Lost in Translation: How Higher Education Studies Conflates Latinx and International Latin American Experiences Through Misplaced Racialization

This autoethnographic study examines how higher education studies conflates international Latin American and domestic Latinx student experiences through what I term “misplaced racialization”, namely, the imposition of domestic racial categories onto international students that fundamentally misrecognizes their distinct positioning as temporary residents, adult-onset racialization subjects, and transnational knowledge holders. Colonial logics are not merely structural; they breathe through the field’s racial grammars. Drawing on Fricker’s (2007) hermeneutical injustice, I argue that higher education’s epistemological boundedness, its lack of native theory and reliance on borrowed American frameworks, does not merely contain colonial logics but is constituted by them, rendering those logics structurally invisible. Through critical autoethnographic reflection on two pivotal tensions during my doctoral training at a U.S. northeastern university, I show how diversity frameworks paradoxically reproduce the epistemic violence they claim to redress. The study calls for disaggregated categorical frameworks that account for citizenship, racialization timelines, and transnational positionality.