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Christina's Worlds: NegotiatingChildhood in the CityJessica C. Zacher aa California State University , Long BeachPublished online: 15 May 2009.

To cite this article: Jessica C. Zacher (2009) Christina's Worlds: Negotiating Childhoodin the City, Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational StudiesAssociation, 45:3, 262-279, DOI: 10.1080/00131940902910966

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EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 45: 262–279, 2009Copyright C© American Educational Studies AssociationISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00131940902910966

Christina’s Worlds: NegotiatingChildhood in the City

Jessica C. ZacherCalifornia State University, Long Beach

This article focuses on the ways that one individual child, Christina, experiencedurban life in and outside of a diversely populated elementary school with a multicul-tural curriculum. Labeled by the school and her parents as white, Christina identifiedas Latina, and used specific spaces in the city to support this claim. Drawing ondata from a year-long ethnographic study, I show how Christina navigated her lifein the city and explore the ways that she consciously represented herself over time,in multiple social spaces, as non-white. Three particular spaces are explored here:the city bus ride to school, Christina’s neighborhood, and classroom discussions.Christina used a variety of resources to negotiate each space, in effect drawing a mapof her racial identity as she lived in the city. Her case offers ideas about how sucha curriculum might influence the senses of self of children in diversely populatedclassrooms.

When Christina,1 the subject of this article, enrolled in kindergarten at GonzalesElementary, she was five years old, had been homeschooled for preschool, andcould already read. In the months before school began, her parents, Susan andPaul, marked her race as white2 on the school district registration forms becausethey considered themselves white, and (they later said in interviews) they sawno reason to see her any differently. They were excited to be able to enroll herat Gonzales, a diversely populated public school, because they wanted Christinato have a multicultural, urban experience. They also appreciated the principal’scommitment to teaching about diversity and tolerance at all grade levels.

Christina’s family remained involved at Gonzales throughout her elementaryyears. By the fifth grade, the year during which this study took place, Christinahad begun to identify herself as “Latina,” “Latin,” “Portuguese,” and “Jewish,”but never, at least not to her two Latina best friends, as white. In fact, she took

Correspondence should be addressed to Jessica C. Zacher, Ph.D., California State University, LongBeach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90840. E-mail: jczacher@csulb.edu

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scrupulous care to paint herself as non-white at every opportunity. In and out ofthe classroom, in city spaces and at home, she claimed a non-white identity. Theways Christina claimed this identity—more specifically, the ways she used urbanspaces to do so—are the subject of this article.

COSMOPOLITAN IDENTITIES IN CHILDHOOD SPACES

Observation of Christina interacting with her peers in and out of school beggedfor an analysis that would encompass her sometimes purposeful and sometimesunconscious use of city spaces and identity labels. Crang and Thrift (2000) urgereaders to think spatially, suggesting that they “look at the evolution of a modernspatial self through the lens of practice and spatialised selfhood” (9). In his 1984essay “Walking in the City,” de Certeau asked people to attend to the “spatialpractices [that] in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life”(96). To look at Christina as a “modern spatial self” is, then, to look at her spatialpractices while taking up issues of difference and identity (drawing on work in thefield of cultural studies) and her use of spaces (from the related field of culturalgeography) at the same time. In the following, each of these is taken up separately,starting with the concept of spatiality and spatial practices.

LeFebvre (1991) saw “three moments of social space” (Soja 1996, 65), the thirdof which, “spaces of representation,” or lived space, is, in Soja’s words, “the spaceof radical openness, the space of social struggle” (Soja 1996, 68). LeFebvre (1991)argued, in fact, that “the social relations of production have a social existence tothe extent that they have a spatial existence” (129); in other words, without space,and our representations of self (as a Latina, for instance) in spaces, there is noconcrete sociality. In addition to this aspect of representational or lived space, it isalso critical to think about the different “functions and scales” (Crang and Thrift2000, 9) implied by a person’s spatial practices. As a middle-class white girl,Christina had “freedom of motion—and command of space” (Crang and Thrift2000, 9) that she took advantage of in this urban school. An analysis of the waysthat she used space, and the ways the spaces she inhabited fostered her identitywork, incorporates examination of both specific spaces of her life (the home, thebus, the classroom) and specific functions of her identities in those spaces.

