Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 1
Reflections
Matt Lamb, Texas Tech University
“What is Latinx Politics?”[1] I start the first day of my class “Introduction to Latinx Politics in the United States” with this question. The students don’t know it yet, but I’ve just launched the opening salvo of a discussion that will dominate the first few weeks of the course. The students quickly suss out the “politics” part. Someone brings up Lasswell’s definition of politics (as “Who gets what, when, and how”) that sometimes gets coupled with Dahl’s definition of politics (as the pursuit of power between groups). The Latinx part, though, eludes them. “The politics of those with Mexican heritage?” someone usually answers. “Colombian Americans, Cubans Americans, Puerto Ricans, and a host of others are going to be shocked that they’re not Latinx,” I respond. “What about culture or heritage that is associated with the Spanish language?” another student asks. “Well, Brazilian-Americans are going to be dismayed to discover they are not Latinx,” I say. “And Spaniards are going to be dumbfounded that they are!”
Their difficulty in defining “Latinx” is understandable. Politicians, journalists, and even academics face the same dilemma. All three of these groups regularly use the term to refer to different concepts and populations. This creates a challenge for those who teach Latinx politics to undergraduates in the United States, especially for those at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in Texas. How can we possibly discuss the politics of a subpopulation that we have such difficulty defining? As though the predicament were not sufficiently cumbersome, the ethnic composition of my students in this class are invariably and predominately Latinx. This is the only class I have ever taught without a majority of non-Latinx, White students (because ethnic studies courses disproportionately attract students from that ethnic group). How does one wade through the challenges with a room full of students who cannot easily separate the course material from their lives? Here I offer general insights from my own teaching to suggest instructors should simply ask these important questions, facilitate substantive discussions, and avoid offering any easy answers.
Personal Experiences Can Be Informative of Larger Academic Concepts
Treating a group as diverse as Latinxs as a cohesive population is not without controversy. Some have accused academics and activists of treating “Latinxs” as a cohesive unit simply for the ease of academic analysis (see Beltran 2010). However, others have noted that increased racialization of political issues and policies may have increased “pan-ethnic” sentiments of Latinidad (Gutierrez et al., 2019; Zepeda-Milan 2017). Even if one accepts this argument, Latinxs are still a culturally and racially diverse group with cross cutting social cleavages that do not necessarily fit into socio-political categories. As Junn and Masuoka (2008) note, “making the connection from shared classification in a racial category to group-based political behavior is neither simple nor obvious for nonblack minorities.”
Latinx and non-Latinx students come into the classroom with the sum of their collective experiences. When teaching a course on Latinx politics, it is difficult to ask Latinx students to disentangle their personal experiences from the course material. Some students come from mixed status households. Others go back four or five generations before they come across an immigrant ancestor. Some Latinx students lack an immigrant origin story in the traditional sense. Their families never crossed the border; the border crossed them as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Their knowledge of the Spanish language varies. Many are “No sabo kids”[2] – a label some wear with pride, others with vergüenza.[3] Some are children of Trump supporters. A few are Trump supporters. Others are the children and grandchildren of former La Raza Unida voters.
Key to engaging students is explaining how their different experiences may impact their interpretation and critique the academic literature. By pointing out the varied experiences of the Latinx students in the class, I ask how that might inform the way they critique the conclusions of the various articles we read. Each week, I assign academic articles that tackle a particular subtopic within the field of Latinx politics (i.e., group consciousness, linked fate, behavior, ideology, representation, etc). As a weekly assignment, they complete aggregate reading summaries that boil the article down to the main takeaways and offer critique of those arguments.
The written assignments ask the students to utilize their newfound knowledge of the social scientific literature on Latinx politics to respond to a current event on Latinx politics. Such assignments may include a prompt asking whether we find academic credence to the punditry that suggested Latinxs were ripe for a political realignment with the Republican party, a common media narrative in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the leadup to the 2022 midterms. The final assignment asks the students to come up with an informed research question that addresses a topic that they feel the current literature under-develops or leaves unaddressed. While they draw upon the previous literature, they also use their personal experiences to demonstrate bigger concepts that the current literature insufficiently addresses.
