UC Irvine

The U.S. South, in spite of its racist Jim Crow era laws and political history, has the fastest growing Latine immigrant population in the country. In North Carolina alone, the Latine population is responsible for over one-third of the state’s growth exceeding all other population groups. Despite this rapid-growing change, the state is third to last in its allocation of funding to support K-12 education, which disproportionately affects the learning experiences of marginalized groups in the state. Currently, literature on educational equity efforts in the South largely reflects the Black-White binary while literature on Latine students in particular is dominated by Western and Southwestern Latines. In such an environment where there is a rapidly growing population, an underinvestment in public education, a history of oppressive institutions, and educational equity efforts that largely reflect the Black-White binary, there is a special need to examine the experiences of Southern Latines. In this dissertation, I draw on data from a Latine immigrant-led and Latine-immigrant-serving education non-profit organization in North Carolina. Grounded in LatCrit Theory, I draw on the perspectives of Latine parents and professionals in education-related fields to understand the barriers U.S. Southern Latine parents face when participating in their child’s education and the barriers U.S. Southern Latine education professionals face to creating learning environments that affirm students’ racial, linguistic, and cultural identities in North Carolina. I also use the Community Cultural Wealth Framework to understand how they leverage their resistant cultural capital to persist in non-affirming environments in the U.S. South. The findings in this study document the challenges and wealth in the stories of Southern Latines among the literature on Latine immigrant communities. This dissertation fills a necessary gap in U.S. Southern history that highlights progressive movements to advance educational opportunities for Latine students through the resistance to and persistence in oppressive institutions.