Race, Place, and Unruly Latinidades in Education

Gamez and Villenas address education across school and community contexts through a capacious conceptualization of “Latinidades.” Unruliness refuses certainty and foregrounds complexity, confronts colonial/racial legacies and practices of movement and place, honors refusals, and centers struggle and solidarities. Focusing on ethnographic research in two middle schools, Gamez explores how unruly Latinidades emerge through rather than alongside Black placemaking practices, while also revealing how schools can simultaneously enable both exclusion and transformation. By bringing Black and Latinx geographic thought into dialogue, she reveals overlooked dimensions of how young people navigate and transform educational spaces. Villenas explores the pedagogical potential of unruly Latinidades in family and community sites of education, looking back to research with mothers in North Carolina in the 1990s and more recently with community pedagogues in upstate New York. Teaching and learning “Latinidades” involved fraught questions about home and belonging, and racialized exclusions and enclosures. Simultaneously, Latinidades was deployed to foster inter-Latinx affinities, desires, and collective futures.