Latinx Women's Leadership

Abstract

Despite the 1982 Plyler v. Doe court decision, which upheld the constitutionality of undocumented youth having access to public K-12 education in the United States, Latina students who are undocumented face unique educational and societal barriers. Material and psychological conditions of “illegality” permeate these young women’s social worlds (Muñoz, 2015). Latina students continue to lag behind their Latino and white peers as a result of historically built gendered and raced school structures of dispossession (Cammarota, 2004; Fine & Ruglis, 2009). This institutional ethnography used the lens of intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1998) to examine how ten Latina students navigated “illegality” in schools, the state house, and an immigrant youth-led organization. Intersectional analyses of the Latinas’ multiple experiences within and across institutional structures shed light on the specific ways that “illegality” and heteropatriarchy manifested, changed or remained stagnant, interconnected with race and class, and how these junctures were negotiated in undocumented spaces of resistance. Based on intersectional analysis of policies, interview, and observation data, it became apparent how nationalistic discourses of citizenship were embedded in structures of white racism and heteropatriarchy. The Latinas of color in the study predominantly endured interlocking forms of gendered and racialized oppression, including sexual violence, which became a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confronted. Based on findings from interview and observation data, this institutional ethnography challenges gendered and raced nativist conceptions of U.S. citizenship, reclaiming pathways for undocumented communities as well as action-oriented educational policies, theories, and pedagogies rooted in intersectional frames aimed at decentering heteropatriarchal whiteness in the construction of the nation state (Collins, 1998), and more in accordance with the fluid, complex realities of interlocked global economies, local cultures, and transnational citizenry.