Abstract
Scrunched into an airplane seat with Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture in my lap, two passengers to my right commented on the title of the book. One told me, “Both of our wives are Latina teachers. We just bought copies of the book for them.” These gift-recipients are part of Glenda Flores’s intended audience: the book appeals to people who are cultural guardians in their current jobs, who want to understand the obstacles Latino / a professionals face in their workplaces, and who want to understand how U.S. school systems can better serve Latino / a student populations.
By “cultural guardians,” Flores refers to those who, through their work, protect, save, and support the provision of services to their disadvantaged, co-ethnic charges in a profession such as teaching. Thus, this book is ensconced in sociological research on race relations in the workplace, but it also draws from work in history, geography, and education in demonstrating the role of laws, regional racial hierarchies, and pedagogical methods on teachers’ own schooling experiences in addition to their current workplace experiences in schools.
The book builds on Flores’s dissertation project, a two-year ethnographic and interview study of teachers across two elementary schools in Rosemead and Compton, California. The demographic composition of these sites enables Flores to investigate the professional lives of college-educated Latina teachers who share their workplace with other societal minority groups: black and Asian teacher colleagues, as well as students. By selecting multi-ethnic sites where Latinas work but whites are in a minority, this comparative study is a pioneer of its kind. Moreover, the author’s focus on Latinas and the teaching profession reflects recent occupational trends that Latino / as are the fastest-growing non-white group entering the profession. Flores’ reliance on interviews is noteworthy because she is able to interview all but two of the 27 Latino / a teachers across the two sites; 25 additional interviews come from teachers of other races.
Flores makes several interweaving arguments in the book, at multiple levels of analysis. She frames them in her introduction as different expressions of Latina teachers’ agency, one that is shaped by structural constraints. Demonstrating Mills’s sociological imagination, she argues that broad historical moments and regional demographic shifts created conditions of certainty of employment that matched upwardly mobile, prospective Latina teachers’ need to support their working-class families financially upon graduation from college. Once in the teaching profession, Latina teachers discover the positive meaning in being cultural guardians for their Latino / a students and their parents, but the ways this guardianship is expressed varies between the two schools due to differing demographics, organizational culture, and rules.
Given these structures, Latina teachers found ways to “exercise the substantial discretion that characterizes the teaching profession” using “non-institutionalized means” and “sanctioned and unsanctioned strategies” to support their Latino / a students (p. 95, p. 65). For instance, Latina teachers felt Latino / as occupied disadvantaged positions vis-à-vis both African Americans (in Compton) and Asians (in Rosemead). Flores argues that such internalized, dominant views of the school community guided Latina teachers’ expression of cultural guardianship by prompting Latina respondents in Compton to resist views that their school was dangerous, partly by distancing themselves from African Americans. Meanwhile, respondents in Rosemead recognized the school resources that the wealthier Asian population provided, hastening greater interethnic cooperation.
Furthermore, through delving into patterns of Latino / a parents’ involvement in their children’s school, Flores shows the ways in which Latina teachers use parent-teacher interactions to push for a more positive “context of reception” (Portes and Rumbaut 2001:42) for their co-ethnic students. Finally, Flores finds that the two schools’ emphasis on standardized testing, and the related processes by which the schools allocate resources to students, produces tensions between teachers of different racial / ethnic backgrounds. Collegial tensions additionally shape forms of cultural guardianship.
The book’s chapters are arranged progressively, from micro to meso to macro and back to meso again. This makes following the analysis both manageable and satisfying, capturing the permeable boundaries between the workplace and the society outside. In introductory chapters, we meet many of the teachers and learn about the socioeconomic and racial / ethnic backgrounds and prior schooling (and, often, immigration) experiences they bring into their profession. Then, Flores introduces institutional differences in comparing the two school sites. The comparisons allow for a fuller understanding of how cultural guardianship operates.
Rich ethnographic data provide the reader with concrete examples of cultural guardianship. For instance, while Asian and Latina teachers in the Rosemead school allowed students to speak languages other than English on occasion, based on a shared belief that this aided their students’ transition to English, Latina teachers at the school in Compton were admonished by most of their white and black colleagues for doing so. Likewise, non-Latino / a colleagues at the Rosemead school, but not in the Compton school, accepted Mexican methods of long division and multiplication. Flores builds her arguments about how the social environment affects expressions of cultural guardianship to the most macro level when she uses Collins’s (2000) concept of controlling images to argue that the racialization of the respective districts affected relationships in the workplace.
Flores’s handling of the data is commendable for its thoroughness and transparency. She accounts for the ways her own ethnic identity, as well as other statuses, often gave her a “hidden advantage” in the field. Her writing has a definite voice, and at select moments she interjects the fact that the repercussions of cultural guardianship are sometimes negative; for instance, Latina teachers’ commitment to and familiarity with their co-ethnics often disadvantaged African American students. She also reports respondents who were exceptions to the pattern.
Given the thoroughness of her analysis, I wish Flores had included more data from her interviews with teachers of other ethnicities at the two schools. Such comparative data might clarify how Latina teachers are distinctive. How do Asian, black, white, and Latino teachers exercise their agency in terms of selecting a teaching career, finding effective pedagogies for diverse student populations, contending with negative images attributed to the school and its community, and approaching relationships with parents? These voices rise in the chapter on standardized testing, which made it one of the strongest chapters in terms of depicting intergroup relations and the whole workplace organization. Flores’s exclusive focus on the Latinas in her interview sample is understandable because it makes her intersectional analysis possible; otherwise, there would be too many variations for the reader to keep track of. Throughout, Flores gives almost equal weight to evaluating the roles of race and class, with occasional treatment of the role of gender, in shaping Latina teachers’ professional choices, behaviors, and experiences.
Latina Teachers provides a wide-ranging overview of Latina teachers’ work lives, allowing Flores’s contributions to the literature considerable reach. To the research on the positive effects of teacher-student racial matching on student and teacher outcomes, she provides supportive, new qualitative evidence of potential mechanisms driving the relationship, which involves teachers’ role in track placements. To studies of parental involvement in schools, Flores adds an understanding of the role of racial matching between teacher and parent to counter the sense of constraint associated with lower parental social class (Lareau 2002).
To the knowledge of interracial relations at work, Flores provides new insights about how institutionalized terminology and procedures that are part of carrying out the work itself produce racial stereotypes and induce workers to protect their own racial group. To the work on professions and intersections between school-work and work-life, she adds an understanding of how family and prior socialization experiences prefigure work choices and motivation. The implications for practice and future research reach far beyond schools. For instance, what would it look like to extend multicultural practices and cultural guardianship into other workplaces? Finally, what would be the consequences for mobility and social inequality in the organization?