Laura Chávez-Moreno: How Schools Make Race

Laura C. Chávez-Moreno, Ph.D., is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles, in the Departments of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Education. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education in Curriculum and Instruction. She will speak at 10:30 am on October 1 in the Wisconsin Idea Room on her new book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America. A reception and book signing will follow at 11:30 am.

In How Schools Make Race, Laura C. Chávez-Moreno examines how a bilingual-education school program in the US Midwest works as a racial project (a project that engages in racialization, the process of delineating racialized groups and hierarchies). It focuses on how the racially and linguistically diverse dual-language program constructs ideas about race and Latinidad, and forms the Latinx group. Prof. Chávez-Moreno argues that bilingual schooling may become a false champion for a future anti-racist, anti-imperialist, decolonial Latinidad if this schooling does not disrupt racially inequitable  outcomes and encourage Latinxs’ critical consciousness. She also posits that the bilingual program advanced an imagined Spanish as the signature boundary delineating the Latinx racialized group in relation to other racialized groups. Lastly, she invites teachers and educators to embrace ambitious teaching about the ambivalence of race, an approach aimed at enhancing critical consciousness about race. The event is part of the School of Education’s Carl A Grant Scholars Lecture Series and is sponsored by the Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program and the Latine Cultural Center.