Truth-Telling,Healing,and Resistance: High Schoolers from Immigrant Households Contest Rising Xenophobia Through Participatory Oral History

Abstract

This 4-year longitudinal Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) study employed over 300 peer-to-peer oral history interviews conducted by 112 mostly Dominican American 10th graders in Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx to examine how conjunctural crises—immigration enforcement, pandemic, and digital toxicity—impact youth from immigrant households. Building on YPAR scholarship and immigration studies, this curriculum-embedded project positions youth as knowledge producers and activists for their communities and generation. Key findings reveal punitive immigration policies created pervasive fear, forcing youth into premature adult mindsets and responsibilities. Students identified school as simultaneously overwhelming and a refuge, and social media as a “double-edged sword” providing community while exposing them to objectification and predators. Despite structural marginalization, youth demonstrated sophisticated analytical capacity, developing critiques of anti-immigrant rhetoric while building solidarity through shared truth-telling. The participatory design of the project challenges deficit narratives while modeling democratic knowledge production.