Encountering Racialized Navism: Mexican and Korean Youth Doing American from an Outsider-Within Position

• In Event: 205 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. Race and Ethnicity in Everyday Encounters

Abstract

Extending the concept of “doing difference,” this article examines the way that working-class bilingual children of immigrants strategically use their “outsider-within status” to cultivate and deploy different interactional strategies when they translate for their monolingual parents. An analysis of interviews with 72 Mexican- and Korean-American children finds that language brokering work exposes these youth to racialized nativism that their immigrant parents of color face on a daily basis. Consequently, these youth creatively use their marginal status, bilingual competency, and accumulated experience of interacting with English-speaking authorities to systematically negotiate the power imbalance pertaining to age, race, class, and social citizenship in different institutional contexts. Paying particular attention to structural barriers that limit the effectiveness of some of these strategies while simultaneously examining the considerable agency of youth, I argue that preexisting structure shape what I call “doing American” thereby reproducing inequalities at the interactional level. At the same time, the findings call attention to how the margin as a social location can create moments of resistance and empowerment.

Author

• Hyeyoung Kwon, University of Southern California