Racialization, Immigrant Identities, and "a broad process of othering"

Dr. Sophia Rodriguez discusses the need for a racialization lens in immigration research and policy.

This week we are sharing the second part of Rita Kamani-Renedo’s interview with Dr. Sophia Rodriguez, an interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines racial equity and urban education and policy, and centers minoritized youth voices. 

In this part of the conversation, Dr. Rodriguez shares why racialization is central to understanding the costs of undocumented life.

RITA KAMANI-RENEDO: You mentioned the importance of bringing a racialization framework to how we think and talk about the experiences of young people, of immigrants in schools, and in your case specifically— the experiences of undocumented Latinx youth. How does a racialization framework help us understand the cost of undocumented life?

SOPHIA RODRIGUEZ: I did this four-year ethnography in the South, and I had never been to the South before I moved there for my first job. I realized when I arrived, it was such a visceral black-white binary that was the way that people thought about life. It was like the white folks and the Black folks in South Carolina, and yet there were Latinos there. So it was sort of like, where do they fit? When I started that ethnography, I wasn't necessarily thinking about race per se. My dissertation was about Latinx undocumented students, and it was more about their activism and civic engagement and social identity formation. But of course, I had read a lot about racial identity and ethnic identity, but I hadn't thought deeply about it during my dissertation.

When I got to South Carolina, I started really seeing how the Latino population was literally hidden and in the outskirts of town. These migrant farms were also there that were not talked about, even though they were federally funded! There were all these components around how the Latino community fit in. They didn't fit in with the white folks and they didn't fit in with the Black folks. The racial dynamics within the Black and Latino community were very challenging also, and so there wasn't a ton of interaction. It was so segregated. I'm sure you are familiar with the literature on immigration, particularly Roberto Gonzales's work. He doesn't really talk a lot about race. He talks about the master status of “undocumented,” so that was my lens, and then the “context of reception” lens.

RKR: Yeah, much of the research on immigrant youth doesn’t necessarily center a racial analysis.

SR: There are moments where [scholars] talked about racial identity and…a racial ethnic “disadvantage”… That wasn't sufficient for me because I felt like it didn't unravel the complexity of these racial dynamics I was observing within the black-white binary.

When I started my ethnography, I was like, "Oh, I need to learn about the policy in the state." I had never examined state policy so closely as I did in South Carolina, but a lot of the language— I published a paper in Education Policy about this—looking at the content and the discourse toward immigrants in the proposed and enacted legislation in the state…. What I learned was that there was horribly racist language!

RKR: So looking at policy helped lead you to a racialization framework?

SR: The legislation referred to immigrants as “jihadists”, “terrorists”, that they were going to “threaten the fabric of the state”. As I was putting together the social fabric of the town I was in, and the state, and then the legislation, I started thinking, “we need to think about how immigrants fit into this kind of white-black binary or this ‘racial order’.” Then in 2015, Sáenz and Douglas wrote a piece called “A Call for the Racialization of Immigration Studies,” and that really spoke to me.

RKR: I’ve appreciated that piece as well!

SR: Then I just kind of started to dig deeper. Since then, there's been such a burst of writing about this, but I started to think about how “immigrant” is not a racial category, but racialization is a lens—it's broadly defined as a process of othering in ways in which groups are racially classified and categorized. As I was studying the kids and they were kind of making sense of their identity as Latinos in the South—one talked about being a “Blaxican”...because she's darker, she's Indigenous, Mexican, but also considered kind of Black in the South. So, that dynamic of how kids at the grassroots level were making sense of their racial ethnic identity and articulating and carving out spaces for who they were and how they identified, but always in relation to this larger structural process of racialization that was reified in school practice at the organizational level, I've argued, and also reified through state policy at the macro level, and then of course, federal policy at the macro level.

“racialization [is] broadly defined as a process of othering in ways in which groups are racially classified and categorized.”

RKR: I’ve appreciated your multi-level analysis of how and when racialization impacts young people. 

SR: Over the course of doing this ethnography, I wrote several papers using the racialization lens, and then in the last piece in 2022 in Teachers College Record, I put it all together: Racialization occurs at the macro level, and then it occurs at the meso school level— organizational level—and then it also occurs through these peer-to-peer dynamics and teacher-to-student dynamics. Most scholars have written about these things in isolation. We have the policy, we have the school, we have the interactions. I was trying to provide a lens so that we could think about these racialization processes across levels, and think about them interacting within different aspects of school dynamics or community dynamics.

That was, for me, why racialization was useful, because it's a broad process of othering, and it certainly can happen to multiple groups, but I think within the Latino community and the immigration status component, we don't think about all the ways that immigrants are criminalized, and through that criminalization, racialized, and the racial profiling that occurs through things like immigration enforcement, 287(g) agreements, “show me your papers” laws. All of those things are enabling this racial classification that I felt was needed to talk about and expose. I try to center the youth experience and voice to do that.

“We don't think about all the ways that immigrants are criminalized, and through that criminalization, racialized, and the racial profiling that occurs through things like immigration enforcement, 287(g) agreements, “show me your papers” laws.”

RKR: That's super powerful, thank you so much.

Propina

We’ll conclude our conversation with Sophia next week. In the meantime, we encourage you to take a look at her 2022 paper she mentions: “Immigration Knocks on the Door . . . We Are Stuck . . .”.

We’ll see you next week!