LatiNXT GEN: A YouTube Series About the Transition to College by First-Gen, Latinx Youth

• In Event: Youth Media as Method and Message: Participatory Approaches Toward Educational Equity

Abstract

Objectives:
The bridge from high school to college has high stakes for students who are multiply marginalized by the institutions on either side of it (Ishanti, 2006, Ayala & Ramirez, 2019). LatiNXT GEN is a youth media-production and research group that addresses these challenges by infusing ethnographic film-making and participatory research to explore the college-going experiences of Latinx, first-generation college students. This collaboration between a university researcher and nine youth media-makers resulted in the production of a YouTube channel documenting youth’s experiences graduating high school and beginning college amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing racial injustice.

Theoretical Perspectives:
Rooted in theoretical concepts of borderlands and nepantla (i.e., tierra entre medio / land in between) (Anzaldúa, 1987; Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002), this project centers the epistemic privilege of youth whose media-making practices cross borders to resist academic gatekeeping and boundary-making. Analytically, we employed a nepantla literacies framework (Lizárraga & Gutiérrez, 2018) that highlights the in-between meaning-making of students living at the intersection of multiple cultures and languages. This framing helped us understand how students’ “nepantla” media-production enacted resistance and inquiry as students strategically hybridized linguistic and cultural resources.

Methods:
This eighteen-month project used connective ethnography (Leander, 2008) and participatory visual methodologies (Cardinal, 2019; Gubrium & Harper, 2013).

Data sources and Analysis:
As an ethnographic, participatory project, data was produced by participants through their films and with their collaboration and continuous consent through recordings, field notes, interviews, and artifacts. Data included 115 audio-visual recordings of meetings, 36 semi-structured interviews, 320 pages of field notes, 121 artifacts, and 13 videos produced for the YouTube channel. During three participatory analysis sessions (Delgado Bernal, 1998), youth and adult researchers engaged in collaborative video analysis (Derry et al., 2010) and inductively and deductively coded transcripts and content logs (Saldaña, 2021).

Findings:
Youth-produced films addressed topics ranging from the effects of COVID-19 on participants’ college trajectories; to the importance of political activism during college; to the challenges of balancing familial, financial, and academic responsibilities as first-gen students. In their films, youth highlighted their bilingualism, their cultural heritages, and their unique challenges and achievements, intentionally telling stories that offered diverse perspectives on college transition within a media landscape that often centers the narratives of middle/upper-class students with more linear college trajectories. Collaborative analysis of these films and our process of making them revealed three central themes motivating their creation: 1) disrupting dominant, white-centric narratives about going to college, 2) representing the diversity and spectrum of Latinx identities, 3) and transforming the myths of meritocracy and exceptionalism that often undergird college-transition narratives for Youth of Color.

Significance:
The films and research produced by this study offer more equitable re-conceptualizations of college transition that resist dominant, singular, and linear narratives, advocating for broader pathways that embrace students’ multiplicitous identities and nepantla literacies. In doing so, they disrupt the gatekeeping and boundary-enforcing of monolithic college-transition narratives while also exemplifying the power of youth film-making to expand access to the production and sharing of knowledge within academic contexts.

Author

• Bethany Monea, University of Pennsylvania