Mapping Intersectionality and Latina/o and Chicana/o Students Along Educational Frameworks of Power

Coping Strategies

A significant amount of the current research using intersectional analysis maps out the navigational or coping strategies Latina/o and Chicana/o students engage to mitigate experiences of disenfranchisement and/or capitalize on instances of privilege via their educational journeys. Together, these studies reveal the contradictions in the array of tactics used by Latina/o and Chicana/o students to navigate these conditions, as not all students countered intersectional forms of oppression in an antihegemonic manner, even when they intuit the injustices they endure. For example, Knight et al. (2006) analyzed a bricolage of texts produced by three young girls for the dominant ideologies about their identities and educational capabilities, as well as the ways the girls acquiesce or challenge them. The authors found that the girls exhibited a multitude of identities that are fashioned and repositioned among overlapping oppressive structures—which include sexist interpretations of their bodies, capitalist expectations about their labor, and nativist understandings about their Latinidades. ⁴ Muñoz and Maldonado (2012) examined narratives of resistance shared by undocumented Latinas, noting the ways these strategic discourses allow them to develop positive self-images that allow “them to hang on to their academic aspirations, to persist in college, and to envision and pursue the possibility of success” (p. 293) but also at times reinscribe dominant narratives. For instance, the authors found that many undocumented students take pride in knowing Mexican history and traditions, challenging how this knowledge is discounted in the United States. Nonetheless, their participants echoed their Anglo U.S. peers in minimizing racism as merely resulting from an individual’s ignorance rather than being institutional and systemic.

In studying the ways Latino college students overcome financial difficulties, Abrica and Martinez (2016) plotted three different persistence strategies—conditional, meritocratic, and transformational—based on the level of critique against racial oppression or meritocracy. For example, participants who invested in developing business plans and acquiring financial capital to solve their money woes “expressed limited racial understanding and emphasized the need to be associated with Whiteness,” whereas those who identified campus resources as a way to offset these financial challenged more readily offered “a critique of racial oppression and deeper racial understanding,” (p. 66). Leyva (2016) found that Latina STEM majors often held success-oriented beliefs that both marginalized and empowered their understanding of themselves as capable math students. In her quest to understand “the mathematical agency of Latina/o students,” Zavala (2014, p. 62) found that both Spanish-dominant and English-dominant high school–aged Latina/o students “most-often adopted a colorblind stance” (p. 66) about their own mathematics identity, stating that race did not matter in their own learning but drew from racialized narratives to make sense of the overachievement of Asian students in math. However, at times, they recognized that their immigrant status and years in the United States affected their mathematics experiences, revealing a contradictory and uncritical assessment of the power dynamics in a math classroom.

A couple of studies suggest that some coping strategies used by Latino/a students can be fueled by a critical consciousness. Ramirez (2014) used the notion of transformational resistance (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001) to describe the ways Latina/o and Chicana/o graduate students circumvent overlapping instances of racism, sexism, ghettoization, and classism they encountered during their first years. Ramirez paid particular attention to the struggle students with working-class Latino backgrounds faced socializing to the middle-class White milieu of graduate school—as initially both race and class markers made them feel as if they did not belong in a graduate school program. To counter these feelings of isolation and alienation, students formed “peer support networks,” accessed “faculty mentorship and support,” established “academic counterspaces” (Yosso, 2006), joined “Chicano/Latino(a) and women’s organizations on campus,” and/or avoided “interactions on campus with individuals perceived as hostile and toxic” (Ramirez, 2014, p. 179). Lastly, professors Urrieta and Villenas (2013) reflected on the intersectional forms of power they faced during their respective educational journeys, as well as the privilege and marginalization they face as a result of their faculty positions. For instance, as students, Urrieta and Villenas both experienced racism against their indigeneities and Latinidades, classism as a result of their working-class origins, and Eurocentrism and colonialism as products of whitestream educational institutions. As professors, they now leverage their multiple identities in ways unavailable to them before, but they are not impermeable from various forms of subjugation. For example, Villenas had to learn to balance being a middle-class professional with a newborn child at a conservative institution with no parental leave, while Urrieta battled racial micro aggressions as a result of the privileged White students who challenged his authority, abilities, and antiracist pedagogy and curriculum. Given the range of coping strategies Latina/o and Chicana/o students employ revealed by intersectional analysis, educators could use these finding to imagine pedagogical interventions that teach Latina/o and Chicana/o students socially conscious and self-preserving coping strategies for navigating the structures of power that shape their educational trajectories.

