Latinxs are a growing population in the United States who disproportionately attend segregated and chronically under-resourced schools. This leads to significant opportunity gaps between Latinxs and non-Latinxs white students. Discussions of meeting the needs of Latinx students often de-emphasize these opportunity gaps in favor of longstanding deficit orientations that suggest that Latinx students do not make progress in U.S. schools because of cultural and linguistic deficiencies in their homes and communities. Culturally sustaining and relevant education offers an alternative approach that seeks to affirm, build on, and extend the existing cultural and linguistic resources of Latinx students. It affirms these cultural and linguistic practices by acknowledging their complexity. It builds on these cultural and linguistic practices by centering them in teaching and learning. It extends on these cultural and linguistic practices by inviting students to use them as a point of entry for transforming academic conventions. This approach acknowledges and challenges the marginalization Latinx communities confront in the U.S. and frames their cultural and linguistic practices as a resource for teaching and learning.
In the first three sections of this paper, we juxtapose the vast racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity within Latinx communities with their shared history of European and U.S. colonialism as a point of entry for making the case for the importance of enacting culturally sustaining and relevant education for Latinx students in ways that center Blackness and Indigeneity. We then use this as a lens for summarizing the existing research on the cultural and linguistic practices of Latinx students before focusing on how these cultural and linguistic practices can be sustained in bilingual education as well as across the content areas. We end with a focus on key directions for the future of research, policy, and practice focused on enacting culturally sustaining and relevant education for Latinx students.
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