The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America 9780520976306

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The Succeeders

California SerieS in PubliC anthroPology The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debate—transforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings. Series Editor: Ieva Jusionyte (Brown University) Founding Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University) Advisory Board: Catherine Besteman (Colby College), Philippe Bourgois (UCLA), Jason De León (UCLA), Paul Farmer (Partners In Health), Laurence Ralph (Princeton University), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (UC Berkeley)

The Succeeders how immigrant youth are tranSforming what it meanS to belong in ameriCa

Andrea Flores

univerSity of California PreSS

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Andrea Flores Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Flores, Andrea, author. Title: The Succeeders : how immigrant youth are transforming what it means to belong in America / Andrea Flores. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] |Series: California series in public anthropology ; 53 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056898 (print) | LCCN 2020056899 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520376847 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520376854 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520976306 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hispanic American youth—Tennessee—Nashville— Social conditions. | Hispanic American youth—Education— Tennessee—Nashville. | Immigrant youth—Tennessee—Nashville— Social conditions. Classification: LCC E184.S75 F547 2021 (print) | LCC E184.S75 (ebook) | DDC 305.235086/912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056898 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056899 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In loving memory of the original “Succeeder,” my grandmother Elizabeth Worth (Maloney). You taught me how to recite the alphabet and how to care for others. Thank you now and always. And, to the Succeeders, who strive to make the world a better place.

Contents

Part i 1.

Part ii

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction. “Be Somebody”: The Stakes of Academic Achievement

1

ContextS of belonging City of Success: Living and Learning in Music City

33

learning to belong

2.

Mowing the Lawn and Getting Pregnant: Latinidad and Educational Exceptionalism

63

3.

“Your Story Is Your Ticket”: Becoming a Moral Minority and Reproducing Exclusion

82

Part iii

unlearning to belong

4.

“Their Name Is Also Written on My Diploma”: Striving for Parental Inclusion

109

5.

“Education with Her Family”: Caring for Siblings and Redefining Success

131

6.

Somos Una Familia: Transforming Belonging and Making Friends into Family

152

Conclusion. Graduations

177

Appendix: The Succeeders Program

195

Notes

201

References

245

Index

279

Illustrations

figureS 1.

Collection of stuff in the Succeeders program office

23

2.

Succeeders’ piñatas, made during a field trip

67

3.

Succeeders sorting Valentine’s Day candy at a club meeting

170

4.

Discarded sign at 2017 protest for DACA in Nashville, Tennessee

186

5.

Proud and grateful Latina college graduate showing off her cap and gown

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tableS 1.

Composite Succeeders High School: Demographics and Academic Achievement, 2012–2013

50

2.

Graduation Rates for Metro Nashville Public High Schools (MNPS), 2003–2013

53

3.

Public School 4-Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR), 2013

53

4.

Succeeders’ Academic Outcomes

54

5.

First College Enrollment Patterns of Focal Study Participants, 2013–2014

200

6.

College Completion of Focal Study Participants, 2020

200

ix

Acknowledgments

Books take a long time to write, I told my mother, as I made it through the last edits. They also take a lot of people. I am forever grateful to the young men and women—the Succeeders— who allowed me into their lives, told me their stories, and entrusted me with their friendship and words. Thank you for sharing your lives and knowledge with me. These young people, who deserve the most gratitude, cannot read their real names here because of my commitment to confidentiality. I hope to show my appreciation for them not only in this book, but in our ongoing friendships. Thank you for coming into my life. I hope to do right by you here and always. There are many people in Nashville to thank for facilitating this research: the administrators, board, and volunteers of Succeeders; the local college admissions officers, educators, activists, educational support professionals, and others I interviewed; the Succeeders program’s teacher advocates; and the staff, volunteers, and administrators of other community organizations I worked with over the years. José Oñate provided tremendous research assistance wrangling my Excel spreadsheets. The pseudonymous Liz and Sofía deserve recognition for opening their hearts to me. I am beyond grateful for your continuing loving presence in my life. xi

xii

acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation at Brown University, where it and I grew under the guidance of my committee: Jessaca Leinaweaver, Catherine Lutz, and Kay Warren. Jessa, you continue to be the best doktormutter out there—thank you for your continued support, feedback, friendship, and many generosities. Cathy and Kay, thank you for your unwavering belief in me and this project. I am also grateful to Bianca Dahl, Paja Faudree, and Dan Smith for their guidance over the years. During my time as student, I also benefited from the good-humored and brilliant company of my fellow budding anthropologists. Matilde Andrade’s ever-smiling greetings and Kathy Grimaldi’s kind car rides are a treasured part of my grad school memories. I was fortunate to find my way to the corner of Hope and Power Streets for many reasons, but mostly for the people. I’ve profited from the careful eyes of friends and mentors, including those named above. They have read or talked through the numerous iterations of this book. Paula Dias, Christy DeLair, Emily Button Kambic, Lynnette Arnold, Stacey Vanderhurst, Bhawani Buswala, Katharine Stockland, David Rangel, Adrienne Keene, Sofia Villenas, Edelina Burciaga, Carolina Valdivia, Joanna Perez, Lisa Martinez, Azra Hromadžić, Kathleen Millar, Jennifer Ashley, Yana Stainova, and Inna Leykin—thank you for sharing your time and thinking with me. Jessa Leinaweaver, Kevin Escudero, Danielle Dubois, and Sarah Newman read the entire manuscript and deserve special thanks. Susan Ellison read it at least three times. Felix Diaz generously fixed my wonky photographs. The remaining flaws, aesthetically unappealing images, errors, fast-food reminiscences, and awkward sentences are not for your collective lack of trying. To all my friends—especially Rob Cioffi, Lauren Curtis, Tony Perez, Allison Peluso, Simona and Jamie Malton, Jeremy Schmidt, Sohini Kar, Susan Ellison, Chelsea Cormier McSwiggin, Sarah Newman, Katie DiSalvo-Thronson, Andrew Sullivan, Felix Diaz, and Debbie and Steve Wilkison—thank you for your care that makes you family. The Department of Education at Brown has been a fantastically supportive place. I especially thank Ken Wong and Tracy Steffes for their guidance. Heather Johnson and Melissa Marchi have been wonderful friends and super administrators. I’d also like to recognize several key mentors from throughout my educational trajectory: Carrie James,

acknowledgments

xiii

Howard Gardner, Davíd Carrasco, Martha McCann, MaryLee Delaney, Barbara Warner, Maureen Fleming, and Marie Kerr. You inspired and taught me so much. It has been a pleasure to work with the University of California Press, particularly Kate Marshall, Enrique Ochoa-Kaup, and series editor Ieva Jusionyte. Kate and Ieva, thank you for your patience with me, a nervous first-time author, and for pushing me to be bold. Enrique, thanks for always answering my questions. Sharon Langworthy, copyeditor extraordinaire, thank you for catching it all. Thank you to the Editorial Committee and to the anonymous presenter in particular for their comments. They were of immeasurable help. I was fortunate to have two wonderfully helpful reviewers, Leo Chavez and Alyshia Gálvez. Thank you for allowing me to thank you by name and for your comments, questions, and thoughtful engagement. The book is far better for it. This project was generously supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program; the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund; the Jack Kent Cook Foundation; the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program; the Department of Anthropology, Brown University; and the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University (T32 HD007338) and (P2C HD041020). Portions of the manuscript were published as “The Descendant Bargain: Latina Youth Remaking Kinship and Generation through Educational Sibcare in Nashville, Tennessee,” American Anthropologist 120 (3): 474–486. Last, but not least, I thank my kin—the Flores, Pullo, Nolan, Worth, Martinez Badía, and Guth families—for a lifetime of love. David, Carol, Robert, and Christy Guth (the suegros) looked after me when I was “in the field.” My siblings—Alexandra, Annie, Allison, and Alex—have my eternal thanks for being the best siblings you could ever love and be loved by. To Caroline, Nick, Spice, and Alex—thanks for filling out the roster. Teddy, Hallie, and Willie Spicer, James and Vivi Guth, Henry Harrison, Gus, and Gracie provided significant research support and distraction. My parents, Ann and Alejandro Flores, gave me the gifts of education and educación. They continue to give me the gifts of their examples and love. My grandmother, Elizabeth Worth, and my mother have inspired

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acknowledgments

this book and me. I thank them for teaching me invaluable lessons over the years, not the least of which is motherhood. Which brings me to my daughter, Elizabeth Providence Flores-Guth. Thank you for making my life richer in unimaginable ways. I promise to care for you always. I love you more than words. Finally, to Alex Guth. You are an excellent husband and an adequate proofreader.

Introduction “be Somebody ”: the StakeS of aCademiC aChievement

Ms. Millerton’s classroom stank. It was the usual mix. AXE body spray, fresh Doritos, caustic hand sanitizer, and vanilla-scented perfume. Five college admissions officers and a handful of Latino college students stood at the head of the classroom, forming a zigzagged line in front of a graying whiteboard.1 They had come to talk about their universities to a packed house of Latino high school students. The high schoolers were part of Succeeders, a nonprofit college access program for Latino youth in Nashville, Tennessee.2 The students in the program, whom I call the Succeeders, were mostly from low-income Mexican and Central American families. A majority of the students were undocumented immigrants. Another sizable chunk came from mixedstatus families whose members had a combination of undocumented, documented, and citizen status. The Succeeders were also poised to become the first in their families to graduate from high school and potentially attend college. Their educational aspirations were rooted in hopeful American Dreams and harsh xenophobic realities. 1

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introduction

One by one the collegians, mostly Succeeders alumni, introduced themselves and described their sometimes circuitous paths to college. As the Succeeders and I politely suppressed late-afternoon yawns, Mateo began to speak. His forceful words, delivered slowly at a volume that demanded each of us lean forward to hear him, electrified the sleepy room: At college, I learned a lot about myself. They developed me to be a better person. If you have the will, the determination, that fire inside you to be something more—make your parents proud. [College] is hard, but it is going to make you a better person.

He then pointed to the standard-issue US flag drooping in the corner of the public school classroom: “You see that flag right there? It stands for freedom. There is no reason you can’t be successful here in the greatest country in the world. It is our responsibility as Hispanic Americans.”3 Following Mateo’s rousing address, known troublemaker Lalo sat down with Liz, the Succeeders program coordinator. Lalo’s sole contribution that afternoon had been confidently answering one admission officer’s question—“What’s our mascot?”—with “Un güero” (a blond or a white person). His heckle was an amusingly accurate description of the school’s marketing materials that caused me to guffaw—inappropriately. As students shuffled out of the classroom, I overheard what Lalo tentatively whispered to Liz. He quietly vowed to graduate, to stop misbehaving, and to make his father proud. In just five words, words that I heard countless times throughout my fieldwork, he expressed the same sentiments and understandings of his education’s purpose that Mateo had: “I want to be somebody.”4 Lalo’s terse statement of ambition to “be somebody” and Mateo’s call to success on behalf of kin and country reveal that educational achievement had far deeper meanings for these youth than just getting a diploma. Only through educational success, Lalo believed, could he “be somebody”: a valuable person worthy of the respect of others. Only through educational success could Mateo fulfill his “responsibility as a Hispanic American.” Only through educational success could they both make their parents proud. Over the course of my fieldwork, I would come to understand the ultimate stakes of academic achievement for the Succeeders and their families: belonging in the United States of America.

introduction

3

Succeeders underscored to me that earning academic credentials could disprove the national and local stereotypes of Latino youth as underachievers and their families as interlopers in the nation. Yet as Mateo, Lalo, and others strove in school, they also became sharply critical of their own striving and the somebodies they aspired to be. The individualistic model of success and racist, moralized terms of membership that pushed Succeeders to see themselves, and those they loved, as nobodies misaligned with their lives’ reality. It was collective caring that sustained these youth and motivated what they understood to be the communal ends of schooling. The people that the Succeeders loved—undocumented friends and family, “at-risk” peers, and others stigmatized by racism and nativism— were and are left out of common notions of success, Americanness, and valued personhood.5 But they were not left out by the Succeeders. These youth’s refusal to leave their loved ones behind in the pursuit of success opposed the petty inclusion offered by a hostile nativist state that breaks families apart through deportation, retracts social welfare from the most vulnerable, and limits inclusion to the “best and brightest.” The Succeeders’ ultimate refusal to discard loved ones is a way for us all to rethink belonging as necessarily rooted in caring connections to others. Those connections are forged by the care we share with each other as people who are always, and already, somebody. •

•

•

•

•

This book centers on the Succeeders’ defiant political critique of what it means to belong—a critique that unfolded in their everyday acts of striving. By striving, I mean the emotional effort, concrete actions, tests and homework, talk, care practices, and daily struggles that youth purposefully and hopefully undertook as part of their work toward the future.6 There is, however, a clear paradox at work. I argue that the Succeeders’ striving was both reproductive and transformative of the existing terms of membership. Striving is both exclusionary and inclusionary. Succeeders’ lived critique of the existing moralized and racialized terms of successbased belonging emerged in contradictory fits and starts as they both conformed to and challenged these terms. These fits and starts reveal just

4

introduction

how narrow the paths are that Latino immigrant and immigrant-origin youth must tread to make their personhood and right to belong legible to those who would deny it and them.7 I tell two stories about belonging through the Succeeders’ experiences: one about what belonging currently is and one about what it could be. The first story is rooted in how these youth strove in school toward a moving target of excellence as a prerequisite for belonging. As they did so, they felt that they must prove their difference from other Latinos to prove their Americanness. In that process, they relied on and enforced the very same Latino stereotypes about others, including academically struggling friends, that they wished to disprove about themselves. The Succeeders’ efforts demonstrate that Latino immigrant-origin youth themselves can be gatekeepers of the modes of membership that also exclude them. The second story, which forms the heart of my argument, is born of the Succeeders’ own epiphanies. As they strove for and alongside stigmatized parents and vulnerable siblings and peers, Succeeders came to value care and connection rather than quantifiable accomplishment as the raw material of an encompassing belonging. They thus pointed to another way of forging national belonging, recasting its terms as the obligation to care for related and unrelated others. This mode aligns with and challenges a vernacular understanding of national inclusion as being “like a family.” This book draws these two stories together, tracking youth’s acts of resistance and social reproduction. I show that youth are primary actors in determining the parameters of national membership in everyday, but highly political, ways. The Succeeders’ actions have consequences for how we all think about what it is to belong—namely, that meaningful national belonging can be based in caring obligation to others rather than in meritocratic markers of success.

“ wh er e ar e y ou Re ally f r om? ” : defi ning b el on gin g in ev ery day l i f e In describing belonging, which I also gloss as inclusion and membership, I mean two things.8 One is the feeling of “emotional attachment” to the nation that manifests in “feeling at home” in it.9 The other is a sense of

introduction

5

incorporation as a socially valued participant in the daily life, culture, and institutions of the nation regardless of juridical citizenship status or sociocultural identities and heritages.10 Institutions—including educational institutions—matter to belonging because it is through access to them and the daily routines within them that belonging as an abstract category is translated into the more concrete comings and goings of our day-to-day lives. It is in these contexts that we feel we belong. While legal citizenship was forefront in the minds of undocumented youth and youth in mixedstatus families, all youth regardless of status had a desire to be seen by others as a part of the national community, especially within their schools.11 We may feel at home in the nation, but how do others know we belong? As my definition suggests, belonging isn’t limited to a legal category but is something that is reckoned in daily life through our contact with others in places like our neighborhoods and institutions like our churches, workplaces, and schools.12 Moreover, we often judge each other as members of or outsiders to the nation through our judgments of ordinary actions in ordinary space. Shared slang; collective cultural references; the routines of a school day; and even dental hygiene, parenting, and prenatal practices are viewed as the way “we” do things as a nation.13 Moreover, we often ascribe moral value to these behaviors and beliefs, imbuing our actions and our nation with virtue and those outside the nation with the reverse.14 Exclusion from the nation becomes moralized as we attribute these categories of “good” and “bad” to practices and people. These notions of who belongs and what constitutes shared national identity are circulated and produced by us all. Be it by the powerful with a pulpit—such as politicians, sitcom writers, and journalists—or by our closer community counterparts, like a neighbor who asks “But where are you really from?” to the dark-skinned citizen child of the foreign-born homeowners next door. As this last un-neighborly example suggests, commonsense notions of belonging are exclusionary along lines of race and nativity. As I demonstrate, the pairing of immorality and racial difference defines US belonging. The circulations and performances of ideas regarding membership, and members, matter. They articulate who we are as nations, for each other by each other. They are also our opportunities to reformulate these ideas in ways that are less hostile to difference. Therefore, these circulations are

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introduction

highly political in their ends. It isn’t, however, only those in power—like politicians, journalists, and (though not all will agree) sitcom writers— who matter in this political process. We matter. Our actions are how belonging occurs. We are in charge of extending belonging to those around us. I frame my discussions of belonging in terms of including or excluding to highlight two points. First, belonging is an active category and not an abstract one. We actively create or inhibit belonging through our decisions about how to treat, talk to, and care for those around us. In this way, we all participate in creating belonging. Those subject to exclusion, like the Succeeders, can themselves enact forms of belonging and exclusion. Second, if belonging is actively made, it is a continual process. It can be made, unmade, and remade. As a shifting category, it can become more and less expansionary in its terms. Highlighting belonging as an active process that we undertake in our choices to either include or exclude illustrates that belonging is not a fixed category but rather one we have agency over. Belonging is something we can make and make over. In this book, I devote a notable amount of attention to language and to the powerful narratives that Succeeders responded to and created while striving. Casual conversations, admissions essays, and the very words Succeeders used to describe themselves and their aspirations may seem insignificant. However, such acts of storytelling are moments of world making. They are how we as individuals fit ourselves into our communities and make our communities fit us. They are how we include or exclude and thus how we make, unmake, and remake belonging. I trace how the Succeeders accepted and contested common, powerful discourses about Latinos and race, success and Americanness, and family and care to demand their and their loved ones’ membership in the United States. I outline these particular discourses later in this introduction. Similar to how we narrate our worlds, how we act in them matters.15 My other main area of focus is Succeeders’ care for others as a mode of striving and means to include. Enrolling a sibling in a high-quality elementary school, urging a friend to join the Succeeders program, and maintaining ties to the program long after college graduation are powerful ways that Succeeders enacted their revisions of membership. Through these actions,

introduction

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Succeeders built a more expansionary form of belonging by enabling the well-being of others. Caring for those who face exclusion may not be as dramatic as a sit-in or protest, but it is how youth on the educational periphery and at the core of ethnoracial anxieties surrounding immigration attempt to change a world that seeks to change them. Given the experiential nature of belonging and the potent power of our everyday actions and words to shape it, the Succeeders’ striving takes on heightened social significance.16 In certain modes of their striving, Succeeders attempted to prove that they and their loved ones fit in with the existing exclusionary values and practices of US belonging. They were engaging in what Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas term “performance-based deservingness.”17 Recognizing the lived nature of membership, Chauvin and GarcésMascareñas offer a framework for understanding how belonging is judged in daily life.18 As an example of their theory, they argue that undocumented adult immigrants’ reliability as workers, taxpayers, and law-abiding residents serves as evidence of their deservingness to belong. Alyshia Gálvez has termed this notion “sweat equity” in the nation; that is, immigrants are seen to earn their right to belong through their “laboral contributions” to their new sites of settlement.19 Immigrants and their allies leverage these performances and the rhetoric that surrounds them toward membership claims. They do so by showing how immigrants’ performances—at work, church, school, and other sites—have consonance with moral values that are assumed to be national ones, such as a belief in hard work. To be successful, deservingness claims must be responsive to context, particularly what anthropologists Sarah Willen and Jennifer Cook term a “vernacular moral register.”20 For example, if paying taxes wasn’t a mark of civic responsibility and good citizenship, then emphasizing taxpaying status would be a moot strategy for proving the right to belong. Moreover, a sense of “social proximity” must be built between the supposedly disparate parties of the supplicant for belonging and the gatekeeper of it.21 I now turn to two of the outsized narratives of US membership that Succeeders appealed to in their own membership claims. These narratives operate within the existing moral and racial registers of belonging in the United States.