Engage with Practitioners
I always invite nonacademic speakers, who engage in civic mobilization of the Latinx communities, to address my Latinx politics classes. This includes Latinx community organizers, local officials, and journalists. My students often grapple with how what these “practitioners” of Latinx politics say sometimes diverges or contradicts the academic literature. I always remind students that they are comparing anecdotal experiences of the speakers with peer reviewed, quantitative work. Exposing students to the practical implications of academic work and the challenges of practical knowledge to it helps students see the limits of the current state of academic knowledge, and invites them to explore the subfield further. It also makes Latinx group less abstract by emphasizing that Latinx voters exist as real people with political agency that changes over time.
The Importance of Teaching Latinx Politics
According to the U.S. Department of Education, Latinxs between 18 and 29 are the least likely to be enrolled in college or have a bachelor’s degree compared to African Americans, Asian Americans, and non-Latinx whites. At the same time, the Latinx student population has grown exponentially in recent decades, making up approximately 4% of the student population at postsecondary institutions in 1980, to approximately 20% in 2020. That percentage is likely to grow as the overall share of the U.S. population grows. It will be important to offer more courses on Latinx politics in order to more directly engage this population. Especially as Latinx students are unlikely to encounter this material before college. Latinxs generally talk about political issues amongst family or friend with less frequency than other racial and ethnic groups (Lamb 2021) and teaching civics education usually privileges the experiences of white students over non-white peers (see Nelsen 2019, 2020). This often appears, as my Latinx students usually remain completely unaware of key historical facts in Latinx political history, such as the border lynchings of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, Operation W*tback, Hernandez v. Texas, and the rise and fall of La Raza Unida.
As the Latinx population grows, it will also become increasingly diverse. This will only complicate defining “Latinx” politics. I always end the semester with the same question that I ask at the beginning: What is Latinx politics? Student almost invariably offer more comprehensive responses than at the beginning of the semester. Sometimes they respond that with some version of the notion that they simply cannot define it but they know it when they see it. What students say demonstrates a desired learning outcome in my view. Scholars should approach Latinx politics as being constantly in flux. The term Latinx remains a highly contestable term as it encompasses a wide variety of experiences. The term also invites scholars to engage in further exploration.
Footnotes
[1] My class discusses the origin and appropriateness of the term Latinx. The term remains a standard amongst academics, but relatively few Latinxs use it in their lives. Many have never heard of it, and we cannot avoid this reality. In class, my students tend to use the term Latino, Latinx, and Latine interchangeably in the course of class discussions. I use Latinx here because of the academic normalization of the term. While I acknowledge that we can argue about using the term, I avoid addressing that argument here.
[2] “No sabo kid” is a slang term used to describe someone of Latinx descent who has no, or limited knowledge of Spanish, and thus may be prone to making simple grammatical mistakes, such as incorrectly conjugating the irregular Spanish verb saber as “Yo no sabo” instead of “Yo no sé”.
[3] “shame”
References
Beltran, Cristian. 2010. The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity. University of Oxford Press.
Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 2(3): 201–215.
Junn, Jane, Natalie Masuoka. 2008. Identities in Context: Politicized Racial Group Consciousness Among Asian American Latino youth. Applied Development Science 12(2): 93–101.
Gutierrez, Angela, Angela X Ocampo, Matt A. Barreto, Gary Segura. 2019. Somos Más: How Racial Threat and Anger Mobilized Latino Voters in the Trump era. Political Research Quarterly 72(4): 960–975.
Lasswell, Harold. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. Literary Licensing, LLC: Whitefish, MT.
Nelson, Matthew D. 2019. “Teaching Citizenship: Race and the Behavioral Effects of American Civic Education.” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 6(1): 1-30.
Nelson, Matthew D. 2021. “Cultivating Youth Engagement: Race & the Behavioral Effects of Critical Pedagogy.” Political Behavior 43: 751-784.
Zepeda-Millán, Chris. 2017. Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization and Activism. Cambridge University Press.
Matt Lamb, PhD is an assistant professor at Texas Tech University. His primary research and teaching interests are Latinx politic, election administration, and civic education.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of the The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.
Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
Submissions: editor.PSE.newsletter@gmail.com
APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Any questions or corrections to how the newsletter appears on Educate should be addressed to educate@apsanet.org
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