If one conceives of lived spaces as spaces of representation, where individualsstrive to represent themselves as certain types of people in certain spaces, issuesof identity come to the fore. Christina was what Giddens (1991) would term a“cosmopolitan person . . . one who draws strength from being at home in a varietyof contexts” (190), and from the increasing “instability of any dominant identity”(Grossberg 1996, 90). Within the context of late modernism, as the notion ofa dominant identity becomes increasingly unstable, one must also examine the“imaginative power that has to go into sustaining [identities]” (Crang and Thrift

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2000, 18) in such a world. Stuart Hall and others in cultural studies initiallybegan to explore alterity and difference through studies of culture and nationality(cf. Hall 1997), disaffected and disenfranchised youth (cf. Eckert 1989; Willis1977) and youth subcultures (Hebdige 1979; McRobbie 1993; McRobbie andGarber 1975). The field began to incorporate explorations of youths’ identitywork as well (cf. Yon 2000), as discussions of difference, alterity, and subculturerequired theorization of identity formation and discussions of identity work inprocess.

Christina’s case emphasizes difference and identity work. Indeed, one might saythat Christina was hailed by certain discourses of race, space, and class that offeredher ways to form her identities as “points of temporary attachment to subjectpositions” (Hall 1996, 6) in and out of school. The subject positions she tookup were influenced by class and race differences, and by the ways that Christinaand her peers racialized spaces. For instance, Christina labeled her neighborhood“half-ghetto,” thereby linking it to the presumably “full” ghetto neighborhoods ofsome of her friends, yet maintaining a race- and class-based distinction from thosewho lived entirely in the “ghetto.” This linking of space, place, and identity wasvisible across her school and home lives (Keith and Pile 1993).

Grossberg (1997), long a chronicler of cultural studies in Britain and the UnitedStates, describes the field as “a particular way of contextualizing and politicizingintellectual practices” (246) within and in relation to both the practices of dailylife and the “apparatuses of power that mobilize different practices and effects toorganize the space of human life and the possibilities of alliances” (271). Morerecently, cultural geographers interested in the nexus of culture, or human life, andgeography have argued for increased attention to children’s sense of place (James,Jenks, and Prout 1998; Skelton and Valentine 1998), and to their attachment toand identification with spaces like schools (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Nespor1997; 2002), cities (Moje 2004), and nations (Gagen 2000; see also Aitken 2001;Scourfield et al. 2006). This study of Christina’s spatial practices owes a debtto both cultural studies and cultural geography, the former for its emphasis onidentity and power, the latter for (in the case of the studies cited) furthering theunderstanding of the roles of space and place in children’s lives.

Drawing on these concepts, the following questions guide this exploration ofChristina’s social spaces. First, what relationships exist between the particularsocial spaces Christina traversed and the identities she narrated in those spaces?And second, in what ways was did Christina contribute to, and in what wayswas she constituted by, the spaces she traversed in her daily life? The followingsection comprises a discussion of the methods used to analyze Christina’s spatialpractices and answer these questions, including a listing of the many spaces sheinhabited, as well as the people in her life with and for whom she created certainidentities.

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METHODS FOR FOLLOWING OUT SPATIAL PRACTICES

Coming to what de Certeau (1984) would refer to as “a theory of everydaypractices, of lived space” (96) of Christina’s life, and to investigating both howChristina navigated social spaces and the identities she narrated in them, requiredfiguring out how to “follow out a few of these multiform, resistance, tricky andstubborn procedures” (de Certeau 1984, 96). This following out required first adetailed description of the places in which and people with which Christina spenther time. The school site, the locus of the larger study, is thus described in the nextsection, as are the various participants in the study, including Christina, her peers,her teacher, and her family.

Gathering Data as a Former Teacher: Field Visits and Observations

Gonzales Elementary is an urban, racially diverse fifth-grade northern Californiaschool with 235 students. Roughly one-third of the students were African Ameri-can, one-third Latino/a, and one-sixth each white and Asian American. The schoolcelebrated multiculturalism through detailed studies of periods in American his-tory like the Civil Rights Movement, and the principal was a long-time activistin the community and the city. The curriculum itself, and the topics taken up inChristina’s fifth-grade classroom, are discussed in the findings section.

I was a kindergarten teacher at Gonzales for three years, and about half of thestudents in the study, including Christina, were once in my kindergarten class.My long-term relationship with the school and school community afforded meunusually high levels of access. I was privy to students’ private conversations, wastold in confidence by them about their personal views, and knew firsthand aboutmany of their family histories. I spent the majority of my time at the site as anobserver, always taking field notes, usually audiotaping events, and moving awayfrom students if my presence caused a disruption (over time, this helped studentsto view my presence and my note-taking as unexceptional).

