Ground-Truthing en el Valle de San Joaquín: A Mixed Methods Study on Rural Latinx Spatiality and College (In)Opportunity

California is home to the largest Latinx population in the United States (Passel et al., 2022) and to one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world: the San Joaquin Valley (EPA, 2021). In this rural region, Latinx students face significant barriers to college preparation, participation, and completion (Contreras, 2015). Yet, these higher education equity issues facing rural Latinx students are rarely considered in research because Latinx students in Western geographies are seldom identified as “rural.” This dissertation examines the intersections between race, racism, and rurality in the college access and choice processes of rural Latinx students from the San Joaquin Valley. Multiple theoretical frameworks are employed to conceptualize issues of race, space, and college choice, including Critical Race Spatial Analysis (Vélez & Solórzano, 2017), college-conocimiento (Acevedo-Gil, 2017), and Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998). A convergent mixed methods research design was used to collect and analyze both qualitative and quantitative spatial data. In this study, 16 rural Latinx high school seniors from six communities in Tulare County served as research collaborators. For the qualitative strand of the study, rural Latinx students provided documents related to their college choice processes, engaged in two pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), constructed asset-based college access maps, and participated in one walking plática (Gaxiola Serrano, 2019). The qualitative data guided the collection and analysis of secondary quantitative and spatial data from various sources, which were then mapped using ArcGIS, a geographic information systems software. The maps produced displayed the sociospatial relationships between Latinx identity, racialized rural space, and college (in)opportunities. These maps were then “ground-truthed” (Vélez & Solórzano, 2017) by the rural Latinx research collaborators to produce a new set of maps that more accurately reflected the sociospatial narratives of rural Latinx youth in pursuit of higher education. Across the various data sources, findings demonstrate that rural Latinx youth navigate college (in)opportunity and constricted college choices because of the white, conservative, and anti-immigrant sociopolitical context of the San Joaquin Valley. This dissertation provides implications for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to remedy the spatialization of systems of oppression in rural Latinx communities