The United States has pride itself in their progressive actions to address racism, however, they have done so without directly addressing the root cause in fundamental issues of race, gender, and sexuality, which have been primarily covered up through progressive policies. The formal policy process making is often a façade that sustains racial patterns of domination (HoSang, 2010). A major issue is how we discuss notions of race, which cannot be separated from gender and sexuality, and how racial theory has shaped ideas around race and racism but have failed to account for historical and political contexts. Race continues to serve as a permanent feature in society that shapes all sectors and institutions in the U.S. The existing ideas of race have influenced discourses of how race is discussed, however, beyond the black and white notions of race, the existing discourses to understand other marginalized groups, have failed to understand how complex racial subjects are.
The United States adopted the term Latino in the 2000 U.S. Census. The term Latino means Latin and was created to refer to people who are from Latin America. On the one hand, Latino serves as a homogenous label that groups people from Latin America or with an ancestry connected to Latin America. It has historically served as a way to organize and empower people who share similar cultural practices. On the other hand, it ignores how diverse Latinos are and it hides and erases the lived experiences of people who have distinct histories, cultures, migration experiences, and many other factors. The current term “Latinx” has been proposed as a genderless term to make language more inclusive for gender non-binary and/or transgender folk. This term is primarily used online and in social media and is being used in academic settings, but older generations and people living in Latin America do not seem to be receptive to this term, which has been explained by linguistics floodgates and a disrespect to Spanish. However, it is important to unmask and interrogate how the Latinx community adheres to a binary view of gender and sexuality and it how it contributes to the tensions and struggles among the several ethnic groups. Existing theories and notions of race have failed to understand and complicate how Latinxs have been racialized as a homogenous group without understanding the historical and political contexts of Latin America and its various countries.
Schools serve as one of the main institutions in the U.S. in which young people are socialized. Latinxs youth, regardless of their legal status, are largely represented in public education. Research on school discipline has shown that students of color, primarily Black and Latinx, are disciplined and policed at higher rates than their counterpart (Advancement Project, 2011; Casella 2003; Wald and Losen, 2003; Wallace et al., 2008). The majority of existing studies have primarily used the School-to-Prison Pipeline (STPP) framework to point out that the harsh disciplining of students places them in the pipeline leading to their incarceration and contributing to the mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. In other words, the STPP framework has served as the common sense understanding of the relationship between schools and prisons in the United States over the last decade. The STPP framework is ahistorical missing the necessary racial, class, gendered, and sexed analyses to understand the root causes of the relationship between schools and prisons (Sojoyner, 2013). It is imperative to examine a historical analysis of the education of Latinxs in the U.S. A historical analysis of the relationship between schools and prisons as mitigated by gendered, sexed, and racialization processes upon Mexican and Central American youth in Southern California. The basis of my support lies in the incorporation of Mexicans during 1850s that established a precarious relationship to blackness through lynching, the carcerality of education that began in the 1960s that used public education as a space to disrupt Black communal organizing by having police officers teach “Police in Government” course manual, and the state violence against Central American immigrants in Los Angeles that has ignored the conditions that led to displacement in Latin America and that has contributed to the tensions among the ethnic groups within the Latinx community.
This image is was taken from Los Angeles Star, the first newspaper in Los Angeles, that covered the lynching of Pancho Daniel. The Flores Daniel group has been historically positioned by white settlers as a gang of Mexican thieves and outlaws. However, within the Mexican working-class community during 1856 and 1857, the Flores Daniel posse were seen as heroes that sought to defend their rights and fought western oppression. Their mechanisms were primarily based on taking back land and animals that were taken from Mexican families through capitalist practices through any measure necessary, including violence. Pancho Daniel and a posse of fifty men were accused for the robbery and murder of a German shopkeeper. Sheriff James Barton was investigating this murder and was killed along with four other men who ambushed Pancho Daniel and his posse. On November 30, 1858, Pancho Daniel was forcibly taken out of the county jail that he was housed in by a group of citizens and was hanged. The California Governor John B. Weller considered his lynching a barbarous execution and issues a reward for the arrest of the perpetrators. Although the perpetrators were never identified, it is within this struggle that Mexicans (and all Latinxs) have been positioned precariously with Blackness. In other words, the lynching of Pancho Daniel positioned Mexicans in an uncertain position in which technologies of control used with Black people would be applied to them, while simultaneously conveying that they would receive the benefits of the justice system in western society. Additionally, it established the use of technologies of control with Mexicans that have similar purposes to those used in schools and prisons. Furthermore, lynching with Mexicans established notions of gender in which men, particularly those in the working class, were to be held accountable with detrimental consequences if they defied the nation state and the authority of white men.
Police in Government (1974) sought to teach black youths how to behave under the façade of U.S. morality, which have been used as “…the legitimacy of physical and psychological violence against Black people in the United States and consequently served to legitimate the oppression of Black life” (Sojoyner, 2013) and were undermining Black organizing within public education and higher education. While the LAPD’s classes targeted Black youth, their mechanism to teach youth how to behave and teach moral standards did not stop with them. LLatinx students, primarily Mexican students, were also in public schools during the 1970s and were exposed to these classes and the technologies of control employed. However, these mechanisms were applied differently to Mexican students.While those mechanism were made for Blacks they were used with Mexicans. However, they were used in ways that would use state violence to control Mexicans, while giving them some of their demands to keep them working within dominating institutions that would continue to limit their organizing.
The United States adopted the term Latino in the 2000 U.S. Census. The term Latino means Latin and was created to refer to people who are from Latin America. On the one hand, Latino serves as a homogenous label that groups people from Latin America or with an ancestry connected to Latin America. It has historically served as a way to organize and empower people who share similar cultural practices. On the other hand, it ignores how diverse Latinos are and it hides and erases the lived experiences of people who have distinct histories, cultures, migration experiences, and many other factors. The current term “Latinx” has been proposed as a genderless term to make language more inclusive for gender non-binary and/or transgender folk. This term is primarily used online and in social media and is being used in academic settings, but older generations and people living in Latin America do not seem to be receptive to this term, which has been explained by linguistics floodgates and a disrespect to Spanish. However, it is important to unmask and interrogate how the Latinx community adheres to a binary view of gender and sexuality and it how it contributes to the tensions and struggles among the several ethnic groups. Existing theories and notions of race have failed to understand and complicate how Latinxs have been racialized as a homogenous group without understanding the historical and political contexts of Latin America and its various countries.
Diana Gamez. 27 November 2018, "Institutional and State-Sanctioned Toxic", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 1 June 2020, accessed 24 April 2024. http://centerforethnography.org/content/institutional-and-state-sanctioned-toxic