All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: Latinxs and Latin America as a Threat in Citizenship Curriculum

Abstract

President-elect Donald Trump along with a bevy of other right-wing politicians espoused anti-Latin@ and anti-Latin American political rhetoric leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election. This outward expression of anti-Latin@ racist political rhetoric poses a moral and ethical conundrum for K-12 educators and scholars of education, especially for social studies educators who are inherently implicated given social studies' natural curricular inclination to engage with the political. Thus, the presence of amplified anti-Latin@ and anti-Latin American political rhetoric in our nation's civic and citizenship-oriented curriculum warrants attention. Using the Latin@ Third World Threat Narrative as a framework, we examined secondary U.S. civic and citizenship oriented curricular standards to determine how anti-Latin@ and anti-Latin American political rhetoric are reified and challenged. Findings indicate that similar to broader political discourses, Latin@s and Latin America are situated as social and political dangers to the overall welfare of the US. Curricular standards often use tropes such as drugs, immigration, and an unwillingness to assimilate to purvey this threat. In light of our findings, we suggest that educators began to examine curricular standards as an apparatus of state politics, especially given their policy status. Furthermore, we argue that educators must also begin to critically analyze curriculum as complicit in advancing racist nativism ideologies common in conservative political discourse.