More than "Papelitos:" A QuantCrit Counterstory to Critique Latina/o Degree Value and Occupational Prestige.

AbstractConcerned with how numbers are misused and distorted in research and public discourse at the expense of People of Color, this article attempts to answer the following: How do we use numbers to tell the stories of Communities of Color? We offer a QuantCrit counterstory to share our journey of (re)imagining quantitative methods to center and extend the commitments of critical race scholarship. Specifically, we employ the tools of cultural intuition and groundtruthing to examine educational attainment and occupational outcomes of Communities of Color generally, and Latinas/os specifically, in order to challenge dominant narratives of postsecondary degree ‘value’ and occupational ‘prestige.’ We describe how our QuantCrit journey led us to theorizing a new index of occupational status and prestige for Communities of Color, what we call a Critical Race Occupational Index. By sharing our methodological counterstory, we offer a strategy for what it means to employ QuantCrit, rather than a strict descripti...