Bonding Through Struggle, Distancing Through Stereotypes: How Latinx Youth Draw Racial Boundaries in a Multiracial Community

• In Event: Healing, Care, and Justice: Navigating Identities and Resilience in (P-20) Latinx Educational Spaces

Abstract

With a much-needed increase in attention to anti-Blackness in Latinx-centric spaces, the meaning-making and behaviors of Latinx youth are understudied. This paper highlights Latinx youth voices on the topic of Black-Latinx relations, with a focus on how they draw racial boundaries in a community celebrated for racial solidarity. Four themes related to boundary-making are discussed: bonding through assertions of sameness, bonding through shared struggle, distancing through anti-Black rhetoric, and distancing through stories of Black violence. This paper showcases why there is much to be gained by interrogating umbrella terms like “Black and Brown youth.” While these broad categories have found use in teaching and policy-making circles, they obscure much nuance in how the categories are lived out by Latinx youth.

Author

• Julio Ángel Alicea, Rutgers University - Camden