Marcando Presencia in a Changing Chicago: Mexican/Latinx Teacher Testimonios from Barrio Classrooms

This dissertation is a qualitative testimonio study that documents the reflections and experiences of twenty Mexican/Latinx Chicago teachers through a Latino Critical Race (LatCrit) Studies in Education theoretical lens. These testimonios contribute to the ongoing documentation of educational lucha and community organizing, by centering Latinx teacher narratives that spoke to their own experiences growing up, and then teaching in working-class Latinx classrooms and barrios. Furthermore, while the research of the evolving Latinx experience in the United States is burgeoning, this dissertation is part of a growing movement of Latinxs marcando presencia within a Midwestern geographical and historical context. Latinx teacher testimonios showed that educators were determined to: 1) contest constantly shifting (and what they perceived as racist) educational policies and reforms that often overlooked and diminished the important work of cariño in schools, 2) elevate curricular and pedagogical practices that cultivated cultural, linguistic, and barrio orgullo in young Latinx students, and 3) (re)claim their schools and barrios by providing more nuanced perspectives about the power of living/working within working-class communities of color, and the experiences with and the meaning of segregation in Chicago. This important experiential knowledge shared through Latinx teacher testimonios can contribute to building more culturally sustaining, humanizing, and place specific curricular and pedagogical practices needed to improve the educational and lived experiences of working-class Latinx youth, as well as gain a more detailed understanding of how to best recruit and adequately support Latinx educators.