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Exploring class-based intersectionality

a b
David Block & Victor Corona
a
ICREA, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain
b
Instituto de Investigación y Desarrollo Educativo (IIDE),
Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Ensenada, Mexico
Published online: 13 Mar 2014.

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To cite this article: David Block & Victor Corona (2014) Exploring class-based intersectionality,
Language, Culture and Curriculum, 27:1, 27-42, DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2014.894053

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 Language, Culture and Curriculum, 2014
Vol. 27, No. 1, 27–42, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2014.894053

Exploring class-based intersectionality

David Blocka* and Victor Coronab
a
ICREA, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain; bInstituto de Investigación y Desarrollo Educativo
(IIDE), Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Ensenada, Mexico
(Received 15 December 2013; accepted 31 January 2014)
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This paper argues that language, culture and identity researchers need to take the
intersectionality of identity inscriptions seriously and, further to this, that an
intersectional approach which emanates from an interest in social class provides a
productive way to examine the lives and experience of individuals living in
multicultural societies. The paper begins with an excerpt from Corona’s research on
Latino adolescents in Barcelona, in which four of his informants discuss how they are
racially profiled as potential muggers by fellow pedestrians on the streets of
Barcelona. This account of experienced discrimination leads to an in-depth discussion
of intersectionality, which provides a way of seeing how race, ethnicity and gender
interrelate in the informants’ lives. The paper then moves to consider how social class
might be added to the equation and a second excerpt from Corona’s research is
presented, in which an informant provides an account of how he felt compelled to
change his way of dress when he arrived in Barcelona at the age of 12. His eventual
sartorial transformation via the appropriation of a hip hop aesthetic is interpreted
intersectionally in terms of his social class, racialised, ethnicised and gendered
positionings in Catalan society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how class-
based intersectionality can provide more nuanced understandings of the lives of
young migrants in multicultural societies than uni-dimensional or multiple uni-
dimensional approaches.
Keywords: identity; intersectionality; social class; race

Introduction
Rony: la mayoría son racistas / aunque no lo digan / o sea / tú vas por la calle=
most of them are racists / even if they don’t say so / I mean / you are walking down
the street=
Sergio: =sí:=
=yes:=
Rony: =y vamos nosotros dos / o que vayamos los cuatro / nos va a ver una señora / y si nos
ve / se asusta /
and the two of us are walking / or maybe all four of us / a lady is going to see us /
and if she sees us / she’s going to freak out /
Sergio: se te queda mirando / se te ve por otra calle / o se ((xxx))
she just stands there looking at you / and she crosses the street / or she ((xxx))

*Corresponding author. Email: dblock@dal.udl.cat

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 28 D. Block and V. Corona

Miguel: cuéntale cuando insultaste a la vieja / cuéntale /

tell him about when you insulted that old lady / tell him /
Naldo: íbamos caminando / y había una señora caminando / y yo / me crucé a otro lado para
ver otra cosa / y éste ›refiriéndose a Miguel‹ / se cruzó al lado / y la viejita se asustó /
pensó que le íbamos a hacer algo / se ((xxx)) / feo /
we were walking / and there was this lady walking / and I / I crossed the street to
see something / and this one ›referring to Miguel‹ / walked across with me / and
the old lady freaked out / she thought we were going to do something to her / she
((xxx)) / ugly /
Rony: ven a un latino / o a un grupo=
they see a latino / or a group=
Naldo: ven a un grupo de dos latinos / o más de dos latinos / y ya /
they see a group of latinos / or more than two latinos / and that’s it /
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This excerpt is taken from an interview carried out in February 2013 in Barcelona.1 The
speakers are four young men from Latino backgrounds,2 who are the children of the
massive migration from Latin American countries to Barcelona, Madrid and other
Spanish cities from the early 1990s onwards (Ayuso & Piñol, 2010). In the exchange,
the young men are responding to a question posed by one of the authors of this paper,
Victor Corona, about the extent to which they feel like they belong in the host society,
Catalonia. They talk about how they are often the object of racial profiling as their physical
appearance is associated with difference, transformed into danger in the minds of many
(a fear of mugging derived at least in part from the highly racialised reporting of street
crime in contemporary Spain). All four would be said to embody a particular racial pheno-
type, known in public discourse as de aspecto sudamericano (in Spanish) or d’aspecte sud-
americà (in Catalan), which translated into English means that they had a ‘South American
appearance’. The latter, in turn, refers to a mixed-race phenotype (to use British parlance)
consisting of indigenous South American, African and European provenances. And it
would seem from the story told here that for many older members of the local population,
and for older women in particular, the mere physical presence of these young men in public
spaces constitutes a menace.
The story is thus about the positioning of individuals in terms of race (they do not look
‘European’ enough) and gender (the story is harder to imagine if we change the sex of the
speakers) embedded in increasingly diverse urban spaces in European societies. Naldo and
his friends live their lives at the crossroads of a range of semiotically mediated phenomena
and it is worthwhile to consider how all of these factors intersect to explain episodes like
the one described by Naldo. We see this kind of analysis and discussion in previous publi-
cations about Latino adolescents in Barcelona (e.g. Corona, 2012; Corona, Nussbaum, &
Unamuno, 2013; Feixa, 2008).
However, there are issues which arise in research which seeks to connect identity
dimensions such as race and gender in an effective synthesis, in which neither one nor
the other dominates and a complete understanding of the context being researched would
be impossible without such a synthesis. Termed ‘intersectionality’, this approach to identity
research seems to be widespread as few of those actually doing research at the crossroads of
the latter three dimensions would claim that they can ever be analytically applied in iso-
lation from each other. Indeed, the general consensus would appear to be that there is a
need to move beyond dual combinations such as race and gender to include other dimen-
sions such as nationality, language, age, sexual orientation, religion and so on. Where inter-
sectionality exists, in practice if not in name, it is generally understood in terms of race (and/
or ethnicity) and gender with one or more of the other identity dimensions just listed
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 29

