Katie Clonan-Roy

This book describes an American town that became home to thousands of Mexican migrants between 1995-2016, where the Mexican population increased by over 1000% and Mexicans became almost a third of the town. We explore how the descendants of earlier migrants interacted with Mexican newcomers, describing how experiences of and stories about migration unfolded across institutional spaces—residential neighborhoods, politics, businesses, public spaces, churches, schools, community organizations. We emphasize the ongoing changes in prior migrant communities and the interactions these groups had with Mexicans, showing how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways. The book richly represents the voices of Irish, Italian, African American and Mexican residents.

The book shows how Mexicans’ experiences were shaped by stories about the town’s earlier cycles of migration. Many Irish, Italian and African American residents narrated an idealized but partly accurate history in which their ancestors came as migrants and traveled pathways from struggle to success—“up and out” of the less desirable downtown neighborhoods. We trace how these stories were often inaccurate, but nonetheless influenced the realities of migrant life.

The town in which this ethnography took place represents similar communities across the United States and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. We must document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience in towns like this if we hope to respond intelligently to the politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.

Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways and draw links between the town’s earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.

We argue that ‘academic language’ should not be understood as technical components associated with a‘register’, and that instead we must attend to its enregisterment. Enregisterment relies upon language ideologies and models of personhood, requiring attention to social components of ‘academic language’ beyond lexico-grammar. We draw on ethnographic data from Latina girls in a US middle school to show how adolescence presents a unique ontogenetic stage that influences how language use becomes enregistered. We show how language is enregistered in middle school differently than in elementary and high schools. Focusing on how language use becomes recognizable and indexically linked to social types, we show how ‘academic language’ is one way through which race, gender, and other socially identifiable positionalities are achieved. Adolescence may present a unique opportunity for intervention as students’ experiences with language and racialization become increasingly generalized.

Drawing on data from ten years of ethnographic research in a New Latino Diaspora town,this article analyzes how heterogeneous resources become relevant to the social identification of one Latina middle school girl as sexually promiscuous. We describe how the focal girl, her parents, teachers, family members, and peers mobilize resources from several different scales as they position her. Following Latour (2005) and drawing on linguistic anthropological accounts of heterogeneous resources across scales (Agha, 2007; Wortham,2012), we describe the networks and trajectories across which one identity is produced.

To fulfill the promise of inclusive school environments that support all students, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which discrimination and support occur in the school setting and how these mechanisms impact student development. The current study explored ways schools facilitate supportive or marginalizing experiences for first generation Arab heritage youth in the United States and investigated how these experiences impact acculturative experiences and identity negotiation for these students. Focus groups were conducted with 21 Arab American early college students and community dwellers. Qualitative analyses revealed three mechanisms by which the school setting uniquely impacts Arab heritage student's identity negotiation in high school: 1) peer and teacher discrimination; 2) school curriculum treatment of Arab history and culture; 3) and broader school structures that allow for student cultural expression. Implications and suggestions for School Psychologists are discussed.

This paper presents a feminist theoretical model of adolescent development for girls of color, a model that can be used to critique and resist the dominant deficit-oriented perspectives about girls of color that appear in research and educational contexts. We integrate ecological, phenomenological, and critical race feminist perspectives on development and socialization and emphasize that girls' emerging identities are complexly heterogeneous. Our model adapts the competencies of the existing positive youth development model (Lerner et al. in J Early Adolesc 25(1):10–16, 2005) by infusing them with a critical feminist lens that emphasizes critical consciousness, resistance, and resilience and allows us to specify the model to fit the experiences of and contexts in which girls of color develop. This paper includes a presentation of our conceptual model and uses qualitative data to examine how components of our model map on to the everyday experiences of Black and Latina adolescent girls and their development.

Drawing on qualitative research with adolescent youth of color, this paper
imagines the power and potential of informal youth-driven spaces in
schools as sites of emotional safety and rebellion. Calling upon Hochshild’s
(1979) conceptualization of the social regulation of emotions, we examine
the racialized and gendered feeling rules that govern the social worlds of
adolescents of color, particularly within educational institutions.
Additionally, we theorize how the presence of informal youth-driven spaces
inside schools, but outside of the traditional classroom or club structure,
provide a place where young people can safely express their emotions,
experience emotional understanding from their peers, and freely critique
the institutional and systemic injustices they experience.