Latinx Newcomer Immigrant Youth Navigating Work and High School in New York City

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Recentering the Transnational Community Cultural Wealth of Latinxs (Table 34)

Abstract

An international migration crisis is leading to the rapid growth of immigrant children in U.S. schools (Amin, 2023). Nearly 50 percent of immigrants are children and secondary school-aged youth (MPI, 2023). Many of these high school-aged youth have engaged in work in their home countries and seek to work upon their arrival in the U.S. (Martinez, 2018). This qualitative study explored how recently arrived immigrant youth navigate work while in high school. This study pushes the school-to-work transition narrative as unfit for this subset of students who have normalized work alongside schooling at a young age. The study’s findings highlight various forms of capital that these students leverage to navigate and integrate their work and student roles.

Author

• Amada Santiago, CUNY - John Jay College of Criminal Justice