UC Davis

While significant efforts have been made to address educational disparities for students of color, there is a critical need to understand how institutional practices, policies, and power hierarchies create and perpetuate exclusion in rural contexts. California’s San Joaquin Valley relies heavily on Mexican (Indigenous and mestizo) and Central American (im)migrant farm labor. These workers are largely excluded from labor rights and protections. Despite this, there is limited research exploring the intersection of global agriculture, regional educational disparities, and racial domination in California’s marginalized (im)migrant farm-working communities. This qualitative inquiry examined how spaces are racially coded and intersect with the regional political economy to exacerbate educational inequality in rural unincorporated farm-working communities. This work was grounded in Critical Place Inquiry (CPI) and employed Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) and Resistance Theory. I documented testimonios, through pláticas, with 20 (im)migrant Mexican mothers to unpack the contemporary implications of the historical racialization of farm work on post-secondary education access and how this context mediated these mothers’ resistance to subordination. Data analysis revealed insights into each mother’s strategic resistance in navigating school-sponsored spaces to challenge institutional unaccountability and deficit narratives of assimilation, while rearticulating their agency within existing power structures. They did so by engaging critically with the contexts they navigated, challenging problem displacement, and transferring this knowledge to their children. The findings highlight the need to address equity and opportunity in K-12 educational settings through a context-informed racial justice lens, including targeting school leadership, centering farm-working parents in decision-making processes, investing in promising practices such as dual enrollment and online learning to bridge the persistent opportunity gaps, and using school-community partnerships as political sites for material transformation. Keywords: Rural education, testimonios pláticas, parent empowerment, coloniality of power, k-16 access and equity, farmworking families, unincorporated central California