The aim of this study was to understand how Latino and Afro-Caribbean immigrant-origin community college students conceptualize adulthood and understand their adult identities. The data are drawn from semi-structured group interviews with 17 low-income immigrant-origin students from three diverse community college campuses in an urban center in the Northeast. The The authors organized the results as a series of dialectic tensions that highlight the contradictions present in the everyday lives of participants. Results reveal that the central task of emerging adulthood is to navigate the multiple divergent messages about what it means to be an adult between home and school contexts. For low-income immigrant-origin community college students, adulthood was defined both by individual responsibility and by social responsibility. Emerging adulthood becomes a time of assuming responsibility for oneself as well as for other loved ones. These findings suggest that developmental pathways vary for immigrant-origin emerging adults and provide avenues for further research to explore how this population emerges into adulthood.
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