"We Are Smart": Latino Youth Leveraging High School Achievement Toward Civic Inclusion in Nashville, Tennessee

• In Event: Latino Immigrant Educational Experiences Across the Life Course: A Multidisciplinary Approach

Abstract

Images of Latino youth in graduation caps and gowns circulate in popular and political discourse as evidence of these youth’s value to the American nation. Put simply, ‘educated’ immigrant youth are deserving immigrant youth. How do Latino students, striving to graduate high school and attend college, make sense of these circulating discourses in terms of their own educational trajectories? Educational attainment is often linked to one’s social value (e.g. Holland et al. 1996), particularly for populations of color and immigrants (e.g. Decker 1997). Moreover, secondary schooling plays a vital role in both ‘nation building’ and forging—or not forging—immigrant youth’s sense of national belonging (Hall 2004, Sarroub 2005, Rios Rojas 2014, Abu El-Haj 2015, Gonzales 2015). While recent research has tracked national, local, and activist discourse around Latino identity and civic inclusion (e.g. Chavez 2008, Nicholls 2013), this paper explores how Latino students make sense of these discourses in and through the everyday process of schooling at the secondary level.

In this paper, I argue that the Latino immigrant and immigrant-descendant high school students who participated in this research link academic high achievement with socially-valued personhood and deservingness for national inclusion. I find that as youth seek to disprove the national and local stereotypes of Latino youth as academic underachievers, they re-inscribe these stereotypes for others—and even for themselves— when they fail to achieve (cf. Yosso 2005). In this way, the paper underscores the central role of secondary schooling in both enforcing hegemonic notions of belonging and nation and developing youth’s sense of inclusion and identity. While academic success is associated with positive social and psychological outcomes, these findings also suggest how academic achievement may be a more complex social good that has potentially deleterious consequences to self and community (cf. Demereth 2009). Furthermore, youth’s understanding of their academic trajectories illustrates the narrow paths that Latino youth have to make their personhood and national membership legible—and the ways they may inadvertently narrow those paths for themselves and others.

This paper is based on inductive analysis of a year of ethnographic fieldwork with youth ages 16-18 who participated in a college access program for Latino youth in Nashville, Tennessee. These youth were immigrant and immigrant-descendants primarily of Mexican and/or Central American origin who were high, average, and low academic performers. Methods included participant observation in the programming and in students’ broader social and family lives; person-centered interviews with 31 students who were representative of the broader student pool; expert interviews with program staff, public school teachers, and college admissions officers; textual analysis of the program’s curriculum and admissions materials from the colleges that program participants most frequently matriculate. This paper draws from these data sources, particularly from person-centered interview and participant observation materials.

Author

• Andrea Flores, Brown University