appearing as well. By contrast, social class as a key mediator of our life experiences has
been under-utilised as a construct (Block, 2014; Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012). It is
therefore of use to consider how social class might figure more prominently in data analysis
which is carried out in an intersectional manner.
With these and other issues in mind, our aim in this paper is first of all to go back to the
roots of intersectionality in the social sciences, beginning with the work of the American
legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991), deemed by many to be the originator of
the term. We think it worthwhile not only to explore the origins of more inter-categorical
(and as we shall see, intracategorical) approaches to identity but also to consider problema-
tisations of the enterprise because such a discussion has not, up until now, been common in
applied linguistics. This done, we examine social class, what it means as an aspect of our
existence grounded in the material (economic) world with links to culture and society, and
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how it might be applied in intersectional analysis. We end with a return to Corona’s

research, examining how race, ethnicity and gender intersect with social class.
Before beginning, however, a caveat is in order. This paper is meant to be programma-
tic, in that it is about how to research identity, arguing specifically for an intersectional
approach which puts social class at its centre. The empirical work cited here, two excerpts
from Corona’s research on Latino youth in Barcelona, is meant to exemplify some of the
points made in the more theoretical sections. The paper therefore is not specifically
about Latino youth in Barcelona and for this reason we do not spend as much time as
we might otherwise on this phenomenon (but see Corona & Block, in preparation).3
There is, however, a connection to be made between intersectionality, as a way to more
nuanced understandings of immigrant youth, and education, specifically as regards
school failure and how immigrant youth are positioned in multicultural schools. We
discuss these issues in the latter part of this paper.

Intersectionality
Intersectionality may be seen as an approach to identity which has grown out of a rising
discontent with two general tendencies in identity research in the social sciences: (1)
while researchers often focus on several identity dimensions at once, they do so without
exploring sufficiently how these dimensions actually interrelate; and (2) there is too
often no attempt to address intradimensional variations, for example, differences among
people positioned as ‘Black’4 or as ‘women’ or as ‘gay’. As was noted above, Kimberle
Crenshaw is generally credited as the originator of the term ‘intersectionality’ in the
social sciences5 as in her oft-cited paper ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and
sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist
politics’, published in 1989, she outlined the need for what she termed an ‘intersectional’
approach to the study of raced and gendered experiences as follows:

Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse
because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately
reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved
simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure.
Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analy-
sis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular
manner in which Black women are subordinated. (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140)

Nevertheless, at the time that Crenshaw was writing these words, intersectionality had been
around for some time, if not in word, surely in deed. And as she notes, where it applies to
 30 D. Block and V. Corona

the intersections of race and gender there is no better source than a speech made by the
former slave Sojourner Truth at a suffragettes meeting in Akron, Ohio in 1851. The
meeting was dominated by well-educated White women and Truth spoke truth to power
when according to witnesses (there was no recording made), she uttered the following
words:

Well, children, where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter, I think
between the Negroes of the South and the women of the North – all talking about rights –
the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this talking about? That man over
there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have
the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look at
me! Look at my arm. I have plowed (sic), I have planted and I have gathered into barns.
And no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much, and eat as much
as any man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have
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borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a
mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman? ... . (Brah & Phoenix,
2004, p. 77)

This speech has for more than a century inspired race and gender scholars and it is central to
the work of those who might be said to have anticipated Crenshaw as regards the impor-
tance of thinking about and researching race and gender intersectionally. For example, in
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, hooks (1981) examined in detail the multi-
layered meaning of Truth’s words, citing other nineteenth-century Black female activists
such as Anna Cooper and Mary Church Terrell. These women took on racism against
Black Americans, but they above all confronted patriarchal discrimination against Black
women. Interestingly, hooks argues that historically Black American women have been
doubly burdened by racism and sexism, noting in particular how they have been ill-
treated – materially, symbolically and physically – by both White men and Black men.
And as regards the prospect of a significant and enduring alliance with White women to
combat sexism in American society, hooks was, at the time she was writing, pessimistic.
She summed up the historical erasure of American Black women in public debates about
race and gender as follows: ‘When black people are talked about the focus tends to be
on black men: and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women’
(hooks, 1981, p. 7, emphasis in original).
As stated above, Crenshaw acknowledges her debt to both past and contemporary Black
feminists as she explains how the experiences of Black women cannot be reduced to ques-
tions of being just women or just Black and how ‘the intersectional experience is greater
than the sum of racism and sexism’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 149). In doing so, she shows
how the metaphor of intersectionality, conjuring images of the criss-crossing of streets,
works to help her develop her argument. Crenshaw thus saw the late 1980s American fem-
inist movement as a contested space in which intersectionality could enrich understandings
of dominance and disempowerment in society. Like hooks (1981), she notes how discus-
sions of patriarchy in American society were always based on the default and unmarked
White woman/White man dichotomy and revolved around baseline ‘observations’ such
as, ‘men and women are taught to see men as independent, capable, powerful; men and
women are taught to see women as dependent, limited in abilities, and passive’ (Crenshaw,
1989, p. 155), even if, it should be noted, she seldom makes explicit that she means middle-
class White women and men and not working or lower-class White people. Crenshaw
suggests that such a statement might make sense when it refers to how (middle-class)
White women had traditionally been kept out of the job market, but that it makes no
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 31

