A call to reshape our desires: contesting the inevitable answer of inclusion within empire

While increased college access is widely celebrated for racialized peoples, the end goal of inclusion maintains engagement with and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. This paper examines a culturally relevant college preparation program designed primarily for Mexican-origin youth in California to consider the college-going competencies and desires the program socializes youth through and to. Drawing from educator and youth platicas embedded within an ethnography of the Bridge Program, this scholarship argues that the competencies youth were socialized into for college-going purposes simultaneously prepared them to uphold the settler colonial state. Engaging language socialization and settler colonial studies perspectives, this paper finds that Bridge Program youth were socialized into understandings of better lives as only possible within U.S. empire by framing college as an almost singular pathway to wellbeing. This work calls for anticolonial desires, visions of and pathways to better lives beyond empire's boundaries.

Automated summary

While increased college access is celebrated for racially marginalized groups, this paper explores how inclusion is aimed at maintaining engagement and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. The study examines a culturally relevant college preparation program for Mexican-origin youth in California, revealing how the competencies and desires fostered by the program ultimately uphold the settler colonial state. The findings highlight the socialization of youth to view college as the only pathway to a better life within the U.S. empire, emphasizing the need for anticolonial desires and alternative visions of wellbeing beyond the boundaries of empire.