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latino thr eat S a n d a mer iCa n dr e a mS : raC i a l a n d mo ral ter mS of b el on gin g in t h e un i t e d S tat e S On June 16, 2015, a few sentences uttered by the soon-to-be 45th president of the United States revealed how the terms of American belonging are both moralized and racialized: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” (emphasis added).22 Here was the truth of how some in the United States imagined not only Mexicans, but all Latinos as a panethnic category.23 “They’re” not “you.” Latinos are criminal, moral reprobates whose practices are wildly opposed to those of morally upstanding, “problem-free” Americans. Exceptions can perhaps be made for the very few who are “good people”—those whose lifeways, aspirations, and presumed morality align with what Donald Trump left unspoken. The unspoken haunting this speech was an assumption many Americans hold regarding who can belong in the United States. In casting Mexicans as not and never “you,” Trump more than obliquely signaled this assumption: his “you” is a white you. Mexicans, due to moral and ethnoracial difference, can never be Americans. White Americans are “real” Americans. Racialized others, “good people” or not, are forever and almost automatically left out of American identity.24 The Succeeders’ striving predates the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. Trump is just the latest incarnation of the naked nativism and dangerous racism that have always been present in US membership since the white settler nation’s very founding on the backs of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people. The association of whiteness with success, morality, and belonging in the United States has long been premised on the degradation and negation of nonwhite others’ success, morality, and very personhood.25 The Succeeders’ striving to be “good people” or, as Mateo put it, a “better person,” shows that they deeply and painfully understood this truth. Trump’s rhetoric is an example of one of the main discourses of US membership that the Succeeders are reacting to, and replicating, in their striving. It is what Leo Chavez terms the “Latino threat narrative.”26

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According to this narrative, the increasing number of Latinos—immigrant and citizen alike—represent a problematic demographic transition away from whiteness. The people behind this demographic shift are a fundamental challenge to an assumed core of white, Protestant culture and moral values that characterizes the United States.27 Making this threat particularly strong is the fact that large numbers of Latinos have increasingly settled in areas that are assumed to be the very home of these core values. These are the places in the South and Midwest that demographers term “new destinations”: places like Nashville, Tennessee.28 In political, academic, and passing discussion, Latinos are stereotyped as immoral criminals, clannish thinkers, uneducated high school dropouts, and out-of-control “breeders” who cannot become reliable, self-made Americans.29 Moreover, some Latino immigrants’ “illegal” presence in the nation—and what this illegality portends about all Latinos’ morality— casts further doubt on Latinos’ ability to be “good people” and successful Americans.30 The perceived moral lack, racial incongruency, and cultural dissonance that these stereotypes are thought to signal become the justification for Latinos’ exclusion from belonging.31 “They” aren’t “you.” When Succeeders claimed they weren’t “that kind of Latino” in their college admissions essays, they reasserted and capitalized on the power of these harmful anti-Latino images. In 2012–13, when I conducted this fieldwork, the Latino threat narrative was present, though perhaps less obviously venomous than it has since become. At the time, under President Barack Obama’s administration, immigration policy looked to be somewhat more inclusive of immigrant families’ right to belong to the nation and to remain with each other in it. Priorities for deportation were supposedly not focused on the parents of citizen children. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the executive order that allowed certain undocumented youth to acquire renewable relief from deportation and access to a work permit, had just rolled out.32 There was hushed talk of plans for expanded deportation relief. At the same time, deportations were happening in record numbers resulting in the painful separation of immigrant families—and Latino families in particular. In 2012 alone, 419,384 people were removed from the United States, 98 percent of whom were from the Caribbean, Central

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America, Mexico, or South America.33 While DACA provided relief for many, there were restrictions on who was eligible, including some based on education. Failed DACA applications pointed out how very limited that policy window to inclusion truly was. Relatedly, at the center of broader immigration policy debates was the question of whether or not family ties or “merit”—defined as chances of economic success—should be the basis for immigration policy. In the intervening years, these circumstances have only hardened. Families have been disastrously separated at the US-Mexico border, including more than one thousand children whose whereabouts were unaccounted for by the federal government for years.34 DACA, though protected in 2020 by the Supreme Court, remained at legal risk and continued on as a legal stopgap for those it covered. Perceived merit came to the fore in immigration priorities through the now-defunct expansion of the public charge rule.35 Amid the public vitriol targeted at Latinos and the contradictory politics of the Obama era, Succeeders invoked another extraordinarily potent “vernacular moral register” when they made claims to belonging in their lives.36 That register is the American Dream and its rendering of quantifiable success as a moral mark of membership.37 The American Dream is the mythological understanding of the United States as a land of opportunity where any self-possessed person can succeed individually on their own merit.38 At the core of the American Dream is not just the ability to achieve success economically, in a given meritocracy or in any other way that can be measured, but what this success represents. To dream the American Dream is to be an American, to be seen by others as an American, and to belong in America. To be a success is to be quintessentially American. Embedded in this belief in a scrappy individual’s ability to triumph is an understanding of success as tied to moral personhood.39 This linkage is why Mateo believed the success represented by his collegiate achievements made him a “better person.” As public speakers from Ben Franklin to Mateo have asserted, successful American people are those who demonstrate moral virtues, such as hard work and responsibility.40 Since success is understood to be won through one’s own moral effort, it is thus a sign of one’s virtue to others.41 If success is tied to both moral personhood and US belonging, the converse is also true and ever present. Those who

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fail in the United States, be it in school or the job market, fail precisely because they lack moral fiber.42 In the process, they show themselves to be less than ideal Americans. Relatedly, in the American Dream mythology there is no racism, ableism, or other “ism” great enough to keep the moral and meritorious individual down. Mateo echoed this sentiment when he claimed there was “no reason” the Succeeders couldn’t achieve in the “greatest nation in the world.” This aspect of the American Dream is insidious because it clearly ignores the structural disadvantages foundational to US legal, social, and economic systems and its meritocracies.43 In this model, it is individual moral failings—not white supremacist racial hierarchies, gender inequality, or the inequitable education system—that make structurally disadvantaged individuals fail. This rendering of success ignores difference and how it shapes our lives and life chances. As historian Cal Jillson argues, who can actually achieve the American Dream is fundamentally tied to broader “patterns of exclusion” regarding who gets to have equal opportunities to succeed.44 Consider the example of minority women reliant on welfare in the United States. Pundits, politicians, and some among the American Dream—believing public attribute these poor minority women’s poverty and failure to thrive economically to individual moral flaws alone.45 These racially marked “welfare queens” are said to have out-of-control sexuality; eschew hard work; lack personal responsibility; and be mired in collective attachments to family, clan, or race that inhibit them from achieving the American Dream and perhaps full Americanness.46 It is these individual moral failings, not structural disadvantages due to race, gender, and class, that make them national failures. Thus, while the American Dream and its attendant image of Americanness are popularly imagined as open to all comers, these categories are built on exclusion. These exclusions are moralized. Americans demonstrate their worthiness to belong through a shared understanding of success as proof of the good morality necessary for US membership. This exclusion is at the same time racialized. Latinos and nonwhite others are fundamentally not Americans, and race-conscious understandings of success and failure, like the trope of the “welfare queen,” only prove that fact. The resurgence of what Lindsay Pérez Huber and colleagues term “racist nativism” at the turn of the twenty-first century has rearticulated the

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historical exclusions of US belonging.47 Americans place a high value on success as a sign of moral personhood and suitability for membership. Success’s prized status makes being successful a fitting strategy for nonwhite immigrants and their children to prove their “deservingness” to belong.48 Success makes immoral, failing Latinos into moral, achieving Americans. The Succeeders looked to do precisely this as they strove toward educational achievement and talked about that striving, their racial exceptionality, and personal moral merits. This strategy is not only reactive but also finds its origins within Latino immigrant communities. In her work with pregnant Mexican immigrants in New York, Gálvez demonstrates how immigration is rooted in the aspiration of familial superación (betterment), which can also be read as chances for greater success.49 An unintended consequence of desiring superación is seeing the Latino self as inferior and thus in need of betterment. This deficit conception of self can lead to overzealous conformity with dominant social norms and the harsh “stripping away” of protective cultural resources.50 Success is thus integral to youth’s remaking of belonging. It is too omnipresent in American life for it not to be. However, youth refashion success itself toward their own ends. In this way, they take control of the founding myths of the nation and use them to their own advantage. Striving, repurposed away from meritocratic success and toward others’ well-being, can be a powerful tool for achieving a reimagined inclusion. The location of Succeeders’ striving—their education—is an apt place for young adults to make claims for inclusion. Educational settings are among the first places where we are brought into the system of supposed meritocracies that define US life. These are sites where our cultural and social resources can be derided and stripped from us, endangering our success.51 They are also sites where we can find we belong and are valued. In these ways, education is also an apt place for the Succeeders to reject the very terms of betterment and inclusion they seek to meet.

eduCatio n a n d e d u c aci ó n ’ s l e SS o n S i n b e lo n g i n g Educational institutions are key sites of socialization, or where we learn how to behave in formal organizations and how to engage with unrelated

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others. They are also where the existing hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality, and ability are reproduced for the next generation through educators’ and students’ own efforts.52 For example, when Lalo was long ago labeled a troublemaker by his teachers, it could just have been because of his disruptive classroom behavior. However, if a richer, whiter student had engaged in the same behavior—but was not seen as a troublemaker by teachers—that label becomes something different. It becomes a socially salient statement about him as a particular kind of student, Latino, and person for whom teachers may have lowered expectations. These lowered expectations could result in his further marginalization in school. This marginalization might have negative effects on his educational outcomes, which in turn could affect his long-term chances of economic or professional success. Due to such labeling, Lalo too (as his confession to Liz suggested) could begin to see himself as a destructive troublemaker rather than as a socially and institutionally valued person—a person who belongs.53 These harmful possibilities are not mere speculations about the potential impact of such judgments on Lalo. Rather, they are widely reflected in the research on Latino youth’s educational experiences and schooling outcomes. Experiences like Lalo’s are where nation and national membership are built.54 From the Pledge of Allegiance, to diversity assemblies, to the decision to call on an immigrant student in class or to call them a troublemaker, students learn if they belong in the nation through whether or not they are valued in its schools. Institutional incorporation is a key aspect of the lived experience of belonging. For immigrant-origin youth these institutions are particularly salient as public schools are among the first institutions of the state where they are included or excluded.55 Beyond its socializing role, education also holds particular weight for the Succeeders’ own efforts to include or exclude because of the immense symbolic value education holds. Educational institutions are among our most prized, and educational attainment, be it formal or informal, is crossculturally valued as a social good. At the same time, education, K–12 and beyond, finds itself mired in a crisis of (public) conscience just as Latinos gain a foothold there. The future of higher education is in doubt, as financial woes shutter small colleges nationwide. Secondary schools, like the ones the Succeeders attended, seem to not be delivering on their promises.

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Certain segments of the population, whites in particular, seem be turning away from formal education as the mark of the valued person and the path to mobility. Elites see tech innovation as the pathway to success, while the middle classes, weighed down by student debt, question higher education’s actual value.56 Political actors on the right and segments of the white working class reject universities, research, and even science itself as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy.57 It is likely not a coincidence that just as Latinos have entered and succeeded in educational spaces the value of those spaces is being questioned. Despite this increase in the questioning of education’s value, it still holds a unique sway in US life. Many segments of the US population—across race and class—still view educational attainment as critical to achieving the American Dream. Moreover, they also see it as what singularly enables structurally disadvantaged populations to achieve the American Dream, even if in practice it does not. This enduring belief in schooling’s essential link to mobility, moral personhood, and full membership in the nation has historically been particularly strong among minorities and immigrants. Ironically, these populations are often the worst served by public schools.58 Perhaps the most famous historical example of this sentiment regarding education’s role is the origins of respectability politics. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, segments of Black America invested in education as an engine of opportunity, equality, and belonging. Central to that investment was a linkage of education with demonstrating “respectability,” or an image of Blackness that “would command whites’ respect” by standing in contrast to both negative stereotypes of Black people and lower-class Black cultural norms.59 Respectability was not only about gaining the educational credentials assumed to lead to mobility, but also about performing the kind of educated minority self that would be valued by whites in power and thus could be leveraged toward full membership. As I demonstrate in this book, Succeeders faced a kind of Latino respectability politics that is related to, but distinct from, Black respectability politics. Separating the two is the question of Latinos’ legal presence in the nation. Indeed, nowhere is this respectability politics more evident than in the undocumented youth movement that counts many Latinos, including some Succeeders, among its activists. Recognizing that membership is often judged by how one lives, these activists have relied

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on alignment with US cultural norms and values as proof of their right to belong.60 Primary to the movement’s narrative has been the image of the high-achieving immigrant student. Since success is understood in the US context as both moral proof and the apex of Americanness, school success transforms immigrant students from deviant delinquents into moral members.61 The iconic image of the undocumented youth movement— activists protesting in their graduation regalia—gestures to this linkage of academic success, morality, and belonging. Common to both Black and Latino youth’s respectability politics then and now is a disavowal of marginalized community members—those in the community against whom “the respectable” must prove their respectability. An additional core commonality is the insidious notion of a preexisting lack of respectability that only education can fill. As I demonstrate through the Succeeders’ reflections, they believed education could mark them as exceptional. Education would wash away the stains of the Latino threat and show them to be model minority members of the nation. Education is also a site of many other aspirations, values, and moral yearnings that chafe against those I have just outlined. It is the productive friction between all these goals, moralities, and visions of education and its purpose that gives striving its transformative power. The Succeeders’ critique of membership pivots on education’s other meanings. Foremost among these is that in immigrant families education takes on heightened significance because of the unique familial demands of immigration. At its core, immigration is about uprooting. It necessarily involves disruption to the routines of family life. Some family ties are reoriented across nations: from daily in-person contact to spotty calls over WhatsApp, from the care of grandparents, aunts, and uncles to the loneliness of latchkey kids. Other relational ties also emerge within the immigrating family, as members rely on each other in potentially new ways in their new home.62 Elder children become primary caregivers and wives primary earners. The “immigrant bargain,” a term coined by sociologist Robert C. Smith, describes educational success as an intergenerational kinship obligation specific to low-income immigrant families. In the bargain, “sacrifice by parents [in immigrating and working in low-status jobs] will be redeemed and validated through the children’s achievements” in school

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and eventually in the workplace.63 Youth’s age and access to age-graded opportunities place the responsibility to succeed squarely on their shoulders. The bargain also works in alignment with the American Dream. Students triumph over their families’ immigrant circumstances through their own merit and effort in school. Such achievement potentially leads to broader economic success and national inclusion. Success becomes a way to care for family and a way to include them in the nation. Immigrant families also see educational striving and success as a potential way to create and maintain families in uncertain times. Striving then is not just about success as meritocratic achievement, but about success as connection and building family. Transnational migration can strain kinship ties and threaten familial thriving, even as it is undertaken for the family’s betterment.64 As merit becomes ascendant in immigration policy, achievement in school can become shorthand for a valued immigrant member and the valued immigrant family from whence they came. It might even be a way to salvage the family itself, as was true with one Succeeder, aspiring artist Perla, whose case I describe in chapter 5. Youth’s work in school is not just something they do in exchange for parental migration and their parents’ sustaining care and concern, but it is a unique responsibility for youth in the making and preserving of kin. There is one more meaning of education I wish to highlight, as it further demonstrates how the Succeeders made sense of education in creative, world-changing ways. In her ethnography of Mexican families’ interactions with schools, Guadalupe Valdés argues that for the families she worked with there were two educations: first, “education is school or book learning,” and second, “what Spanish speakers call educación has a much broader meaning . . . including teaching children how to behave, how to act around others, and also what was good or moral.”65 Succeeders and their families deeply valued educación. For the Succeeders, there was also an emergent hybridity between education and educación. This hybridity suggests the shifting moral meaning of “book learning.” Becoming credentialed could be used as positive moral proof against deficit constructions of Latinos while also maintaining a link to educación’s personal, cultural, and familial value. Such hybridity also suggests the innovative ways that Succeeders repurposed circulating values and discourses for their claims on belonging.

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Much more often than not, when I asked students what education meant to them they ascribed moral value to book learning. Succeeders thought that college would be morally transformative. Mateo even said it would “make you a better person.” Students believed that gaining formal credentials demonstrated virtues that aligned with both the values of their Latin American parents and those of the American Dream. In effect, youth used formal education as a moral statement about themselves. This moral statement was not just a simple parroting of the exclusionary terms of membership, but it also emphasized connection, family, and a reworked notion of success rooted in family and care. The Succeeders blended education and educación in their striving to make claims on virtuous personhood that are legible across Latino and dominant US moral registers. As they did so, they uncovered another route to belonging: family and care.

Jus cu R a n d i: Ca r e a n d the rem a k i n g o f belo ngin g in fa mil ia l t er mS Family is an enduring organizing principle of our lives. It, like education, is also a weighty symbol within it. For example, as I revised this book with my infant daughter in the care of my sister and mother, I wondered if I was a good mother and thus a good person. Our assumptions about family—how it is made, who is part of it, and how meeting our obligations in it makes us who we are—speak to family’s central role in the making up of ourselves and our worlds. Family is also intimately bound up in how we make up our nations and exclusion from them. We have perhaps all heard political rhetoric that frames the nation in kinship terms. Such usage ranges from the most directly idiomatic— “Uncle Sam” or the mother/fatherland—to terms that suggest the necessity of collective socialization in the “national family” and a common “national heritage.” These terms are used because they draw on the powerful attachments we may feel, or think that we are supposed to feel, in family life. They suggest our tie to the nation is as primordial as those we imagine we have with our families. Such rhetoric thus draws the domestic into the public so that we “love, die, or kill for nations” as we might for our families.66

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The family is also often invoked in political rhetoric as the building block of the nation, tying individual families’ reproduction to that of the nation.67 This reproduction is quite literal in the making of children as new citizens. It is also figurative in the intergenerational transmission of national values and norms, such as the American Dream, the idea of public schools as the great equalizer, or even the Latino threat narrative. This understanding of family as the building block of the nation is even encoded in law. In the juridical sense of membership, the principle of jus sanguinis (right/law through blood) holds that legal citizenship in the nation is passed by parents to children. Beneath jus sanguinis lies the sense that national identity and ethnicity are inherited traits, as nineteenth-century European nationalists and today’s racist nativists suggest.68 In the United States, and in most of the Americas, legal citizenship is assigned at birth though jus soli (right/law of soil). Citizenship is granted for all those born within the nation’s borders, even if their parents are not citizens.69 Globally, and in the United States, there have been movements to remove or restrict this principle. For example, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011 looked to narrow jus soli, excluding people like US-born Succeeders whose parents were not citizens or permanent residents.70 Among the bill’s ninety cosponsors were two from Tennessee congressional districts that border Nashville, the hometown and site of some of the Succeeders’ “birthright citizenship.” Beyond citizenship law, control over the physical and social reproduction of families is where national identity is worked out.71 One area where this linkage has been particularly prominent in the United States is the regulation of immigration. Since the 1950s, family reunification has been the guiding principle of national immigration policy. Such a preference suggests that the ties of kinship are those currently most valued by the nation.72 Recent political rhetoric bears this out. In 2019, President Trump suggested that “merit”—defined as the ability to contribute economically to the nation as an educated, highly skilled laborer—rather than family reunification should guide immigration policy. In response, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi countered with both a critique of merit and a defense of family: “It [merit] is really a condescending word. Are they saying family is without merit? Are they saying most of the people

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that have ever come to the United States in the history of our country are without merit because they don’t have an engineering degree?”73 However, the definition of which kinship ties count for the purposes of family reunification reveals an exclusionary notion of the family, both natal and national. Family, as defined by US immigration law, means conforming to the structure of the white, nuclear family, not to the extended family formations common in Latin America and the Global South. For example, a citizen can sponsor the migration of a spouse, their child, a sibling, or a parent, but not an aunt, cousin, or nephew. Moreover, the separation of immigrant families at the border, the denial of citizenship to the internationally adopted children of queer parents, and the deportation of undocumented family members suggest that only certain members of the nation have the right to a family at all.74 This fact has been readily confronted by the immigrant rights movement as activists assert their right to belong through their right to a family.75 American immigration has been about defining what, as sociologist Catherine Lee states, “constitutes a legitimate family . . . and whether such families should be allowed to join the nation.”76 Families matter to the nation because they are the nation. Succeeders were critical of US immigration policy and its effects on families. They walked the line of American success through their striving but also looked to shift the scope of what constitutes the US family by demanding the inclusion of their own. They also hoped to unmoor the limited notion of family defining US membership by asserting a broader set of kinship ties. They did so not through justifying their and their families’ rights of belonging through jus soli or jus sanguinis, but rather through kinship fostered through caring—a kind of jus curandi. Kinship in the nation is made through care for those within it. Care has garnered much scholarly attention in recent years and has been defined in multiple ways.77 Across its many different usages, what emerges about care is that it is not a neutral category. Care is laden with relations of power and inequality, but at the same time, it can be harnessed to sustain another’s well-being and to build a just world. Following geographer David Conradson, I define care simply as demonstrating concern for and acting in support of others’ welfare.78 At the core of this definition is a sense of care forging enduring connections to others. It is unsurprising then that kinship scholars have looked at how care practices

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create kinship and relatedness.79 Scholars examine a range of such caretaking and “kinning” or family-making practices from spirit possession to naming, feeding, and housing others.80 In any care practice, it is the act of nurturing that creates the bonds that tie us together in collective attachment and mutual obligation. Such practices and sentiments are at the core of family ties. Care makes family. I propose that educational striving is one of these caretaking practices through which immigrant youth produce kinship and relatedness, including to their peers. Recall that the Succeeders saw their striving as a unique familial obligation that was a way to care for their families and to make and maintain kinship ties. Moreover, through striving Succeeders hoped to earn not just their own national membership, but also the membership of those near and dear. The Succeeders demanded their families’ inclusion in the national family by steadfastly asserting that their individual success was only possible through the care provided to them by these often morally and racially stigmatized family members. This care included, for example, parents’ undocumented or otherwise devalued immigration. That is, by immigrating parents were enacting a mode of care for their children. As students articulated and enacted striving in terms of kinship and relatedness, they disrupted and rejected dominant notions of success and inclusion that positioned their families and their care practices—including undocumented immigration—as immoral. In so doing, Succeeders widened the scope of who is a moral American family member. They replaced one system of determining moral personhood with another: kinship. The Succeeders’ ties of caring were not limited to their immediate families, but also extended to friends. Within the Succeeders program, students built relationships with staff and each other that they understood as tantamount to kin. Indeed, students described the program as “like a family” and as the “Succeeders familia.” Additionally, they referred to staff as “like a mom” or as “tias” (aunts) and to participants as “like a sister” or “like a brother.” The family has long been a mainstay in Latin American and Latino politics—a rallying point for inclusion, a symbol of it, and an object for political control.81 Invoking the powerful symbol of the family brings with it layers of complex political and personal meanings. Succeeders (and to some extent staff ) first became connected to each other through a stated interest in educational success. It was then the

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practice of striving toward educational success together, and caring for each other beyond meritocratic success, that made them a family. This striving toward a common project worked to produce relatedness, just as striving produced kinship in their families. Just as parental immigration and sacrifice are the raw materials of success in the immigrant bargain, students asserted that peer support, including that of academically unsuccessful peers, played a similar role in their own triumphs. It is, however, through Succeeders’ caring for each other’s welfare beyond academic success that these bonds of relatedness were truly cemented and success and belonging were reimagined. When peers care for each other in terms of mutual well-being, they embody a commitment to each other that affirms that their value comes not from being successful individually but from expressing hopeful solidarity with each other as they pursue, achieve, and fail at their goals. By caring about each other’s educational and personal outcomes and by positioning their individual accomplishments as contingent upon the care of peers now related to them, youth are reworking the idea of success and the parameters of belonging. They do so in their own terms of familial relatedness rather than in the dominant terms of individual achievement. Through asserting the supremacy of relatedness, care, and kinship over individual merit, youth also reclaim the value of peers and family stigmatized by the exclusionary notions of belonging that I have laid out. When Succeeders extended kinship to peers and unrelated others, they pushed against the limited renderings of family as nation baked into immigration law. Refusing to exclude family from success became a way to include that family in the nation. Anthropologist Ghassan Hage argues that in the fear-based politics of contemporary life, care “generates hope among citizens and induces them to care for it [the nation]” just as they care for each other.82 In redefining success as relational and US belonging as something that could be built on care, I find that the Succeeders rejected the dominant model of national inclusion built on exclusion and the retraction of care. Care is a form of political action especially when the removal of it—ranging from the shuttering of social services to the deportation of immigrant families—dominates our political landscapes. When uncaring is the dominant political practice, caring for others takes on additional significance.

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It is what geographers John Horton and Peter Kraftl term “implicit activism” or what fellow geographer Kye Askins terms the “quietly political.”83 I argue that care is neither implicit nor quiet. Caring, when others and governments don’t, is an overt act of resistance to these uncaring systems of power. The Succeeders’ efforts demonstrate how the fight for inclusion works in our everyday routines, our acts of care for others, our language, and our social and institutional spaces. The politics of belonging are, as Askins writes, thus “performed through relationships” and how we nurture them and become interdependent through them.84 These efforts are not insignificant because these are the spaces and practices where belonging is built in practice. Belonging is forged by mundane actors in their everyday acts of inclusion and exclusion. Chief among these acts is the choice to care. A focus on the everyday political actions of inclusion shows that belonging is an active, expansive process. We can all undertake the process of fostering belonging through choosing to care and thus choosing to include. In tracking this political statement as it manifests in youth’s striving, I have learned how inclusion, and the hopeful work of remaking membership, might be redefined by those most at risk of exclusion.

meth o dol ogy a n d b ein g a (S ort o f ) “hel Pful white l a d y ” The Succeeders office was cramped, always hot, and wedged between a pool, a basketball court, and an exercise studio where Zumba exercise classes took place at least four times a day. As basketballs hit one wall, the pounding bass from the Zumba soundtrack bled through the other. The office had too much furniture and a glut of what can only be classified as stuff: old art projects, binders of expense reports, Rubbermaid storage units brimming with college pamphlets, and glossy graduation photos from alumni. During my research, my life orbited around this office. Here I laughed and cried with students and staff, shared family gossip, and waited for a myriad of Succeeders program events to begin. For the purposes of the Succeeders’ parent organization, I was a volunteer conducting research. Practically, I was both doing research and serving as

Figure 1. Collection of stuff in the Succeeders program office. Photo by author.