sense at all when applied to Black women and men. This is because Black men have tra-
ditionally been portrayed and positioned in America as the opposite of ‘independent,
capable … [and] powerful’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 155), while Black women have been por-
trayed and positioned as anything but ‘dependent’ or ‘passive’, even if they have also been
seen as ‘limited in abilities’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 155). Of the very different experiences of
Black women vis-à-vis their White counterparts, Crenshaw notes how ‘Black women are
somehow exempt from patriarchal norms’ (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 156), and she goes on to
cite as an example the fact that Black women in the USA have always worked outside
the home far more than White women in proportional terms.
At the time that she was introducing intersectionality into debates about race and gender
in American society, Crenshaw was involved in a broader dialogue with fellow scholars
who were following the rising tide of postmodern understandings of identity as multiple,
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fragmented and context-sensitive. A big part of this shift in thinking was based on anti-
essentialism, or the rejection of views of identity as primordial, determined or fixed in
time. While Crenshaw was in broad agreement with these trends, she nonetheless
opposed a ‘version of antiessentialism, embodying … the vulgarized social construction
thesis, that since all categories are socially constructed, there is no such thing as, say,
Blacks or women, and thus it makes no sense to continue reproducing those categories
by organizing around them’ (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1296). Meanwhile, a perhaps bigger
problem with identity politics in the 1980s was that there was very little attention to
intragroup differences. Ultimately, intersectionality was proposed as the way forward as
it brought to the fore the differences contained within broad categories such as women,
men, Black, White, Latino and so on.

Critiques and the advancement of intersectionality

Since Crenshaw first wrote her seminal papers some 25 years ago, intersectional scholar-
ship has advanced in the sense that more and more researchers in the social sciences
have taken on board its basic tenets. These include the framing of identity as multi-
layered and complex; the notion that different dimensions cannot be dealt with in isolation;
and finally, the belief that the most interesting issues, and those worthy of research, often
arise as intracategorical phenomena. Nevertheless, several pending issues remain even
today as regards some aspects of intersectionality. For Nash (2008), one issue of importance
is how and to what extent intersectionality is about a general theory of identity. Nash queries
‘whether intersectionality actually captures the ways in which subjects experience subjec-
tivity or strategically deploy identity’ (Nash, 2008, p. 11). There are several questions
arising from the notion that people exercise self-conscious agency in their day-to-day
lives. For example, do people live their lives intersectionally in that they are always con-
scious of how constraints on their activity are multi-layered and never just about one
single dimension? And do they self-consciously invoke different dimensions of their iden-
tity, selectively and strategically, as they go about their day-to-day activity? In the midst of
these and other questions, Nash suggests that answering them ‘requires intersectionality to
craft a theory of agency and to grapple with the amount of leeway variously situated sub-
jects have to deploy particular components of their identities in certain contexts’ (Nash,
2008, p. 11).
A second point raised by Nash concerns how intersectional research is carried out. Here
she cites a paper by McCall (2005) in which the author takes on this very issue in depth. For
McCall, there are three ‘complexities’ which have been dealt with over the years by scho-
lars. First there is ‘anticategorical complexity’, which is about how feminist theorists,
 32 D. Block and V. Corona

poststructuralists and antiracist theorists came to the rejection of boundaried identity cat-
egories like race and gender, framing them as too simplistic and totalising for the
complex lives of individuals living postmodern lives. The use of such categories by
researchers was seen as strengthening the very power regimes that these scholars sought
to destabilise and overturn. The second complexity cited by McCall is what she calls ‘inter-
categorical complexity’. This is based on the notion that categories can be used strategically
to uncover inequality in society (see also Spivak, 1990). Inequality is observed to exist
between social groups, even if social groups are deemed to be relatively difficult to
define. McCall’s third complexity, ‘intracategorical complexity’, is based on a suspicion
of categories, as in the case of anticategorical complexity. However, it is more about hand-
ling categories with care and above all challenging the nature of their composition and use
via empirical research. This research is narrative in nature, examining the stories told by
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oppressed individuals: originally, Black women, but in a more expanded version of inter-
sectionality (see discussion above), more categories would be added. These stories are
used to explore the double marginality suffered by subjects as researchers conduct intra-
categorical analysis, for example, how Black and woman are multi-levelled constructs.
McCall sees intracategorical complexity as her preferred option, not least because she
sees some use in categories, thus rejecting a major tenet of anticategorical complexity. In
effect, she wishes to go beyond an examination of intercategorical inequality and conflict
to delve into these same processes as they exist inside categories. Indeed, one could argue
that until the diversity inherent in categories has been dealt with, they cannot be invoked in
research in a coherent manner. In addition, even if we could reach a full and complete
understanding of the intracategorical diversity of an identity dimension, we would still
need to consider how it is not the entirety of an identity dimension, for example ‘Black’,
which intersects with another dimension, for example, ‘woman’; rather it is particular socio-
historically situated versions of these categories which intersect. McCall explains how
matters work in this approach through the following example:

