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Articles

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021): Journal of Leadership, Equity, and Research

“We Have That Opportunity Now”: Black And Latinx Geographies, (Latinx) Racialization, and “New Latinx South”

Submitted
April 27, 2021
Published
2021-04-27

Abstract

The “New Latinx South” is a term used by a number of interdisciplinary scholars to describe recent demographic shifts in a region not traditionally home to large Latinx communities. While this scholarship often posits that examining the Latinx experience in regions of the South will shed light on developing processes of racialization, we argue that more specific attention needs to be paid to the construction of Latinidad in the “New Latinx South.” More specifically, and applied to education, we ask what might be gained by interrogating constructions of Latinidad within school spaces in the South. In this conceptual article, we draw on Black and Latinx geographies scholarship to analyze our own (auto)ethnographic layered accounts about living, teaching, and researching in Maryland and South Carolina. We pay particular attention to how the script (and subject) of Latinx is relationally deployed to mark Latinx as both forever outside the South and as a tool to perpetuate deficit notions of Black students and communities. We hold that in interrogating these relationally racialized discourses we might highlight opportunities in newer spaces to build emergent infrastructures and systems towards more just educational outcomes for marginalized and minoritized youth while guarding against the tendency to unintentionally reproduce essentializing and marginalizing ideas of ethnoracial categorization.