ASA Rose Series. Learning to Lead: Youth Organizing in Immigrant Communities by Verónica Terriquez (Russell Sage Foundation 2026)

Session Submission Type: Book Forum

Description

Children of immigrants make up more than one in four people in the United States under the age of thirty. Amid today’s multipronged attacks on immigrant communities and growing threats to democratic participation, these young people often encounter significant barriers to political participation. Despite these challenges, some children of immigrants and refugees engage in nonpartisan grassroots campaigns. In Learning to Lead, Terriquez examines how youth organizing groups facilitate the civic and political engagement of low-income, second-generation immigrant adolescents, enabling them to collectively exercise power alongside their non-immigrant peers and adult allies.

Drawing on extensive survey, semi-structured interview, and other data, the author shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. Although these groups vary in the quality of their programming, they generally share a commitment to supporting young people’s healthy development, offer a critical form of civics education, and provide extensive guidance on how to participate in civic life. These groups adapt their programming in response to local demographic and political dynamics. Many adolescents who join grassroots organizing groups face overlapping stresses related to poverty, immigration status, neighborhood violence, and other hardships. In response, youth organizing groups create spaces that support emotional well-being while also encouraging academic success and job-readiness. At the same time, they help young people develop a critical understanding of social inequality, power, and public policy.

Because of these formative experiences, adolescents who participate in youth organizing during high school tend to remain highly active in civic life into early adulthood. Terriquez concludes that these groups offer important lessons youth-serving institutions seeking to strengthen engagement in a multiracial democracy. Learning to Lead offers a thorough examination of the role of how young people acquire the capacities to become a meaningful political force.

Sub Unit

• American Sociological Association

Author

• Veronica Terriquez, University of California, Los Angeles

Panelists

• Jessica Taft, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Kevin Escudero, Brown University

• Amy L. Best, George Mason University

• Philip Kasinitz, CUNY-Graduate Center

Moderator

• Aaron Major, University at Albany, SUNY

Session Organizer

• Joanna Dreby, University at Albany, SUNY