This dissertation investigates the apprenticeship of students in the Migrant Student Leadership Institute (MSLI) into the practice of critical social thinking. From 1993 to 2006, the MSLI was a summer residential college outreach program for high school aged youth from migrant farmworker families in California. In California and across the United States, the children of migrant farmworkers face significant social, economic, and educational barriers to accessing post-secondary pathways (Nu�ez & Gildersleeve, 2016; Nu�ez & Jaramillo, 2009). Every year, the MSLI brought over 100 students to engage in a month-long program oriented toward developing their academic and college-going literacies, while also engaging them in a critical social analysis of the historical and political dimensions of their lives. This dissertation contributes to a body of work documenting the learning and literacy practices of students and teachers in the MSLI (Espinoza, 2008, 2009, 2020; Guti�rrez, 2008, 2019; Nu�ez & Gildersleeve, 2016; Pacheco & Nao, 2009; Vossoughi, 2011, 2014). This study utilized classroom audio-video recordings, student writing portfolios, and interview data to provide new perspectives on the routine teaching practices, classroom talk, and social interaction in the MSLI. In particular, it investigated how students were apprenticed into the social practice of critical social thinking through the everyday engagement of social theoretical texts and academic writing. To this end, I asked: (a) How were students in the MSLI apprenticed into the practice of critical social thinking in the context of reading social theoretical texts? (b) If and how did students apply critical social thinking in the writing of academic essays? Through the analysis of student and teacher interactions in the context of reading circles, this study found that the routine practices of close-text analysis created opportunities for students to build conceptual understanding and engage in critical social thinking. The analysis of student writing portfolios and interviews found that students utilized social theoretical concepts to write texts aimed at contesting dominant narratives and reframing their lived experiences. These findings contest current literacy approaches that seek to restrict access to robust academic literacies to historically underserved students. Additionally, this dissertation study argues against common perceptions that radical or critical educational approaches and practices are distinct from or “soft” on academic skills.

Although the overall health in the US has improved over the past few decades, Black men, regardless of socioeconomic status or educational attainment, bear a disproportionate burden in disease morbidity and mortality. African-American men remain the most vulnerable racial gender group for almost every health condition that medical researchers monitor and feature the lowest life expectancy of any cohort in the country. Current research suggests college-educated African-Americans accumulate stress through frequent encounters with subtle and seemingly ambiguous forms of racial discrimination. These racial microaggressions (a particularly mundane and insidious form of modern racism) can wreak havoc on the psychological and physiological functioning of Black males and may be complicit in their elevated levels of stress-related disease and shortened lifespans. Most educational research on Black males’ racialized experiences at purposively white colleges and universities (PWIs) has featured qualitative, self-report measures of psychological health. Educational researchers know far less about potential long-term physiological and physical health outcomes associated with racial microaggressions.

My dissertation, Revealing Cuts Beneath the Skin: Black Collegiate Men and the Biopsychosocial Impact of Racial Microaggressions, examines the effect of racial microaggressions on indicators of early biologic dysregulation among Black male collegians. Guided by the tenets of Critical Race Theory in Education, I utilized a Transformative Sequential Mixed Method to collect biostatiscal (saliva sample), quantitative (microaggression survey), and qualitative (focus group) data to more reliably investigate the relationship between Black collegiate males’ recognized experiences with and responses to “everyday racial invalidations” on PWIs and their relative telomere length; a biometric of stress-related (vs. chronological) aging.

Analysis of the survey data revealed that nearly all of the men report some form of stress-related ailment (such as tension headaches, stomach pain, and difficulty sleeping). Additionally, the majority of participants anticipate that they will endure daily discrimination and prepare for the potential of negative interactions prior to leaving their living spaces each day. However, when considering survey responses in relation to participant telomere lengths, a far higher proportion (85-100%) of individuals with longer telomeres recognized enduring everyday discrimination across various campus spaces and attributed these negative experiences to racism compared to individuals with shorter telomere (less than 46%).