Institutional Practices

A second major theme in the intersectional research reviewed here is a focus on the educational practices, policies, curricula, or pedagogy that marginalize or empower Latina/o or Chicana/o students. In particular, these include the types of academic preparation, resources, or campus climate that Latina/o and Chicana/o students navigate as they pursue higher education. Intersectional analysis with this particular focus makes visible the ways institutional practices can either enfranchise or disenfranchise Latina/o and Chicana/o students, allowing scholars to draft recommendations that institutions can adopt to enable Latina/o and Chicana/o students to succeed.

For example, in her work with Latina/o and Chicana/o graduate students, Ramirez (2011) identified the institutional barriers hampering Latina/o and Chicana/o student success that result from the transections of racism, patriarchy, classism, ethnocentrism, and nativism. These include a lack of information about graduate school, the biased GRE entrance exam, and the absence of mentoring from counselors and faculty. As an implication of her research, she advocated that institutions design supportive programs that account for the “multidimensionality of Latino college choice process” (p. 220) to mitigate these constraints. When analyzing the college decision-making process for undocumented Latina/o students, Pérez et al. (2015) found that Latina/o students often lack college-going preparation because a lack of citizenship channels their parents into the low-wage labor market and relegates them to underfunded and underresourced schools. The underresourced schools many Latina/o and Chicana/o students attend function to limit college-going options for undocumented students, but, Pérez noted, these conditions can also serve to positively motivate undocumented students to pursue college as a way to give back and better the quality of life for their family members and larger community. Moreover, the authors noted that undocumented students seek affordable options for college that allow them to remain close to familial support. As members of families who endure the convergence of racism, classism, nativism, linguicism, and xenophobia in their daily lives, a close-knit support system is a survival mechanism to navigate these conditions, and a key consideration for Latina/o and Chicana/o students who are encouraged to pursue higher education. Lastly, Castro and Cortez (2017) interviewed Mexican-origin community college transfer students to shed light on how the transfer-receptive culture—that is, “the collective practices and norms of an institutional environment as well as the discursive habits and narrative logics that drive institutional thinking” (p. 89)—of the receiving university hinders the acculturation process for this group of students. The authors argue that the onus should be on the institution—not on the student—to change by tailoring a transfer-receptive culture unique to its needs.

Structural Forms of Oppression

A third focus of the intersectional analyses reviewed here specified the forms of intersectional oppression frequently experienced by Latina/o and Chicana/o students. One of the contributions of this research is the vernacular scholars have proposed to distinguish the ways larger hierarchies of power shape Latina/o and Chicana/o students’ experiences: the privilege paradox, the citizenship continuum, gendered familism, racist nativism, and internalized racist nativism. These concepts are fleshed out below.

Cabrera et al. (2016) investigated the structural causes for the increasing underrepresentation of men of color in higher education. Because this issue lies along the fault lines of both advantage and disadvantage, intersectional analysis allowed the authors to interrogate Latino masculinity as a power dynamic balanced on both colonization and patriarchy, problematizing the benefits Latino men may derive through this gendered identity. The term privilege paradox refers to the contradiction that Latino students would be “systemically marginalized via their racial/ethnic identity, much like all other non-White racial/ethnic groups” yet synchronously “systemically privileged relative to women in terms of their gendered identity” (Cabrera et al., 2016, p. 75). This study elucidated the intersectional tension that men of color experience as a result of their ethnoracial identities and hegemonic Western and colonial ideas of masculinity, pressures that work in tandem to impede Latino males from seeking help to navigate hostile campus climates, resulting in the decreased numbers of Latino males pursuing higher education.