Data collection and analysis drew on anthropological notions of thick descrip-tion a la Geertz (1973), interpretive methods (Erickson 1986), and an analysis ofsocial structures (Bourdieu 1985) to ascertain Christina’s social standing amongsther peers. Data were collected during two to three site visits per week over theentire school year, for 3 hours per day. The majority of these visits were duringthe language arts and social studies periods, but additional observations includedmath and science classes, the cafeteria for lunch, on the playground for recess, andfollowing students all over the school. Detailed field notes were taken of all ob-served events, handwritten notes that were rewritten into longer notes away fromthe site, using audiotapes of events to clarify events and verify dialogue as needed(Bogdan and Biklen 2003; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Sanjek 1990). Copies

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of any student writing (official or unofficial) that was done during observed eventswere obtained at each visit. Copious photographs of students in and out of schoolthat captured them in their moment-to-moment interactions were used to help inwriting detailed field notes. Over the course of a year, the data amassed totaledeight notebooks filled with scratch notes, 55 sets of 15–20 page typed field notes,copies of approximately 250 pages of student writing, and over 200 photographs.

Of the twenty-four students in the fifth-grade class, six focal children werechosen to represent a variety of race, class, gender, and other marked differences.Christina and her best male friend, DeAndre, an African American boy who self-identified as the “most popular” boy in school, were two of my focal students.I had the closest ties with these two; I had watched them become friends inkindergarten, and had followed both their individual growth and the developmentof their friendship over the intervening years. These links gave me greater accessto Christina’s thoughts and feelings, and also forced me to look very closely at heractions and my interpretations of them.

I conducted approximately three individual interviews with each of the 6 focalstudents (for a total of 18 interviews) and four with the teachers to add “coherence,depth, and density” (Weiss 1994, 3) to my interpretations. I also jotted notesabout, and wrote up, casual interviews with children’s parents and other staff andcommunity members that I encountered in and out of the school. I had severalstudents, including Christina, make maps of the friendship groupings of the class,and I used them to triangulate my own assessments of social groupings. I alsoused video to document events and, later, be able to analyze patterns of spatialorganization. The study also had a popular culture component, which includedreading children’s self-reported favorite books (including, for Christina, Flowersin the Attic (Andrews 1979), listening to their music, watching suggested movies,and, when possible, playing their video games.

Participants

As kindergarteners and, later, as older volunteers in the kindergarten classroom,the children in this study had, in many ways, acculturated me to teaching childrenwho were socioeconomically, racially, and linguistically different from me (awhite, middle-class woman in her thirties). Several of these students’ experienceswere key to my analysis of Christina’s negotiation of social spaces. These includeChristina herself, her best male friend, DeAndre; her two best friends, Marta andVanessa; her mother, Susan; and her classroom teacher, Ms. Jean. Other people inher life make smaller appearances, but these are the participants about whom themost will be written. These portraits combine description and analysis, because, indescribing Christina’s friends, for instance, one must discuss the ways in which,for example, their racial identities influenced Christina’s choice to identify asnon-white in particular spaces.

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Christina. Christina knew that she was my main female informant, and shewas interviewed more than any other student in the project. One day early on,she casually began to label children in the class by race as a conversational aside(during free time), and she went on to make a list of all of the students’ racial labels(as she saw them), labels that became part of the data set. Throughout the year,she continued to be both a subject of observations and a point of triangulation fordata gathered on other students. The school records indicate Christina’s ethnicityas W for white, and her parents were both white, her father also Jewish, but, asmentioned, she described herself as “Latina.”

She lived with her artist mother, Susan, and reporter father, Paul, in a rentedhouse in a racially mixed urban neighborhood. From the second story of the house,she could see part of the neighborhood where DeAndre lived, across a major road,a highway, and blocks of light industrial buildings. Christina was labeled as a“Gifted and Talented” student (a school district classification based on high thirdgrade test scores, known as “GATE”). She was in the “highest reading level,” shesaid, and was aware of her own and her friends’ test scores. Christina’s male bestfriend was DeAndre—not a boyfriend, as they both told me—and her two femalebest friends were Marta and Vanessa (see the following). She was specifically notfriends with any of the other white girls in the class. Christina’s mother fosteredher relationship with DeAndre over the years, driving to pick up DeAndre or dropoff Christina, taking the pair to lunch, making sure that they were in the sameclass each year. The cultivation of this friendship, in which Christina’s mothertook her back and forth from one neighborhood to another, to play with an AfricanAmerican boy, was one of her early experiences traversing racialized spaces.

