UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the logics and relations that Latinx youth are socialized into via a college preparation program from a settler colonial studies perspective. An ethnographic project drawing upon critical place inquiry and language socialization approaches, it features data from pláticas and interviews, participant observation, and a multi-sited place project, building upon youths’ and educators’ readings and navigations of their social worlds. It contends that white possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) were enacted through a series of classificatory technologies of control which shifted in response to efforts by local educators to employ educational structures and practices that countered them. Further, it examines the navigation of the settler-native-slave triad by Latinx youth, as their status as exogenous others positioned them as not-quite-yet determined within this structure. This dissertation argues that the precarity and tenuousness of life shaped by racialized and gendered vulnerabilities made aspiring towards normative visions of success a (non)option for those given the opportunity to do so. Finally, it describes the complex and at times conflicting relations with Land, community, and success that Bridge Program youth were socialized into, arguing that, ultimately, the relations embedded therein limit the potential for such a program to produce significant changes to the structural inequities of the U.S. nation-state. In all, this dissertation underscores that college-going pathways and the attainment of higher education are always embedded within the white supremacist, settler colonial nation-state, and cannot be the primary strategy for racialized peoples’ liberation, despite its championing by liberal multicultural approaches to social change.