“I might just feel a little safer”: How Minoritized Gen Z Young Adults Imagine Their Futures

• In Event: 40459 - Identity, Work, and Family: Latinos in the US and Beyond

Abstract

A key U.S. demographic change is the declining share of the nation’s population that identify as Non-Hispanic White, hereafter White, and the simultaneous increasing shares of people who identify as Latine/o/x/Hispanic (hereafter Latinx), Asian, African American/Black, Native American and with more than one race. Extensive research has focused on how White people perceive and are responding to these population shifts. In contrast, little scholarship centers how people from ethnoracially minoritized communities interpret these changes and how they envision the impacts of a more ethnoracially diverse nation. The present study explores how the country’s youngest generational cohort of adults, Gen Z, make sense of these shifting population changes and imagine the impacts for their own lives in future decades. Our analyses are based on intensive interviews with forty-five U.S.-born Gen Z young adults of color (predominantly of Mexican ancestry but also people identifying as Native or as multiracial/biracial) collected by the Arizona Youth Identity Project (AZYIP) in 2023. The study is informed by the sociology of the future, racialized futures, and the systemic racism, xenophobia, legal violence, and racialized illegality present nationally and specifically in Arizona. The results reveal “spillover effects” for Latinx, Native, and multiracial young adults alike, with participants acutely aware of and affected by this toxic climate. Moreover, these structural factors and individual and communal experiences also “spillover” to how these diverse U.S.-born young adults imagine their futures. This is most poignantly expressed by the third of participants who hope that their future selves will enjoy the “ontological security” or the ease, safety, and trust in society that is missing from their current lives. The results demonstrate the “spillover” effects of systemic racism, xenophobia, and racialized illegality for multiple minoritized communities and to future temporal landscapes.

Authors

• Eileen Díaz McConnell, Arizona State University-Tempe

• Daniela Carreon, Arizona State University-Tempe