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Liz’s and Succeeders program director Sofía’s sidekick. I appeared to all parties as someone who could give advice about college, given my seemingly endless schooling. As a white-presenting, half-Latinx American, my Latinidad or Latinxness was—and continues to be—not immediately obvious. One student laughingly told me she thought I was “just some helpful white lady” until I mentioned my extended family in Mexico and Guatemala. My background was also not the same as that of the students in the Succeeders program. While I shared much with them (including the sting of low expectations from some of my own past teachers), I was raised in an upper-class household. Going to college was never in doubt or a question in my life. The students’ background was structurally similar to that of my mother. She is a working-class white woman from the Boston area who was the first woman in her immediate family to graduate from both high school and college. My father, a doctor from Guatemala, imparted to me a shared cultural heritage with the Succeeders. It was, however, my knowledge of my maternal grandparents’ educational deprivations (themselves the children of working-class Irish and Canadian immigrants) and my mother’s educational triumphs as a first-generation, low-income college student that gave me a very limited window into what the Succeeders were facing. While my Latinidad wasn’t initially clear, I did make my research objectives clear to the students and to Liz and Sofía. I attempted to be a sympathetic yet objective researcher. That soon changed. As students, staff, and I shared our lives, our relationships shifted from researcher and subject to deep and abiding friends. This friendship sustained and improved my research: from Liz’s joking, but insightful, suggestions about what I should be writing in my many notebooks to meaningful conversations about emergent themes with the Succeeders during the writing of my dissertation, articles, and this book. I am forever grateful for these friendships. The Succeeders have changed my life in a way I cannot express except to say that I have become a “better person” for knowing them. These relationships, and the ethics of anthropology, compel me to prioritize these individuals’ confidentiality and their concerns first. This manifests in small ways, like the use of pseudonyms.85 My prioritization of Succeeders’ trust in me also manifests in more complex ways. For example, I became privy to some things that I am not writing about, and there were

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things I did not ask out of deference for both privacy and the intimacy we were yet to build. These practices were and are intentional as part of my ongoing moral commitments and relationships to these young people and the adults who work with them. I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork with the Succeeders program and participants over twelve months in 2012 and 2013.86 Since then, I have returned to Nashville almost every January and summer, including to conduct formal follow-up interviews between 2015 and 2017. It has been a privilege to remain in the Succeeders’ lives and to share in part of their life stories. I purposely spent the first three months of research in 2012–13 getting to know the youth participants without conducting formal interviews or surveys. I was, however, conducting participant observation, a method in which the researcher observes, partakes, and then reflects on the daily course of life in the field site. Using this method enabled me to see how students navigated the college application process, the end of high school, and their personal lives. Participant observation meant attending field trips and joining in the regular after-school Succeeders meetings, sometimes as a facilitator and sometimes like a student. It also meant going to activities outside of the program—fundraisers, community service activities, soccer games, tailgates, music and drama performances, and graduation ceremonies—that were held in the school settings described in the next chapter.87 Additionally, I was present in the out-of-school lives of learners, teachers, and staff members: having dinner or grabbing coffee, going to family events and parties, and socializing after school. As our relationships grew through my presence and mutual selfdisclosure, I began conducting formal interviews.88 I selected thirty-one students to interview who were representative of the program participants’ overall demographic, socioeconomic, immigration, and academic profiles.89 This resulted in a mix of thirteen male and eighteen female students between sixteen and eighteen years old whose families were largely from Mexico and Central America. Slightly over half of those interviewed were undocumented immigrants.90 The students were a mix of high, average, and low academic achievers. I did not focus just on “high achievers,” only Mexican, or undocumented students because I wanted to examine how students across a variety of academic preparations and immigrant

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backgrounds who were all active participants in the Succeeders program came to view their lives inside and outside of school.91 These semistructured interviews focused on Succeeders’ home lives, family immigration histories, educational experiences, future aspirations, civic involvement, and social lives as teenagers. I also engaged in more targeted questioning on how they conceptualized what it means to be an educated person, a citizen, an American, and a Latino. Most clearly, these semistructured interviews reveal students’ own personal reflections—providing me with individual narratives regarding why students value college enrollment and how it is linked to their sense of belonging. This controlled narrative of the self is precisely how interviews are limited, as they are a highly structured and performative mode of conversation.92 Such concerns are not just limited to interviews—the essays and other written materials I collected were limited in the same way. They are all highly curated artifacts. Nonetheless, these interviews and written materials reveal how these young people thought through their lives, educational experiences, and beliefs when asked about them. I also conducted semistructured interviews with Liz, Sofía, four teachers involved with the Succeeders program, and four admissions officers from nearby colleges.93 As I did with the Succeeders, I asked all the adults to reflect on broader questions regarding the relative welcome of the Latino population in Nashville and their understandings of education, citizenship, and self. Similarly, I also asked all adults about their relationships with the Succeeders program and the students. These interviews provided insight into how the adults who care for the Succeeders, and those brokering their admission to college, think about educational access, the young people struggling for it, and the meaning of belonging as it intersects with these two categories. Finally, throughout the project I gathered curricular materials, college admissions handouts, and other materials that provide an archive of both the texts learners collect in the course of becoming college-bound and those they create in the process of applying for college. These texts show the stated goals and objectives of the programming and the admissions process, but also reveal how the discourse of the American Dream is present in educational materials.

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A quotation attributed to Margaret Mead states: “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.” These differences are why ethnographic methods are eclectic by design. Combining methods enabled me to observe how individual perspectives on college matriculation, Latino identity, and belonging map or do not map onto the social and discursive constructions of these issues. No combination of methods can ever “control” for the inherently contradictory ways people understand their lives and their worlds. Youth’s transformative refashioning of belonging and their reproductions of its exclusionary social orders are equally part of their understandings of their accomplishments and identities. Representing the fullness of these seeming contradictions is a critical obligation of the ethnographer.94 In tracing those contradictions, we see how people muddle through an imperfect and complicated world, attempting to make their realities sensible and their worlds livable. In this case, tracking the broad strokes of the more and less transformative ends of youth’s striving reveals that remaking belonging is an uneven and contradictory process. It is also a process that we undertake as individuals with muddy motivations, incomplete information, and inchoate goals. Yet I hope to show that for the Succeeders—and for all of us—this erratic process is a worthwhile one.

o r g ani zation of the book Following this introduction, the book is organized in three sections that explain youth’s conformity to racialized and moralized terms of successbased membership and the alternative terms they propose based in care and kinship. The first section, “Contexts of Belonging,” consists of chapter 1. The introduction and chapter 1 lay out the social, political, and local contexts that shaped Succeeders’ lives, including their schooling and their families’ immigration. Whereas in the introduction I have focused on the main arguments, motivating political and theoretical concerns of the book, and my methodology, chapter 1 hones in on the specific circumstances of belonging in Nashville that youth responded to with their striving.

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In chapter 1, I discuss how Nashville’s success-obsessed cultural politics grounded the Succeeders’ efforts to achieve in order to belong. I outline the city’s recent history of immigration and its qualified acceptance of immigrants in terms of economic success. I then show how similar terms apply in the context of the city’s schools. Nashville public schools are ground zero for broader contestations over belonging because of the special part schools play as institutions that broker inclusion for youth and families. While schools can be overlooked in popular efforts to understand immigrants and belonging, here I show that schools are the heart of the state and a primary site of incorporation into the nation. Educational settings can also be sites of resistance to local and national exclusion, as the Succeeders’ voices attest. By bringing together local histories, immigration politics, educational change, and Succeeders’ sense of it all, this chapter illustrates how the terms of who belongs are worked out not only by activists and policy makers, but also by youth in and through their educations. The next two parts of the book, “Learning to Belong” and “Unlearning to Belong,” are filled with more detailed ethnographic descriptions and the kind of close analysis of observed life that characterizes the anthropological project of witnessing how people live. In these chapters, I analyze how Succeeders talked, wrote, and cared toward their notions of success and membership. In part II, “Learning to Belong,” I show how youth replicated existing and exclusionary terms of belonging through their actions and talk. I start in chapter 2 with how youth came, abstractly, to link their academic success with escaping the stigma of Latino stereotypes. Through that achievement, they hoped to belong. As I begin to demonstrate in chapter 2 and expand on in the following chapter, youth ended up reproducing the very same negative stereotypes about others that they hoped to escape for themselves through educational striving. While Latino stereotypes undergirded Succeeders’ striving, youth also understood their Latino ethnicities through their kinship ties. This focus on close family ties as definitional to Latino identities hints at the dynamics I explore in part III of this book: how caring and kinship can produce a mode of inclusion that is both resilient and resistant. While chapter 2 examines how youth linked education to belonging and how that linkage may exclude others, chapter 3 shows how students

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specifically reproduced belonging’s exclusionary terms in their academic lives. They did so through their language. Focused on students’ college admissions essays and a series of skits in Succeeders club programming, this chapter demonstrates how youth’s self-presentations as moral and academically successful Latino others were consonant with the idea of success being due to individuals’ possession of moral virtues like responsibility, faith, and industriousness. In the final part of the book, “Unlearning to Belong,” I shift focus to how youth constructed kinship with family and friends through educational striving repurposed as care. Through this process, Succeeders proposed a new mode of belonging that resists the marginalizing exclusions of nativist and anti-Latino discourses and low expectations for Latino youth as citizens and students. This new mode of belonging replaces marginalization with affirmation of Latinos’ moral worth through the vernacular terms of familial care. In this section, I show how even as the Succeeders strove toward success, they redefined it in relational terms. In that process, belonging transformed. Succeeders came to see success as ultimately about others and forging caring connections to them. By valuing those connections, these Latino youth created a broader notion of belonging that sustained their education, their communities, and themselves. Chapter 4 turns the focus to these efforts, examining how youth understood their education in relation to their parents, their parents’ care, and their family’s collective national inclusion. By seeing success as a kinship obligation, Succeeders pointed to another way to measure the moral personhood required for membership: how we meet our responsibilities to others. The Succeeders believed their educational success was a unique way that they could reclaim the worth of immigrant parents stigmatized by their undocumented status or low social status jobs. They also positioned this success as only possible through the care of their parents, making success and the belonging it is expected to engender fundamentally relational. Yet there are still remnants of the exclusions explored in the prior chapters to be found here, as success is still the necessary building block of inclusion. While the Succeeders emphasized the importance of care and kinship as moral goods, kinship is also not free from exclusions— particularly those rooted in gender. As youth came to value connection

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and care as valuable in and of themselves, they asserted that a transformation of belonging through kinship is possible. Chapter 5 remains focused on Succeeders’ families but turns to the building of a distinctive kinship obligation between the Succeeders and their siblings. I outline how the Succeeders supported their siblings’ welfare and academic striving—sometimes at a cost to Succeeders’ own striving. I argue that through this altruistic support for others, Succeeders began to see the maintenance of relatedness and support for others’ wellbeing as both a kind of success and a viable alternative frame for belonging. In this and the prior chapter, we begin to see how care was the raw material for youth’s remaking of success, moral personhood, and inclusion as relational, intergenerational, and intragenerational life projects. The next chapter expands on this point, as Succeeders both built kinship through care and took on responsibility for the success of nonfamily. The sixth and final ethnographic chapter examines the supportive peer relationships formed in Succeeders that youth described as “like family.” Peer caring, understood in essentialized terms of relatedness and familial responsibility, is how Succeeders ultimately transformed the very terms of proving membership. By showing that care and concern for both kin and kith were paramount to their idea of achievement, Succeeders positioned success as fundamentally about social ties. In caring about each other, regardless of accomplishment, youth demonstrated that they were worth caring about more globally and that care can become the bedrock of membership. This remaking is a critical alternative to individualistic success and its social exclusions, explored in chapters 2 and 3. The conclusion centers on the much-anticipated graduations of the Succeeders. I also revisited the Succeeders after the pomp and circumstance ended to see how education, success, and belonging’s terms continued to shift as youth left school. I explore the broader implications of success as a means for inclusion and how we might reconsider our roles as caretakers, citizens, and perhaps even succeeders.

Part i

Contexts of Belonging

1

City of Success living and learning in muSiC City

What do you imagine when you think of Nashville, Tennessee? When you see it in your mind’s eye, do you picture crowded souvenir shops selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Getting Shitty in Music City?” Or do you see the cranes that hover menacingly over half-built mega-hotels and gleaming, high-rise condos? Maybe you stay closer to the ground, envisioning the neon kitsch music venues downtown teeming with pink-cowboy-hatted, out-of-towner bachelorette parties? These images are icons of what local journalist Steve Cavendish calls the “honky tonk industrial complex” associated with Nashville’s recent meteoric growth.1 When you think about Nashville, you probably are not thinking about South Nashville. Home to much of the city’s immigrant population, South Nashville has an altogether different set of icons. It’s full of winding, beige apartment complexes rife with what my car’s shocks found to be unexpectedly tall speed bumps. There are simple, cozy ranch houses arranged on dead-end streets and tightly packed trailer parks. Along its main drags are mechanics selling llantas usadas (used tires), car title loan shops promising quick cash, and storefront nonprofits promoting English classes. Bakeries offering their wares in Kurdish, Spanish, and Arabic dot petite strip malls dwarfed by supersized Walmarts. At its neighborhoods’ quiet edges 33

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are its midcentury, low-slung high schools and more recently built concrete ones. Both types are overcrowded, underfunded, and overlooked in this era of roaring economic success. At the time of my research, South Nashville contained the city’s fastestgrowing and most diverse neighborhoods. It bore the brunt of jokes regarding urban blight and served as a cautionary tale regarding both past gang violence and present school failure. A visit inside one of these apartments, trailers, or high schools, however, revealed immigrant families and youth striving to belong in a city that needed them but seemed not to want them. Since the late 1990s, Nashville has experienced unprecedented immigration from across the Global South, especially from Latin America. Despite their centrality to Nashville’s boom—as they cleaned its hotels, cooked food for hungry tourists, and built its ever-expanding skyline— Nashville’s new immigrants were “invisible to the rest of the city.”2 For years they went unnoticed by locals due both to their residential segregation in South Nashville and to immigrants’ “institutional invisibility” in metro government.3 Ms. Millerton, a white, lifelong resident of South Nashville and the teacher who worked closely with the Succeeders club at Gilead High, remembered this period: All I remember kinda seeing is going to a Walmart or going to a Kroger [a regional grocery store chain], literally, and seeing a group of Latino men in plaid and jeans, and, like, they had just gotten off work . . . manual labor, usually dirty hands. . . . And that’s what I remember from the beginning.

Despite this initial invisibility even to more attentive neighbors like Ms. Millerton, Nashville’s immigrants were increasingly visible in its schools starting in the early to mid-2000s.4 As geographer Jamie Winders argues, schools are “often the first institutions to experience the transition from Latino workers to Latino families” and are “frequently the institutions through which immigrant students and their parents first feel connected to the local community.”5 They are also the first sites where the local population encounters immigrants in more sustained ways than furtive glances exchanged at the supermarket. When Ms. Millerton began to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) at a local community college, she began to “see” the immigrant population: “That [teaching] was my first real ‘okay, wow, there are lots

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of immigrants here now.’ ” When she became a teacher in Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), she saw the change even more closely as her emergent bilingual students picked up academic English. By the 2014– 15 academic year, Latino learners would account for 20 percent of the district’s students, and emergent bilinguals comprised 14 percent of the school population.6 Through her teaching, Ms. Millerton also saw how these growing populations were excluded in their schools and city as some colleagues failed to show what she called “willingness” to help emergent bilinguals and Latinos in or outside the classroom. This chapter situates Succeeders’ striving for belonging in the wider success-focused cultural politics of Nashville and its educational institutions. I briefly sketch the city’s recent past, including the latest wave of economic growth, Global South immigration, and local immigrationrelated policies. I show how the city’s political elite included immigrants through highlighting the latter’s role in producing local economic growth. While urban economic growth is different from academic accomplishment, they both prize a common value: achievement. Thus, this more macroanalysis at the level of city politics reveals widely circulating ideals of success-based membership. I then narrow my focus to the role local educational institutions play in brokering belonging. Schools are often ignored when it comes to belonging, but they matter as much as—if not more than—what happens at city hall. Schools are belonging’s front lines. As Ms. Millerton’s experiences attest, schools hold a unique social position as a point of first, sustained contact between newcomers and the local community. They thus can be the foundation of meaningful inclusion or perpetual exclusion. The transformation of Nashville’s schools into immigrant-serving ones is, at its core, about membership. There were persistent inequalities within Succeeders’ schools. Moreover, the dominant success-based terms of membership in schools produced deep and enduring marginalization, as students’ academic failure was used to exclude them institutionally and from a sense of belonging there. However, there were also glimmers of hope in the inclusion that students and teachers alike felt and fought for daily in their schools and in the Succeeders program. As the repositories of students’ hopes and dreams and the location of their sense of community, educational institutions

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played a critical role in forging belonging in Nashville. Throughout this chapter I include the voices of the Succeeders, teachers like Ms. Millerton, and others to show how local histories are lived. The ways students and locals make sense of their city’s cultural politics, immigration history, and schools show how notions of belonging are worked out not only by politicians but by us all.

th e “it ” City : tra C k in g eCon om i C g r o w t h and imm igration in a n ew Cen t ury Midway through my fieldwork in 2013, it seemed everyone from my dad to my dissertation adviser sent me the now locally infamous New York Times profile of Nashville. Nashville, author Kim Severson argued, was the latest “it city” having its moment in the spotlight due to its expanding economy, rising tourism downtown, and even the glamorous (now long canceled) primetime musical soap Nashville.7 Although the national press may just then have been bestowing “it” status on the city, Nashville’s previous century was dominated by economic success. Nashville’s success made it largely exceptional as a southern city.8 Like the other big economic winners of the Sunbelt, Nashville experienced its most significant growth after the 1970s. During that period, local government introduced “business-friendly” incentives like corporate tax exemptions to lure industries southward.9 By the end of the 1990s, Nashville had cemented its status as a national hub for the insurance, healthcare management, music, and corporate services sectors.10 For example, Hospital Corporation of America, one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers, was founded in and is currently headquartered in Nashville. State Farm, Dell computers, Caterpillar Financial, and LifePoint Health also have corporate operations or headquarters in the metro area.11 The city’s rise to economic prominence has only increased since the 1970s, according to its well-advertised, double-digit job and economic market growth figures.12 Its success has been vital to how city leaders and boosters have seen and sold Nashville to would-be tourists and relocating Fortune 500 companies—even if locals, including my in-laws and friends, complain about the increased traffic this success has wrought.13

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Despite Severson’s passing reference to the city as being “alive with immigrants,” the immigrants of South Nashville were mostly ignored in media clips that documented the city’s rise to prominence.14 Immigration, however, has been central to Nashville’s economic growth in both this century and the previous one. Until the end of the twentieth century, the city’s steady population growth was due to the arrival of internal migrants, or US residents moving from one state, region, or city to another.15 As “highskill” labor came to Nashville for work in the 1990s, there were increasing demands on the service, hospitality, and construction industries.16 Instead of rural white and black populations filling these niches, as they had done a century before, it was international immigrants who did so.17 Between the years 2000 and 2012, international immigration accounted for 60 percent of total metropolitan population growth, and foreign-born residents increased from 2 to 12 percent of the city’s population.18 Almost half of these new Nashvillians hailed from Latin America.19 This new local pattern of immigration reflected a broader one of Latin Americans settling in the new destinations of the Southeast at the turn of the twenty-first century.20 Immigration scholars assert that the Southeast had many draws for working-class immigrants from Latin America and original sites of settlement in other US regions. Chief among these was the economic success I have just outlined in the alluring forms of plentiful jobs, a low cost of living, and high wages relative to those available in more saturated labor markets like California.21 In the wake of 9/11 and amid increasingly stringent immigration enforcement, Latin American immigration changed in new destinations like Nashville. It went from being the unnoticed, impermanent labor pool at Kroger that Ms. Millerton remembered seeing to a population of families with small children in South Nashville.22 By 2010, when the oldest Succeeders I worked with finished their first year of high school, Latinos comprised 10 percent of Nashville’s population.23 To give a further sense of the scale and speed of this population change, Nashville’s Latino population (native and foreign born) increased thirteenfold in a twenty-year span—from 4,775 people in 1990 to 62,527 in 2010—an approximately 1,200 percent increase.24 Yet these economic push-pulls and impressive percentage increases tell only part of the story. Immigrants came to Nashville and the South for

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other reasons, including perceived lower levels of immigration enforcement targeting undocumented family members.25 Students whose parents came from rural areas of Central America and Mexico also told me that their parents had moved to Nashville after they heard from early immigrant movers there about the availability of land, the pleasant climate, and the slower pace of southern living.26 Some students also mentioned their families’ desire to leave high-crime urban areas, particularly New York and Los Angeles. Soccer-playing senior Jane-Marie’s family left Los Angeles for precisely this reason: “Another reason they [the family] left was because there was a lot of gangs going on there in Cali. . . . But the ironic thing, when we came over here years later, there was gangs coming up in Nashville.”27 From Succeeders I also heard stories of the much-derided chain migration, or what we might call family migration: an uncle or aunt who moved to Nashville first and then encouraged family reunification. Clusters of aunts, uncles, and cousins already in Nashville made the city— with its ample work opportunities—seem all the more attractive.28 Nashville presented an opportunity to belong, with economic success, reunited families, a house of one’s own, and a calmer way of life. It could grant the American Dream. Latin Americans were the largest group of immigrants in the city, but they weren’t the only ones. Another significant migration stream has been the steady flow of refugees almost entirely not from Latin America. In 2001 Nashville was designated part of the “Building the New American Community” initiative which looked to place refugees in cities that, while not traditional sites of entry, could absorb refugee labor locally.29 In 2012 the state resettled 1,032 refugees from throughout the Global South in Nashville.30 Today, Nashville is home to refugees from Iraq (most notably Kurds), Bhutan, Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia, among other nations.31 Despite their shared “foreignness,” there was a difference in reception for refugee versus economic immigrants in Nashville. In 2010 Sharon, an immigration counselor with over twenty years of professional experience, succinctly expressed this difference to me: I think the reception for refugees is more compassionate than for just immigrants. . . . Most people know they’re refugees and they’ve come from hard times, but they don’t know the hard times that people from Mexico have

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gone through to cross the border. . . . I’ve seen where people have died trying to cross the border and it’s just as sad a story [as that of the refugees] or could be, but reception of refugees is more compassionate.

Despite this compassion differential, both groups of immigrants—the small number of refugees and the large number of Latin Americans— shared common experiences. They both strove to succeed in Music City, worked in the industries fueling its urban growth, lived in the same segregated parts of Nashville, and had children in the same struggling schools. As I describe next, they also faced the same exclusionary terms of local membership predicated on success.