DeAndre. DeAndre was an African American boy who, along with Christina,was one of my two main informants. He and Christina had been friends sincekindergarten, when they were both students in my own class at Gonzales. DeAndretold me on more than one occasion that he was “the most popular boy in the school,”defined by him as someone who “everyone knows,” and he may have been right(Zacher 2008b). DeAndre had recently returned to his mother’s care (after manyyears of living with his paternal grandmother). His mother, who was a welfarerecipient, found the family a rental apartment through Section 8 funding in apredominantly African American neighborhood of the city (the one that Christinacould see from her house). Mark, the husband of Christina’s godmother Abigail,was an administrator at what many in the community said was the best publicmiddle school in the district, and Christina and DeAndre both wanted to go therefor sixth grade. By contacting DeAndre’s mother and talking to the principal atGonzales, Christina’s mother had made sure that DeAndre would go there aswell.

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Best friend Marta. Marta was one of Christina’s two best friends. Her par-ents were from El Salvador, and she was Vanessa’s cousin. Marta and Vanessa livedin the same historically Latino neighborhood, a mix of Spanish-speaking immi-grants, established Latino and Chicano families, and young urban (mostly white)professionals. Marta spoke Spanish and English at home, and English at school.Her parents both worked blue-collar jobs, and were both fluent bilinguals. Theyhad had several children attend Gonzales—Marta was one of the youngest—andwere very involved in the school’s parent association.

Best friend Vanessa. Vanessa, Christina’s other best friend, claimed aLatina identity. Her parents were from El Salvador and Venezuela; she had beenborn in California, but had many relatives in both of those countries, as wellas in this California city. Like Marta, she spoke Spanish and English at home,and English at school. Her parents both worked, sometimes legally, sometimesnot. Although Vanessa rarely socialized with Christina out of school, she oftenspent weekend days with Marta, due to their parents’ relationship. Vanessa, whosefamily was very religious, was the class expert on Anne Frank; her interest inall things Jewish connected her with Christina in class discussions and in moreinformal conversations, partly because Christina occasionally pointed out herown father’s Jewishness when Vanessa began talking about Anne Frank (Zacher2006a). This threesome was socially very powerful in the classroom, partly be-cause of Christina’s alliance with DeAndre. Christina, more than her white femalepeers, was able to control other students’ actions, tell them what to do, and hurtfeelings, all with little fear of reprisal.

Christina’s mother Susan. Susan had invited me for dinner when I wasChristina’s kindergarten teacher, and she and I remained friends over the years,exchanging occasional phone calls, invitations to events (Susan’s art openingsin particular), notes, and indulging in long conversations at the school. She wasan artist, and before and during the data collection year she had written grantsto allow her to spend approximately ten hours a week at the school, creatinglarge murals with the children. This interactional pattern continued during datacollection, with the two of us often eating a quick lunch together and/or chattingabout the children and her and my work with them. She freely shared her thoughts,hopes, and worries about Christina, and her words often worked their way intomy analytic memos (Bogdan and Biklen 2003). Through our friendship, I alsomet Christina’s aunt, Tamara; her godmother, Abigail, Susan’s close friend; andAbigail’s husband, Mark, an administrator at the public middle school Christinaand DeAndre planned to attend.

A conversation with Susan in December, before Christina’s eleventh birthdayparty, illustrates both her candor with me and some of the issues she faced with

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her daughter. In the car on the way to pick DeAndre up for her birthday party,Christina had asked Susan, very seriously, that her mom not tell the other girlsthat she was “not a Latina.” Christina said she knew her mom objected to lying,but she was concerned that her friends—particularly Marta and Vanessa—did notlike white girls (Zacher 2006b). Her friends knew that her dad was Jewish, butin that conversation, Christina asked her mother how much of a stretch it wouldbe to think of someone who was Portuguese as “Latin” (Christina’s maternalgrandmother, Linda, was from Portugal). An added factor, Christina pointed out,was that her (white) grandmother did live in Mexico. Susan told me that, as far asshe was concerned, “as long as she can be flexible, that’s fine.” Part of her plan tokeep Christina “flexible” was to encourage friendships with her peers at Gonzales,and to send her to places like cello camp with kids who were, in Susan’s ownwords, “super snobby.” Christina never commented on the children at the camp,and only mentioned the camp experience itself in interviews, in a laundry list ofout-of-school activities, with the added note that her grandmother, not her parents,had paid for the camp.

