“Type of Movement We Gon' Need A Change:” Youth Politics of Intersectionality and Political Quilting

• In Event: 1165 - Latinx Politics: Rights, Resistance, and Race in the Trump Era

Abstract

Studies demonstrate that Black and Latino young men are alienated from the K-12 schooling process through a youth-control complex that relies on their criminalization, expulsion, and incarceration (Rios 2011; Rios 2017). Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic observations and 20 interviews with youth activist (ages 14-20) from a coalition of 9 youth organizations mobilizing to dismantle the youth-control complex, I examine Latinx and Black young men’s vision of transformation in South Los Angeles. Specifically, I highlight the strategies they deploy as they mobilize to decriminalize youth of color across Los Angeles County and promote their vision of social transformation. Focusing on their efforts to dismantle policies and practices that facilitate their criminalization, I find that the Latinx and Black young men are mobilizing against criminalization by centering a youth politics of intersectionality and serving as youth political quilters in Los Angeles County. This paper concludes with a discussion of implications for social movement frames and scholarship on youth activism.

Author

• Uriel Serrano, University of California, Santa Cruz