“it ’S no t ar iz ona ,” bu t a r e we i n t e rna S h i o na l? im mi gra n t r e CePtion in naS h v i lle I asked Melissa, an aspiring elementary school teacher and eldest of three sisters, my usual last interview question: “Is Nashville a welcoming place for Latinos? For immigrants?” She paused for a second and gave me—as most students did—a qualified response: “I guess at this time, yes. My parents say that it wasn’t very nice when they got here [in the 1990s].” Her parents were among the vanguard of Mexican immigrants from the western state of Jalisco who first settled in the city. Since coming to Nashville, her father had worked construction doing drywall and her mother at a dry cleaners. I asked her what her parents had told her about the early, unwelcoming days: “That since there weren’t a lot of them [Mexicans and Latinos], they were looked at differently. It wasn’t so much about immigration, but just them being different and not speaking English, so it was a lot harder.” When I asked her about her own experiences of belonging, she described changes from then to now. She stated: “Since our schools are so diverse now, it’s not something strange [to be different] and—there’s so many stores, Mexican stores, and Spanish is spoken a lot more. It’s not something strange.” At the same time that difference became normalized, particularly in schools, Melissa realized that immigration would now temper her belonging. She perceived that non-Latinos thought she and others

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like her “can’t be called . . . American[s] because [of where our] parents come from.” She told me that such an uneven experience of belonging “isn’t a struggle; it’s just what it is.” Melissa’s resigned acceptance that “it’s just what it is” speaks to the shaky terms of belonging for people like her and her family in Nashville. In broad strokes, the local reception of immigrants in Nashville has quickly moved from the ignorance about immigrants’ presence that Ms. Millerton highlighted (the late 1990s), to intolerance (the early 2000s), to the more recent, uneasy acceptance that Melissa noted.32 The early 2000s was a period of high nativism: a nationalistic and xenophobic worldview and policy outlook that looks to defend “natives” against immigrants. Antiimmigrant policies and legislation began appearing at the municipal and state levels. Many policies sought to disrupt daily life for undocumented and other immigrants. For example, the state revoked undocumented immigrants’ ability to get state identification or driver’s licenses, and the city participated in the controversial 287(g) and Secure Communities programs which both enabled local police and sheriffs to enforce national immigration law in the context of normal municipal work like a traffic stop.33 Legislatively, the most significant action was the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to amend Nashville’s city charter to make municipal services provided in the English language only.34 This proposed English-only amendment aligns with Melissa’s understanding of her parents’ frosty welcome in terms of their Spanish language usage. While she doesn’t tie immigration to local exclusion, attempted control over foreign language use is often a cover for nativists’ fight against immigrants and immigration. Indeed, analysis of local media surrounding both the ballot and the amendment suggested deep division and a wider “moral panic” regarding the shift from a majority white to a multiethnic, multiracial city.35 Also lurking under the terms of the amendment was a sense that immigrants were drains on city services rather than active contributors to the local economy. According to local activists, English-only’s defeat was the pivot point to the current, more welcoming Nashville.36 The Tennessee state legislature, however, continues to propose virulently antiimmigrant bills that threaten this municipal welcome.37 Local activists also told me that central to English-only’s demise was their use of rhetoric reinforcing the economic value of immigration.38 Luke,

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a prominent local businessman and immigrant rights activist, discussed how pushing the business angle helped the cause both then and now: And for these politicians to be out there proposing an Arizona bill [SB 1070] that would kill our economy, literally.39 Gee, if the general public knew that, they’d be shocked, I mean they would be really shocked. . . . [I]f we went out to Clay County [a Tennessee county on the state border with Kentucky] or something and Renault [a French car manufacturer] had decided to put a plant in Clay County—not that they have, they haven’t—but “Well, we don’t want those French speaking people here.” They’d love to have those Frenchspeaking people there if it created the employment that they need. . . . We do a lot of international business in Tennessee[;] we have lots of trading partners. Our economy is actually doing much better than most. Cause it’s a very diverse economy. But, you know, these [anti-immigrant] folks, they don’t realize, you know, killing the chicken that laid the golden egg.

Immigration, in Luke’s framing, could be defended as “the chicken that laid the golden egg” of Nashville’s success. Luke was keenly aware of the “sweat equity” of the working-class immigrants who worked in his business and kept Nashville running.40 However, he was careful to frame economic growth not in terms of the labor of low-wage immigrant workers from the Global South, but rather in terms of Global North foreign investors like Renault. Importantly, Luke linked the two groups. These transnational businesspeople face the same nativist rhetoric as workingclass immigrants like Melissa’s parents. His statement that “we don’t want those French speaking people here” echoes a more common refrain about Spanish speakers like Melissa’s parents. He finished his discussion of immigrant rights in business terms: “Even a couple of emails [to me] this morning saying, it’s, you know, ‘we shouldn’t be involved in politics.’ It’s not politics, it’s business. It’s not politics, it’s what’s right for the community.” As he pointed to “what is right,” Luke framed his activism as a moral imperative, but also as an economic or “business” one. In the years since English-only, Nashville has rightfully gained national attention for its relatively warm welcome of immigrants in contrast to other new destinations. This welcome has been fought for by dedicated community members and activists—by Luke and Melissa alike.41 It is undeniable now that southern cities have increasingly global futures due to foreign investment (the imagined Renault factory Luke

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mentioned) and immigrant-owned local businesses (the “Mexican stores” Melissa cited).42 In order to lure more investment into the city, local boosters emphasized Nashville’s growing international diversity. Such efforts are a common strategy for cities looking to draw commercial and residential interest from cosmopolitan investors.43 This strategy is also how immigrants’ difference gets commodified in terms of local economic growth. Then mayor Karl Dean’s administration (2007–15) touted Nashville’s growing immigrant population publicly in such a way: “To Mayor Dean, it is no coincidence that the increase in immigrants and refugees to Nashville has occurred at a time when the city is at its most vibrant” and perhaps, one might add, its most successful.44 Beginning in the late 1990s, local festivals celebrating immigration and the diversity it brings emerged in the city. These included the first-ofits-kind Celebrate Nashville (begun in 1995) and the more recent InterNASHional Food Crawl through South Nashville’s immigrant-owned restaurants (2012), sponsored by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, one of the main players in the robust immigrant nonprofit landscape that has flowered in the city.45 A few students even cited the growing festival circuit as proof of growing tolerance. Natalia stated: “Yes, I do [think Nashville is welcoming], because we have a lot of cultural festivals here.” Such events can be read as a sign of growing tolerance, but also as a mark of cosmopolitan sophistication. As I have just done, scholars often investigate local laws, political rhetoric, and even events like food crawls as key to understanding local terms of membership. Local terms are reflective of national ones. For example, it is critical to remember that Nashville’s nativist period corresponded to a period of increased immigration enforcement during the Obama administration and the nationwide spread of local anti-immigrant laws, like Alabama’s HB 56 (2011) following Arizona’s SB 1070 in 2010. Yet these historical contexts are only one part of the story. Moreover, focusing on them tends to center high-profile governmental actors, activists, and social elites.46 Melissa and the other Succeeders’ reflections on their city reveal that inclusion was even more complex—and restricted—in daily life than these high-level frames suggest. The vast majority of Succeeders thought Nashville was a welcoming and/or friendly city to Latinos and immigrants, matching the common

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political notion that the city is now inclusionary.47 However, most of those students saw this welcome as limited, citing as proof the fact that neither they nor their families had experienced direct discrimination or overt racism. This justification is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the city’s welcome. Many youth saw inclusivity as neighborhood specific, meaning inclusion was only possible in the immigrant neighborhoods of South Nashville. Emma believed that she was welcomed because she lived in “a really heavy, concentrated Hispanic location.” In contrast, Lupita cited the less diverse west of the city and westerly suburbs in opposing terms: “I think areas like Brentwood and Franklin, they are still ignorant.” While Nashville touts its diversity as a lure for elites to relocate, Latino youth like the Succeeders believe they are only included in the city’s immigrant enclaves. Such an understanding indicates that cosmopolitan terms of inclusion are less effective for diverse populations than these terms’ propagators believe. The other key way students qualified their responses was as Melissa did, referencing the city’s past history of intolerance as a foil to a more welcoming period in the 2010s. This rendering aligns with the broad history I have just charted, suggesting a common framework between city boosters and Succeeders. Fernando, who came to Nashville from Guatemala as a child, even put a date on the city’s welcome: “Well, at first back then, it wasn’t—around in 2000. But now, I guess it [Nashville’s welcome] is growing a lot. . . . It’s [Nashville] really not like Kentucky and all that.” Fernando also pointed to another qualification in his statement: Nashville’s welcome was superior to that of Kentucky. This comparative focus underscores that local terms of belonging are not isolated ones for those who live them, but are also relative to other localities’ terms. Sebastián, an aspiring dentist, summed up the ongoing mixed reception of Latino families in the city in the same way, but this time with a different reference. He stated: “I mean, it’s not Arizona,” a state infamous at the time for SB 1070, the harshest anti-immigrant, anti-Latino local legislation in the country. These comparative reflections on the past and other locales underscore that while locally students may feel some inclusion, they are well aware that their inclusion is contingent. Moreover, local inclusion does not necessarily mean they are included elsewhere in the nation, state, or even other neighborhoods of their city.

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Returning to Melissa’s reflections that opened this section, she highlighted another often ignored institution that is a bellwether of belonging: “Since our schools are so diverse now, it’s not something strange [to be different]” (emphasis added). Isabel, an immigrant rights activist and Succeeder, took this sentiment further. She saw the reception of Latinos as mixed and planted schools in the middle of it: “Like, yes and no. To me, personally, I haven’t had any racist comments or anything like that . . . [but] because there are stories where it’s like, well, they [some Nashvillians] don’t really like undocumented students or like undocumented immigrants” (emphasis added). Isabel had been quick to reply to my prior question by stating that her hyper-diverse school was her community, where she felt a sense of unity, mutual support, and connection. In her shifts between student and immigrant in describing immigrants’ local welcome, she recognized that this school-based welcome might not be the case for all students and thus not for all immigrant Nashvillians. Both young women’s responses provide evidence of the link youth draw between schools and country, between belonging in the institution and belonging in the city. For Melissa, Nashville schools were a harbinger of immigration and diversity’s normalization. For Isabel, school could also be a place of very real legal and social exclusion. In the remainder of this chapter, I turn my attention away from the local politics of membership in Nashville to the experience of it in Succeeders’ schools.

equal in Stitu tion S a n d e qua l me m b e rS h i P: S Ch o o l inf raS tru Ctu r e a n d b e lo n g i n g Historically, American schools have worked to culturally assimilate immigrant students through formal and hidden nationalist curricula.48 Additionally, in the not-so-distant past, bigoted local governments restricted minority populations’ access to high-quality schooling (and the potential mobility it offered) through practices like school segregation. In the contemporary moment, schools remain deeply stratified, often segregated places where all students can feel marginalized and anything but “at home” in class or the nation.49 Marginalization is also structural. Poor, minority, and immigrant students often find themselves in struggling,

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underresourced schools in contrast to those of their richer, whiter peers. Cycles of inequality and exclusion are perpetuated as minority students struggle to achieve academic success in schools that have not been designed for them or their success. Yet schools are also where youth, regardless of juridical citizenship status, race, or class, develop shared culture, find friends, and build citizen identities. They are also places where students achieve belonging when teachers and peers recognize them as valued members of the school community and nation.50 Schools can also be sites of expanded inclusion when students and teachers demand equality of opportunity. Education’s fraternal possibilities—of inclusion and exclusion, of opportunity and inequality—show how education is a unique site for maintaining or disrupting orders of membership. In the day-to-day workings of schools as institutions, we see how membership is made and unmade. The most basic way a school can either include or exclude immigrant and immigrant-descendant learners is by providing the basic infrastructure for these students to learn. As I have noted here and in the introduction, being able to fully access and participate in institutions matters to our sense of belonging and our politicization.51 If the people who control those institutions fail to make room for you and your achievement in them, your exclusion is the end result.52 Current battles over resources, curriculum, and hiring strategies in today’s schools are then not just about the bottom line. They are fierce ideological battles where the future of the nation and belonging are decided through how schooling will work, for whom, and to what ends. This fact is apparent in the transition of MNPS into a district serving immigrant and immigrant-descendant learners. As students, families, and educators fight for better schools, they also fight for better belonging in the city and nation. In a city consumed by success, the main educational story, ironically, has been about failure. Despite increasing numbers of emergent bilingual and immigrant-descendant students in MNPS, schools’ infrastructure and students’ needs were mismatched. Such a persistent mismatch suggested newcomers’ ongoing social exclusion in a city that needed their parents’ labor. All the educators I spoke with between 2010 and 2013 suggested that international immigration introduced unprecedented, and unprepared for, linguistic and cultural diversity to MNPS.53 The influx

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of Latino and immigrant students into a district accustomed to a monolingual, Black-white racial binary raised unique challenges. The “institutional invisibility” of immigrant families and a failure to invest the profits of a century of economic growth in public schools only exacerbated these challenges.54 For example, there was an initial dearth of appropriate school services and personnel. These deficiencies included a lack of translation services, insufficient numbers of English Learner (EL) teachers for emergent bilingual students, inadequate forms of parent outreach and engagement, and lagging cultural responsiveness in teaching practices. Ms. Verett, the teacher at Jackson Hills High who supported the Succeeders program there and had worked in MNPS since the late 1990s, recounted that EL services were a meager “two-room operation” in the early days despite clearly increasing need. Moreover, as many educators were often quick to point out, many principals in the district still believed that translation services and the hiring of a few EL teachers were where community outreach started and stopped. All of the educators I spoke with saw efforts to recognize cultural and linguistic pluralism in the mid-2000s as positive signs that MNPS was making an effort toward inclusion. These efforts ran the gamut from the merely celebratory to the potentially transformative— from cultural festivals mentioned in the next chapter to one elementary school’s multilingual storytelling series with immigrant parents.55 While the numbers of family engagement specialists, parent workshops, and in-school translators have grown in MNPS, cracks remain. Committed educators I respect and admire, as well as parents, students, and others, continue to push for more resources. These pushes are made not just in the name of improving rates of academic success, but also to ensure that immigrant-descendant and immigrant youth feel like they belong. When youth, parents, teachers, and other immigrant activists fight for city resources, they attempt to overcome “institutional invisibility.”56 They also demand full membership and the entitlements that come with it for all students. Consider Jim’s efforts. One of the first things I learned about Jim, the Gilead High Succeeders’ club president, was that he got tablets for the history department. On a field trip to the MNPS administrative offices, Jim’s group met with a technology administrator. The administrator droned on

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about the recent tablet program at a high school in a well-heeled part of the city. Jim then asked why Gilead High wasn’t a candidate for such a program: his history teacher had one iPad for the class of thirty-plus students to share. Taken aback, the administrator promised to look into it. A few weeks later, tablets and a note to Jim were delivered to Gilead. Jim’s simple question—Why not my school?—exposed a larger question of whether or not the city’s schools would recognize his majority-minority, immigrant peers as learners who were entitled to the same education as their white peers. There were other examples of successful advocacy for equality of membership by students’ allies. The formidable and funny Ms. Carmen—who worked with the Succeeders program at Edward Maloney High and was a dozen-plus-year veteran teacher in MNPS—had seen that emergent bilinguals were not getting the test accommodations they should by law receive. To rectify this problem, she chose to “shove myself into this process at the beginning” to make sure that accommodation happened and happened correctly. Such an effort meant students could enjoy needed accommodations. It also made a larger claim, demanding that the school fully saw, met the needs of, and included immigrant learners. Despite the efforts of heroic educators like Ms. Carmen, schools still struggle with gaps in teaching staff ’s treatment of immigrant youth. In other words, immigrant students experience a “care gap” when compared with their white, nonimmigrant peers.57 Part of that care gap has been teachers’ lack of experience with immigrant learners. Ms. Carmen stated: Whether white or black, teachers at my school, they’re afraid of immigrants because they have no experience of being with them. So it’s like, “Eh, they don’t bite. They’re just kids,” and they forget that. A lot of teachers get it, and a lot of them don’t. And then there’s that, “They can’t speak English so they’re stupid.”

In her last comment Ms. Carmen pointed to the more insidious side of a lack of caring: teacher bias, which can make schools inhospitable places where students and families don’t belong. If schools are the first arm of the state that immigrant families encounter, teachers are its first representatives. When teachers exclude their students and their families, they send a powerful message: we don’t want you here. My interactions with

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Mrs. Keohane—a white South Nashville native who had around forty years of experience in MNPS—further underscores this fact.58 In our interview during the waning days of summer 2010, Mrs. Keohane expressed her frustration with the Latino families in her school—a feeling she said was shared by white and Black American parents. She relayed to me her and native-born parents’ frustrations with Latino immigrant parents during Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) meetings. According to Mrs. Keohane, Latino parents failed to silence their cell phones, spoke loudly in Spanish, and allowed their children to play during meetings. Fed up, she stated: We’ve got to find a nice way, a PC way, of teaching the [Latino] parents etiquette. . . . It’s not that we mind them being here, it’s that somebody’s got to help teach them some etiquette. If they’re here, if they are going to live here in America, they—you know, we’re not asking them to have all American ways. But, just be respectful of our culture. I mean we are always told we need to respect their culture. . . . Well, they need to respect our culture.

In this comment, Mrs. Keohane voiced frustration not just with Latinos, but also with multiculturalism generally. She stated that she resented having to “respect their culture” when she perceived that her culture—of working-class, English-speaking whites who live in South Nashville—was not afforded the same respect.59 She privately wished these Latino parents wouldn’t come to PTO meetings, an outcome that would effectively bar them from school events as full members of the school community. Later, I saw Mrs. Keohane at a MNPS professional development session focused on immigrant learners. Greeting me with a warm hug, Mrs. Keohane told me that the event was just another way MNPS was taking up teachers’ time. While she said “[I] loved my Latino kids [her students],” I wondered how her love for them came across in her indignant attitude toward their immigrant parents. When I asked educators to reflect on Nashville schools’ performance in teaching Latino and immigrant populations, they typically responded that schools initially struggled but improved significantly toward becoming better, but not perfect, institutions. Part of that improvement, they and others argued, was the emergence of ethnically and racially targeted school partner programs like Succeeders.60 Schools relied on the growing

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collection of service-providing immigrant nonprofits for teachers’ professional development, parental programming, and outreach for students. Some teachers felt this increased reliance on nonprofits helped schools become more culturally sensitive and responsive, whereas others argued that the result of nonprofit-school partnerships was a difficult-to-navigate web of services. It was clear, as I bounced from interviewing the head of one school-based nonprofit to another, that these partnerships created a shadow network of educational allies for immigrant learners.61 These partners looked to provide what the city would or could not: an opportunity for immigrant learners’ “success.” One such partner was the Succeeders program. Teachers agreed that Succeeders was a relatively seamless nonprofit partner that improved schools’ ability to serve Latino learners and blunt sharp opportunity gaps. The program worked in six high schools with high Latino enrollments but low Latino graduation rates. I conducted fieldwork in four of those schools: Hickory Heights High and Gilead High, two large high schools in the city’s far south; Edward Maloney, a significantly older high school that had traditionally served white and Black students on the city’s rural edge; and Jackson Hills High, a traditionally white working-class high school smack in the heart of the immigrant southside. Table 1 provides a composite overview of these high schools’ demographics and educational outcomes. I briefly describe the contours of the Succeeders program here, and I provide more information on the program, its history, its structure, and its student population in the appendix. Succeeders was founded in 2002 as an occasional Saturday morning, all-ages program committed to improving Latino graduation rates.62 When I conducted my research, the Succeeders program consisted of several moving parts. Its core was the two-hour biweekly, after-school club meetings held in a teacher’s classroom at one of the six high schools. At each school there was a teacher “sponsor,” the teacher whose classroom was used for meetings and who was the point person for the program at the school. Run mostly by Liz, the after-school clubs followed a college access and leadership development curriculum developed by Sofía in conjunction with Liz that consisted of group activities and discussions. There were also weekend field trips to local workplaces and colleges, case management of students’ educational progress by Sofía and Liz, a college

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contexts of belonging Table 1  Composite Succeeders High School: Demographics and Academic Achievement, 2012–2013 Enrollment

1,705

 Hispanic

25%

 White

29%

 Black

41%

 Asian

5%

 Economically disadvantaged

71%

Graduation rate overall

75%

 Latino graduation rate

74%

Average ACT score

17

Source: Tennessee Department of Education (n.d.) This composite is the average of the six schools participating in the Succeeders program at the time of this research. To preserve anonymity, I do not provide the disaggregated data or the ranges.

fair, and fall and spring break camps consisting of a mix of similar programming. In its 2012–13 form, the Succeeders organization effectively operated as a kind of enhanced school guidance and enrichment program for Latino students that improved upon the services Succeeders had or should have had in their schools. While the Succeeders program provided these benefits, it did much more. It allowed students to come out as undocumented in a safe environment, to process experiences of inequality with peers, to have fun, and to forge relationships with fellow Latino learners. In short, as detailed in chapter 6, it provided a community while also enabling academic success. I am less interested in the upward growth of the Succeeders’ test scores than in the relational bonds formed there and their social impact. Creating a space within struggling schools where students could share their hopes and fears, find like-minded peers with similar experiences, and gain the mentorship of dedicated teachers and the Succeeders staff is a critical, caring intervention in the structure of schools. In the supportive work of the Succeeders staff, care of devoted teachers, and the efforts of students like Jim, I came to see how inclusion could

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be expanded. Undergirding these efforts, of course, was an emphasis on improving rates of measurable success. Jim got the tablets to improve his and his peers’ performance in their AP US history course. Ms. Carmen got accommodations for her students to improve their test scores. Succeeders exists because of its objective of meaningful improvement in individual student outcomes, even if it thrives because of the community students find there. Success matters. However, inequitable schooling outcomes among MNPS students suggest that the work toward meaningful inclusion at the institutional level remains unfinished.

“g h etto ” SChool S a n d g ra d uat i o n rat eS : S uCCeSS a S e xC lu S ion in S u CCe e d e rS ’ SC h o o lS Mrs. McCann’s classroom at Hickory Heights High School was maximally decorated. The orange bulletin boards that flanked her dry erase boards overflowed with Succeeders program event flyers and school announcements. On the remaining wall space she had tacked up brightly colored posters of flamenco dancers, sweeping shots of Maya pyramids, and laminated printouts of inspirational quotes. There was even student work mounted on the ceiling tiles. Her classroom, like those of all Succeeders club sponsors, was the eye-catching end product of teachers’ unending efforts to make their classrooms into havens for their students. In the Succeeders program high schools, I spent most of my time in soothing spaces like Mrs. McCann’s inviting classroom. I knew, of course, that these high schools had the usual issues facing poor, urban schools: chronic absenteeism, frequent teacher turnover, high suspension rates, occasional in-school violence, overcrowding, limited resources, and poor academic outcomes among its structurally disadvantaged, majorityminority learners. Lupita, one of Gilead High’s Succeeders, was blunt when it came to describing her school, its quality, and its reputation. It was “ghetto,” she said—meaning, it was poor, disadvantaged, and stigmatized in the city. She hated going there. As I discuss in chapter 5, Lupita and other elder siblings like her sought to negate their experiences of “ghetto” schools by enrolling their younger siblings in high-quality public magnet schools or even private ones. These students used their own

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experiences as educational guinea pigs in MNPS’s failing schools to ensure better outcomes for their siblings. If a city’s success is measured in its growth rates, what are the signals of success for its schools or other educational interventions? The myriad of seemingly straightforward statistics that define educational policy—from college readiness indicators, to standardized test scores, to absenteeism rates—are used as direct proxies for success. Tracking whether or not an educational program is successful in including immigrant-origin learners and imparting a sense of belonging is quite a bit trickier. Quantitative education scholars rely on graduation rates to track an individual school’s or intervention’s ability to successfully serve students. However, quantitative truths are not always what they seem. We can think of graduation rates— and discrepancies between them according to various axes of difference— as indicators of whether or not the right to an education is equally enjoyed by all national members, including immigrants and immigrant descendants.63 Students’ performance in school is the canary in the coal mine for how well supported they are in their schools and how they may feel about school and their place there. We can also look just underneath the statistics to see how success-based inclusion’s limits are acutely felt by students. Since the earliest days of its shift toward becoming a more international school district, MNPS’s graduation rates have been consistently disparate between white, Black, and Asian populations on the one hand and emergent bilinguals and Latinos on the other. While, as table 2 shows, the situation was particularly dire in 2003, Latinos and emergent bilinguals continue to graduate at a lower rate than most of their peers at the city, state, and national levels (see table 3). Such discrepancies serve as troubling indicators that these students are not well served by their local schools, their state, or their nation.64 The four focal schools did not fare much better; occasionally they fared worse. The data on the students in the Succeeders program show more quantifiable achievement (table 4). These improved outcomes are to be lauded; however, amid their academic achievements, Succeeders themselves grew increasingly critical of how such indicators speculate that their worth corresponds to a standardized test score. I caution against interpreting improved scores as the enduring value of the Succeeders program. It is students’ critique of success-based membership that matters most to measuring the program’s “merit.”