In their work disaggregating the educational attainment rates of undocumented Latina/o students from documented (U.S.-born or naturalized) Latinas/os (a study and methodology more fully discussed in the next section), Covarrubias and Lara (2014) found that the closer Latina/o students are to idealized notions of U.S. citizens, that is, “American-born, English-speaking, Christian, mostly White” (p. 98), the more likely they are to graduate from high school, enroll in college, graduate from college, and pursue graduate or professional degrees. They advance the idea that a citizenship continuum operates systemically to “wield[s] its own power and exert[s] its own impact” (p. 97), privileging some Latinas/os and disadvantaging others. They argue that the notion of citizenship operates concurrently with the hierarchical systems of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and so on and requires more theorizing to better account for the challenges it holds for those students.

Ovink (2013) tracked the college-going behaviors of Latina/o high school youth and found that gender and racial/ethnic cultural beliefs intersected to influence the respondents’ attitudes, behaviors, and college-going pathways. She found that many Latina/o students trust that a college education will lead to social mobility for themselves and their family members. However, Latinas desired greater economic means for their current family unit (parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, etc.), while Latinos hoped to achieve mobility for their future families (wife, children). Moreover, for Latinas, a college degree ensured autonomy and independence, preventing financial dependence on men, whereas Latinos already assumed a sense of independence and freedom as college-going students. In addition, Latinas indicated that romantic relationships distracted from educational success, but for Latinos, romantic relationships often kept them persisting toward their degree. According to Ovink, these differences “revealed the intersectional influence of Latino/a and gender beliefs—or gendered familism—on life course decisions and college pathways,” (p. 271). Ovink’s concept—gendered familism—complicates familism, or “a social pattern that privileges family interests above those of the individual” (p. 267), often associated with Latino/a groups, as a factor affecting the college-going choices of Latina/o and Chicana/o students. With her intersectional analysis, Ovink differentiated the effects of a Latino cultural norm, systemic patriarchy, and Eurocentric ideals of educational attainment for Latinas/os and Chicanas/os.

Lastly, two additional conceptualizations of interlocking forms of oppression are the constructs of racist nativism and internalized racist nativism (Pérez Huber, Benavides Lopez, Malagon, Velez, & Solorzano, 2008). Racist nativism names the convergence of these two interrelated ideologies of power to assign

values to real or imagined differences, in order to justify the superiority of the native, who is to be perceived white, over that of the non-native, who is perceived to be People and Immigrants of Color, and thereby defend the right of whites, or the natives, to dominance. (Pérez Huber et al., 2008, p. 43)

Pérez Huber (2010) applied an intersectional analysis to discover how racist nativism becomes “layered with class and gender at particular moments in” the educational trajectories of undocumented Latina college students (p. 82). She offered examples of racist nativism—such as when her participants recalled particular painful moments when they felt unsafe, outnumbered, frightened, and/or targeted as a result of anti-immigrant discourses espoused by authority figures in school settings. When this rhetoric is infused with commentary about Latina women purposely seeking to have “anchor babies” and draw on social services, it exemplifies they ways racist nativism traverses with gender and sexism. Furthermore, Pérez Huber argued that a “racist nativist class structure” relegates the college-educated parents of these undocumented women to low-wage labor market, erasing the “educational capital” the women’s parents attained and consigning their children to schools that lacked “educational resources and quality teachers, decaying school facilities and limited college access” (p. 87). Also, because undocumented Latinas often have work to pay their college tuition, they are often unable to participate in programming on campus that could aid in their persistence, a systemic disadvantage Pérez Huber claims is rooted in the convergence of class and racist nativism.

Lastly, Pérez Huber theorizes internalized racist nativism to account for the ways members of Latina/o communities adopt racist nativist logics. She argued that the normalization of a racial hierarchy predicated on White supremacy in both mainstream media content and the U.S. educational curriculum results in many Latina/o and Chicana/o students internalizing these beliefs and perpetuating them by repeating racist nativist language or ideas—such as calling other classmates “beaners,” teasing about the arrival of la migra (Immigration and Customs Enforcement or border patrol), and mocking accented English.

