This study highlights the importance of Ethnic Studies education with a specific focus on how particular assignments and curriculum positively impact students’ academic performance as well as peer and family relationships. I conducted an in-depth ethnographic study of an Ethnic Studies course over an academic year where I observed the classroom environment and interviewed 35 current and former students of the class. I argue that Ethnic Studies helps students develop a sense of what I call academic familismo through completing coursework common to this education framework. Students develop academic familismo through engaging with Ethnic Studies pedagogies that draw information and insights from Communities of Color and youths’ families and cultures while also providing learners opportunities to share their biographical information with peers. Education that draws from marginalized groups and students’ backgrounds helps learners develop consciousness of systemic oppression that Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) groups historically face and encourages youth academic engagement as their background becomes a central feature of the learning materials (Au 2009). I show how students form academic familismo through ethnographic analysis of three assignments students completed over an academic year. I specifically demonstrate how students were able to bond through working in the classroom and specific projects that helped them feel like “family.” Photos of and testimonies from students in the class further show how students build important academic and familial connections in the Ethnic Studies class that motivated their educational success. Findings from this project can help scholars and educators understand the nuanced impacts of Ethnic Studies.

Insurgent Learning examines neoliberal assaults on K-12 public education in Los Angeles County during an era of No Child Left Behind, from 2000-2015. In an era in which so-called “failing” public schools were accountable to rising academic expectations from the state, a movement to privatize public education, fueled through national, state, and local policies, enabled an outgrowth of corporate charter schools. Inspired by the author’s quest to understand the political landscape in education that led the non-profit, Parent Revolution, to organize in the city of Compton to invoke the California “parent trigger law,” Insurgent Learning reveals the policy architects behind the movement to privatize public schools in Los Angeles County.

The dissertation expands beyond geo-political boundaries often defined by city limits and school district boundaries to present the region of South Los Angeles as a zone where structural violence is permissible and the school apparatus is a form of domestic warfare. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, the author relied on interviews, archival research, and her own auto-ethnographic experience to use a muxerista portraitist sensibility that captures competing visions for public education. Collectively, Insurgent Learning is an archive of insurgent knowledge that contributes to a genealogy of Black and Brown grassroots radicalism in the region of South Los Angeles as it centers communities at the forefront of efforts to reclaim and regenerate the democratic potential of public education.

Scholars in fields that explore Black historiographies have examined the various relationships between African Americans and identity formation and the ways in which African Americans crafted meaning between the concept of Americanness and belonging. The exploration of the lives of African descended peoples throughout the Diaspora beyond narrow interpretations has facilitated an epistemological body of knowledge that underscores the vast contributions peoples of African descent have made globally. From a perspective primarily situated on the experiences of African Americans in the United States, this research contributes to the body of scholarship within the field of Black Studies in that it furthers our understanding of how African Americans demonstrated agency by defining and exercising their rightful belonging within American society.

Whether it be redefining identity and belonging through the facilitation of concepts such as racial colorblindness, convening conferences to strategize and leverage their desires, or an exploration of those who ignored rigid boundaries that limited the accessibility of exercising legal entities, this research highlights the experiences of African Americans who fought for and redefined American identity while also maintaining a solid connection to their Blackness.

Further, this research aims to explore various ways African descended peoples in the United States resisted legal and social subjugation and, as a means of forging beyond liminal belonging, constructed identities legible within the nation-state. Understanding their relationship to American belonging as precarious, African Americans crafted and navigated their identities in myriad ways to gain access to what should have been rightfully theirs, although not always legally or socially extended to them.