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city of success Table 2 Graduation Rates for Metro Nashville Public High Schools (MNPS), 2003–2013 Average MNPS (%)

White (%)

Black (%)

Asian (%)

Latino (%)

ELL (%)

2003

59.1**

64.4

54.9

63.2

43.3

—

2007*

70.0

73.6

68.0

79.9

57.7

—

2008

72.6**

75.4

72.5

79.9

57.3

—

2009

73.1

77.0

71.9

83.2

61.3

—

2010

82.9

83.1

82.6

91.5

80.8

—

2011

76.2

77.1

76.8

90.1

66.5

64.7

2012

78.4

80.6

77.9

86.2

71.6

64.9

2013

76.6

78.9

75.8

81.8

72.3

68.0

Sources: Tennessee Department of Education (n.d.), Tennessee State Library and Archive (n.d.-a), Tennessee State Library and Archive (n.d.-b), Tennessee State Library and Archive (n.d.-c), Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (2010), and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools Department of Research, Assessment, and Evaluation (2015). Note: Graduation rates calculated differently in different years: according to averaged freshman graduation rate (AFGR) for 2007–9, adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) for 2010–13, and an older formula in AY 2002–3. *Data from 2004–6 only available at the aggregate level. **Based on male and female graduation rates.

Table 3 Public School 4-Year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate (ACGR), 2013 National Rate (%)

Tennessee Rate (%)

MNPS Rate (%)

White

86.6

89.8

78.9

Black

70.7

77.8

75.8

Asian

88.7

90.3

81.8

Latino

75.2

81.3

72.3

Limited English proficiency

61.1

72.8

68.0

Sources: National Center for Educational Statistics (n.d.) and Tennessee Department of Education (n.d.).

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Table 4 Succeeders’ Academic Outcomes

Number of Seniors

Graduation Rate (%)

College Application Rate (%)

College Enrollment Rate (%)

2010–11

139

93

43

38

2011–12

80

93

57

47

2012–13

83

94

85

64

2013–14

93

100

82

61

Year

Source: Succeeders Program staff (pers. comm., 2014).

Teachers and nonprofit service providers argued that the low graduation rates for emergent bilinguals and Latinos were the product of many things. These ranged from a breakdown in already-strained guidance and support services, to a lack of care for Latinos and emergent bilinguals despite professional development meant to foster it, to the pressures of high-stakes testing, to a district-wide push for higher graduation rates. When I asked educators about the significant jumps in Latino graduation rates in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, their answers suggested that the numbers lied. Some interlocutors suggested that the graduation rate numbers were artificially bumped up in the early 2010s. Around this time, schools implemented policies to remove learners over the age of nineteen from the student population and to place lagging learners in the Academy, an alternative and mostly online school. Once in the Academy, students, it seemed, were not counted in their schools’ graduation rate data. As many teachers saw it and one teacher put it directly, emergent bilinguals and lowachieving Latinos became “scapegoats” for low district-wide graduation rates. As a result, these learners were often targeted for removal through both policies. The removals were not just about bumping up the stats: they were also about systematic exclusion from schools and from belonging. I heard about or witnessed the scapegoating of more than a handful of students. June, the youth coordinator at a refugee resettlement agency, told me of a particularly harrowing set of meetings between her, Shugri (an emergent bilingual Somali student), Ms. Verrett (the family outreach

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coordinator and Succeeders sponsor at Jackon Hills High), and Mr. Atkins, the school principal. Mr. Atkins had sent a letter informing Shugri and her family that she would be placed in the Academy in the next academic year. I was familiar with this type of letter. Some of my English learners in the adult ESL program I taught in had asked me to parse the letters for them. According to June, Mr. Atkins was looking to remove Shugri because she was both nineteen and unlikely to graduate on time. At the last meeting, June was taken aback when Mr. Atkins asked Shugri to tell him—in two minutes—why she “deserved” to graduate from Jackson Hills High. Shugri told him she wanted to be with her friends and her teachers, like Ms.Verett and June. She also didn’t want to clean MNPS toilets with her parents at night forever—her current after-school job. She was allowed to stay. Angel, a nineteen-year-old, low-achieving, homeless Succeeder at Hickory Heights High, was only able to graduate with his peers at his school because of Mrs. McCann’s efforts in lobbying the principal, Dr. Ruiz. Together, Mrs. McCann and Dr. Ruiz created a work-around to the strictures of the system. Angel could continue at school and graduate with his Hickory Heights classmates if he logged onto the Academy’s system and then logged off. By doing this, if Angel failed to pass his outstanding remedial coursework, he would not be counted against the school’s graduation rate. Instead, he would be a failure of the alternative system. If he did not fail, he could be counted as a success for Hickory Heights High School and counted toward its all-important graduation rate. For Angel, who dreamed of his education making him “a productive person in the society,” the chance to remain with his supportive teachers was critical to his sense of self-worth. Both Shugri’s and Angel’s cases illustrate the challenges facing learners like them and the high stakes of educational attainment. While these two students benefited from supportive allies’ intervention, there were plenty of others who did not. For these other students, the goal of success would be used to exclude them from their schools, the futures they imagined for themselves, and ultimately belonging. Pulling emergent bilinguals and struggling Latino youth out of their schools to not tarnish a school’s record of academic success is a violent act of exclusion. It sacrifices these youth’s thriving for the sake of statistics. Struggling emergent bilinguals and minority learners were “scapegoats”

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for a system built to fail them. As education scholars have long noted, the labeling of some youth as “model minorities” is at its core about labeling some minorities as moral strivers and others as immoral failures. Such labeling creates a color line of belonging and academic success.65 It also papers over the failures of school systems to ensure equal opportunity to all learners. In a city obsessed by success, the failure of its schools and the steadfast hope for academic success held by its students form a deep and lasting paradox.

mo r e t h a n S uCCeSS : S uCC eed erS ’ e xP e r i e nC e o f belo ng in g in S Chool Alix and I sat cross-legged on the beat-up couch in the newly designated Succeeders room at Hickory Heights High. The principal, Dr. Ruiz, had happily let the program use the otherwise empty classroom when Liz had broached the idea of spending one afternoon per week at the huge high school. Liz had just popped out of the classroom to head over to Gilead High’s club, leaving Alix and me to decorate the desolate classroom with Mrs. McCann’s leftover décor. Alix was a senior, an undocumented Venezuelan student who had moved from New Jersey to Nashville in the early 2000s. She dreamed of being a nurse and loved watching the Food Network, particularly Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. Her father was an occasional Pentecostal preacher and a regular construction worker. Her mother watched neighborhood kids in the family home, attempting to recapture a career as a primary school teacher that she had left behind in Venezuela. Alix had just received her acceptance letter to her dream school: Baldwin College, a conservative Christian university in suburban Nashville. In the afterglow of our decorating, we celebrated her college acceptance with some chocolates that I placed on the middle couch cushion between us. Alix showed little hesitation in answering my question. I had asked her to define community and tell me if she had a community in Nashville.66 She replied: “School’s pretty much my life, so I guess there is no other community.” As an undocumented person, Alix was aware that she wasn’t afforded the same opportunities to belong as her citizen peers: “I mean,

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like, I’ve been here all my life but it’s like—it’s hard because I don’t get, I feel like I don’t get the equal treatment as a natural-born American.” School, as she saw it, was a space where she could belong, participate, and get “equal treatment,” if not equal quality of schooling. Alix was an excellent student, but it wasn’t just the few “good” students in struggling schools who felt this way. Angel, whom Mrs. McCann had administratively manipulated out of the Academy, expressed a similar understanding of school-based belonging and community. He worried about how he would fare when he left high school. To him, school was the place where he could “feel good, because you know you have people in your back who cares about you. And when you do something wrong—I mean you know the little things that you do, bad decisions—they are there to support you.” As he spoke, I remembered the preceding week’s events. Angel had failed to make up another remedial class. Mrs. McCann had chastised him about it before the Succeeders program meeting. I remembered her exasperated look, his sheepish shoulder shrug as he excused his mistake with a cringe-inducing, “I just didn’t feel like doing it.” Then Mrs. McCann commanded him to do the work that weekend before she picked him up for church from the friend’s house where he was crashing. Mrs. McCann cared for him, well beyond his grades. She was “there to support” him even if he didn’t act for his own success. As a result, he felt “good” about school and his place there. He later graduated. He was a success for his high school. He was a success to himself. These outcomes were possible through Mrs. McCann’s high expectations for him and her care for him.67 These experiences of institutional inclusion matter, especially for students like Angel who are otherwise deeply marginalized. While such institutional settings can result in positive academic outcomes, they can also result in a deeper sense of belonging. Most of the responses to my question “Do you have a community?” cited school or the Succeeders organization within the students’ schools as their community. As explored in chapter 6, students often felt a particularly strong sense of community and membership in Succeeders, likening the group to family. As David, a newcomer to Succeeders that year, stated: “I always want to have time for Succeeders. They are like my family.” These responses, at a very basic level, suggest that not only is school and the

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contexts of belonging

Succeeders program where students spend a lot of their time, but it is the place where they—as immigrant and immigrant-origin youth—feel a sense of membership.68 Beyond a feeling of connection, students also saw their schools as bulwarks against the exclusion of diverse community members. Students often pointed to their diverse schools as exemplars of the ideal Nashville. Alejandro went so far as to state that the “people who are still racist” in Nashville “should come to Jackson Hills [his high school] because we really do try to work together with everybody.” Some even pointed to their schools as buffers to nativism and racism. Neveah remarked: “I haven’t really been exposed to actual racism. I feel like . . . I’d be very hurt, because Edward Maloney High has a lot of interracial people, different races and stuff, so there’s not a lot of discrimination . . . and if there is, the people usually get shut down real fast.” A few days later, she was told by a megachurch pastor that as an undocumented immigrant she was a sinner who deserved to be cast out of the nation and heaven. She now knew the sting of actual bigotry. In Alix’s, Neveah’s, Angel’s, and Alejandro’s comments, their academically struggling but diverse schools were celebrated as positive examples of the inclusive community that Nashville could be. Moreover, students’ reports that their schools were their communities suggest that MNPS schools, despite their faults, were institutional contexts where many students felt welcome. The seeming disconnect between low student achievement rates and students’ love for their schools suggests that schools matter as a lever of inclusion beyond academics. I do not mean to suggest that as long as Succeeders like their schools, it doesn’t matter if those schools are failing them as learners. Rather, I suggest that simple markers of academic success do not capture the fullness of institutional belonging as a part of national belonging. Moreover, failing schools whose teachers and administrators fight to serve their learners better—as the staff of Succeeders’ schools do—show how solidarity can be success when it comes to belonging. Importantly, while students saw their schools as positive forces in their communities, they also were quick to point out the negatives. Students like Lupita, who characterized her school as “ghetto,” were well aware of the academic failings of their schools. Many high achievers felt let down

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academically by their schools. Beyond schooling outcomes, there were other failings. Jim described a negative interaction with a teacher in his prior year at Gilead High. When Jim showed up at the first class of the year, the teacher told him he “didn’t belong” in the higher-level math course and that there must have been a mistake. It did not escape Jim that he would be the only Latino, and the only immigrant, in the class. Jim felt embarrassed by the teacher’s remarks, but he also felt discriminated against. Sometimes these shots were less subtle. Courtney described a litany of school-based slights: Like, one time at Hickory Heights [which she attended for a year before transferring to Jackson Hills]—I was at Hickory Heights and I was speaking Spanish to my friend. My teacher was like, “Speak English. This is America. Now, get out of my classroom.”. . . [There was] this other Black guy [at Hickory Heights] who said, he told me at school, he was like “Oh go back to your country and chop tomatoes.” . . . And then, this other girl, I got so upset because . . . she called [another student] a wetback.

While Jim and Courtney both still saw their schools as the location of their communities despite profiling and poor quality, Courtney’s response suggests that schools were still a place where some students had hostile experiences. Moreover, these in-school experiences made them acutely aware of their exclusion from the nation in race- and success-based terms. In sum, students were cogent analysts of their schools—their flaws, their steady improvements, and their role as critical sites where inclusion can be made either possible or impossible. In the variety of Succeeders’ experiences and outcomes, we see that belonging is fitful. Students can see their schools as their community but also can be told by a teacher that they don’t belong. Schools can be places of support but also places of exclusion.

Co nC luS ion Nashville’s history of legislative fights and its economic growth curves can only show so much about living in the city as an immigrant or immigrant descendant. Examining how the meanings of belonging and success are worked out in schools by teachers, students, and administrators reveals

60

contexts of belonging

the lived messiness of belonging in Nashville. In this chapter we see how local contexts—including institutional ones—provide a unique prism through which we can examine how notions of belonging and membership are constructed and contested. Through individuals’ sense making and navigating of these contexts, we see how politics plays out in ordinary ways. Our experiences are shaped by broader social orders, by city boosters’ efforts to grow and by local nativist politicians’ efforts to exclude; however, individual actions too shape these processes, such as when a student demands, and receives, tablets for his classroom. Alongside the political elite of the city, Succeeders saw Nashville as more welcoming over time, with schools making critical improvements. Succeeders were able to situate their schools and city in relation to others, making mental maps of more and less inclusive institutional and national geographies. These youth were able to track the welcoming and unwelcoming spaces in their schools and hometown. Succeeders’ mental frameworks of their city and schools, introduced here, illustrate the keen grasp these youth had of the cultural politics of their city and times. Succeeders applied this syncretic kind of sense making to their own identities as they intersected with currents of thought regarding what it means to be Latino, educated, and worthy of inclusion. These understandings were at times compatible with the views of people in their broader community. In other instances, their understandings were illustrative of efforts to fashion a new sense of belonging on their and their families’ own terms. In this chapter I have focused primarily on the big picture of international immigration and the smaller one of local schools. The remainder of the book tracks not just how students opine on these ideas of immigrants’ value, schools’ social role, or the place of immigrants in the city and nation, but also how they act on their opinions in socially reproductive and transformative ways. The next chapter shows how individual youth make sense of more Latino-specific cultural forms and formulations as they attempt to assert their value as educated, ethnic others.

Part ii

Learning to Belong

2

Mowing the Lawn and Getting Pregnant latinidad and eduCational exCePtionaliSm

Reggaetón remixes blasted from the Zumba class next door. I was in the Succeeders office trying to finish up my interview with Sebastián. He leaned in closer to my recorder in a surprisingly fruitful attempt to maximize his voice over the music. The blaring bass reverberated through the thin walls. Now practically shouting, I asked him to define what it means to be Latino and if he identified as such. At the end of the interview, as I clicked off the recorder, Sebastián told me that it was hard not to laugh as I asked these questions when what he called “beaner” music rang out from the room next door.1 On our way to the parking lot, we let out our concealed laughter over the incongruity of talking about the personal meanings of Latinidad—or Latino-ness—over a Latin pop soundtrack. In the interview, with a poker face that didn’t betray his stifled laughter, Sebastián had told me that he considered himself Latino: “I am, 100 percent. . . . At the end of the day, that’s what I am. At the end of the day, I’m proud of my heritage.” He contrasted his pride to the attitude of his cousin, Serena, who lived in a white-majority suburb and was “embarrassed” to be Latina. He attributed her embarrassment and his pride to their different schools and neighborhoods:

63

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learning to belong

Maybe because she goes to Eastlake High, where it’s majority white, and maybe they make racist jokes. . . . She grew up in a more American American, like Caucasian, area and I was born in a place where it’s a melting pot. Being Mexican is actually cool here [in his neighborhood] kind of thing, but at the same time, don’t be ashamed of who you are.

In the contrast between himself and his cousin, Sebastián pointed to the importance of proximate influences (like neighborhoods and schools) and social interactions (like racist jokes) in shaping ethnic identity. While recognizing the power of those influences, Sebastián held fast to the notion that Latinos, despite racism, should be proud and not “ashamed” of their heritage. He also demonstrated an understanding that being “American American” meant being white, suggesting that his Latinidad may mean only partial Americanness.2 In contrast to Sebastián’s assertion that he was “100 percent” Latino, what composes Latinidad is not “100 percent” given, even for Latinos.3 The panethnic label of Latino draws together a diverse array of national identities, racial groups, and Indigenous languages into one social category, resulting in both solidarity and subgroup tensions.4 The very terms Latino/a, Hispanic, Latin@, and most recently Latinx are themselves complicated signifiers imbued with shifting notions of inclusion and exclusion. Moreover, as this chapter shows, youth’s definitions of Latinidad in reference to their own lives, educations, and families were varied, multidimensional, and even contradictory.5 Succeeders understood being Latino in interconnected terms: those of their families, as Sebastian did with Serena; pervasive anti-Latino stereotypes; and positive but clichéd notions of Latinidad, like the Zumba music that plays on the recording of Sebastián’s interview.6 Exploring youth’s conceptualizations of Latinidad seems far afield from US belonging and schooling. However, Succeeders lived under the weight of pan-Latino stereotypes. Their perceptions of Latinidad’s negative reception and experiences of Latino threat stereotyping by nonLatino others formed the basis of their striving. It also came to form the basis for their critique of the racial, moralized, and success-based terms of US membership. As they strove to distinguish themselves as proper Latinos, these efforts also illustrated how those most vulnerable to exclusion from belonging can enforce its limited terms. In sum, the Succeeders’

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understanding of their Latinidad suggests the bleeding edge of our collective notions of how membership is practiced, inherited, and linked to self. Emerging from the Succeeders’ notion of Latinidad is a Latino respectability politics where educational achievement is proof of the “good” Latino personhood needed to belong. As youth viewed themselves in terms of ethnoracial stereotypes, they began to see education as a circumvention of the racialized exclusion that makes only whites “American Americans.” Success became the way out of race and the way toward belonging. Success was also an individual way out, one that relied on marking yourself as distinctive from your community. This and the next chapter focus on how Succeeders reproduced existing racial and moral terms of belonging through striving. In this chapter, I show how youth linked academic achievement to belonging. As they made this linkage, they asserted that Latino academic achievers were “good” Latinos worthy of inclusion, whereas nonachievers, as “bad” Latinos, were not. In this way, education is a sensible route for escaping racial and moral stigma. This chapter provides a general outline of how students linked educational exceptionalism with belonging and thus how striving can promote the existing terms of belonging. In the next chapter, I detail how this reproduction of exclusionary terms of membership happened specifically in the medium of students’ speech in club meetings and their college essays. Both chapters show how abstract aspiration leads to real exclusion. I also hint in this chapter at how Succeeders unraveled limited racialized and moralized terms through family ties, a theme taken up in part III of this book. In emphasizing their families, Succeeders showed that Latinidad can also be about connections across nations and familial generations. This is not to say that these familial understandings of Latinidad are not also limited, particularly around the contradictions of proving one’s worth by potentially degrading that of other family members. In tracking Latinidad’s meaning to youth, it is possible to see how the scope of belonging is both tightened along the lines of success and race and expanded through our connections to others. This tension between the castigated, the celebratory, and the consanguineous narrows the scope of Latinidad for youth and forces the distinctly Latino respectability politics present in exclusionary educational striving.

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S Pi Cy and S P ir itua l : l atin ida d and Po Sit iv e S ter e oty PeS Pedro told me that I should check out the Egypt booth since they “always have a good vibe,” visit the El Salvador booth for the pupusas, and stick around for his breakdancing. The soccer-playing senior was currently representing Spain at Jackson Hills High’s International Day. A fundraiser for the school, the event was a community highlight. Students created booths in the gym complete with informative posters, household objects offered as artifacts, and, to my delight, snacks. It was a micro-version of events like Celebrate Nashville or the InterNASHional Food Crawl that I highlight in chapter 1. Most students were representing their or their family’s nation of origin. I was initially surprised to see Mexican-born Pedro at the Spain booth. Pedro told me that Mexico already had “a ton of people” and that the event planners needed someone for Spain. They speak Spanish in Spain—close enough—he figured. Alejandro, one of the student planners of International Day and a dedicated Succeeder, had previously told me that the music, clothes, and dances on display all had to be approved as appropriate by the event’s teacher sponsor. The food did not. As students danced to a mix of regional music and hip-hop, they performed what it was to be a teacher-approved Mexican, Honduran, or person from various other nations of origin. I consumed it all with both my eyes and stomach. Jackson Hills High’s International Day is emblematic of easy, or passive, multiculturalism—the kind that was also highlighted by city boosters as a lure for urban sophisticates to Nashville. This mode of multiculturalism works to highlight what Shalini Shankar calls “culture with a capital C . . . food, clothing, music, and dance” rather than to develop youth’s understanding of “the power relations that contribute to [the] inequality” that necessitates International Days in the first place.7 The event is also emblematic of something else: how youth define their ethnic identities, and their panethnic one, in celebratory but stereotypical terms.8 In school, work, and their broader lives, the Succeeders learned what limited parts of Latinidad would be approved of socially and institutionally. Although a limited means of assessing youth’s conceptualizations of Latinidad, my interview questions on it provide a useful map of how

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Figure 2. Succeeders’ piñatas, made during a field trip. Photo by author.

youth think about these questions when asked to consider them. Many students cited practices like the foodways, folklore, clothes, dance, and Spanish-language skills on display at International Day.9 Javier, a junior student who loved Japanese anime, shared a typical response: “The culture that you’re exposed to makes you Latino . . . the food, the language, the holidays, all that.” Beyond language and cultural traditions, there was also evidence of a heavy reliance on positive stereotyped traits in defining Latinidad.10 As Lupita stated, being Latino means “being family-oriented, having some sort of strong religion affiliation, being very driven and determined.” Such responses emphasized the tropes of familism, religiosity, and “sweat equity” that circulate among the media, social scientists, and others when it comes to defining Latino populations.11 There was one more stereotype added onto this pile: being passionate, “spicy,” or having “flavor,” or an attitude or style that is attractive. For example, class cutup Courtney replied that “being Latina is just—I just have flavor in my blood,

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you know? It’s just, like, I am so, like, you know, I love to dance and I love to cook.” This kind of response was only expressed among women, suggesting that the common trope of the tempestuous but domestic Latina was being repurposed from a negative to a positive by the young women likely to be branded with this stereotype. Collectively, these notions of Latinidad are those most readily apparent in popular imaginings of it.12 Such pop imaginings are not limited to the folkloric, but also include pigeonholes like the passionate Latina woman or the devout one. I am not suggesting that the largest organizational principles of diversity, like language and food, are an inaccurate understanding of Latinidad. Rather, it is an understanding that suggests the narrowed scope of what the Succeeders believed to be the parts of Latinidad that are socially valued and worthy of pride. It also suggests that Latinos’ membership is predicated on a softening of difference to palatable terms. Events like International Day, sometimes the lone event in a school year to acknowledge difference among students, reinforce these circumscribed terms of acceptable minority identity. It is important to acknowledge that the Succeeders likely relied on these affirmative terms for precisely that reason: they were positive and insulated the students’ self-image from the common and injurious stereotypes that they wished to distance from themselves. While these upbeat conceptions are tangential to youth’s striving, I include them here to provide a fuller representation of youth’s notions of Latinidad and to suggest that such understandings have value in protecting youth. It was the negative stereotypes—the ones Succeeders hoped others did not perceive them as— that became central to both these youth’s striving and their propagating of the exclusionary terms of belonging.