… an Arab American, middleclass, heterosexual woman is placed at the intersection of mul-

tiple categories (race-ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual) but only reflects a single dimen-
sion of each. Personal narratives may aspire to situate subjects within the full network of
relationships that define their social locations, but usually it is only possible to situate
them from the partial perspective of the particular social group under study (i.e. if an
Arab woman is the subject of analysis, then issues of race and nationality are more fully
examined from the perspective of Arab women than from the perspective of Arab men).
(McCall, 2005, p. 1781)

Intersectionality and Latino youth in Barcelona

With these issues in mind, we return to the excerpt which opened this paper and see how
they might be applied. As noted above, Nash (2008) questions the extent to which individ-
uals actually experience themselves as intersectionally constructed and whether or not they
strategically deploy different aspects of their being in their interactions with others. We see
an element of both of these phenomena at work in the excerpt. The young men interviewed
by Corona seem very aware of how their racial phenotype, their ethnic identity as Latinos
and the masculinities which they perform multimodally (via their general manner, their
speech, their body movements, their clothes, their hair style and so on) all come together
in their lives. Their racial phenotype is visibly different from the putative southern Euro-
pean norm which is dominant in Barcelona, and it is difficult to conceive of this racial
difference without relating it to a Latino identity in this context. And as noted above, the
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 33

gendered position performed by Naldo and his friends, a version of hard masculinity, is
positioned in society at large as ‘typical’ of Latinos who are seen as morenos (dark
skinned). In addition, the young men exercise a self-conscious awareness of how they
are positioned in society and they use this public portrayal strategically in their conversa-
tions with Corona to explain how they are the victims of discrimination in the host society.
In elaborating this type of analysis of the interview excerpt and those who participated
in it, we are working at the level of what McCall (2005) termed intercategorical complexity.
In this sense, in order to discuss inequality in society, we are strategically accepting and
drawing on the pre-defined categories race, ethnicity and masculinity. Still, there is a
remaining issue to be addressed in any discussion of intersectionality and it has to do
with how in such research there is generally a dominant dimension focused on, which is,
in turn, intersected with what are relatively less central dimensions. Thus, it is fairly
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clear that in Crenshaw’s early work, race is in some sense the starting point of her move-
ment outward to examine intersections with other dimensions of identity. In McCall’s
case, this centre point would appear to be gender. Meanwhile, hooks (1981) seems to be
on a balanced trajectory through the intricacies of gender and race in nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century American society, although she does situate patriarchy centrally in all of her
work and this perhaps makes her more gender-based when all is said and done. In the case
of adolescent Latinos in Barcelona, Corona (2012) draws on the work of Alim (2004),
noting how race and ethnicity – mediated multimodally and via musical cultures associated
with Reggaeton and hip hop – are the base for the gendered subject positions of informants.
In the midst of such analysis, however, there is one aspect of the story which is notable by
its absence, the social class positions of Naldo and his friends. In the section that follows,
we present a brief but comprehensive understanding of the social class, one which draws
heavily on Block (2014). This understanding of social class will, in turn, allow us to
return to Corona’s research to see how social class intersects with the already cited identity
dimensions in the lives of male Latinos in Barcelona.

Social class at the centre of intersectionality

Over the past century and a half, understandings of class have evolved from a more econ-
omics-based interpretation to the idea that class is constructed and shaped by both econ-
omics (Marx’s base of society) and social and cultural forces (Marx’s superstructure)
(Marx, 1976 [1867]). Although it is often observed that Marx never directly defined
class, it is generally accepted that the construct permeated all of his writing: he continually
makes reference to how people’s relationship to the means of production acts as grounding
for all social activity and ultimately class positions in society. In addition, class is under-
stood to exist not as an individual attribute of people or as a static position in capitalist
societies, but as a social relation, emergent in the social world of interactions with others
and the collective associations that people engage with. Later scholars who drew directly
on Marxism have done somewhat better than Marx as regards the provision of clear defi-
nitions. For example, writing about capitalist societies of a century ago with a specific inter-
est in goings on in Russia, Vladimir Lenin described classes as:

large groups of people which differ from each other by the place they occupy in a historically
determined system of social production, by their relation … to the means of production, by
their role in the social organization of labour and, consequently, by the dimensions and
method of acquiring the share of social wealth of which they dispose. (Lenin, 1982 [1919],
p. 57)
 34 D. Block and V. Corona