This mixed method study suggests that Black students on PWIs are besieged by daily encounters with antiblack racism. The findings also speak to the importance of Derrick Bell’s concept of racial permanence and Chester Pierce’s (the person who coined the term racial microaggression) contention that Black people must be prepared to recognize and navigate a racialized climate that is inherently noxious to their existence. Moreover, it appears that the unnaturally shortened lifespans of Black men marked by the social embodiment of racism commence earlier than was previously imagined. The current findings affirm the interdisciplinary work of scholars investigating the impact of racism across various levels of societal interaction in Public Health, Social Epidemiology, and Psychology and help extend their observations to the field of Education.

This qualitative study examines the experiences of Native American urban high school students in an Indigenous college preparatory program. Attainment of higher education is very important to Indigenous college students, their families, their communities, and their nations (Brayboy, 2005; Quijada, 2012; Keene, 2014). However, few studies have outlined how Native American high school students make sense of higher education and how they engage in college preparation pathways. As such, this study identifies the structural challenges that limit Native American high school students’ access to higher education. Guided by the insights of Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2005), Indigenous Methodologies (Kovach, 2009) and Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998), this study also illuminates how writing emerged as a salient pedagogy for affirming urban Native American students’ intersectional identities and educational aspirations.

Employing a case study method as well as Indigenous methodologies, this study focused on 20 Native American high school participants’, ages 15-18, who participated in an Indigenous college preparatory program. Eighteen out of the twenty participants self-identified as female and two students self-identified as male. The student participants attended urban public schools in Southern California while participating in a year-long college preparatory program developed by Native American educators at a public research university. Data for this study is drawn from 1) interviews of participants schooling experiences, 2) Sharing Circles, 3) participant observations, and 4) a collaborative analysis with participants of over 60 written documents (letters, essays, personal statements, and journal entries). Preliminary themes from written documents were identified and presented to student participants for a collaborative analysis and development of sharing circle protocols. Following this process, final themes were identified. Findings from the study indicated that, through an Indigenous college preparatory program, Native American youth in urban schools can be engaged as writers to imagine more just education practices, more meaningful social movements across communities, and ultimately more empowered ways of living while refusing settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. This study offers recommendations for college preparatory programs and targeted writing pedagogies to prepare Indigenous students to become competitive for baccalaureate education that contributes to the sovereignties of Indigenous peoples.

My research study reveals the racial, gender, and maternal experiences among nine first-generation Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Motherscholars enrolled in Ph.D. programs in U.S. Southwest Universities. Nationally Latina, Chicana, and Indigenous women are less likely to complete post-secondary degrees. Further, academic mothers with children under five years of age, pursuing professorate positions, are less likely to receive tenure. Through an ethnographic research approach and in-depth interviews, my research agenda captured the following: (a) Educational trajectories and the interventions of femtors/mentors and Ethnic and Gender studies; (b) Negotiations in navigating higher education and family formation as everyday movidas, or hustles; (c) Naming and addressing marginality and microaggressions as Maternal Microaggressions; and (d) Spiritual activism(s)—in multiple manifestations—as resilience, resistance, and survivance in the home and academia. Although my findings reiterate painful stories of “push-out” culture grounded in gender-racial discrimination, the narratives are challenged by Motherscholar resilience, survivance, and resistance. I draw from Critical Race Theory in Educational Methodology (Sol�rzano & Yosso, 2002), Chicana Feminist Theories (Delgado Bernal, Elenes, God�nez, & Villenas, 2006), and Critical Maternal Theories to identify and analyze the social condition and oppression of doctoral Motherscholars at the complex intersections of identity, education, and family. To honor the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and motherhood (amongst others) in the liminal spaces of education and motherhood, I offer a Critical Maternalista Matrix as theoretical and methodological approach.

