Looking, listening, leaning into the insights of youth: Building solidarity in the classroom

As Latinx youth growingly add to the cultural wealth of this nation and its schools, research has yet to explore the ways they integrate themselves socially and culturally into schools that house predominantly Black students. While a curriculum of cultural integration is stifled by systemic hindrances, including Eurocentric curricular mandates and a neoliberal ideology of schooling, youth utilize their curiosities, interests, and dispositions to transgress artificial boundaries of difference. Situating the experiences and observations of two high school seniors — a Latina of Mexican and El Salvadoran descent and young Black woman from New Orleans — I examine their advice that seeks to build solidarity in a predominately Black school with a growing Latinx population. Their advice can be scaffolded upon for explicit curricular, instructional, and pedagogical orienting for the explicit purpose to build solidarity amongst differently racialized groups. Moreover, I transfer learnings from organizers and alliances working to build solidarity into the classroom as a political site of orienting youth.