Meanwhile, other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber being the most prominent, were starting to respond to the emerging
changes in capitalist societies once industrialisation had become more established and
therefore more of an organising base for societies. Above all, these scholars attempted to
reconfigure class against the backdrop of the increasing complexification of societies.
One type of complexification, observed by Durkheim (1984 [1893]), had to do with
increases in both the number and range of occupations which came with ever-deepening
industrialisation. In particular, a range of middle-level occupations, situated between the
capitalist class and the working class – often clerical but also managerial in nature – had
a great impact on how the holders of these jobs lived their lives. And it was these
changes in lifestyle which captured the attention of Weber, who posited an economic
order which led to the differentiated class positions of individuals and groups in the indus-
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trialised societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also showed a
certain agreement with Marx when he included in his work the notion that social class
was a relational phenomenon emerging from social activity. However, the economic base
that Weber posited differed sharply from Marx’s: while Marx saw economic activity in
terms of the relationships between capital and labour and the exploitation of the latter by
the former, Weber understood it in terms of a market involving the exchange of assets
by individuals with unequal access to the object of their exchange. Thus, for Weber, ‘[c]
lass situation’ and ‘class’ refer only to the same (or similar) interests which an individual
shares with others, such as ‘the various controls over consumer goods, means of production,
assets, resources and skills which constitute a particular class situation’ (Weber, 1968
[1924], p. 302). Importantly, this view of class is not just about production; it is also
about economic exchange occurring after production (i.e. selling and consuming).
Fast forwarding to the latter part of the twentieth century, we come to the work of Pierre
Bourdieu, a scholar who very adeptly managed to amalgamate the ideas of Marx, Durkheim
and Weber (as well as many other scholars) into a model of social class which included and
integrated material relations and processes with both established and emergent cultural
phenomena. As Block (2014) argues, Bourdieu’s conceptual frameworks have taken hold
to such an extent in the social sciences that from the 1980s onwards most social-class the-
orists seem to have become, in effect, Bourdieusian to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. Bennett
et al., 2009; Bottero, 2005; Crompton, 2008; Savage, 2000; Subirats, 2012). A clear
account of the general understanding of class which has become dominant is captured in
the following quote from Harriet Bradley:

Class is a social category which refers to lived relationships surrounding social arrangements of
production, exchange, distribution and consumption. While these may narrowly be conceived
as economic relationships, to do with money, wealth and property, … class should be seen as
referring to a much broader web of social relationships, including, for example, lifestyle, edu-
cational experiences and patterns of residence. Class, therefore, affects many aspects of our
material lives. (Bradley, 1996, p. 19)

Social class is therefore understood to be embedded in social relations and as emergent in

day-to-day activities, even if there is an objective reality of institutions and larger social
structures and forces which shape the prospects of individuals acting within them. In
these social relations, there are a number of key dimensions which index class positions.
These include: wealth (an individual’s possessions and disposable money); occupation
(manual labour, unskilled service jobs, low-level information-based jobs, professional
labour, etc.); place of residence (a working-class neighbourhood, a middle-class
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 35

neighbourhood, an area in the process of gentrification); education (the educational level

attained by an individual by early adulthood); social networking (middle-class people
tend to socialise with middle-class people, working-class people with working-class
people and so on); space (different class positions bring with them different orientations
to space as abundant or scarce, or as confining or liberating); mobility (e.g. who has the
means to travel and who does not); consumption patterns (buying food at a supermarket
that positions itself as ‘cost-cutting’ vs. buying food at one that sells ‘healthy’ and organic
products); and symbolic behaviour (e.g. how one moves one’s body, the clothes one
wears, the way one speaks, how one eats, the kinds of pastimes one engages in, etc.).
This latter dimension is particularly important in the context of this paper and will be
treated, in more detail, in the final section.
Several caveats are in order as regards this list. First, in the spirit of intersectionality
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(and specifically, intracategorical complexity), no one of these dimensions ever offers an

airtight means of classifying people, especially when viewed relationally, with respect to
other dimensions. Thus, wealth might be associated with particular types of employment
which require years of formal education leading to specific qualifications or it might be
associated with more manual professions requiring few or no educational qualifications.
Second, pace Marx, class must be understood not as an individual characteristic but as a
social relation. And this leads to an additional point and a key one in any discussion of inter-
sectionality, namely that class always intersects with a long list of identity dimensions, such
as gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, language and so on. Indeed, it is one of the challenges
of class-based research today to work out exactly how these different identity inscriptions
interact with class, and in the remainder of this paper, we will explore briefly how this goal
might be achieved.
Finally, it is worth noting how class theorists have often included in their work a con-
siderable psychological/affective component and this element of class scholarship should
not go unnoticed or unaddressed in discussions of class as immanently social. Thus,
while Marx lamented how in capitalism, ‘estranged labor turns … [m]an’s species being,
both nature and his spiritual property, into a being alien to him’ (Marx, 1988 [1844],
p. 77), Engels charted not only the physical effects of the poor working and living con-
ditions among members of the mid-nineteenth-century English working class, but also
the psychological price which was paid. Over a century later, Sennett and Cobb (1972)
wrote about interviews carried out in the late 1960s with White working-class American
men. They found among these men a great deal of personal anguish along with feelings
of disappointment and shame at not having achieved more in life. The feelings of inade-
quacy that many of them felt are captured well in the following quote in which a house
painter describes his initial nervousness about being interviewed by a researcher:

Um, let me try to explain to you why I was so nervous at the beginning of the interview, [ … ]
It’s not you, you’re all right – but you see … um … whenever I’m with educated people, you
know, or people who aren’t my own kind … um … I feel like I’m making a fool of myself if I
just act natural, you know? See, it’s not so much how people treat you, it’s feeling like you
don’t know what to do. Like – see, I remember, for instance, going to a Knights of Columbus
social, and there were all these people in suits and I had on a jacket, you know, a windbreaker,
and somehow people were introducing themselves to each other all over the place, but nobody
was introducing themselves to me. So, that’s how it is. (Sennett & Cobb, 1972, pp. 115–116)

In this type of statement, we see the psychological and affective aspect of class runs deep
inside those who are deemed to be less successful and even not to have realised (in this case)
the American dream of education, high income, a large home and other markers of
 36 D. Block and V. Corona

middle-class achievement. The man interviewed by Sennett and Cobb cites several different
dimensions of class, including education, public behaviour and dress, all of which combine
to put him in a position in which he feels ‘nervous’ or that he is ‘making a fool of [himself]’
or simply that he ‘doesn’t know what to do’. We deal further with this psychological/affec-
tive aspect of class, along with other dimensions discussed above, in the next section, in
which we return to the topic of adolescent male Latinos in Barcelona.