Although the Mexican population is experiencing tremendous growth, they continue to lag behind the national average in, and have amongst the lowest, educational attainment levels of all Latinos/as (P�rez Huber et al., 2015). Some studies have looked at the experience of Mexicans along the K-12, undergraduate, and doctoral educational pipelines. However, the experience of master’s students has gone under-examined and resulted in a gap in higher education research. In an attempt to continue filling the gap on master’s education research, this dissertation focuses on the factors that influence Chicanas decision to pursue a Master of Arts in Education and the sources of support that Chicanas draw from in their pursuit and attainment of the master’s. Using Chicana Feminist Epistemology (CFE) and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) as the theoretical foundations for this research, the method of Pl�ticas was instrumental to studying the experiences of 12 Chicana Master of Arts in Education students. CFE was included to strengthen the gender lens of this research and to unapologetically center Chicana identities. CCW was included to shift the research lens away from a deficit view of Chicanas and instead focus on the cultural knowledge, skills, and abilities they bring to higher education. My analysis revealed two general findings. First, the decision to pursue a master’s is not a single choice, but rather a collective of the personal, familial, and logistical. Chicanas’ identity, familial relationships, graduate school exposure, values alignment, passion for area of study, mentors, and representation are factors that influence Chicanas decisions to pursue a master’s. Second, Chicanas draw from unique sources of support, personal motivation, ambition, and coping skills, and engage in their own strategies of resistance to create more empowering master’s experiences. With the Latino/a population on the rise and continuing shift in master’s enrollment demographics, it is crucial that we understand how to intentionally support Chicano/a recruitment, enrollment, retention, and graduation.

This dissertation examines the experiences of the Roses in Concrete Community School (RiC) in East Oakland, California. Conceived as a counter-hegemonic schooling project, RiC responded to the community’s demand for self-determination in education; the school’s founders sought to fulfill this demand by designing a school organized around a culturally sustaining/revitalizing and healing-centered program dedicated to serving predominantly Black and Latinx children and families of Oakland. This project centers on a central research question: How does a school that was deliberately designed to counter the adverse conditions in a low-income urban community meet the social-emotional and academic needs of the students and communities it serves? I conceptualize the theoretical framework of Frontier Education, or white settler colonial schooling practices, and schooling as marronage, or liberatory schooling practices grounded in autonomous community and freedom, to guide this analysis. Decolonizing, critical Indigenous, and critical race methodologies also guide the data collection strategy used in this research. Using a critical ethnographic case study approach, I analyzed observations, documents, and interviews with key stakeholders from the school’s design stage in 2014 until its fifth year of operation in 2020. Three key findings emerged from this case study. First, RiC successfully adopted a community responsive approach to student and family engagement, prioritized an alternative model of student success embodied by the concept of the Warrior Scholar, utilized an Ethnic Studies-based, Spanish-English dual immersion, arts-oriented social justice educational program, and worked in solidarity with students and families. Second, the school’s approach to healing and transformation responded to harm at the community and individual level. Third, despite its efforts and significant accomplishments, the school encountered obstacles in building the long-term capacity of faculty and staff to meet the needs of stakeholders. Despite these challenges, RiC offers an example of education being used to forward social change and disrupt hopelessness that all educators can learn from. The conclusion explores the implications of this case study for teachers and school leaders who seek to pursue a social justice educational agenda.