“ S tu C k o n that S ter e oty P e” : y out h li v i n g with and r e Pl i Catin g the l ati n o t h r e at Salvadoran-born Janitza felt the sting of stereotypes from non-Latinos: I’ve seen people looking at me with the corner of their eyes because ‘I’m Hispanic. . . . Like, I feel like I’m proud of being Latina, but all this is stereotypes. . . . They think just because you’re Hispanic—you reproduce

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[children] three times more than the other people [or] just because you’re Hispanic—you’re part of La Mara [a Salvadoran gang].

Lupita, also Salvadoran, echoed Janitza’s assessment, arguing that nonLatinos were “stuck on that stereotype” when it came to her and other Latino youth. She provided a litany of the stereotypes she and her peers faced: Well, there’s so many stereotypes, like the average Hispanic girl gets pregnant at 16. The average Hispanic boy drops out of high school, works in some kind of construction or manual labor kind of job. They’re not very educated. They can’t speak English very well. They’re just not very bright.

Both sets of stereotypes align with those glossed by Leo Chavez as the Latino threat narrative, described in the introduction. According to this narrative, Latinos are criminal, uneducated, unskilled, overly fertile, dimwitted others who are incapable of becoming moral, successful, educated Americans.13 As described in chapter 1 and illustrated by Janitza’s and Lupita’s statements, Succeeders were highly aware of the overall mixed reception of Latinos locally in Nashville and the stereotypes of Latinos nationally. While Succeeders may have believed being Latino is a “good thing” personally through their holidays, language, and “flavor,” they also believed that some others might not see it that way. As youth took these stereotypes to heart, these images formed the basis of their motivation to succeed and their desire to distinguish themselves. In mundane moments, these stereotypes surfaced and revealed their deep ties to students’ sense of self and the assumed power of striving—like when a playful game turned pointed. We were headed to the fourth or fifth event of the exhausting three-day weekend. The bus, as usual, was late. I was already tired and wondering how I would make it through that day’s activities. Having waited for an hour and half, students’ enthusiasm was also flagging. To keep energy levels up and keep the horde of students out of the cramped and increasingly humid Succeeders program office, Liz suggested playing a complex version of Duck, Duck, Goose in the empty and blissfully cold indoor basketball court. In her version of the game, the student who was the caller would yell out a trait they assumed was shared among several students.

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Those students would then get up, run around, and change places, with the last one standing becoming the new caller. A few rounds went by, and peals of laughter began to mount over the sound of students’ squeaky sneakers as they attempted to make their way around the lopsided circle in time. Students yelled out perceived similarities from the obvious—like wearing white sneakers or a black hoodie—to the less visible—like having three or more siblings or liking the then-popular boy band One Direction. As the game progressed, a slight young man shifted the tenor of characteristics called out. He shouted that students should get up “if you are illegal.” About a third of the assembled students, including the young man who had shouted out the prompt, scattered quietly around the circle. Students did not laugh but instead murmured to each other. The call’s silencing effect revealed not a proud reclamation of the term illegal but its stigma. Liz shot me a worried glance and interrupted the next caller with a new prompt: “Who’s going to college?” she asked excitedly. All the students got up and ran around an invisible circle of non-college-going Latino youth. In “Illegal” Duck, Duck, Goose, students appropriated charged language about immigration status as equally definitional to their teenage selves as music, dress, or family. There are layers of meaning in the term illegal, including not just one’s unauthorized immigration status, but also what that status indexes, or stands for: criminality, immorality, and even Latinidad itself. While immigration status has been argued to be the dominant factor defining life trajectories, the appropriation of illegal in the language of the self suggests something more intimate, more personal than abstract structural disadvantage and ethnoracial membership.14 It suggests a deep internalization of negative stereotypes of criminality with one’s definition of self and one’s perceptions of other Latinos. It likely did not go unnoticed by the students in the gym that morning that Liz diffused the situation by bringing up college. She identified all the assembled students, including those who were undocumented, as model Latino others who aspire to higher education. The message was clear: illegality—and the other Latino stereotypes that go with it—can be mitigated through educational striving. Liz’s interjection resonated with both the notion of education as the pathway to social inclusion and the DREAMer movement’s strategy of leveraging educational attainment as

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a sign of undocumented youth’s right to belong.15 The Succeeders took up this strategy as their own that morning when they all ran around the empty circle of non-college-goers. They would also do it through striving in school. This strategy became central to how students reproduced exclusion for others while claiming inclusion and distinction for themselves.

Güey Smart: S tr iv in g a n d exCe P t i o na li Sm a S exClu Sion Lupita, who had rattled off a lengthy list of Latino stereotypes, worried about how her fellow debate competitors saw her as a Latina. She shared: “That’s the impression when I walk in first in the room, that I’m like that. But then I think I have to prove to them in some sort of way that I’m not, and then they realize that I’m different.” The way Lupita thought she could change her competitors’ perceived view of her was through education: Education is like this invisible force that knocks down boundaries that I don’t think you can do by yourself. When I go to debate, as soon as I walk in, they think, “Well, she’s an easy target.” And then I go up there and I start talking, and then they’re like, “Well, she’s not an easy target anymore. She’s really good.” And then I come, and then I see— Like I did a poem once. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t expecting me to be very fluent or very [properly] enunciated. And then, I finished, and then a very arrogant southern [white] boy came up to me and he was like, “You did a good job,” which was a compliment because he’s one of those people who don’t give out compliments very easily. And that’s how I feel that education, it’s an equalizer.

Education was, for Lupita, an “equalizer,” an “invisible force” that could make her the equal of a white southern boy. Lupita believed she could escape the stereotypes of Latinos being not very intelligent through her academic performance. This notion aligns with the American Dream: an individual has power over their future through success in the meritocracy. My focus here is not on whether or not education accomplished Lupita’s goal. Rather, Lupita’s belief in its truth shows how the myth of the American Dream, and the educational meritocracy, endure among the Succeeders. In the next chapter, I explore how Lupita and others

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reproduced these same stereotypes for other Latinos, specifically through their college application process. Here, I point to her faith in education as evidence of what these youth thought education could do: make them exceptions to race-based exclusion. This example also demonstrates how Lupita reinforced the stereotypes of Latinos. As she pointed out that she was “different” and exceptional in her educational success, there were implicitly others who were not—like the empty circle of imagined noncollege-goers—those who were “easy targets” for her competitors and for exclusion from belonging. While gender was certainly relevant in Lupita’s example, sometimes the stereotypes of Latinidad that youth were responding to in their striving were even more starkly gendered. One Saturday morning, Jenny described to me why education could make her “become somebody,” like she thought Sofía and the Latina professionals who came to Succeeders meetings as special guest speakers were: Well, I feel like education is the one thing that people think we can’t accomplish as Hispanic women—well Latina women. And just overcoming that obstacle, per se, is a big step into becoming something, because you prove that you’re not just another—Hispanic, you know, who’s just here to, I dunno, babysit and be—I dunno—stereotypical jobs lots of people have.

Jenny pointed here to the gendered nature of Latino stereotypes, ones where Latina women are associated with caring professions and childrearing. Moreover, she perceived that education is something unknown others think that she, as a Latina, cannot accomplish. Her education became a way to prove that she was “something” and not just “another Hispanic.” Latino males also experienced gendered stereotypes, citing assumptions that all Latinos were gang members, worked in construction, or bussed tables in Mexican restaurants as motivational to their educational aspirations. For example, Alejandro stated he wanted to go to college because “I’m not into like, hard labor, and if I don’t go to college, I feel like that’s where I’m going to end up” as a Latino male. Alejandro was a bona fide intellectual and eventually became valedictorian of his class. His perception that he would end up in manual labor also speaks to how stereotypes of Latinidad foreshortened the horizons of youth’s futures even to themselves.

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The vast majority of students declared, in interviews, casual conversations, and club meetings, that they were pursuing education to beat back Latino stereotypes of themselves. For some, this aspiration was more collective and inclusionary. Natalia was one such case. She shared: I don’t want to be the only Latino standing. I want to say, “Hey, yeah. We’re breaking that cycle where people think of us as this and that. We’re actually saying, ‘No. We’re not. We’re just like everybody else.’ ” . . . People always think we [Latinos] don’t know English or we can’t learn as fast as anybody else can, or we’re ghetto. We’re like these thugs and cholas and what they see on movies.16 It hurts sometimes that when I raise my hand in class and I know the answer, people are surprised at me. And I’m just like, “Why?” I’m just like— I always say—people have this, are intimidated by Asian people because of their smarts and when they walk in, everybody just gets quiet because they think the Asian knows everything. And my goal for me is to have Latinos be looked on like that, where like, “Oh, crap, she’s Latina, she knows what she’s talking about.” Because it’s like we have a bad rep now that we’re only good for maids or—you see it in cartoons. Like, “Oh, señor, excuse me.” And it’s ha ha, hee, ha, but it’s like “wow, do they really think of us like that?”

Like Lupita and Jenny, Natalia saw education as a way to erase stereotypes regarding Latinos’ intelligence that she experienced from her classmates. The main goal of her educational striving was to have Latinos overall be seen as bright and not to be “the only Latino standing” personally. She appropriated model minority discourse and stereotypes regarding Asian students to do so. In this way, she looked to replace one stereotype with another, a common strategy among minority youth when developing their sense of ethnic self.17 Natalia’s case was rare among Succeeders because she used another minority group, Asians rather than whites, when describing the Latino threat she wished to escape through education. Intellectual Alejandro used a more common strategy: marking himself as exceptional by marking other Latinos as stereotypical. While I explore the ins and outs of this strategy more thoroughly in the next chapter, I introduce it here to demonstrate how espousing educational desire in order to countervail stereotypes can lead to these stereotypes’ application to others and their exclusion.

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As a planner for International Day, Alejandro was also one of the few students able to represent his birth country of Mexico during the festivities. A cogent observer of Jackson Hills High’s racial hierarchies in the cafeteria, Alejandro had a diverse group of friends and was worried about attending a less-diverse college in Kentucky. He was also a lover of languages who hoped to study another language in college and become trilingual. We had become fast friends, first bonding over what I saw as his nascent anthropological interests. When I asked him during our interview how he was similar to or different from other Mexican American students, his answer was simple: he hated the word güey. A common Mexican slag word, güey is the rough equivalent of dude in English, though it can also be used to mean idiot or jackass/asshole in more and less loving ways.18 I asked why he, a rare user of güey, hated the term despite his love of language diversity. He replied that “just some of the things they [heavy güey users in his school] say, I’m like ‘Really?’ They just add to the stereotype . . . that we speak funny, that we’re not educated.”19 He then linked the slang-informed stereotype of Latinos/ Mexicans to his educational striving: I want to change the stereotype. . . . If people see that Hispanics are trying to better themselves by going to college, then possibly it will end the stereotype, and know they’re not going to get pregnant when they’re in high school. We are smart. We’re not going to go cut your yard. Mow your lawn, that’s the word. We might, [if] we need money.

Alejandro’s aspiration and language self-policing were tied both to his personal preference to not be a Latino stereotype and to a broader goal of ending negative Latino stereotypes. While Alejandro wanted to change non-Latinos’ perceptions of Latinos, this goal was a product of an individual desire to not be like the güey-speakers, to not “add to the stereotype” himself or be seen as one. When I asked Alejandro to define being Latino, he stated: “Have a lot of culture, a lot of food definitely, dancing, happy people.” Alejandro spent months planning International Day and learning the complex ranchera/ banda dance routine that he, normally a shy student, performed for the crowd. His hatred of güey, his desire not to be read as a stereotype, and his motivation to pursue education toward that end are not necessarily

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contradictory understandings. Alejandro could be both a proud Latino and one who wished to distinguish himself from those who matched the stereotypes. His Latino identity, his pride in it, and its links to his educational aspirations illustrate the difficulty of living in and beyond stereotypes for Latino youth. They also show the complex ways that education is tied to a sense of ethnic respectability and racialized belonging.

la s an GRe lla ma , the b l ood be C k o n S: latini dad in the b l ood a n d C laSS r o o m Beyond stereotypes, family played a major part in how youth saw their Latinidad and how it intersected with their striving. Jane-Marie showed matter-of-fact clarity when I asked her what makes someone Latino by succinctly stating “having parents of Latin descent.” Natalia and Alejandro upped the drama with the common kinship metaphor of blood.20 Natalia stated that “being Latina means . . . having that blood flow through you.” Alejandro asserted he was “100 percent Mexican, and I am by blood.” As Sebastián did with his cousin, many Succeeders also measured their Latinidad relative to siblings, cousins, and other kin. This Latinidad reckoning ranged from explicit comparison to informal jokes and gossip about how Latino/a someone was in reference to appearance, food preferences, or even Latino stereotypes. One such case was Freddy. When half-white, fair-complexioned Freddy came to a Hickory Heights Succeeders club meeting, there was confusion. Some students asked him to “prove” he was Latino by speaking Spanish. When Freddy couldn’t, they told him he wasn’t a “real Latino.” Freddy attempted to silence his detractors that afternoon by clarifying his bloodline. “No, man,” he told the ringleader of his attempted exclusion. “I am. My mom’s white, but my dad, my dad, he’s Puerto Rican. It’s my dad’s side.” His detractors then moved on, and Freddy remained at the Succeeders meeting. He proved his right to stay through blood. Those who doubted Freddy had a sense of what composed Latinidad— Spanish language skills and phenotype. This latter factor echoes US race-based understandings of difference.21 Freddy’s comments also suggested that Latinidad was a heritable trait passed through kinship. This

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conception had two parts. First, in alignment with race-based understandings of Latinidad, Freddy invoked the US category of hypodescent, or “the social mechanism that works to place the offspring of two different racial groups into the lower-status category.”22 Despite presenting as white, Freddy the non-Spanish-speaker was Latino to himself because in the US context it is his father’s minority heritage, not his mother’s majority one, that confers ethnoracial status.23 Freddy legitimized his Latinidad by hypodescent, but also through a related understanding of nationality. Building on David Schneider’s insight that Americans see nationality as heritable, Jessaca Leinaweaver argues it is not just any nationality that is passed on through kinship, but an essentialized core she calls “national substance.”24 It is this idea of “national substance” that Freddy cited to his hecklers: to him, his parentage was enough to give him a Puerto Rican national substance and therefore the Latinidad required for inclusion among the Latino Succeeders.25 Despite Latinidad’s pan-national nature, Freddy and other Succeeders seemed to believe that national substance was still a prerequisite for pannational Latinidad.26 Freddy didn’t just say that his father was Latino to prove his bona fides, but that he was Puerto Rican specifically. There is clear consonance here with other notions of membership: namely, the principle of jus sanguinis (right or law of blood) in defining juridical citizenship. This principle holds that legal citizenship in a nation is transferred from parents to children. In this understanding, it is not where one is born that matters for inclusion in the nation, but to whom one is born that does.27 While the Succeeders were not claiming legal citizenship in their parents’ nations of origin, they were suggesting that their blood ties to a Latin American national made them members of a broader ethnicity of Latinos in a similar way as jus sanguinis.28 Such an understanding of Latinidad also translates to youth’s notions of US belonging through kinship more broadly. In asserting his father’s identity as central to his own, Freddy placed interpersonal connection, alongside its layers of race, nation, colonization, and culture, as central to belonging in Latino spaces. Freddy’s identification with his father echoed the phrase la sangre llama in the title of this section. A common idiom in Latino and Latin American households, it can be translated as “the blood calls”—or, more dramatically,

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as “the blood beckons.” The expression refers to the notion that the family, and the cultural practices of the family, have an inescapable pull on a Latino person. Like the idea of a heritable essence, la sangre llama presupposes an inevitable return to national substance and/or core Latinidad through family ties. It also suggests a kind of belonging based on connection to others—a sense of Latinidad based not on exclusion, like the stereotypes just discussed, but on inclusion. This idea transfers to youth’s critique of the exclusionary, solitary terms of US belonging explored in part III of this book. Javier, who saw his Mexican identity as commensurate with his Latino one, demonstrated an understanding of “blood beckoning” to both his national origins and enduring connection to kin: At first I kinda thought of myself as not really Mexican, but I knew I was. But, like, I didn’t know what it meant to be a Mexican, okay? And I asked my parents around elementary school, I forget what age I was. But I asked them “What does it mean?” And my dad joked around and said “That means you eat tortillas, and rice, and beans.” And then he took it a little more serious and said “Well, your culture is not only what you eat, but what you speak, how you talk about things, and it’s a way of life.”. . . And that’s how I kinda like got to know myself. ’Cause I always knew I was Mexican, but I didn’t know what Mexican is, and now I do. I feel like it’s a part of me now, and it’s never gonna go away. My kids are gonna learn Spanish.

Descent—from his father, to him, to his own future children—propagated Mexican “national substance” and the pan-national substance of Latinidad for Javier.29 On a more practice-based level of culture and kinship, but still in terms of descent, Javier looked to his father to teach him about Mexican identity. He then looked to himself to teach his future children Spanish as a marker and practice of that identity. In tracing these generations, Javier suggested the propagation of a durable sense of membership in the Mexican diaspora, if not in the US nation. Javier’s telling of his Mexican awakening rendered his Mexican and Latino identity as something that was “part of ” him and that would “never go away,” further suggesting an inalienable linkage of heritage to his very core self. In other words, his blood beckoned him to the present moment, where he now knew what it means to be Mexican, Latino, and ultimately “myself.”30 We can consider Javier’s assertion another way. It is an act of quiet defiance to assert ties to another nation when whiteness and total allegiance to

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the United States are de rigueur for US membership. Javier’s assertion of his Mexican Latinidad challenged the notion of “American American” identity as white, monolingual, and non-transnational. Youth’s attempts to live in between these terms of membership can potentially reshape and reform membership’s seemingly zero-sum terms. While such understandings suggest kin ties are transformative of the terms of belonging, they can also support exclusion and Latino stereotypes—even Javier’s father joked about Mexicanidad as eating “rice and beans.” One case I encountered stands out for its more insidious internalization of potentially harmful images of Latinidad. This case also demonstrates how tying educational achievement to escaping these images can work for you, but not for your own mother. At the start of the school year and my fieldwork, Liz and Sofía ran an evening informational session for parents at Hickory Heights High. The cavernous cafeteria was set up with a hundred or so folding chairs, an ambitious attendance forecast. Mrs. McCann, the teacher sponsor, and Sofía were setting up cookies, chips, and soda at a few card tables, and Liz was hooking up the projector for the PowerPoint presentation. I attempted to make myself useful by volunteering to figure out how to set up the rickety microphone and ancient amp. We chatted politely as we set up, still getting to know each other. Liz was worried about getting good attendance, and Sofía called out from among the Doritos that it would all be fine. Sofía then squealed with delighted as the slight, middle-aged Mrs. Hinojosa made her way up the aisle with her enormous purse. Mrs. Hinojosa was the mother of a recent Hickory Heights graduate enrolled in a local community college. She had another son who was a sophomore at the high school. She was joining the presentation tonight as a parent presenter, providing a firsthand account to other parents about the benefits of the program. A funny, vivacious woman who worked long hours in a restaurant, she instantly made me feel welcome as part of the Hickory Heights Succeeders team. Soon all the chairs were filled. Parents were crowded into what had a few hours before seemed an enormous space. Younger siblings played in the back and, in all likelihood, ate too many Doritos and cookies. As Sofía and Liz finished up with their PowerPoint, Mrs. Hinojosa pulled her speech out of a well-organized plastic accordion folder. She grabbed Mrs. McCann’s wrists, saying she was nervous. Mrs. McCann reassured

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her. When Mrs. Hinojosa got up, she movingly told of the hope the organization had given her formerly gang-affiliated and undocumented son and the help they also had given him in navigating college admission. Then, feeling more comfortable, she went off script and told the crowd about how she tried to impart the value of education to her sons: “I tell them, I already have a dishwasher in my house. I don’t need another one. I am a dishwasher—I didn’t come here for you to be one. Get your education: don’t be just another dishwasher.” The crowd laughed. The joke, and the advice, positioned education as the pathway to social mobility, as part of an intergenerational migration and mobility project, which I explore in chapter 4. It also made self-deprecating fun of the stereotype of Latinos as low-skilled restaurant workers. Mrs. Hinojosa implied that she had migrated and become a stereotype so her sons would not—illustrating both the insidiousness of negative Latino stereotypes and their link to educational aspiration. Mrs. Hinojosa’s message was clear to the Succeeders. School success meant belonging. It meant not becoming just another Latino dishwasher. Just as youth can make sense of the positive and negative messages circulating around Latinidad, so too can they parse—in their parents’ talk, in “Illegal” Duck, Duck, Goose, and in other everyday interactions—that educational desire could shield them from at least some of the negative stereotypes they encounter. It might also be a way to show that their parents, who became stereotypes for their children’s success, did not do so in vain. Mrs. Hinojosa’s presentation also foretold that youth would have to decide whether or not their mobility relied on the degradation of generations gone before. I draw attention to Mrs. Hinojosa’s comments here as an example of this conundrum. Another is that of Sarai. When a Succeeders alum spoke with a trio of sophomore girls and me one afternoon, the reserved Sarai noted that she didn’t want to become a Latina stereotype and get pregnant and drop out of school. She feared she would because all her cousins had. Here, the personally valuable terms of kinship intersected with the harmful stereotypes of Latinidad, creating a potent brew of shame, attachment, and fear. Sarai would strive to not be like her family, to not be like those kinds of Latinas. Showing oneself not to be a stereotype through striving sometimes means asserting difference from those closest to you who may appear

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stereotypical. Through education, the Hinojosa boys wouldn’t be “just another dishwasher,” even if their mother was. Sarai wouldn’t be another teen mom dropout, even if her cousins were. With this type of repeating message, including from one’s parents, it is no surprise that the Hinojosa boys, Sarai, and other Succeeders linked education to escaping stereotypes. Aspiration became a means for exceptionality, but also for exclusion.

Co nC luSion When asked what it means to be Latino, pride mattered to Succeeders. Alicia was on the extreme end of this spectrum, but she was not alone. She stated: I think there’s a lot of people who are—like, their family are, they’re born or their parents are from Spanish-speaking countries, but I wouldn’t call them Latinos, because a lot of people aren’t proud of their background, so you have to be—you can’t be ashamed of where you’re from. Yeah, you have to be proud.

