Working Class Latinos Invisibility in the American Community College -- Part 2
Part 1 Marginalization and the Rhetorical ecology of Community College Latinos Though I believe that the site of the community college is one of the nation’s last hopes for a utopian system of equality, the reality is that most often it has adopted multiple practices of postcolonization that other state institutions have practiced for decades. One of these practices is the hidden and implicit labeling of Latinos as “other” for the college’s statistical means of reporting to the state. Lazaro Lima argues in his Latino Body that it was an early identification of Mexican Americans in an 1894 pseudo-ethnographic description that framed Mexicans as “other” because of physical markers, “savage” traditions, and so forth, that demarked these Americans as non-Americans. This otherness continues to this day, though now we must add the complications of limited education, literacy, class, language, and even the imagined reification of “documentation” to maintain this otherness. This weighs ...