Class-based intersectionality
As a way back into some of the issues arising from the interview extract which opened this
paper, we return to Corona’s research on Latino youth in Barcelona. In the following
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exchange, Corona is interviewing Denilson, a 20-year-old from the Dominican Republic:

Den: y cuando me vine / también estaba en un bus /

and when I arrived / also I was in a bus /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: y pregunté la hora / y vi que todo mundo / estaba alejado de mi / así / no así / y es que
antes / yo vestía mal / vamos /
and I asked someone for the time / and I saw that everyone / was far away from
me / like this / not like this / and it’s just that before / I dressed badly / I mean bad /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: yo pensaba que estaba vestido bien / porque venía de mi país / pero vestía mal (.5) y
todo mundo me miraba así / y yo sólo tenía doce años / sabes / lo que te digo /
I thought I was dressed all right / because I came from my country / but I dressed
badly (.5) and everyone was looking at me like this / and I was only 12 years old /
you know / that’s what I’m saying /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: eso me jodió / me jodió / y en esa época / fue que empecé a pelearme / empecé a
pelearme / yo era tranquilo / sabes / lo que te digo / pero me peleaba fuera del
colegio / y cosas así / así fue como fui conociendo a la gente / con la que iba en el
colegio /
this really pissed me off / it pissed me off / and at that time / that was when I started
fighting / I started fighting / I was quiet / you know / that’s what I’m saying / but I got
into fights away from school / and things like that / that’s how I started meeting
people / that I went to school with /
VC: esto de que vestías bien / o vestías mal / no lo he entendido /
this thing about you dressed well / or you dressed badly / I didn’t understand /
Den: por ejemplo / como que tú vengas de México / no? /
for instance / since you’re from Mexico / right? /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: y allá en México / tu te vistes de una manera / pobre / claro / yo era pobre /
and over there in Mexico / you dress a certain way / poor / right / I was poor /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: tú te vistes de una manera / que tú te crees que estás bien / tú dices / joder / así sí que
estoy bien / cuando llegué acá / ya versa /
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 37

you dress a certain way / that you think is all right / you say / fuck / this way I am all
right / when I arrived here / the other way around /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: y llego / y veo que todo mundo iba mejor que yo / sabes / yo iba como un perro /
vamos /
And I get here / and I see everyone is better dressed than me / you know / I was
dressed like a dog / really /
VC: aha /
aha /
Den: entonces (.5) me miraban por eso / se pensaban que yo era pobre / o mendigo / o algo
así / no sé (1) allí fue que comencé a vestir rapero / y cosas así / y cuando empecé a
vestir rapero / me relacionaban más co:n / con latinos y cosas así.
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So (.5) that’s why they looked at me / they thought I was poor / or a beggar / or
something like that / I don’t know (1) that’s when I started dressing like a
rapper / and things like that / and when I started dressing like a rapper / I spent
more time wi:th / with Latinos and stuff /

In this excerpt, Denilson explains how when he arrived in Barcelona at the age of 12, he
stood out as different because of the way that he dressed and as a consequence he was
easily identifiable as poor and as what is known locally as a nouvingut (newcomer) to
Catalonia. In effect, he was from a poor household and he dressed according to what his
parents’ income allowed, which was a fairly bland style, what he called ‘normal’. To
remedy this situation, he took the conscious decision to wear different clothes. As
Corona (2012) notes elsewhere, because he was Black, he was channelled into dressing
like a rapper, wearing ‘baggy’ clothes, because according to dominant discourses in
Catalan schools with a significant immigrant population, that is what adolescent males
with his physical experience were expected to do. We thus have here an example of how
dress style indexes particular ethnic, racial and gendered identities in the local context of
schools. But further to this, and indeed further to the same kind of intersectional analysis
which we applied above to Naldo and his friends, it is worthwhile to consider another
angle on Denilson’s words.
While he speaks as a racialised, ethnicised and gendered Latino adolescent in Barce-
lona, Denilson’s story is one of overcoming overtly manifested lack. In general terms, it
is about how those from poor backgrounds often shed the most obvious vestiges of their
lower social class position, which are embodied and reflected in their illegitimate clothing
and other multimodally mediated manifestations of their being. In his change of clothing,
Denilson is responding to general notions of what constitutes proper dress in Catalan
society, which though ever evolving, run deep as sociohistorically situated ‘structuring
structures’ (Bourdieu, 1977). As Bourdieu suggests:

[i]f a group’s whole life-style can be read off from the style it adopts in furnishing or clothing,
this is not only because these properties are the objectification of the economic and cultural
necessity which determined their selection, but also because the social relations objectified
in familiar objects, in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or ‘vulgarity’, their ‘beauty’
or ‘ugliness’, impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be … profoundly
unconscious … (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 77)

Denilson’s story is about how he became conscious of dress differences across cultures
(Dominican and Catalan), how he came to see himself as ‘dressed like a dog’, and ulti-
mately how he re-invented himself in ethnic, racial, gendered and class terms.
 38 D. Block and V. Corona

