Speaking Our Stories: The Community Cultural Wealth of Chican/Latin Students in a University Honors Program

In an effort to document the experiences of Chican/Latin students on predominantly White campuses, the purpose of this study is to understand their educational experiences, the community cultural wealth they bring to education, and how they navigate their identity. This study uses a composite critical race counterstory to foreground the community cultural wealth Chican/Latin students bring to challenge cultural deficit ideology in an Honors Program at a Southwestern University. Through collecting their stories and understanding the sociopolitical and historical contexts of their educational experiences, we can begin to move beyond cultural deficit ideology to begin integrating their community cultural wealth as we move towards a socially-just, diversity in education.;This study focuses on the community cultural wealth outlined by Yosso (2006), which includes familial capital, aspirational capital, linguistic capital, social capital, navigational capital, and resistant capital. Chican/Latin students in the Honors Program use these multiple forms of community cultural wealth in dynamic and complex ways. Their familial capital foregrounds social responsibility and grounds education in a larger social project. Linguistic capital develops intellectual and social skills through various communication styles while navigational capital supplies them with the agency of maneuvering social institutions. Furthermore, Chican/Latin students bring social and familial resources, which bolster their aspirational capital, and this, in turn, inspires and motivates them and others to communally overcome obstacles.;Critical Race methodology positions Chican/Latin students as producers of knowledge through the use of Critical Race counterstories; these depend on sociopolitical and historical contexts to reveal patterns of racial inequality while using community building to dismantle systems of racial oppression. This study uses individual interviews and a focus group to create composite characters and narratives. By illuminating patterns of structural inequality, Critical Race counterstories can reframe the discourse of diversity from a focus on individuals to one grounded in sociopolitical and historical contexts.