Orange background with a repeating tribal pattern, featuring a monarch butterfly above the text "Undocu-Crit: Critical Race Theory" with white corner accents.

UNDOCUMENTED CRITICAL RACE THEORY

Research Project Title: Re(imagining Undocumented Critical Race Theory in Education

Objectives:

  1. Examines the theoretical foundations of Undocumented Critical Race Theory (UndocuCrit) and interrogates how its existing tenets can be extended, complicated, and reimagined within K–12 and higher education contexts.

  2. Proposes a theoretical intervention that moves beyond descriptive accounts of undocumented experience toward a more structurally and institutionally grounded analysis of how educational systems produce and reproduce conditions of legal vulnerability.

Two students with backpacks and notebooks stand in front of a blue background with the text "USBCC" and a graduation cap icon. The background splits to show a white building with Spanish-style architecture. SDSU San Diego State University logo is at the bottom.

Biliteracy and Cultural Competence

Objectives:

  1. To examine how postsecondary biliteracy recognition frameworks function as institutional mechanisms for validating the linguistic and cultural knowledge that students from historically marginalized communities bring to higher education, and to analyze the structural, policy, and pedagogical conditions that either advance or constrain equitable implementation across diverse institutional contexts.

  2. To develop a theoretically grounded and practically transferable model for conceptualizing cultural competence as an inseparable dimension of biliteracy recognition, one that moves beyond additive or performative approaches and instead centers the epistemological contributions of bilingual and bicultural students as essential to the academic and civic mission of higher education institutions.

Smiling man with children and "Debeer Male Scholars" text, featuring logos of San Diego Mesa College, San Diego City College, Southwestern College, and San Diego State University at the bottom.

Objectives:

  1. To investigate how Catholic educational leadership frameworks can be reimagined to authentically center the cultural, linguistic, and communal identities of Latino male students and families, analyzing the degree to which institutional commitments to human dignity, solidarity, and the common good are translated into structurally equitable practices within Catholic schools and the broader mission-driven organizations that serve historically marginalized communities.

Latino/x Male teachers in k-12 Catholic education