UC Berkeley

A growing number of school districts are seeking to remedy the high dropout rates and achievement gap experienced by Latino boys through Latino male mentorship programs. Indicative of neoliberal shifts in urban education, these programs often involve public-private partnerships and represent a new ideological blending of Latinx community interests and corporate philanthropic goals. This dissertation asks: How is Latino masculinity framed and constructed in the neoliberal era of urban education? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnographic case study of Latino Male Success (LMS; pseudonym), a Latino male mentorship program run by a non-profit organization servicing 10 middle and high schools in an urban school district in California. Data collection for this study consisted of two years of ethnographic research including 40 interviews, document and curriculum analysis, and over 500 hours of classroom observations.

Three main findings emerged from this study. First, dependence on philanthropy and the need to cater to wealthy donors resulted in a cultural deficit framing of Latino male mentorship in the program’s mission and curriculum. This approach obscured structural racism and centered the boys’ behavior as the primary source of underachievement by implicitly or explicitly positing them as disinterested in school, potentially violent, and in need of cultural change. Second, LMS day-to-day lessons and activities deprioritized a critical race and gender consciousness and cultivated an ideal Latino masculinity characterized by the neoliberal values of meritocratic individualism, benevolent hetero-patriarchy, and smart consumerism. Third, mentors and students also resisted the neoliberal logics that framed LMS. Select mentors taught extra-curricular and politically charged lessons centering racism and collective struggle, while students engaged in small moments of subversion enacted through repudiations of respectability, collective hopes, and loving, queer moments.

By integrating critical and intersectional theories of race, gender, sexuality into my analysis, this research provides a timely addition to the literature on educational empowerment programs for boys and men of color. In contrast to scholarship that prioritizes an analysis of school punishment and pushout, my work reveals the profound impact educational empowerment projects have on influencing Latino male identity and learning experiences. My findings demonstrate the ways problematic racial and gender politics remain prevalent in these programs despite a rhetoric of racial uplift. Through tracing the intersectional racial politics of neoliberalism guiding Latino Male Success, this work sheds new light on the ways educational philanthropic foundations and non-profits shape racial formation in U.S. schools.