ABSTRACT

Latina/o youths along with their families, communities, and advocate scholars have long experienced and tried to explain the challenges of education and schooling in the United States. Th ey have told stories, created songs, provided consejos (advice), and conducted research with narratives and numbers to explain how they have succeeded and how schools have failed them. Recently, the fi eld of Latino education emerged from an impressive accumulation of over half a century of research addressing Latinos/as’ diverse histories and experiences of education and schooling (San Miguel & Donato, this section). Researchers, scholars, and practitioners have addressed and continue to address with great urgency what has become a crisis in Latino educational attainment and achievement (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). Th ey have worked to interrogate educational inequities, to challenge defi cit-oriented perspectives about language and culture, and to propose new ways for thinking about school reform and pedagogical practices. For such a task, researchers have contributed to and made great use of all the theoretical and methodological tools at their disposal including developments in critical and cultural studies, Mexican American studies, Puerto Rican and Latino/a studies, women of color and Chicana/ Latina feminisms, linguistics and second language acquisition, critical race theory, ethnography, and narrative methodologies to name a few. Th e chapters in this section demonstrate how the fi eld has merged these tools in unique ways to develop new understandings of Latino educational history and produce innovative conceptual frameworks and methodologies for naming and addressing the critical state of Latino education (Zarate & Conchas, this section; Elenes & Delgado Bernal, this section; Irizarry & Nieto, this section).