This dissertation tells a story about raced and gendered socialization processes that develop across generations, among a distinct yet growing population: Chicana/Latina mothers and daughters who attend U.S. colleges and universities at the same time. Specifically, I analyze how nine mother-daughter teams (22 women in total) leverage their carework to facilitate their individual and collective movement through U.S. higher education spaces over a 50-year span. The study’s qualitative, phenomenological design employs individual and group pl�ticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) and a qualitative methodology I am developing, the Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Methodology (CRFEM) (Escobedo & Camargo Gonzalez, under review). By triangulating 42 letters, 17 individual and 7 group pláticas, and reflexive journal materials, I inquire: (a) What are the raced, gendered, classed, individual, and joint experiences of Chicana/Latina motherscholars and daughterscholars who attended college between the 1970s and 2020s? and (b) What are the pedagogies the motherscholars and daughterscholars developed and imparted to one another as they navigated higher education? Several findings stand out in the Motherscholar-Daughterscholar Educational Birthstory. First, this research designates the 1970s as the Chicana/Latina motherscholar-daughterscholar point of genesis, and it names the de Uriarte family as pioneers who initiated the birth of the Chicana/Latina motherscholar-daughterscholar phenomena in the U.S. Findings further indicate that Chicana/Latina motherscholars and daughterscholars have historically endured challenges such as internalizing and responding to racial and maternal microaggressions (Sol�rzano & Perez Huber, 2020; Vega, 2019) and struggling to balance academic and domestic demands. In spite of these hurdles, the women traversed the terrains of motherhood, daughterhood, and scholarhood by intentionally engaging in care practices that nurtured their spiritual, physical, and interpersonal wellbeing, practices I have termed Chicana/Latina daughterwork and Chicana/Latina motherwork (Caballero et al., 2017; Collins, 2009). By leveraging their motherwork and daughterwork, the women developed motherscholar-daughterscholar pedagogies. I contend, motherscholar-daughterscholar pedagogies are a microaffirmative (Sol�rzano & P�rez Huber, 2020) socialization tool that Women of Color draw on to facilitate their physical, emotional, spiritual, and academic wellbeing. In addition to complicating the discourse on Chicana/Latina education, this research contributes to a (limited, yet) growing archive of Chicana/Latina educational history.

According to Valencia (2011), the persistent inequalities confronting Chicanas/os and leading to what he defines as school failure is a matter rooted deeply in history. Covering a range of 150 years of Mexican American education in the Southwest, San Miguel and Valencia (1998) examine how “the foundation of conflict, hostility, and discrimination, as symbolized by the Treaty [of Guadalupe Hidalgo], shaped the emergence, expansion, and changing character of public education for the Mexican American people.” In response to unequal educational conditions, Delgado Bernal (1999) states that Chicana/o students and their communities, influenced by the Black civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war protests, organized protests, walkouts, and boycotts as they struggled to call attention to and improve their quality of education across the Southwest.

This dissertation thus centers the historical counterstory of a nearly month-long Chicana/o boycott at Phoenix Union High School in 1970. This dissertation utilizes a Critical Race Educational History methodology to construct a counterstory by analyzing the role of race in creating the conditions for the boycott to take place through a Critical Race Theory in education theoretical lens. Focused on documenting and better understanding the educational experiences and community history of Phoenix Chicanas/os during this time, I explore the following questions: 1) Why and how was the Phoenix Union High School Chicana/o Boycott of 1970 organized and who were the main stakeholders behind the organizational efforts?; 2) What was the socio-economic context of the community within the attendance boundaries of Phoenix Union High School in the period of the 1970 Chicana/o Boycott? How is the socio-economic context relevant to the educational conditions of Phoenix Union High School during the period of the boycott?; and 3) What were the outcomes of the 1970 Phoenix Union High School Chicana/o boycott? How did the district and high school meet the demands and needs of the Chicana/o community?

A Critical Race Educational History is constructed as a response to these questions utilizing historical research methods. This includes drawing from primary archival sources collected from various archival holdings and collections at institutions including but not limited to Arizona State University, the Phoenix Union High School District, Library of Congress, and Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records. Moreover, collaborators contributed oral histories as a part of this dissertation study to explore and document the Phoenix Chicana/o educational experience while centering the experiences of Chicanas/os during the 1970 boycott of Phoenix Union in this counterstory. Building from these primary sources, this research documents the racialized school’s educational and community inequalities, the boycott’s organization efforts, and eventual short- and long-term outcomes of the 1970 boycott.