In common with the four young men cited at the outset of this paper, Denilson lived in
the district in the northern part of Barcelona known as Nou Barris (literally, ‘nine neigbour-
hoods’), which has historically been a predominantly low-income and working-class area
and in recent years has been host to a heavy influx of immigrants. And like the others,
he forms part of the growing Latino population born to immigrant parents who came to Bar-
celona with few (if any) professional qualifications and who work as cleaners, paletas
(bricklayers) and repartidores (distributors of print advertising). In Bourdieusian class
terms, their economic, cultural and social capitals, as a ‘set of actually usable resources
and powers’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 114), are relatively low. And, as Marina Subirats notes
in her comprehensive survey of immigration to Barcelona between 1995 and 2010, ‘[immi-
grants’] working conditions are much more precarious than those of the autochthonous
population, … as a consequence of being situated in the low qualification sector’ (Subirats,
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2012, p. 378; translation by David Block).

None of the young men cited here had completed their secondary studies, although three
of them enrolled in what are known as ‘Initial Professional Qualification Programmes’
(Programes de Qualificació Professional Inicial), which provide basic vocational training
to secondary school dropouts to facilitate their entry into the job market. They thus form
part of a generation among whom school failure has been widespread, with over 40% of
the children of immigrants dropping out of school before completion of their studies
(FEDAIA, 2012; Serra & Palaudàrias, 2010). One of the young men, Miguel, was actually
expelled from school and later became a gang member and fathered a child while still in his
teens. Ultimately, like so many other Latino adolescents in Barcelona today, Denilson,
Naldo and the others are either unemployed or working in low-level manual jobs after
having passed through the educational system, seldom applying themselves to academic
study and waiting for the day when they would no longer have to go to school. In this
sense, their experiences were not unlike those of the ‘lads’ in Willis’ (1977) classic
study of how working-class boys ended up with working-class jobs in 1970s British
society. However, Denilson, Naldo and the others have lived and continue to live within
a class system and set of gendered regimes which are very different from those experienced
by Willis’ lads, ones in which they are marked – racially and ethnically – as other. And their
other status intersects with their class position in a society in which there are few examples
of economic, cultural and social success among people who look like them in terms of their
racial phenotype and their multimodal presentation. In the end, the profile emerging in the
stories told by these young men (and many others like them) is one of a particular type of
insertion into the Catalan class system. In Table 1, we present a series of progressions,
framed as moves from identity indexicals to class positions, which mark the day-to-day
lives of young Latinos in Barcelona.

Table 1. Progressions.
Immigrant → Certain types of → Working-class position in society
employment (as lived materially)
South American → Racialised → Lower class and marginalised position
appearance subjectivities (as ascribed by others)
Educational → In family/in society → Working-class position (via low cultural
expectations and social capital)
Cultural practices → Hard, working-class masculinities
(multimodal behaviour) (as habitus emergent in fields of social
activity)
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 39

Conclusion
In this paper, we have highlighted the notion of intersectionality as a methodological
advance in discussions of identity in the social sciences, focusing on the specific
example of Latino youth in Barcelona. As regards intersectionality in practice, we have
aimed to show how intercategorical intersections may be established which involve race,
ethnicity and gender before moving on to see how this nexus further intersects with
social class. In doing so, we have taken on what McCall (2005) terms intercategorical com-
plexity somewhat at the expense of intracategorical complexity. Suffice it to say that we are
aware of this relative omission, which is more about space limitations than a lack of interest
on our part. Indeed, elsewhere (Corona & Block, in preparation) we explore in more detail
how being a Latino in Barcelona is a complex phenomenon for which simple one-dimen-
sional categorisations do not work. There is thus a big difference between Latinos who are
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visible minorities in Barcelona (e.g. the five young men discussed here) and those who have
a European phenotype and therefore are able to enter a wide range of fields of social activity
with a degree of camouflage (lost only if they speak with what is perceived to be a Latin
American accent6). Having made this point, it is worthwhile to note that not all racialised
Latinos in Barcelona grow up working class or in a poor environment in terms of their home
life, their neighbourhood, their school and so on. A significant minority are raised in what
might be deemed upwardly mobile environments with stable family life and above all
achievement-oriented school experiences which contrast with those of Denilson, Naldo
and the other young men cited in this paper.
The upshot to this discussion, and a short answer to the perennial ‘so what?’ question, is
that viewing groups like Latinos in Barcelona in an intersectional way allows researchers to
elaborate more complete accounts of the lived experiences of those who live more margin-
alised and precarious lives in multicultural societies. It also provides richer explanations for
phenomena like school failure, showing how causes are multiple and inherently complex in
and of themselves. In addition, intersectionality links with ongoing efforts to combine, in a
balanced and coherent manner, concerns about inequality based on misrecognition and mis-
representation (racism, sexism, homophobia, national hatred, etc.) and inequality based on
the unequal distribution of economic resources, on the way to transformative social, politi-
cal and economic policies (Fraser, 2009). Linking social class (at its base, an economic
resource distribution issue) with race, ethnicity and gender (as mediators of misrecognition
and misrepresentation), as we have done here, is a move in this direction.
To conclude, we believe that what we have discussed in this paper is important for those
working in language education in societies which are ever more diverse in terms of race,
ethnicity, gendered subjectivities, national affiliations and allegiances and language affilia-
tions. Intersectionality stands as a challenge to the way that many language education the-
orists, researchers and practitioners have, in recent years, framed multicultural and
multilingual identities in such societies. Among these collectives, there has arisen a kind
of consensus around a respect agenda which is deployed to take into account differences
based on other cultures and other languages. However, while well meaning and well inten-
tioned, this respect agenda is part of a romantic approach to diversity7 which often inadver-
tently reinforces the kinds of stereotypes which hinder the educational and emotional
development of those deemed to be different by their peers and society at large. In contrast
to the romantic approach, intersectional analysis generates nuanced versions of the identity
dimensions cited above and therefore is a far better way to capture the intricacies of twenty-
first-century migrant identities. Taking on board intercategorical and intracategorical com-
plexity, for example, allows us to see beyond the cardboard cut-out identities ascribed to
 40 D. Block and V. Corona

