A Critical Race Spatial Analysis of Rural Latinx Students’ College (In)Opportunities and Conscious Choices during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated educational inequities for students from institutionally marginalized communities. This article specifically examines the college (in)opportunities and conscious choices of rural Latinx students from California’s San Joaquin Valley as they pursued higher education during the pandemic. This article applies a Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA) framework to analyze the intersections of race, space, and college (in)opportunity for rural Latinx students. Additionally, this article draws on a college-conocimiento framework to argue that despite navigating deep-seated sociospatial inequities, rural Latinx students still enrolled in college. Using Chicana/Latina feminist pláticas and geographic information systems (GIS), this article takes a mixed methods research approach to analyze rural Latinx students’ college (in)opportunities and conscious choices during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately impacted their im/migrant farm working families and communities. Results from the pláticas and maps revealed that rural Latinx students lacked access to quality technological devices, internet infrastructure, high speed internet, and college information and guidance. Still, rural Latinx students enrolled in colleges that aligned with their and their families’ financial and emotional realities during the ongoing pandemic. The article concludes by providing rural Latinx-serving school districts with recommendations for increasing college access amid and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.