Classroom teacher Ms. Jean. Jean and I had gotten our teaching creden-tials together, and taught together at Gonzales after we graduated. While I leftto go back to school, Jean stayed and taught, in third, fourth, and fifth grades. Awhite woman in her thirties with a commitment to teaching about social justice,she taught her language arts and social studies classes with an antiracist curriculumthat included a long-term study of what she termed the “Cycle of Oppression”(Zacher 2007). Jean found Christina to be very intelligent, but also socially toopowerful, and too much of a “bully.” When I told Jean about Christina, and myrealization that she was calling herself a Latina, Jean told me she thought Christinawould try to be Black if she could, to garner more social power, but that the Latinas(including Marta, Vanessa, and another girl in the other fifth grade class) seemedto follow her, and Jean did not think that the African American girls would. Jeansuggested that Christina wanted to be “ghetto,” a spatial and cultural marker thatChristina herself used in reference to city spaces. What “ghetto” meant to eachof them, in terms of racialized and classed urban spaces, as well as a racializedidentity, is the subject of some analysis in the following.

FOLLOWING CHRISTINA’S FOOTSTEPS: BUS,NEIGHBORHOOD, CLASSROOM

I go home, I hang out for a while, maybe eat a snack, then I do my homework, andthen on some days that I’m not off, I practice my cello, and then my dad comeshome, and then we eat dinner, and then maybe we watch a movie, or we play acard game, or I just hang out and listen to music while they talk. Basically. And

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sometimes I have dance classes like on Monday and Friday. Oh, and Wednesday, Igo to the after-school program. (Christina, interview, 11/26)

Clearly, Christina traversed an incredible number of spaces during her averageschool day, as do many urban children (James et al. 1998; Scourfield et al. 2006).Although I will not describe each of these spaces in the sections that follow, aspart of my initial analysis I made a list of social spaces she passed through ona daily basis, in a roughly chronological order. These spaces included (as shenoted): home, three distinct city neighborhoods via the public bus, the publicbus itself (to and from school), the school (including its playground, cafeteria,hallways, bathrooms, and office), the classroom, the after-school program (in theschool cafeteria), basketball practice at the neighborhood youth sports center,Flamenco dance classes at her dance studio, hip hop and salsa dance classes at thelocal recreation center, monthly overnights at her godmother Abigail’s house, andmonthly overnights at her grandmother’s house in the suburbs.

In the course of her relatively short life, Christina had also traversed otherspaces, including: New York City (she and her parents had lived there until sheturned three, and she had traveled back a few times with her father), a move froma rental apartment in one part of the city to a rental house in another, annualmonth-long trips to the countryside (taken by Christina and her mother), andtrips to cello camp (paid for by her grandmother) at an in-state private university.This tour of her spaces begins with a discussion of transportation, then move toneighborhoods, and end in the classroom, where Christina first found the need forher spatial practices, and constantly deployed them in her identity work.

A City Girl Takes the Bus

One day, when I sat next to Christina during small group work, I noticed thatshe had written “I (heart) 3 + NY” and drawn a big heart after the letter “I.” Ipointed at it and whispered the names of the cities. She nodded and said, “I usedto live in New York!” I nodded, and whispered in reply, “When you were little,huh?” She nodded in reply.

Being an urban child, one who “used to live in New York,” was a critical part ofChristina’s “reflexive project of the self” (Giddens 1991, 5). Even at age ten, shewas able to use “NY” as a signifier for the urban, to connote a sense of city spaces.Although she had spent time in the country—her grandmother lived in a suburbabout an hour away, and she had camped and traveled in the country—Christinaseemed to derive particular pleasure from being someone who knew her wayaround the city. She used certain aspects of the urban, including her knowledge ofthe public bus system and her understanding of neighborhood populations and thekinds of identities certain neighborhoods indexed, to bolster her identity claims.

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Although she lived in the same neighborhood as her teacher Jean, she and Jeancertainly each inhabited very “different cities” (Jacobs and Fincher 1998, as citedin Nespor 2004, 309).

Middle school children in this city were required to find their own way to school,either on the public transportation system, through rides, or on foot. Christinahad decided to prepare for middle school by getting her parents’ permission totake the public bus from her house to school while she was in fifth grade. Ona typical day, she walked up the street to the bus stop by herself—sometimes,she reported, she heard the Latino men waiting for work on the corner catcallingwomen on the street in Spanish; she was proud she could understand them, and sat(or stood) for the two-mile, twenty-minute ride. Because her neighborhood wasadjacent to the predominantly African American one in which DeAndre lived,the bus was generally already filled with African American teens on their wayacross town to middle or high school. DeAndre himself took the school bus;Christina was the only student in the class who used public transportation to get toschool.

