Centering Black geographies in Latinx education scholarship: youth perspectives from El Sur Latinx

ABSTRACT This article advances Latinx education scholarship by centering Black geographic thought to reconsider how space, race, and identity intersect. While scholarship has moved beyond deficit framings, it often treats space as neutral or isolates Latinx experiences from Black spatial histories and antiblack logics. Drawing on 18 months of ethnography in Greenside (pseudonym), a predominantly Black Southern city experiencing rapid Latinx migration, I use a reading/counter-reading approach to analyze classroom and neighborhood encounters across two middle schools. Three insights emerge: (1) Black placemaking profoundly shapes where Latinx identities form; (2) schools, as sites of both enclosure and resistance, are entangled in broader Black geographies that shape emerging Latinidades; and (3) Black refusals shape and can reconfigure Latinidades toward more expansive forms that resist antiblackness. Centering Black geographies reframes Latinidad as relational and unruly, foregrounding youth as theorists of entwined Black and Latinx educational futures.