discrimination directed at immigrants that is not often recognized as discrimination due to a Black and White view of prejudice termed racial dualism. In addition to identifying the influence of the nativist legacy of the Americanization period in the current era, the implications of the conflict of legacies between the Civil Rights and Americanization eras for the education of immigrant students are discussed.

Cultural Appropriation, Performance, and Agency in Mexicana Parent Involvement

Parental agency is examined in the creation of a dance performance by a group of Mexican immigrant mothers that combined a mixture of genres into an educational message. The folklórico performance resulted from a process of cultural appropriation involving linguistic, cultural, and experiential “translations.” This process was concerned with communicating a message of parental involvement in a culturally relevant form to Latino parents. The performance developed by the mothers can be understood as a definitional ceremony that rejected marginalization in favor of images of self-representation that represented Mexican mothers as they viewed themselves and as they desired to be viewed.