On the city bus that Christina took, African American and Latino youth talkedin and across the middle of the bus, hanging off straps over the laps of older Latinoand white men and women on their way to some kind of work. African Ameri-can and Latina girls sat together, talking about boys, clothes, and the upcomingschool day; there were no visibly white youth on the bus. One day, I observedas most of the older passengers, whites and Latino/as a like, tried assiduously toignore the two teenage Latinos sitting in the back of the bus playing rap musicwith loud, explicit swear words on a handheld boom box. They sat right under-neath a sign that read “No Music;” when they got off, I asked what their musicwas, and one said that he did not know; they had borrowed the boom box fromtheir brother. Christina traversed such racialized spaces within racialized spacesevery day.

She never explicitly told me that her choice to ride the public bus was related toher claim to being Latina, but she took pleasure, she reported, in being able to takeit by herself, get off at the corner, and walk the two blocks to school. Althoughalmost all of her white peers were dropped off in front by their parents in theircars, Christina arrived on foot, self-transporting. Without her parents’ approval,she would not have been able to take this step, but they were willing, they said, togrant her this independence. However, independence engendered by the bus tripwas not its only draw. On the way to and from the stop at home, there were theLatino men she could identify, hear, and later talk about to her two best Latinafriends, who lived in what everyone recognized as a primarily Latino neighbor-hood. On the bus itself, she was surrounded by African American and Latinoyouth, whom she could study and be near. Her description of her neighborhood,which I turn to next, relied on these others to act as evidence for her claims forit.

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A “Half-ghetto” Neighborhood

The first time that the extent of Christina’s spatial awareness became clear waswhen she described the family’s new rental house. They had rented a two-bedroomapartment near the school for five years, since they had returned from New York,and moved at the end of her fourth-grade year to a rental house in a more “mixed”(according to Christina) and less gentrified neighborhood. Christina listed thehouse’s many benefits, including a hot tub and two stories, and then said that sheliked it better than the old apartment. When asked why she liked it, she said it wasnot because it was a house instead of an apartment—although she did think the hottub was “cool”—but because it was in a “kinda half-ghetto” neighborhood, and“half-ghetto,” she said, was “cool” and not “too dangerous.” Her mother, Susan,concurred, saying later that Christina liked it because it was in a “half-ghetto,”but not “all ghetto,” neighborhood. Christina had been in neighborhoods in thecity that she would describe as “ghetto,” including DeAndre’s mostly AfricanAmerican one. She had a sense of what made a neighborhood “ghetto,” noting forme its signifiers in the course of one of our conversations: men hanging out on thestreet during the day, multiple corner liquor stores, cars playing loud music, andgraffiti.

As Jean, Christina’s teacher, had noted, Christina seemed to want to be “ghetto,”in the sense of marking herself culturally. It gradually became clear that Christinawas uncomfortable, for many reasons, with being seen as white, and her insistenceon the quality of her neighborhood was finely tuned to corroborate her Latinaidentity claims. For instance, although she never said outright that she lived withor near other Latinos, she once said, indexing her neighborhood with that of herfriend’s, “we got people by my house and Vanessa’s, too, named Vato, Chico,Cruiser. . . ” She was an expert at making such casual statements; no one coulddisprove her claim that she had neighbors with Latino gangster nicknames, andshe also had the evidence of her recollections of men who called out to women inSpanish as she went to and from the bus stop.

However, the non-“half ghetto” half of her neighborhood was populated bymiddle-class homeowners, including her teacher, a connection she usually ignoredin front of her peers. The desire to be half ghetto also signifies a desire to remainhalf middle class, or perhaps half white. The sum total of her experiences includedmany interactions with other white children, and other middle-class and uppermiddle-class people; being half-ghetto allowed her to maintain these aspects ofher life and sense of self when she chose. It is also possible that the act of claiminga Latina identity was a signifier for being half-ghetto in and of itself. Either way,her use of the term ghetto as a spatial signifier and as a cultural marker highlighther awareness and purposeful, if not conscious, use of it to mark out her ownspaces and identities.

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Contested/Contesting Identities in the Classroom

Christina was flexible, agentive, and capable of representing herself as manytypes of people in different spheres. She knew how to talk the curricular talkof antiracism, and she used every available resource to claim non-whiteness inmost social situations. Her identity claims, and the evidence she amassed tosupport them, were created in response to the social justice curriculum, andafforded her prestige and cultural capital in the classroom and school (Zacher2008a; Bourdieu 1985); they also contributed to other white girls’ discomfortwith being white (Zacher, 2006b). At school, she engaged in a delicate balanc-ing act. She claimed a Latina identity, but knew it was technically false. Sheused all available resources to appear to be a Latina, but was afraid her friendswould make fun of her if her mother told them she was white (or even “not aLatina”).

