High School Latinx Counternarratives

Between 1999 and 2012, I taught in a semi-rural county in North Carolina. As a native of Panama, I was able to communicate in both Spanish and English. Although I was aware of my privileged position as a legal immigrant and male teacher, I experienced the same layers of discrimination and racial profiling that most of my students and parents faced in the community. Talking about our personal experiences allow us to develop reciprocal confianza (trust). I also learned to respect my students and their families since they gave me a sense of belonging. In other words, we became a big familia.

After ten years, I feel the urgency to document twelve of my former students’ narratives and to discuss what happened to them after high school graduation. Since moving into higher education, I have kept most of their writing journals as a personal treasure. During this time, I have been in touch with most of them; some have pursued higher education, some have joined their parents and relatives, working two or three jobs, and others have become new parents. As a new faculty member, I feel the need to analyze these twelve students’ journals. I understand the importance of sharing what my students wrote in order to echo how their school experiences prepared or did not prepare them to face life’s challenges and/or higher education. Due to the fact that students of color represent the highest dropout rate in the nation, I see my study with urgency and relevance. I feel this book can be an excellent asset for teachers, school administrators, parents, community leaders, and for anyone who is interested in the educational experience of communities of color in the United States.

The most exciting part of this reencounter with my former students was to show them how I had kept the dialogue journals they wrote when they were in my ESL classroom. Some of them were surprised to realize that I had kept their writing projects for so long. Others even cried while reading their narratives and some others laughed and said things like, “I was so wrong when I wrote it.” However, the most important thing about my data collection was the promise I made to my students to document and to publish their histories in this book. Throughout all of these years my students and I have developed a strong friendship through confianza (trust) and respeto (respect). In this book, I will be using the term “Latinx” as a non-conforming male-female binary.

Theoretical Frameworks