Identities and Agency in the Invisible Work of Latinx Youth

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 7
  In Roundtable Session: Latinx Youth at Work: Negotiating Identity, Agency, and Communication in Professional, Community, and Academic Spaces

Abstract

To navigate successful career trajectories, Latinx youth must not only develop and mobilize a broad range of communication and “work” skills; they must also negotiate identities across diverse contexts to understand and meet personal or community goals and changing workplace needs. Latinx youth engage many “worker” identities and related skills in their homes and communities as they meet responsibilities and work demands that are invisible to adults who serve them in schools and in formal employment settings.

In this paper, we analyze the responses of 340 Latinx youth to open-ended survey questions. We documented their work responsibilities at home and in their communities, and the identities suggested by their framing of this work. Our goal was to generate insights into work, identity, and agency interactions at home to promote youths’ development of positive worker identities and expertise at school and work. Specifically, we address the following analytic questions: (a) What forms of work are engaged by Latinx youth in their homes and communities? (b) What kinds of identities are suggested by their work- and identity-related survey responses? We close our analyses with the interpretive question, (c) What forms of agency and expertise are suggested by these findings?

Data from two surveys were included in our analyses, with questions related to youths’ activities and responsibilities during out-of-school time and work-study placements, interests and perceived talents, self-assessments regarding school-based communication and literacy activities, and home or family-based activities related to language, literacy, and technology. Inductive analyses yielded emergent themes that connected forms of work to different types of worker identities. In our next analytical phase, we developed codes by drawing from literatures on Latinx youths’ roles and responsibilities in homes (Covarrubias, et al, 2019; Sy & Romero, 2008) and language/literacy practices they engage in paid employment (Mirabelli, 2008; Stewart, 2014) and community settings (Orellana et al, 2014; Valdés, 2014). We drew from Holland et al’s (1998) theory of identities in action to explore potential positionings and identity negotiations suggested by our data.

Findings indicate five common areas of household or community work: (a) maintaining and managing the household; (b) directly supporting wage-earners in their paid work; (c) caregiving of younger household members; (d) translating and interpreting; and, (e) church-based leadership activities. Content and discourse analysis generated findings not only related to worker identities, but also to the ways in which these worker identities framed the work’s and youth’s relationship to ongoing family needs. Agency related to family-based “work” was distinct from patterns in our work-study data due to the immediacy of family-based needs for work, and youths’ awareness of how their work fit into needs and processes of the larger family system.

We present our analyses and examples from our data, concluding with the relevance of these findings for building on and expanding youth’s abilities in school-based and employment-based work. We also describe next steps beyond surveys, to data collection youths’ homes and communities, and suggest directions for future research related to youths’ invisible work in homes and communities.

Authors

• Jessica Avila, University of California, Davis

• Kerry A. Enright, University of California - Davis