students in schools based on romantic and essentialised notions of race, ethnicity, national-
ity and language affiliations. And it helps us understand what is going on when individuals
do not act in ways predicted by such romantic and essentialised notions. Ultimately, the
lives of the children of immigrants, and indeed, their life prospects, are far too complex
and far too important to leave to such essentialist thinking and this paper, we hope,
offers a path away from this eventuality.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank John Gray, two anonymous reviewers and Durk Gorter, the editor of
Language, Culture and Curriculum, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. The data
cited in this paper were funded by Fondo Mixto CONACyT – Estado de Nuevo León (Project
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 05:52 24 December 2014

FOMIX NL-2012-178237).

Transcription conventions
Slash (/) shows the end of a chunk of talk, normally paced
A question mark (?) indicates question intonation
Pauses are timed to the nearest second and the number of seconds is put in brackets: (.5)
Square brackets ([) aligned across two lines indicate the point where speakers overlap
Equals sign (=) at the end of one utterance and the start of the next speaker’s utterance indi-
cates that there was no audible gap between speakers
Double brackets around ‘x’s show that the speaker’s utterance is inaudible or cannot be
made out: ((xxx))
Phrases or words in angled brackets (< … >) are an additional comment by the transcriber
on what is happening at the time or the way in which something is said
Colon (:) indicates an elongated vowel (e.g. no:o)

Notes
1. The data cited here were funded by the Fondo Mixto CONACyT – Estado de Nuevo León
(Project FOMIX NL-2012-178237).
2. The term Latino in the context of contemporary Catalan (and Spanish) society captures the ways
in which immigrants (in particular young people), from a good number of Latin American
countries (e.g. Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia), actively affiliate to a
variety of activities and behaviours (e.g. dance, cinema, food consumption and so on) and semio-
tic resources (language, body movement, hair styles, clothing and so on) which index not only
difference vis-a-vis members of the host society, but also Latino-ness as a distinctive subculture
in Catalonia.
3. It also does not focus on the multilingual resources and practices of immigrant youth in Barce-
lona, which have been the topic of a good deal of research in recent years. The interested reader is
directed to Corona et al. (2013), Newman, Patiño-Santos, and Trenchs-Parera (2013), Pujolar and
Gonzalez (2013) and Woolard (2011), which build on earlier work on the Spanish–Catalan bilin-
gualism of adolescents (Pujolar, 2001; Woolard, 1989).
4. Practice varies as regards the use of capital letters when ‘Black’ refers to race. Here we have
chosen to use capital letters following the practice of most scholars we have read who write
about race. In addition, and for the sake of consistency, we have also used ‘White’, with a
capital W when referring to race. However, we have left intact all quoted material where
either term appears in lower case.
5. However, earlier publications calling for intersectionality in social analysis might also be cited.
One key example is the The Combahee River Collective’s ‘Combahee River Collective State-
ment’, published in 1977 by a group of Black Feminists, who named themselves after the location
 Language, Culture and Curriculum 41

in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman organised the liberation of hundreds of slaves on 2 June,
1863. The collective made clear their intersectional intentions as follows:

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively
committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as
our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact
that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions
creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women, we see Black feminism as the logical pol-
itical movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color
face. (Combahee River Collective, 1977, p. 1)

6. However, it should be noted that no such thing as a ‘Latin American accent’ actually exists in a
unified and comprehensive form and that not all accents from the Americas are received by locals
in the same way in a range of institutional and informal contexts. While an Argentinian accent
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would likely be perceived as ‘nice’ or even ‘sexy’ (although it might also be taken as ‘sly’ or
‘evasive’), Bolivian, Peruvian and Dominican accents are generally perceived as ‘vulgar’ or
‘incorrect’. Examples can be found in the mass media, in particular on television programmes,
where we come across Argentinians who are cultured professionals and Bolivians who are
dumb waiters. A good example of such stereotyping can be found on the long-running Telecinco
sitcom ‘Aida’, where a Peruvian waiter is called Machupichu instead of his real name and in
every episode he is the butt of insults masquerading as jokes.
7. Our use of the term ‘romantic’ here is based on the work of Roxy Harris, who elaborated a
concise and informed critique of ‘romantic bilingualism’, which he defined as ‘the widespread
practice, in British schools and other educational contexts, based on little or no analysis or
enquiry, of attributing to pupils drawn from visible ethnic minority groups an expertise in and
allegiance to any community languages with which they have some acquaintance’ (Harris,
1997, p. 14). For Harris, such practices, though well intentioned, often led to the miscategorisa-
tion and essentialisation of pupils, whose lives were complex and multi-layered.

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