American Dreams, Latino Realities: Reconciling Poverty and Mobility in the Hyper-Segregated City

• In Event: 4265 - Latina/o Youth and Legal Liminality

Abstract

A tradition of scholarship explores the relationship between culture and poverty. While scholars have more recently developed careful analyses of when and how culture might condition the experience of poverty, we still know relatively little about how Latino/a youth understand their possibilities and the alternatives the use to evade persistent poverty. This project uses interview data to explain how Latino/as make sense of poverty and social mobility in Detroit. In particular, it looks at three different Latino/a groups to understand how Latino/as navigate their ambivalent social location in a majority-minority city. On the one hand, their racialized experience implicates them in the color line, which is particularly marked in the black-white binary of the city and its suburbs. On the other hand, Latino/as in mixed-status households struggle as an immigrant ethnic group to “make it” relative to a mainstream economy shaped by space beyond the city’s boundaries, including the U.S.-Canadian border. The urban and national boundaries shaping the experience of Latino/as in Detroit also informs the way they use space to navigate this ambivalent position. The project draws from the experiences of Latino/a citizens, undocumented immigrants, and those whose “liminal legality” as “Dreamers” remains uncertain to understand how boundaries are sites of simultaneous disadvantage and opportunity.

Author

• Nicole Elise Trujillo-Pagan, Wayne State University