Through an ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach, this study draws attention to the plight of 4 Mexican immigrant high school students and their pursuit of education and mathematics learning. Their elementary school stories and experiences show a deep relationship between the learning contexts in which these students largely do school (i.e.,…

Recent studies show that many college instructors still believe that Latino students lack the "school smarts" for academic success. This essay challenges the notion of school smarts in order to highlight Latino students' numerous strengths. I share my model for a mentorship program that facilitates better student-faculty…

This storytelling begins with a positioning of why and how we use "testimonio" as part of a larger project of social justice and transformative pedagogies. In this collective "testimonio," 5 working-class Latina scholars tell the stories of their struggles to overcome the challenges of language and assimilation, of gender discrimination and…

This piece presents a teacher's reflections on her experiences working with Latino English language learners with and without disabilities. The author's voice narrates her journey as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator preparing professionals to work with bilingual populations. The beliefs and factors she identifies as influencing her…

Research on Latinos in schools tends to focus on first-generation immigrant and second-generation students. This article raises the profile of the later-generation (third or later) Chicano (LGC) or Mexican American students who continue to experience academic neglect despite their citizenship and English monolingualism. Using 31 oral histories…

This article discusses how key interactions between community members, teachers, and Latino counselors and advisers were integral in providing support, knowledge, and agency to marginalized, Mexican-descent students in their 1st year of college. Findings show that particular types of discourse and narrative exchanged between integral adult figures…

This autoethnography elucidates the challenges I encountered in my efforts to maintain my commitment to leadership for social justice. When I assumed the superintendency of a small rural school district in southern Texas, I started collecting data in the form of a journal. My lived experiences, as recorded in my journal, were the sole source of…

This poetic-prose piece is my personal ethnic educational history. It challenges the misconception that Cuban students (so-called voluntary minorities) are not oppressed, especially not by their Cuban teachers, and that they thus achieve more academic success than other Latinos. Some may be hiding. Perhaps this work will help to find them.

Influenced by Freinet, Freire, and Sherover-Marcuse, the author describes the evolution of her pedagogy, including a demystifying and empowering approach to working with graduate students in the dissertation process. Alma Flor Ada's educational philosophy and praxis, grounded in critical pedagogy and transformative education, developed in the…

This "critical personal narrative" is aimed at deconstructing the imposed definition of Hispanic-Latino(a) identity to unveil its typecasting and stereotypes, although reconstructing it based on shared language, values, and experiences despite our pan-ethnic characteristics. Based on a deep and systematic reflection on my own experience as…

Narratives used by parents in Mexican working-class families to motivate their children to study are examined for the advice offered and parental attitudes about the importance of school. The integration of contemporary pressures about the value of schooling is investigated, as well as the ways in which the value of schooling is being…

Narratives by three undocumented immigrants relate the realities of surviving in hostile and often cruel school environments. These students have succeeded not because of the system, but despite the system. Such testimonials can be effective in teaching future teachers and raising the consciousness of people who do not have sympathy for…

In this reflective narrative, the author ponders the abstract nature of knowledge and knowing. The peeling of an onion while she sits in her father's garden recounting her funds of knowledge serves as an ontological and epistemological metaphor for her learning. (TD)

A Puerto Rican scholar describes his second-grade experiences as a newcomer to the U.S. mainland: learning English required forgetting Spanish, and this "forgetting" was a requirement for successful inclusion into a new culture. Language has regulatory power to set up conditions for belonging and exclusion, but resistance to the hegemony and…

A professor giving a lecture/performance on Native American history to Mexican American second-graders wrestled with the limits of what he could tell the children about their own Native American identity and about Our Lady of Guadalupe's origin as Native goddess. The relationship between postcolonial scholarship and performance theory is explored…