In addition to the social justice, multicultural curriculum (Zacher 2005) taughtby the teachers at Gonzales, Christina had been placed in Jean’s classroom forfifth grade, where there were few African American girls to lead (according toJean) and, according to both Christina and the other white girls in the class, albeitfor different reasons, no white girls she would befriend. Christina’s mother hadnever befriended the mothers of these other white girls, who had been in separatekindergarten classes; in addition, Christina was sometimes seen as mean and cruelby the other white girls. Between being part of the trio of Vanessa–Marta–Christinaand her friendship with DeAndre, she was near, or at, the top of the social hierarchy,and could call on a fair amount of social capital to ensure her status (Bourdieu1985; Zacher 2008a). This status protected her from direct questioning about thevalidity of her identity claim, for the most part (her racial categorization was onlyquestioned once—described in the following), and afforded her great mobility andpower in the classroom.

The curriculum itself, especially the topics taken up and the issues studentsaddressed, had marked effects on Christina’s sense of self. Generally, the studentshad covered several areas of oppression, including racism, sexism, ageism, genderbiases, and more. In this school year, they had read and discussed fiction andnonfiction accounts of the Holocaust (Frank 1993), Japanese-American internmentin camps during World War II (Houston and Houston 1973; Stanley 1994), slavery(McKissack and McKissack 1992), American sweatshop factory workers’ rights(Dash 1996), and the oppression and slaughter of Native Americans (Armstrong2001). The following vignette details a brief conversation between Vanessa andChristina after they had read about half of the biography of freed slave SojournerTruth (McKissack and McKissack 1992). It illustrates some of the complexitiesthe curriculum engendered for Christina. The girls were talking about “if therewas still slavery.”

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Christina:

If there was still slavery, um, we would be washing the floors.

Vanessa:

You?

Christina:

Yeah (nodding vigorously).

Vanessa:

You?

Christina:

Yeah.

Vanessa:

No, [shaking her head]. No, but you’re white, okay?

Christina:

I could be washing the floors. [The girls looked at each other for a moment. Then,after a moment of silence, Christina continued the conversation.] How do you shapeyour eyebrows?

Vanessa:

I want to shave them. [Vanessa pointed at Christina’s eyebrows and started to talkabout where she would pluck them.]

This is one of many discussions Christina had throughout the year that werecentered on, or around, the official school curriculum (in this case, the treatment ofslaves in Sojourner Truth’s lifetime), but were also profoundly personal and relatedto her partially successful identity work. At first, the girls placed the injustice ofslavery firmly in the past (“If there was still slavery”), and then Christina, whowas always trying to maintain her non-white identity, empathized with slaves. Thisclash—Christina was visibly not “Black,” even if she could pass for Latina—mayhave pushed Vanessa to directly label Christina as white; this was the only timeVanessa did this in my hearing throughout the year. Ironically, Vanessa was notBlack either, but her identity, the possibility of her being a slave and washing thefloors, was not at issue at the moment. After Vanessa let Christina’s comment abouthow she “could be” washing the floors slide, Christina salvaged the moment witha direct change of subject, and the topic was forgotten. The issue of her whitenessor non-whiteness was not discussed again by the two girls in my hearing, and nosigns surfaced that further called into question or challenged her identity claim.

The change of subject was also not accidental; the subject of eyebrow groomingwas specific to Latinas in this classroom, because correctly shaping and penciling

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in eyebrows was a mark of sophistication and beauty for most of the girls, in theirimagined futures if not in their present states. This conversational slice serves asan example of the way the classroom space impacted Christina’s identity choices,and the way her identity choices impacted classroom learning.

CONCLUSION: ANSWERING RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The relationships between the social spaces Christina traversed and the identitiesshe narrated in those spaces, as well as the consequences of her use of space, aremanifold. In truth, she did not narrate particular identities in particular spaces,but instead wove a constantly shifting identity, created a narrative (Hall 1996) ofherself as an urban, Latina, ghetto, white, middle-class girl. Initially, it seemed thatChristina’s identity work was contingent on the particular school and classroomculture in which her parents had placed her, but over time, it became clear that thespaces of her life outside of school held equal sway in her maneuvering. Classroomcurricula interact with children’s identity work in complicated ways (cf. Daiuteand Jones 2003; Dutro Kazemi and Balf 2005), and classrooms themselves aredeeply inflected by the spaces children move through in the city, and their spatialexperiences (cf. Christensen and O’Brien 2002; Zacher 2006b).