In the early 20th century, the U.S. American landscape experienced a social and political movement that allowed pseudoscience to be implemented as law. Emblematic of this was the California Chapter 720 of the Statutes of 1909, colloquially known as the California Asexualization Act. This piece of legislation endowed the state with expansive power to institute eugenic-inspired protocols across various institutional landscapes, including schools, medical facilities, and asylums crafted to manage and control those deemed "feebleminded." The study illuminates how deeply rooted practices of control, containment, and surveillance – all derivatives of a eugenic mindset – have persistently interfered with Chicana/Latina women and girls’ access to sexual citizenship. This interdisciplinary exploration exposes the continuity of such institutional impositions in the American Southwest, with this study spotlighting Chicana/Latina experiences with eugenic violence in California between 1909 and 1979 and from 2009 to the present. Furthermore, it underscores the enduring influence of eugenic violence on sex and health education discourse in K-12 learning environments and its impact on the daily lives and experiences of Chicana/Latina girls navigating these spaces.

I use an extensive data corpus to integrate archival records from various special collections, individual and community pl�ticas, oral histories, and digital media. The objective is twofold: first, to trace and expose the echoes of eugenic violence permeating academic, familial, and religious social spaces; second, to highlight and celebrate the acts of Chicana/Latina resistance against this pseudoscientific oppression. This research is timely as the current legal landscape involving women’s reproductive agencies mirrors policy, social, and public health efforts utilized in the last century to justify the total dominance of the sexual agency of Women and Girls of Color. Moreover, this study will make a valuable contribution to educational research at the intersection of pedagogies of pleasure and desire in K-12 sex and health education discourse, histories of public health and medicine in education, and eugenics.

Despite the perceived innocence of children’s texts, scholars like Donnarae MacCann, Nancy Larrick, and Violet Harris have long documented the history of white supremacy and racism within them. Therefore, this dissertation undertakes a historical analysis of the activism of critical Chicana/o librarians and community organizations to advocate for anti-racism and social justice within children’s literature and library services. This study focuses on the time period from 1960 to 2000 to better understand the socio-political environment that led to new efforts within children’s literature and librarianship. This dissertation’s conceptual framing is informed by the fields of education, library/information science and ethnic studies and is guided by Critical Race Theories in education and Chicana Feminist Epistemologies. Drawing from oral histories with six Chicana/o librarians, personal documents and archival sources from eleven different collections across the nation, this study answers the following research questions: (1) What is the history of efforts by community-based organizations and librarians to challenge race and racism within in Latina/o representations in children’s literature and library services between 1960 and 2000? (2) What is the history of efforts by community-based organizations and librarians to support the creation of culturally relevant Latina/o children’s literature and library services between 1960 and 2000? (2a) What is the state of efforts to challenge and create accurate depictions of Latina/o representations in children’s literature and library services today?Findings from this study reveal that Chicana/o librarians, seldomly regarded as activists, have indeed transformed librarianship, library services, and literature for their communities. The Chicana/o librarians within this study, all shared how Civil Rights Movements shaped their consciousness of engaging libraries as spaces for connection and relationship building. At the core of their activism and efforts was the care and motivation to connect Communities of Color with libraries by recruiting diverse librarians to field and creating services and collections that reflected the needs of the local communities. The narratives of the Chicana/o librarians within this study highlight the importance of grounding of cultural affirmation within the training of future librarians and educators. In addition, while this dissertation brings to light new knowledge surrounding the activism of Chicana/o librarians, it further illustrates the cyclical patterns of racism, censorship, distortions, and stereotypes embedded within literature and librarianship that are present today. Findings from this dissertation reveal that censorship of materials in the 1980’s related to combating racism and sexism were usually grounded on claims of raising “anti-American children,” similar rhetoric is used today to justify the censorship of Critical Race Theory and Ethnic Studies curriculum across the nation.