Evoking the Guerrera Spirit: Latinas Pursuing Self-Definition and Navigating College Access

U.S. Latina youth are often positioned as invisible within educational systems and face numerous obstacles in their pursuit of higher education. In this pursuit, they have engaged in visible activism, as well as daily resistance to combat the marginalization they experience. To further explore these challenges and resistance tactics, we use a guerrera framework (Londoño, 2005) to analyze la palabra participants use to describe the assaults and symbolic violence they experience in pursuit of educational attainment. Within this framework, we center la piel y cuerpo in the exploration of how participants prepare for obstacles they encounter, while also examining how participants use la palabra to understand their being and identities, as well as how these obstacles led to defining or redefining themselves. The findings of this study emerge through further exploration of Latinas narratives in a community-based qualitative study previously executed. Our participant sample consists of 16 Latinas in urban schools in the Northeast United States. The use of the aforementioned framework as an analytic tool illustrates the complexity of surviving and navigating obstacles to access, how Latinas are prepared or prepare themselves to attain educational access, and the ways that resistance to symbolic and physical forms of violence is complex. More specifically, the three findings identified are as follows: preparación y acceso, navigating differences en piel y clase, y the embodiment of dandose a respetar.