In this set of intersectional analyses, attention to the structural power dynamics seek to name multilayered forms of marginalization. Together, these concepts— privilege paradox, citizenship continuum, gendered familism, racist nativism, and internalized racist nativism—offer a specificity to the experiences of subjugation and empowerment that result from these interconnecting sources of power, arming Latina/o and Chicana/o students with a language that allows them to identify, understand, and, if necessary, subvert these circumstances. This scholarship also points to other cultural forces that have yet to be fully explored, namely, colorism, transnationalism, postcoloniality, diaspora, neoliberalism, capitalism, globalism, and imperialism. For instance, many waves of immigration from Mexico and Latin America are the result of neoliberal and imperialist policies (Gonzalez, 2011). Also, many generations of Chicanas/os have suffered displacement in a land that was once their homeland, as a result of continued colonization (Gonzalez, 2011). As these repressive conditions and doctrines have shaped and continue to shape the experiences of Latina/o communities across the North American continent, it is only appropriate to begin unmasking the ways in which they intersect in the lives of Latina/o and Chicana/o students.

Highlighting these three nodes individually allows an efficient means to expose the primary contours of intersectional analysis regarding Latina/o and Chicana/o students, but it does not intend to create rigid boundaries or divisions within this corpus of research. Additionally, by paying attention to the theoretical and methodological frameworks employed by scholars applying this approach, additional findings are revealed. The next section attends to these characteristics.

Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks

Assessing the characteristics of the 19 articles and 5 book chapters synthesized here revealed patterns in this scholarly work, as well as opportunities for additional applications of intersectional analysis. These patterns reveal the following: (1) that the diversity, or intracatergorical intersectionality (McCall, 2005), that comprises the Latina/o community has yet to be represented in this sample; (2) that the entirety of the P–20 educational trajectory has yet to be studied through this lens, as most studies focus on high school (Knight et al., 2006; Leyva, 2016; Ovink, 2013; Pérez et al., 2015; Zavala, 2014), college (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Cabrera et al., 2016; Castro & Cortez, 2017; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Pérez Huber, 2010), or graduate students (Ramirez, 2011, 2014); (3) that the theoretical frameworks have remained rooted to a race-based or gender-based orientations; and (4) that qualitative methods—primarily interviews—are the most frequent methods for this work. Indeed, two different frameworks—a methodological approach called CRQI, or critical race quantitative intersectionality (Covarrubias, 2011; Covarrubias & Lara, 2014; Covarrubias & Veléz, 2013) and a conceptual model named the multilevel model of intersectionality (Nuñez, 2014a, 2014b)—have been proposed to help broaden the methods and research designs used in intersectional analysis. These frameworks and the insights they offer will be discussed below.

Although intersectionality is often critiqued as research that merely subdivides marginal groups rather than transforming unjust social conditions (Carbado, 2011; Cho et al., 2013), the particular groups studied in this corpus of work instead illustrate the value of this nuanced analysis and, in fact, leave room for additional gradations for study. In particular, three articles focused exclusively on undocumented Latina/o students (Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Pérez et al., 2015; Pérez Huber, 2010), four studied only Latinos (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Cabrera et al., 2016), and another three only examined the educational experiences of Latinas (Knight et al., 2006; Leyva, 2016; Zavala, 2014). The intersectional analysis Covarrubias developed to disaggregate educational pipeline data (Covarrubias, 2011; Covarrubias & Lara, 2014; Covarrubias & Veléz, 2013) exemplified the ways Latinas/os and Chicanas/os can be subdivided into groups that account for their generational status, citizenship, income level, and gender, yet few other scholars examined groups along additional axes, including sexuality, phenotype, or language abilities. In addition, very few other Latinidades (beyond Mexican, Mexican Americans) have been studied along class, language, gender, or sexual orientation. Given the common application of intersectional analysis to recognize how all these aspects of identity affect educational experiences, it seems warranted for there to be additional work along these key identity markers. Intersectional analysis would also be a useful tool to examine the experiences of other types of Latina/o or Chicana/o students, such as elementary or middle school Latino students, English-language learners, students who have been pushed out of high school or into alternative tracks, or high-achieving high schoolers.