Her words echo Sebastián’s disapproval of his cousin, Serena. The origin of this shame about Latinidad could be many things, including the racist jokes in school Serena may have heard, the Latino stereotypes that students made sense of through moments like “Illegal” Duck, Duck, Goose, or Sarai’s fear of becoming like her cousins. Proximate influences like racist jokes and pregnant cousins meet distal ones like systemic racism, language ideology, and the Latino threat narrative in youth’s understanding of the meaning and making of Latinidad. At the same time, a reliance on family ties in defining Latinidad offers a shift in perspective. In this example, asserting familial Latinidad is a robust counter to a nativist nation that demands total allegiance and the denial of ethnoracial others’ right to belong. Emerging from students’ reflections is the idea that the negative interpretations of Latinidad can be combated for the self through demonstrating educational striving and academic excellence. There are echoes of the American Dream here: success in the meritocracy can lead to membership that supersedes ethnoracial difference. Inherent in making oneself

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distinctive is asserting the prevalence of your opposite. For some Latinos to be exceptional, others must not be. How youth understand Latinidad is not only about ethnicity, but also about how they understand their membership in the United States. It is contingent. They must achieve to escape the stereotypes of race and failure that threaten their inclusion. They know there are other ways to belong—through enduring connections to loved ones—but those too can be marshaled toward replicating the dominant order of success-based membership. Such understandings show the complex ways that belonging is worked out in practice. Youth’s attempts to show themselves as distinctive through educational desire end up reproducing Latino stereotypes for others—sometimes even for family. As Tara Yosso asserts, this desire to prove stereotypes and stereotypers wrong is a powerful motivator for individual youth achievement, but one that ultimately “relies on an individual solution to the structural problem of racism.”31 In this chapter, we see the general contours of how youth show themselves to be exceptional Latinos worthy of belonging and others not to be. Education is the key to escaping stereotypes generally for the self, but also to perpetuating them for others. I now turn to how youth specifically accomplished this task: through their language in clubs and college admission.

3

“Your Story Is Your Ticket” beComing a moral minority and reProduCing exCluSion

The classroom’s back door was propped open onto the teachers’ parking lot. The humid air from a late afternoon spring rainstorm drifted into the already warm classroom. The focus of this Jackson Hills Succeeders club meeting was leadership. Liz had made posters with quotations from Winston Churchill, John Quincy Adams, and other notable figures, including anthropology’s own Margaret Mead. The posters were conversation starters about the kinds of leaders students aspired to become. Or at least they were supposed to be. Courtney, an outgoing senior and New York transplant, interrupted our stilted conversation by posing a provocative—if not exactly on topic—question: “Guys, do you think people have the same opportunities to succeed? Because I don’t.” Camilia, the president of the Jackson Hills club, responded from the opposite side of the large classroom where she was slouched against the whiteboard, her arms folded defiantly across her chest. “No, I don’t agree. There are people in a little pueblito (small village) and if they want it, they can do it. If they work really hard. You have to have—have a mentality to succeed.”

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Courtney leaned forward from her cross-legged position on top of the window seat, ready to spar. The rest of the assembled students prepared themselves for the kind of back and forth between upperclassmen that could become local lore. I tried to make eye contact with Liz. Her eyes, like those of the students, were sharply focused on Courtney. “Okay,” said Courtney, plotting her next rhetorical move. “But those people in the pueblito, what if they don’t know about college and stuff and scholarships? What are they going to do? How are they even going to know about it? I mean, I have cousins in Puerto Rico and they are—I mean, some are in college—but some just don’t care. Or don’t know.” Camilia pushed back, uncrossing her arms to allow for dramatic hand gesturing: “But if you have that mentality—maybe there is a bus and you can take it. And you find out and look for those opportunities.” “But what about someone who is poor and they barely went to college, and they are trying to make it? Str-ugg-ling,” Courtney drew out the syllables, tapping her fist into her other hand for even more emphasis. “Versus someone who is wealthy and doesn’t really need a job. I think money is a huge part, especially in the U.S. Why do you think the rich people stay rich, the poor poor, the middle middle?” “Because they know people,” conceded Camilia. Courtney triumphantly responded: “See! I caught you. I’m right! Not about what you know, but who you know.” The room went quiet. The weighty reality of social reproduction made the classroom’s now muggy air even heavier. Ever enthusiastic, Liz broke the silence by brightly asking the students what they thought about the “mentality to succeed” that Camilia had brought up. Courtney, Camilia, and the others excitedly chimed in, naming the skills and moral values that they possessed and believed would lead to success. In these moments, Succeeders were working out precisely what it took to be a success and to belong in the United States. They also pointed to structural inequality’s role in mediating mobility for “struggling” Latinos in pueblitos near and far. As the clock edged toward four, Liz closed the meeting, attempting to dissolve unresolved tensions. “Remember those statements [about personal qualities] weren’t ‘I’m rich, I have papers.’ They were those things we first see about you—those

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things you are good at. Success isn’t just about your address, your papers, what you do for a living, but knowing yourself.” “Knowing yourself,” Liz seemed to suggest, also meant performing a self that “work[s] really hard” and gets on the pueblito’s bus to unknown opportunities.1 Chapter 2 illustrated how students generally envisioned striving as critical to their own inclusion. Building on that coupling of excellence and inclusion, this chapter focuses on specifically how Succeeders presented themselves as remarkable and worthy of inclusion and other Latino youth as not to be. They used their language. I focus first on students’ performances in skits on effective communication and then on their college admissions essays. Across both modes, Succeeders spoke and wrote about themselves as strivers. In the process, they reproduced the racialized and moralized language of membership. Succeeders’ language in these contexts was interdiscursive—related in genre, style, diction, or other element of language—with the American, or perhaps pueblito, Dream.2 As shown in the previous chapters, in the American Dream narrative success is due to an individual’s moral virtue and is often assumed to be dependent on educational attainment for immigrants and minorities. The end result of achieving success is belonging within the nation. In club meetings and in their college essays, students often talked and wrote about themselves in concordance with the American Dream’s plucky protagonist. They were the motivated strivers with both the morality and “mentality” to get beyond the pueblito and into college. This Latino self that the Succeeders projected is what I call the moral minority: the Latino person who conforms to US-specific assumptions regarding how “good,” and therefore successful, minorities behave and act. I borrow the loaded terms of Evangelical political movements precisely because of their imbrications with the moral and cultural wars that have come to define US politics.3 The lived experience of belonging is equally moralized. Good morality, reflected by success, is grounds for inclusion in practice. The term moral minority also resonates with and borrows from the notion of the model minority, associated with Asian Americans. This myth holds that Asians, due to their culture and hard work, succeed where other minorities fail. In short, they become the ideal of what all

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minorities should be. In this myth, we see a racialization of success and inclusion in the meritocracy, just as we see its moralization in the Evangelical movements. Ultimately, what the Succeeders hoped their words “did” was actually make them model, moral minorities in the eyes of peers, admissions officers, and even the nation.4 Succeeders believed that by speaking and writing as moral strivers, they became so to themselves and those around them. These performances would then garner them both admission to college and acceptance in the nation. Such a belief in the power of language to reveal interior states and transform speakers underlies American language practices.5 Linguistic anthropologist E. Summerson Carr argues that in certain settings Americans believe that the language a person uses reveals their inner self—what she terms a language “ideology of inner reference.”6 In this understanding, there is “a presumption that the structures of language,” or the way we speak and what we say about ourselves, “should transparently fit the structures of the real self”—that is, who we truly are.7 By extension, changing how one talks can also change the self. Succeeders’ “metalinguistic labor”—their effort to talk as moral minorities dedicated to education, to write as moral minorities in their admissions essays, and to police others’ words—normalized exclusionary ways of talking, being, succeeding, and ultimately belonging.8 In their language, the Succeeders upheld the powerful moralization and racialization of US belonging. As we begin to see in Courtney’s disquieted questioning—and as I discuss more prominently in part III of this book—Succeeders also questioned these narrow parameters of deservingness and the very exclusion they enacted with their talk. Moreover, as they entered the high-stakes world of college essay writing, they found themselves juggling different rhetorical registers of the moral minority including some that ran counter to how they defined themselves. In Succeeders’ careful calibrations of their words, the tight boundaries of Americanness are evident. To become a moral minority, its inverse must also exist. In asserting one status, we also assert the validity of the other. Therein was the Succeeders’ bind: the narratives about their community that they wished to disprove were those necessary for the act of disproving.

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“ yo u faile d y ou r Sel f ” : Per f or m i n g t h e mo ra l mi no r i ty in l ow er- S ta k eS S ett i n g S I observed many instances like Camilia and Courtney’s debate. The “Effective Communication” skits in club meetings stand out in particular because of youth’s explicit focus on the language of achievement and its link to morality and race.9 Such connections are not only about success but also about showing oneself worthy of the belonging that this success represents. Informal talk like Courtney and Camilia’s debate and more structured moments like the skits were prime occasions when Succeeders practiced presenting themselves as American Dream–believing moral minorities worthy of inclusion. They were also the moments when Succeeders drew distinctions between themselves and other, nonstriving Latinos. Underlying the “Effective Communication” curriculum was Liz and Sofía’s fear that admissions officers would misinterpret some Succeeders’ communication as evidence of their inability to thrive in higher education.10 This concern was a real possibility. Latinos’ speech, even if it is the supposed Queen’s English, is often perceived negatively by those in power because of Latinos’ ethnoracial difference. The converse is also true, as Latinos’ language is used to racialize them.11 Liz and Sofía based the skits’ scenarios on real-life situations they had seen students grapple with over the years. These included academic contexts like asking teachers for help or leaving a voicemail for an admissions officer. There were also situations closer to home, like negotiating family caretaking. In cases like the latter, as I show in chapter 5, students expressed critiques of the success-based terms of membership. At each site, the “Effective Communication” unit started with a quick, general discussion of the importance of good communication skills. Liz and Sofía did not preface the activity with their ideas of what constitutes good communication. Rather, in asking students to perform their understanding of ineffective and effective communication with little priming, the women gave students free space to work out their own ideas on the modes’ respective qualities. Students then broke into small groups and prepared two skits for each type of communication. From this first principle, the skits were designed to mark one mode as negative and one as positive.

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Students exploited this simple dichotomy. In the skits, Succeeders grafted the US conflation of success, morality, and race onto effective communication. One set of speakers was immoral, racialized failures and the other set was moral minorities who articulated and espoused the right virtues and racial comportment for inclusion and success. Ways of speaking thus marked “good” and “bad” minority people who were more and less able to succeed and to belong. While Succeeders may not always have left cogent voicemails for admissions officers, they clearly understood this grammar of American success and inclusion. The skits did not ask students to present themselves in these terms. However, in their performances Succeeders showed themselves to be savvy speakers of this language of moral success. They knew who was a moral minority and who was not. They knew it by how they spoke. The following skit from Edward Maloney High School shows just how Succeeders reproduced these exclusions for others as they presented themselves as moral minorities through language. Alicia, a studious senior described as a “dream girl” by one program participant, portrayed the student in the scenario who asks her teacher for help. In the effective version of the skit, Alicia approached Gina, the student playing the teacher, very politely. She knocked on the invisible door and asked Gina if she could come in and talk to her. Throughout her plea for help, Alicia peppered her speech with plenty of pleases and thank-yous; kept her hands glued to her sides; and stood a considerable distance from Gina, who was seated at an imaginary desk. Alicia normally spoke using what some scholars call Standard English, or the kind of English we might hear on the news. She continued to do so in the effective skit. Most notably in her plea to Gina, Alicia said it was her “responsibility” to do better in class. For her good communication, Gina rewarded Alicia with offers of tutoring and extra credit. She was now able to achieve the academic success students linked to inclusion. In contrast, in the ineffective version of the scenario Alicia adopted what students termed a “ghetto” style, involving features such as double negatives and teeth sucking.12 In most of the ineffective skits, ghetto style was used, whereas in the effective skits, Standard English was always used.13 In further contrast to the effective skit, Alicia now dropped all niceties in her speech, barged in through the invisible door, and used aggressive hand

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gestures in close proximity to Gina’s now-stern face. Rather than assume responsibility for her in-class failure, Alicia blamed the teacher, stating that Gina had failed her because “you don’t like me.” With her hands neatly folded midair atop the imagined desk, Gina calmly responded: “No, you failed yourself.” She then sent Alicia to in school suspension. The language of responsibility—like ghetto style—was a hallmark of all students’ skits across sites. In the discussions following the skits, students were keen to talk about responsibility and how professing it would lead to success, while “blaming others” would not. In this case, students noted that when Alicia accepted responsibility she was rewarded with the chance of improving her grade. When she did not, she was punished. There was no opportunity to achieve. She was excluded from the classroom and perhaps the opportunity for success and belonging it may have held. This understanding of how responsibility works aligns with Katherine Newman’s notion of “meritocratic individualism,” the idea common among Americans that they control their future through their moral merits.14 Taking responsibility—as Alicia did—is a loaded concept embedded in Americans’ understanding of the ties of success to morality and membership. The conflation of responsibility with the moral US member is a long-standing one, rooted in both contemporary neoconservative, neoliberal politics and the exigencies of the American Dream.15 The idea of individualism and personal responsibility as key criteria for US belonging dates back even earlier than the American Dream itself. The responsible, agentive individual as ideal national member tracks to the colonization of the United States and is even ensconced in its founding documents. The Succeeders and I did not discuss the type of personhood neoliberalism requires or the rhetorical circulation of terms like personal responsibility in law, mass media, or history. However, Succeeders used responsibility interdiscursively with political rhetoric and the American Dream in ways that suggested youth had internalized taking responsibility and its importance for success, moral personhood, and belonging. Gina-as-teacher asserted that Alicia’s lack of personal responsibility made her “fail herself,” pointing to the centrality of responsibility to success. Alicia only had herself to blame. By espousing this value, Alicia, Gina, and the other Succeeders looked to signal their moral consonance with a particular virtue of the ideal American and the broader

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understanding of success and how it is made as set forth in the narrative of the American Dream. Saying one is “taking responsibility” is different from actually being responsible or valuing the virtue of responsibility. However, given that holders of US language ideology think that words represent inner states and beliefs, professing responsibility—as Alicia did in the effective skit and students did in discussion—can be seen as a speech act that demonstrates their virtue.16 It is an act that affirms the speaker holds a good set of values that in turn prove them to be morally good. Alicia here was playing a part. In neither skit can we assume her role equated to who she was. However, in demonstrating that she knew what makes a good speech act for a moral minority, Alicia showed herself to be a moral striver to her peers, to Liz, and to me through her performance of one. She also showed that those who talked like she did in the ineffective skit were the opposite. As both the skits and the essays explored later in this chapter demonstrate, students saw their language operating in this way: how they talked or wrote could create moral and immoral minority personhood. Belonging, however, relies on more than professed responsibility and attendant good morality—it also relies on racialized exclusion. The “ghetto” style Alicia and others used aligns with what linguists call African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or the mode of speaking associated with certain Black communities. Ghetto—as used by students—served either to obliquely gloss Black Americans as immoral minorities or to extend ghetto’s racial overtones to certain kinds of Latinos.17 When Alicia spoke ghetto, she was not only an ineffective communicator but also a racialized other.18 The reverse is also true: Standard English was used as an unmarked category, a category racialized as white. Here, the Succeeders reproduced racialized exclusions for others (Black peers), but also for themselves. Only when Latinos use Standard English can they be valued as moral minorities, minorities who trade one racialization for another. When students linked the white-racialized Standard English with good morality and success, they reproduced the racial borders of American success-based inclusion. They excluded the ineffective speakers in ways that were not only moral but also racial. Such judgments align with the historical precedent of the American Dream—where successive immigrant groups rely on anti-Blackness to assert their belonging in the nation.19 In

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so doing, Succeeders perpetuated the notion that certain racial others may not align with success and may not merit full recognition as members of US society. Sometimes Succeeders’ reproductions of the exclusionary terms of belonging along moral and racial lines were more obvious. Again, while the skits were not performances of self in the same way as the college essays, the skits did show that Succeeders understood how to portray themselves as moral minorities. Natalia, for example, prefaced her skit at Hickory Heights High by stating that her group hadn’t focused on effective or ineffective communication, but rather on “good and bad behavior.” She then profusely apologized for their misunderstanding of the prompt. This misinterpretation revealed how the group would tie language, behavior, race, and moral personhood together in the making and unmaking of moral minorities. The skit began with Natalia walking in an imaginary park with Eduardo, a senior soccer player who sporadically attended the Succeeders program during the off-season. They talked about how great going to college was in amusingly vague ways that caused them to break character and laugh. Like Alicia in the effective skit, the pair’s speech was in Standard English. As they walked through the park, Natalia and Eduardo encountered several classmates. First, there were students drinking and smoking under a bridge—played rather well by a desk. Not only were these classmates “partying,” but they had dropped out of school. When Natalia and Eduardo spoke with them, the partying dropouts also “talked ghetto.” Natalia, acting ruffled from the encounter, exclaimed: “Oh my God, guys, you used to be good people!” Here, behaviors marked as morally bad in the context of Succeeders— drinking, recreational drug use, and critically, dropping out of school— were tied to ghetto speech by the partying students’ performances. Even though “good” and “bad” communication wasn’t the group’s focus with their skits, Natalia’s group nevertheless relied on racialized speech styles to mark bad behavior and failing people. Such a reliance underscores Succeeders’ belief that language maps onto the person, their racial otherness, their morality, and their propensity for success. Natalia then voiced a definitive moral judgment regarding the dropouts’ illicit behavior, departure from school, and lack of interest in educationally based success. The partying dropouts were once, but were no longer, “good people.” The

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students positioned abstention and higher education as what makes moral people. Striving is an active process that requires vigilance—it requires work. This work of striving, abstention, and school going were presented as enabling a certain kind of success, as measured in educational attainment and, perhaps, not having to socialize under a bridge. Another notable appearance during Natalia and Eduardo’s stroll was by a couple, Efrain and Rich, a Southeast Asian student with an impressive faux hawk who often attended Succeeders club meetings alongside his Latino best friends.20 Rich had stuffed his backpack under his shirt to mime pregnancy. Efrain and the now-renamed “Richelle” told Natalia and Eduardo they had dropped out of school because of the baby. Neither Rich nor Efrain used ghetto style. Instead, like Natalia and Eduardo, they used Standard English. Rich and Efrain’s lack of ghetto style attempted to destigmatize, albeit only slightly, racialized teen pregnancy from moral failing to surmountable obstacle. In this choice to have their speech styles match, the students loosened the otherwise tight coupling of morality and success and questioned the stigmatizing rhetoric about their communities. This speech act partially upended the clear distinctions Succeeders were otherwise making between themselves as moral others and imagined peers as not. I say only partially because the way out of racialization was conforming with speech racialized as white. Nevertheless, here Succeeders’ language choices were an example of their small acts of resistance to exclusionary terms of membership, even as they continued to reproduce them. Upon Rich and Efrain explaining their reasons for leaving school, Natalia responded in a concerned and not accusatory manner: “But you can still go to community college. And make something of yourself, be a better person, for your baby.” In Alicia’s skits, education’s power was hinted at more obliquely— effective-skit Alicia scored extra credit. When Natalia declared that college could make the pair “better” people, the morally transformative power of education was clearly signaled. Recall that when discussing the origins of their educational aspirations students often reflected on the role of Latino stereotypes that cast Latinos as amoral. Natalia’s statement made this coupling of stereotype and aspiration obvious. Intriguingly, while there were other girls in the group, Rich played the pregnant girl—to considerable laughter. In the car ride back to the

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office, Liz and I discussed what an interesting choice that was. Perhaps it was too taboo, too mortifying to have a girl or even a Latino boy play this part because of the broader stigma of Latina pregnancy and Latina teen pregnancy in particular. Leo Chavez argues that Latinas’ perceived high fertility levels are held up by nativists as a grounds for Latinos’ social exclusion. Politicians and the media portray Latina fertility, compared with that of white women, “as irrational, illogical, chaotic, subject to tradition and superstition, and therefore threatening” to white moral orders and the nation.21 Such a rendering serves to portray Latinas as incapable of full subject status, where the subject is conceptualized as a “rational” white actor. The fact that non-Latino, non-female Rich plays the pregnant dropout points to the fact that even miming such racialized, gendered stereotypes has the potential power to exclude for Latino youth. The one non-Latino must play this part because of the strength of guilt by association with this particular stereotype. Succeeders didn’t want to perform this kind of self because of its exclusionary power. However, in pointing to the role of education in remediating “Richelle’s” morally transgressive pregnancy, Succeeders asserted that even the most feared othering can be solved by success in education. In their skits, Succeeders showed they knew who belonged—it wasn’t the partiers, the failing and irresponsible student, or even the teen parent. It was them: the moral minorities striving toward educational success. The communication skits reveal that students are sharply aware of the modes of self-presentation and expression that will garner the desired results. This knowledge does not mean they always deployed these modes effectively. The skits were in many ways practice for the self-representations that I examine next: personal statements for college admission and financial aid. The stakes of these representations were far higher. Whereas the skits were where Succeeders displayed their moral minority status to their peers, the essays were where that display could result in a tangible gain: admission to college and hoped-for acceptance in the nation. These deservingness claims to college admission are ultimately about who belongs in the institutions where national membership is experienced and where mobility is potentially enabled. Granting access to such institutions “involve[s] complex forms of moral reasoning” that are not just about access but also

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about the kinds of lives that deserve to thrive with the help of institutions that support that thriving, such as hospitals and schools.22 In their essays, Succeeders had to carefully think through how others outside of their close-knit community would see them through their words, ideally as moral minorities deserving of admission to college. Before turning to what students did with these words, I explore the significant representational stakes of these essays.