Christina’s case suggests that youth might, in a sense, draw maps of theirracial identities, map their sense of who they are, racially speaking, by markingsimilarities and differences, and creating what Massey (1998) would call “con-stellations of temporary coherence” (125) within which to sketch out racializedselves. Christina redrew her racial identity map every day, adding new locations,new people, new supporting characters and threads. Her maps were, of course,inflected by a classed identity, because she was a middle-class girl who playeddown the benefits of her middle-class life, which included a rental house in a half,(not fully) ghetto neighborhood, many after-school activities, and extensive andfrequent travel.

The public bus, with its opportunities to sit near and reflect the non-whiteness ofother urban youth, was one of many opportunities Christina purposefully employedto erase “half” of her whiteness. Not only was riding the bus, or more accurately,occupying the space of the bus, critical, but she also used her ride to makeherself seem more urban, grown up, and independent in her peers’ eyes, especiallycompared to the other white girls, who were driven to school by their mothers.She was both shaped by this racialized and classed space, and used it to bolster heridentity claims. Her biased descriptions of her neighborhood allowed her to refer toit as a particular kind of urban space, a “half-ghetto” space, populated by particularkinds of people with linguistically and racially marked names speaking particularmarked languages. Finally, the friendships she cultivated in the classroom, as wellas those that she shunned, were yet more points in her constellation.

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Christina contributed to, and was constituted by, these spaces in certain ways.One of the spaces in which she had the greatest immediate effect was in theclassroom, where her claims to a Latina identity pulled on and pushed againstothers’ notions of who and what she was, and who and what they were. Vanessamay have mentioned her whiteness once, but Marta never did; DeAndre seemedto ignore her racial identifications and focused instead on the social networkinghe could accomplish with and through her friendship. DeAndre was not the onlyone who used her social power to maintain his own; Vanessa and Marta, as wellas several other younger girls, seemed to rely on her support and power in theclassroom and on the playground.

Christina was, to be sure, a powerful and “cosmopolitan” person (Giddens1991) adept at using the resources at hand to build and maintain an identity thatshe found useful in her life. She also impinged on the identity claims of others.She also was able to pass as Latina because of her coloring—brown hair, browneyes, medium pale skin—but if the situation were reversed, most Latinas wouldnot be able to pass as white (should they wish to claim a non-Latina or whiteidentity). Yes, she drew on the privilege she had as a white, middle-class person inthis classroom—including the privilege to describe her neighborhood in one wayand not another, and the ability to pass as Latina—but she did so in response tothe spaces in which she found herself. The power imbalances were striking, andyet, adults around her let her continue to make her claims, and let her continue tohold a certain kind of social power in the classroom.

Finally, Christina’s case shows that children do take notice of their socialspaces, do attend to the power dynamics in and outside of their classrooms,and do struggle to make the best of their life situations, as geographers havelong argued about adults (de Certeau 1984; Soja 1996) and youth (McRobbie1993; Yon 2000). Christina was neither delusional nor simply power-hungry (bothaccusations that have been leveled at this presentation of her case in the past);instead, she made the best out of her situation as a white child in a diverse classroomwith a curriculum that focused on multicultural issues. Other white children inthis classroom responded differently, in their identity work and uses of space, tothe same curriculum. Christina consciously crafted a Latina identity, and used thespaces she traversed, particularly her descriptions of them, as proof of her claims.

Cultural geographers have tackled these issues at more global scales—for in-stance, researching the identification practices and identity politics of Welsh chil-dren (Scourfield et al. 2006)—and yet there is room in this field to expand on whatindividual children do, in and out of schools, with their spatial awareness. Spatialpractices can be traced, identity politics can be analyzed, and new understandingsof why it is children do what they do may come to light. The ways that Christinacasually racialized the spaces she traversed, and used those racializations to sup-port her Latina self, are not answers in and of themselves, but beg further questionsabout how and why children engage with space—and place—in their lives. All

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children share this ability to use the spaces of their lives in some way; furtherinvestigation into individual lives would doubtless lead us to many other kindsof stories of different identity work fostered by different sets of social networksand hierarchies. In sum, we must continue to explore the “spatial dimensions” ofchildren’s lives, looking closely at the relationships between spaces and identitiesfor other individuals in different settings.

NOTES

1. All names are pseudonyms.2. The label white is used here with no capitalization for two reasons. First, it represents ahost of European American ancestries that can be capitalized (i.e., “Irish American”), andsecond, it was the school district’s label for those with European American ancestry, usedfrequently as a racial descriptor by students and adults at Gonzales.3. As noted, the name of the city has been removed to dis-identify it and maintain researchsubjects’ confidentiality.

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