The limited number of issues studied through an intersectional lens also points to prospective areas to research. Only one article focused on the experiences of Spanish-speaking Latina/o high school youth in their mathematics classrooms (Zavala, 2014). The rest of this research was focused on higher education. For example, this work examined either the college selection process (Knight et al., 2006; Ovink, 2013; Pérez et al., 2015; Ramirez, 2011) or Latina/o and Chicana/o students’ various experiences navigating a college environment (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Cabrera et al., 2016; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Ramirez, 2014) or college math courses (Leyva, 2016). Another article examined the transfer process from community college to a 4-year university (Castro & Cortez, 2017), and one investigated the intersecting layers of power structures shaping the K–20 educational trajectories of its participants (Pérez Huber, 2010). A final article applied intersectionality to understand how two scholars of color experienced, learned about, researched, and navigated being both marginalized and privileged as first-generation college students, graduate students, junior faculty, and tenured professors (Urrieta & Villenas, 2013). College-going and persistence have been most often studied, but many other possibilities remain: inquiries regarding how Latina/o or Chicana/o students of all ages might come to understand and/or use the tool of intersectionality toward increased educational success, whether colorblind ideologies in K–8 public school curricula allow for students to embrace multiple identities, whether working-class third- or fourth-generation Chicanas/os who are not fluent Spanish speakers and do not have strong ties to Mexico or Latin America find saliency between their identity and educational achievements, or how queer Latina/o or Chicana/o students navigate both racist and heteronormative educational policies.

Fittingly, critical race—or gendered—theoretical frameworks were often combined with intersectional analysis in this body of work. Twelve of the articles evoked critical race theory (Covarrubias, 2011; Covarrubias & Lara, 2014; Covarrubias & Veléz, 2013; Leyva, 2016; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Pérez Huber, 2010; Urrieta & Villenas, 2013; Zavala, 2014) or critical race theoretical constructs like social capital or community cultural wealth (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Pérez et al., 2015; Ramirez, 2011), counterstories (Leyva, 2016; Zavala, 2014), transformational resistance (Ramirez, 2014), micro agressions and racial battle fatigue (Cabrera et al., 2016), and a transfer-receptive culture (Castro & Cortez, 2017) guided by the tenets of critical race theory (Jain, Herrera, Bernal, & Sólorzano, 2011). A few also coupled intersectionality with Latino critical race theory (Leyva, 2016; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Pérez Huber, 2010; Urrieta & Villenas, 2013; Zavala, 2014), Chicana feminist epistemologies (Knight et al., 2006; Pérez Huber, 2010; Urrieta & Villenas, 2013), or other multiracial or multicultural feminist theories (Knight et al., 2006; Ramirez, 2011). Leyva (2016) drew on poststructural theory and its conceptualizations of discourse and power to help him analyze the counterstories he collected. Clearly, there is an opportunity to draw on queer theory, class theories, or disability theories as additional pivot points for intersectional analyses of the educational experiences of Chicana/o and Latina/o students.

Similarly, the methodologies employed for intersectional analysis are primarily qualitative in nature. Twelve out of the 19 articles analyzed for this section relied on interviews (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Cabrera et al., 2016; Castro & Cortez, 2017; Leyva, 2016; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Ovink, 2013; Pérez et al., 2015; Pérez Huber, 2010; Ramirez, 2011, 2014; Zavala, 2014). Some of the interviews were conducted over a period of time—revisiting the same participants at different points along their trajectories (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Ovink, 2013; Pérez et al., 2015; Zavala, 2014)—while the rest were only interviewed once. Two incorporated testimonio methodology ⁵ as part of their data collection and analysis (Pérez Huber, 2010; Urrieta & Villenas, 2013). A few interviews were coupled with focus groups (Abrica & Martinez, 2016; Leyva, 2016; Muñoz & Maldonado, 2012; Pérez et al., 2015; Zavala, 2014) and a written questionnaire or reflections (Leyva, 2016; Ramirez, 2014). One analyzed a mélange of student-produced text and data to understand the various critical literacies Latina youth engage to make sense of their college-aspirant identities (Knight et al., 2006). Given the overreliance on interview data, it is likely that other forms of qualitative and quantitative approaches—such as ethnographies, textual analysis, or even survey data—might provide additional approaches to intersectional analysis of the experiences of Latina/o and Chicana/o students.

Notably, several scholars employing an intersectional analysis advanced a distinctive quantitative methodology as a way to expand the scope and breadth of intersectional scholarship (Covarrubias, 2011; Covarrubias & Lara, 2014; Covarrubias & Veléz, 2013; Sólorzano et al., 2005). The next section provides an overview of these efforts.