The Unhomely in Academic Success: Latino Males Navigating the Ghetto Nerd Borderlands

This qualitative study examines the ways in which Mexican-origin scholarship boys (Hoggart, 1957/2006; Rodriguez, 1982) use their conceptions and connections to their working-class “home” to achieve academic excellence all the while resisting hegemonic discourses in higher education. “Home” is framed as site of political memory, hope, agency, and struggle. Bhabha’s (1994) notion of the unhomely provides additional theoretical grounding for exploring the schooling trajectories of the scholarship boys. This research moves beyond clean victory narratives by unpacking various traumas associated with social class mobility, bounded assimilation, and the politics of whitestream (Urrieta, 2009) knowledge and settings in higher education. The analysis of the students’ identities and coping strategies provides valuable contributions to the dearth of research on academically