Abstract
Coming of age in a time of contested citizenship: Growing up Latinx uses an ethnographic study of youth in an afterschool program at an elementary school in the Maplewood community in the Central Coast of California to illustrate the complexities and dichotomies Latinx youth face in the United States. The author explores three main constructs—citizenship, education, and social identity and awareness. The population chosen seems to be comprised of mainly Oaxacan and Salvadorean communities. Although many themes that Latinx youth might experience are universal, these two subgroups have particular identities, cultures, and histories that truly limit the ability to generalize to all Latinx youth. The distinctiveness of these two populations speaks to the larger complexity of defining Latinx individuals, who may include immigrant families with an array of immigration stories, undocumented families, citizens, U.S.-born individuals with parents who are born in Latin America, English speakers, Spanish speakers, and personas con papeles (someone who has documentation), as the author points out.
The book offers a comprehensive overview of some of the experiences of youth. It also provides data, qualitative findings, and a historical view of the sociopolitical landscape in which the youth exist. The book explores the perspective of youth in their own voices. Perhaps one of the biggest strengths of the book is the use of youth participatory action research in which their stories and their agency in developing the design, implementation, and dissemination of skills to navigate their socio-political environment are demonstrated. This comprehensive participation in the research by the youth who are the subjects of the study adds a layer of legitimacy that truly speaks to the title of the book. The book highlights how citizenship has multiple meanings: citizenship is legitimacy; citizenship is having a presence; and citizenship is counting in society. And if one does not count in society, then one has no rights, claims, nor visibility as a citizen. The mixture of circumstances present in Latinx youth families is also exposed: non-documented immigrants, documented immigrants, paths to citizenship, forced immigration, labor immigration, etc. Within each family, there are varying levels of hierarchy, opportunities, and legal vulnerabilities that each status provides.
Growing up Latinx also emphasizes the complex cultural and social identities that the adolescents must navigate. The youth in this study dealt with instructors that did not speak Spanish though the student body was primarily Spanish-speaking. Their cultural customs and mannerism were critiqued or viewed under the microscope by the instructors. Their identity and its celebration were challenged, thereby limiting the youths’ free expression of themselves in many spaces. The author highlights the social identity, critical consciousness, socio-emotional awareness, and political engagement of these youth.
The book has five chapters—the first three are primarily devoted to citizenship and human rights for Latinx youth. Chapter 4 focuses more on the experiences of youth around their sociopolitical personas, and chapter 5 discusses the constructs of their identity within their communities. Each chapter uses words of the youth to exemplify and share their points of view. The book offers extremely important considerations on how citizenship, human rights, and identity are all intertwined for Latinx youth.
However, the book does not frame the important discussion of citizenship within the many aspects of a Latinx youth identity. For example, left unexamined are parents’ reasons for coming to the United States, the vision of the United States in their countries of origin, the variations in upbringing and opportunity, mentorship, gender norms, and religion. Part of what makes Latinx a rich population is the diversity within each subgroup that makes it unique and multifaceted, but that also influences their environments immensely. The book greatly delineates the United States political structures that have had an influence in the Latinx experience as well as the immense weight that power, legality, and hierarchy play for Latinx youth, but not how the country of origin, culture and identity markers impact that experience.
There is a glaring lack of literature on the real experiences of Latinos in the United States, particularly regarding Latinx youth whose voices are not typically included and their many identities they must manage as Latinx individuals. Precisely one of the values of this book is the author’s explicit valuing of the resilience and the strength of this community and, more specifically, its youth.