“ yo ur S tory iS y ou r tiCk et ” : th e hi g h S ta k e S o f f inanC ia l a id a n d ad mi SSio nS e SS ay S It was the end of the Baldwin College tour. I was relieved to be sitting down and to no longer be head counting my small group out of fear of losing someone’s child. Lainie, Baldwin’s admissions officer for Nashville public schools, peppily ran through the requirements for admission as we enjoyed the fancy ergonomic lecture hall chairs. She then addressed the value of the admissions essay. “Your essay is your chance to tell your story. The essay is your ticket into money, into school. Knowing who you are. Your story is your ticket.”23 I heard Lainie and other admissions officers voice this sentiment regarding the essay’s value each time they presented about their schools at club meetings or settings like this tour. For example, at Edward Maloney High, Lainie elaborated on what she had said regarding the essay on Baldwin’s campus: “The better impression you make on me, the more I want to help you. It’s about presenting the best ‘you’ you can possibly be. The more I know about you, the more I can help you.” In my interview with her, I told Lainie that I was struck by her presentation of the essay’s purpose both on Baldwin’s campus and at Edward Maloney High. I asked her to clarify what she meant by the personal essay being a student’s ticket. She stated that students couldn’t control the quality of the schools they attended and how that might map onto lower standardized test scores and fewer advanced classes. They could, she said, “control the story” about themselves.24 She also positioned the essay as a main component of how she and other admissions officers come to

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advocate for students. Lainie said that when a student had a particularly strong essay, it helped keep that student on her “radar.” She felt connected to them by “knowing” who they were. The premise of the college essay thus conforms to the “ideology of inner reference” that Summerson Carr points to: through the essay, admissions officers believe that they have a window into the student’s interior self.25 Admission to a place like Baldwin is predicated on performing a certain kind of deserving student identity through excellent grades, high standardized test scores, significant extracurricular commitments, and clearly, the essay.26 An often-questioned—and sometimes legally challenged—part of this holistic judgment is diversity.27 Minority applicants like the Succeeders must show that they “know themselves,” but also that they know the kinds of Latino selves that admissions officers will reward with college access, the presumed ticket to American success and inclusion. They have to engage in what Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas term “performance-based deservingness.”28 Critical here is carefully calibrating their deservingness claim to the “vernacular moral register” that creates “social proximity” between themselves and the admissions officer.29 This proximity was particularly important for Succeeders, as their racial, legal, and other modes of “diversity” could potentially create distance between them and admissions officers. The goal, for Succeeders and minority applicants everywhere, is to present their potentially socially distant diversity in socially proximate ways—namely, as American Dream–oriented, striving moral minorities. In this way, the essay implicitly asks students to show themselves to be exceptional and deserving and, by extension, to assert that others are not. When I asked Lainie and others what stood out for them in Succeeders’ essays, they pointed to narratives of immigrant families’ struggles or students’ triumph over immigration status and other obstacles. These narratives highlighted hard work and virtuous striving where students and their families took responsibility for their success.30 Some institutional actors were quite explicit about the role of these and related narratives in their admissions decisions. Most directly, Lainie advised undocumented students to disclose their immigration status. From perhaps a more strictly informational view of the essays, knowing about students’ status allowed Lainie to advocate for private scholarship dollars to be allocated

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to them—which she successfully did for almost every admitted undocumented Succeeder.31 More abstractly, such acts of disclosure asked students to perform their structural disadvantage in ways that emphasized triumph over disadvantage through virtue. It wouldn’t be enough to merely say “I’m undocumented”—students had to show they had risen above their legal circumstances through moral effort. As I illustrate in the next section with Neveah’s essay, a successful disclosure was interdiscursive with other tropes of deservingness. When Lainie said “your story is your ticket,” she did not exaggerate what that story could do.32 The struggling, but triumphant, immigrant student essay seemed to be a surefire way for Succeeders to make their deservingness claims for admission. Certainly all applicants are tasked with personal disclosure in the admissions essay, not just immigrant-origin youth.33 Guides on how to write the essay chronicle the range of advantageous and disadvantageous narratives, such as the to-be-avoided “5 Ds” (divorce, drugs, depression, school detention, and death) and the more successful mirror, the “Survivor.”34 While Succeeders were not using these guides—primarily used by upper-middle-class students—they and admissions officers like Lainie were familiar with expected genres like the “Survivor” and the characteristics they invoke like “grit” and “growth mindset.”35 For many highachieving Succeeders, the essay was the last part of the applications they completed. They told me that they put it off because they were worried their essays wouldn’t be good enough or unique enough to qualify them for admission. For a few students, fear regarding the essay almost stood in the way of their applying to college at all. Alberto, a student I worked particularly closely with on his essay, described to me what he perceived the essay does, aligning with Lainie’s and others’ perception of the essay’s role in admission. “To me,” he said as we revised his essay, “this college essay will replace the things I lack, for example my low ACT score. It’s more of an interview, it allows you to speak to the admission officers without ever seeing them.” Succeeders recognized they could add value to the application through a good story. The good story required in the college essay is fundamentally a project of interdiscursivity with the broader college essay genre. For Succeeders, the most successful essays were also interdiscursive with the American

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Dream’s narrative of moral success. Alberto echoed this when I asked him what he thought admissions officers wanted to see: They want to see if I actually struggled to be where I am or if everything was handed to me. They want to see determination, consistency, and most importantly they want to see if I am ready to be at their colleges. I think they can identify this by the way I wrote my essay.

Alberto believed he must prove his readiness through the fact that he had struggled, persevered, and triumphed—in short, he had to prove his personal fortitude and his moral alignment with American norms of success through his essay. He showed a belief in inner reference here: an admissions officer would be able to see the true Alberto by “the way I wrote my essay.” While the importance of the essay was clear to students, the “vernacular moral register” of each gatekeeper they encountered on their path to higher education was not.36 The danger of this unknown is clear: an essay that fails to resonate, fails to create “social proximity” between the deservingness claimant and admissions gatekeeper, could break a Succeeder’s chance for higher education and the inclusion it represents.37 A month after the charged debate that opened this chapter, I was grabbing coffee and bagels in a sleek conference room in a downtown office building. I was there with Liz, Sofía, and six Succeeders program supporters to decide—over the course of a five-hour meeting—who among the Succeeders participants would receive the program’s annual scholarships. The scholarship program was different from most others, as it was immigration status blind and not based on academic merit.38 Rather, the scholarship was designed as a reward for dedicated students’ commitment to participating in the Succeeders program. The scholarship was meant to emphasize their individual growth as students and as people. I was a relatively late addition to the scholarship committee, joining only a couple of weeks before this busy Saturday morning.39 To be eligible for the scholarship, students had to provide two personal statements: one focused on how the program had prepared them for success and another on their personal goals and influences. They also provided two recommendation letters, their transcripts, and proof of acceptance to a college or a technical program. In the weeks before the

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meeting, I had read through fifty-three applications—a mighty stack of paper that Liz had copied and collated for every committee member. In their instructions, Liz and Sofía charged the committee (and themselves) to be “objective.” We were all tasked with scoring each student’s application based on fifty possible points, with a maximum of five points assigned to each of the various application components including level of community and school involvement, quality of recommendations, and the essays’ effectiveness. We were to disregard grammar and spelling that didn’t follow Standard English. Considering each application holistically, we also assessed more abstract concepts like “self-awareness,” defined through the question: “Does this applicant have a strong sense of self and culture, and an awareness of how he/she interacts with others and his/ her community?” Echoes of Liz’s admonition that success is “knowing yourself ” and Lainie’s understanding of the essay as gatekeepers’ “knowing who you are” rang in my ears, as I was now tasked with “reading” who students were through their writing. We all took our seats at the long conference table. Succeeders’ board president Roberto commented that he was touched when students discussed their families, undocumented status, experiences of discrimination, and goals for the future—their American Dreams. Inés was not impressed. “I didn’t cry this year,” she coolly stated as she buttered her bagel. Inés clarified. Last year, her first on the committee, she had been moved like Roberto was when reading the students’ essays. This year, however, she found them thematically repetitive. Moreover, she was upset at students’ increased discussion of Latino stereotypes, racial profiling, and experiences of discrimination. Inés’s response contrasted with Lainie’s take on similar essays that she, like Roberto, saw as memorable. The gulf between Roberto and Lainie’s impressions and those of Inés reveals the tightrope of social proximity and social distance that youth must walk in these presentations of self. One admissions officer’s ideal essay is another gatekeeper’s most despised. Inés’s distaste for those particular stories made sense in light of how she and certain other Latinos presented their own success when they came to clubs as guest speakers. In these presentations, she and others reproduced the American Dream’s success narrative, arguing that individual

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hard work, determination, educational attainment, and what Camilia had glossed as a “mentality to succeed” had led to their realization of the American Dream. Racism, to Inés and some others, was what she termed an “excuse” for personal shortcomings in becoming a successful Latino American. Such an excuse failed to “take responsibility” for success or failure, as Gina had impressed on Alicia in the ineffective communication skit. Inés’s strong feelings made her tight with the purse strings, as she freely admitted over breakfast. It also made her reluctant to value Liz’s, Sofía’s, and my insights on the score sheet’s question about students’ “selfawareness” gained through sustained interaction with them. As we moved on to discuss our scores, I thought of Camilia, Courtney, and that rainy afternoon when the young women debated whether or not individuals have equal chances for success. Camilia’s defense of the pueblito “mentality to succeed” aligned with Inés’s own success narrative. Now, however, the reproduction of that narrative involved less figurative stakes than showing one’s peers that you are a success, as Alicia and Natalia did in the “Effective Communication” skits and Camilia did in the debate. Successful reproduction of American Dream discourse translated into access to education and the success and inclusion that education was assumed to bring. Inés’s and Lainie’s inverse preferences demonstrate that the scholarship essays, personal statements, and myriad other self-presentations required in the college admissions process must be carefully calibrated to elicit “social proximity” in disparate gatekeepers so they recognize the applicant as universally deserving.40 One such durable strategy that would appeal to Lainies and Inéses alike was the moral minority essay.

“ bei ng hi S Pa n i C” : the m ora l mi n o r i t y in Co lleg e ad miSS ion S eSSayS On a gray Saturday morning in October, Succeeders took turns submitting their college applications on the marginally functional computers in the program’s office. Seated on the beat-up karate mats that were also stored in that cramped space, Raquel was struggling to come up with a compelling personal statement. “If I tell them some sad story about being Hispanic, I guess I’ll get more money,” she joked with me and the other

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patiently waiting students. As I encountered more and more essays, I found that many students followed this half-joking suggestion of writing about “being Hispanic” of recent immigrant origin. They did not write “some sad story about being Hispanic,” but rather one particular story. This story reproduced a hierarchy of “good” and “bad” Latino immigrants and immigrant descendants as the authors positioned themselves as immigrant-origin youth who adhered to the value of hard work, sought self-improvement, and achieved academically due to their own efforts. The “Hispanic” in the “Being Hispanic” essay was the moral minority. Students discussed with me the challenges of writing moral minority essays and how they stood not just for admission to college, but rather for admission to full belonging in the United States. Lupita’s essay is one such example. Lupita was a high-achieving senior from Gilead who, at the time, hoped to pursue a career in the medical field. Her “dream” school was South, a slightly selective college (58% acceptance) that is 86 percent white.41 Lupita was inspired to apply after a stint cleaning an elderly white woman’s house. Lupita felt that the woman “looked down” on her because of her Latino roots. Upon learning that the woman’s son went to South, Lupita decided on it as her school. She explained why: I felt like, in a way that if I . . . if I go to that school, I’m just as good as her son and it’s not because of race that makes us the same. It’s because I was able to get into school. . . . We went through the same admissions process, and we both got in. So that doesn’t make him better than me, just because he’s white and I’m Hispanic. And the way that I feel like I’m competing against him, and it’s almost my way to prove that I’m just as good as you are.

In this quotation, Lupita linked college admission to proving her equality with white Americans and in so doing proving her equal right to membership in the United States. By applying to and potentially attending the same school as a white man, she experienced a kind of social equality with him. Here, school was the gateway to inclusion, to being “just as good” and just as included in national institutional life as white Americans. Given Lupita’s view that admission would neutralize difference, it is interesting that she chose to write about “being Hispanic.” In some ways, choosing to write about her ethnic difference acknowledged that she was different from her onetime employer’s son. Lupita partially recognized

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the contradiction in her approach to the essay and in her view of college admission as proving her worth beyond ethnicity. She stated: It was contradicting to me because I wanted people to know I was different, but I didn’t want people to use my race as a reason to be like, “Oh she’s Hispanic, so they don’t succeed very often” . . . kind of thing.

Lupita’s awareness of this contradiction is evident in her response’s layered meanings and the equally complex understanding of admission it reveals. First, Lupita did not see a contradiction in marking difference for the purpose of sameness—to show she is the same as her white boss’s son. Unlike the skits, where students cast racialized speech as a hindrance to success, Lupita actively wrote about her ethnoracial difference. What made this difference different, however, was that she and others wrote about being Latino in ways that aligned with moralized success. What Succeeders were performing was not a “ghetto” difference, but minority respectability. Here, Lupita also revealed her understanding that diversity was a valued social good in the university, potentially as valuable as whiteness had been in her boss’s family’s past. However, Lupita also saw that the discussion of her difference could be a potential strike against her. Rather than seeing diversity as an asset, some admissions officers might see her difference as the expression of not sameness but the subpar status of Latino learners. Lupita assumed that admissions officers would see her in terms of the stigmatized view of Latinos as educational failures, reproducing this narrative in her own thinking about herself. Lupita showed critical awareness of the challenges of pitching these versions of self to unknown gatekeepers. Perhaps because of the difficultly of proving sameness through difference, Lupita identified the essay as the most difficult part of her application. She produced many versions of her essay, resulting in “at least ten essays saying ‘I’m Hispanic.’ ” Lupita went on to tell me that she wanted admissions officers to know that she was “different, but that I understood what it was like to be an American, and that I’m not just like the typical Hispanic. . . . I don’t know how to say—very Hispanic-y.” She elaborated that being “very Hispanic-y” or the “typical Hispanic” meant dropping out, getting pregnant, and being undocumented. She, in contrast, was a native-born citizen who would not

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get pregnant, would complete college, and would pursue white-collar work—as detailed in her writing. Thus, a central motivation for writing her essay about her background and her striving was thwarting potential stereotyping of her in these terms. By marking herself as distinctive and not the “typical Hispanic,” Lupita reproduced those stereotypes for other “typical” Latinos. From my observations and conversations, it was clear that students often followed the “being Hispanic” narrative style in two main ways. The first is Lupita’s: stating that you are different from the “typical” or the negative images of Latinos but “just as good” as whites. The other mode is narratives of triumph over structural obstacles like legal status, institutional racism, or financial hardship.42 However, there is a risk in writing the second kind of essay. As seen with Inés, such an essay may be outside of some readers’ “vernacular moral register” and could fail to create “social proximity,” thus sinking youth’s claims of deservingness for admission.43 Thus, when writing the triumphant narrative essay, students need to make a complex calculation regarding whether or not an admissions officer or scholarship evaluator will find it compelling. Like Camilia’s narratives of the pueblito resident’s pathway to success, these essays should show that structural obstacles stemming from difference are solved through adherence to the values undergirding American success and membership. Neveah’s essay on her undocumented status and experiences of nativism is an example of this strategy. She began her essay by stating “I am illegal,” outlining how that had led to difficulty in navigating the path to higher education—precisely what Lainie asked undocumented students to do in their essays. By beginning with the statement that she was “illegal,” however, Nevaeh marked herself in terms of immigrant criminalization, putting her firmly outside of commonsense notions of deserving immigrants. Rather than distance herself from immigrant illegality, Neveah heralded it. She also discussed exclusion, stating: “Throughout my life, I experienced moments of hatred by my own peers . . . because of my way of being, or my culture.” She then quickly shifted, stating “my immigration status has not stopped me from being a part of my community.” In this assertion, Neveah obliquely hinted that undocumented status may have stopped others from community involvement. She was engaged in many clubs, wanted to pursue college, and dreamed of becoming a lawyer. These

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aspirations and accomplishments were possible, she argued, through her hard work and determination. She went on to discuss the value of her personhood in other terms, relying on Christians’ notion of universal equality in the eyes of God. Neveah’s essay made two interesting rhetorical moves. First, by addressing her undocumented status in light of how she comported herself in terms of hard work, determination, faith, and professional aspirations, Neveah demonstrated that undocumented youth like her can be moral and deserving youth through their individual efforts. She thus reversed the stigma for herself while allowing it to still be reproduced for others. Second, by framing the value of her personhood in religious terms, Neveah relied on a different, but salient, logic of inclusion that aligned with that of the Christian college to which she had applied.44 This frame too can be a refusal of immigrant deservingness because, in invoking Christian doctrine, Neveah looked to be included through another means, religious salvation, which accords with conservatives’ view of the nation as rooted in the Christian faith. Neveah spoke back against the deservingness frame by freely stating her status and using a religious frame to trump the immigrant one. She also reproduced it by highlighting how she did, in fact, align with the image of the deserving immigrant. For Succeeders like Neveah and Lupita, a central motivation for writing a moral minority essay was to thwart potential stereotyping of them as individuals who were part of a dangerous Latino culture. Some students, like Alberto, explicitly stated this as their goal. In a supplemental essay for one college, Alberto stated he was motivated to pursue higher education in order to combat “the negative statistics of Hispanics not going to college.” However, when Succeeders demonstrated their individual distance from the “negative statistics,” they also reproduced exclusion. By showing themselves to be distinctive, as Alberto, Lupita, and to some extent Neveah did, students asserted that their peers behind those negative statistics didn’t succeed because of individual moral failings or precisely because they were stereotypical Latinos. Some students framed their essays as a critiques of the idea that Latino students were only valuable to universities because they were diverse or conformed to a “sad,” but ultimately triumphant, story about “being Hispanic.” Pedro wrote in the introduction and conclusion of his essay that

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he could have written about, as he put it, “being Mexican,” but that would only have represented one part of his identity. He instead discussed his commitment to breakdancing and involvement in an antibullying organization. Even for Pedro, who looked to escape being defined by his Latinidad, the way out from writing about “being Mexican” was first to state it and then to write about being a moral minority. In the conventions of this essay type, and the college admissions essay genre as a whole, youth are pressed into reproducing the tropes of both the moral minority and its inverse. Writing in and against the politically and popularly circulated frame of deservingness and morality can be a point of resistance to dominant negative discourse about Latinos, specifically immigrant Latinos. However, these kinds of essays are also about wanting to not be “read” as the stereotyped, undeserving minority immigrant. To not be read in this way, students have to gesture to the stereotype. As youth draw on the moralized language that marginalizes them, they perpetuate the stigma they wish to reverse. This requirement to use the stereotype to escape it is a central contradiction of living within these discourses.

Co nC luS ion In the prior chapter, I showed how students hoped their educational aspirations would make them stand out as the ideal strivers-cum-members. Through attention to Succeeders’ speech in this chapter, I have illustrated how they accomplished this task. Crucial to all the narratives examined here is a set of paradigmatic American moralizations about success that youth are told to value, do value, and trade on the value of in admissions applications and elsewhere. The through-lines of these moralizations— of individual hard work, responsibility, minority respectability, and a desire for social advancement through education—are both historically American and reflective of the contemporary orders of deservingness rooted in racialized and moralized exclusion. The fact that Succeeders’ narratives were interdiscursive with these historical and contemporary notions of US success speaks to a durable idea about the connections between morality, accomplishment, and education.

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Beyond demonstrating a narrative continuation of the US success allegory, the actual articulations—the words themselves—matter. By talking and writing in certain ways, Succeeder youth were not merely parroting Dream discourse, but rather were claiming it as their own. They asserted their own moral deservingness for admission and membership through their metalinguistic labor. At the same time, their metalinguistic labor reproduced exclusion for others. These words mattered for Succeeders in particular because of the prevalence and internalization of the Latino threat narrative. Their words were how they reclaimed their value, but their reclamations were predicated on asserting others’ communicative and moral deficiencies. These words took on even more heightened stakes when addressed to the gatekeepers of their education—their admissions essays were their “ticket” to success and inclusion. By pointing out that students were aware of the breadth of deserving narratives and were prompted into certain narrative strategies, I do not mean to disparage their thoughtful reflections on who they are or the stories of personal meaning they represent. Succeeders were aware of topics and traits that might make them stand out and how those same topics and traits reflected what Lainie called “their best” selves. The commonalities of these essays and skits reveal the limited ways that minority, immigrantorigin youth can make their value legible to others.45 While the representational stakes of the personal statement seem limited to questions of college admission, they are an integral part of the broader stakes of civic and institutional belonging. Lainie was an excellent institutional advocate for first-generation, immigrant, and undocumented students. However, her advocacy was—in part—predicated on students performing their need, their difference, their struggle, and their “best” selves as moral minorities.46 Given the broader social and political purchase of the deserving DREAMer and the continued ascendency of the American Dream as national myth, conforming to these kinds of narrative makes sense. It also reproduces their exclusions. Psychologist Dan McAdams notes that “beginning in our teenage years, we [as individuals] endeavor to understand our lives as grand narratives, reconstructing the past and imagining the future in such a way as to provide our lives with some semblance of purpose, unity, and meaning.”47 The Succeeders’ essays and skits built toward their own grand narratives of

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successful, moral, and American personhood. Untangling the ways these narratives connect with and disconnect from each other reveals how individual youth began to see themselves as successes and in so doing came to see other others—like those they imagined in the skits—as immoral failures. Melissa, an aspiring teacher from Gilead, discussed how Succeeders taught her “the values and morals a Latino must live by in this country and time” in order to be a “good example” to other Latinos. It may have also taught her how her talk demonstrated these values and her status as a “good example.” Desiring to be a good example is not inherently exclusive: the “values and morals a Latino must live by in this country and time” are. When I asked Raquel, the young woman who first described the moral minority essay, what she thought “some sad story about being Hispanic” would be, her demeanor suddenly changed. Moments before we had been laughing about the essay’s narrow parameters. Then, hesitantly, and only for my ears, she said it would be something about her immigrant mother. As she reluctantly spoke, I realized that I had asked her to perform the very same confessional narrative of deservingness to me—the nosy Latina anthropologist she assumed had understood her desire not to. Angry at myself, I did not push her about her mother or her family’s immigration story. Instead, I changed the subject, asking both her and myself: “So, what do you want to write about instead?” When writing about immigrant youth, it can be tempting—especially given the political climate—to focus on either the triumphant or the tragic. However, to do so is to work within the existing, exclusionary frame of the deserving immigrant youth. By examining how youth live around these discourses and do or do not perform them, it is possible to see how youth make and unmake the terms of inclusion. To this point, I have focused on the making. I now turn to the unmaking of inclusion’s exclusionary terms.

Part iii

Unlearning to Belong

4

“Their Name Is Also Written on My Diploma” Striving for Parental inCluSion

The ways Succeeders reproduce belonging’s exclusionary terms are clear. They conform to them in their striving. Succeeders speak, write, and aspire to rise above stereotypes through educational success. This striving toward success, they believe, shows them to be the exceptions to the moralized and race-based rules of belonging. Through striving, they both reinforce the explanatory significance of stereotypes and exclude other Latinos, including their peers and maybe even their parents. The ways Succeeders transform belonging’s terms through striving are no less clear. They can, however, initially escape our perception because they appear apolitical. Youth recast their striving from a moral good signaling their individual position as a moral minority into a collective good and signal. In its collective form, striving works to expand belonging to those the Succeeders care about and for in their lives. In that process, Succeeders’ striving becomes collective in its ends, shifting from individual accomplishment to obligating care that produces bonds of relatedness. Moreover, as they come to value relatedness to others as success, Succeeders propose a transformed understanding of what it is to belong to each other and the nation. To track how youth’s transformation of belonging unfolds, I start in this chapter with relationships imagined 109

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as foundational to the making of family and our ability to care: those between parents and children. I first show how youth leverage the moral good of their educational striving to redeem their parents as model members of the nation rather than the objects of nativists’ exclusion. Put simply, youth hope the “good” of educational achievement that rubs off on them also rubs off on their parents. Succeeding, and securing parental inclusion through it, was a unique kinship obligation for the Succeeders. Moreover, youth staunchly asserted that their valued success was only possible through the stigmatized migration, labor, and care of their devalued parents. As described in the introduction, care refers to concern for others’ welfare and actions in support of their welfare.1 Striving and success, as kinship obligations, recognize the value of parental care and particularly the act of care that is immigration. Parental immigration, as Succeeders saw it, was a form of care that supported Succeeders’ academic aspirations and success. While Succeeders’ efforts work within the success-based terms of membership, they are nonetheless transformative. Success casts a long shadow in the United States. Working to redefine success in one’s own terms is a savvy act of resistance against the exclusionary terms of belonging that can cut one’s family off from one’s self. Succeeders blend the terms of kinship and success to make a claim on expanded belonging for their families. The recasting of success as an obligation to parents and as rooted in parents’ care pushes against achievement and moves toward mutuality and a recognition of the worth and worthiness of others. This repositioning of success, as not individual but rather collective in origin and ends, is an act of defiance, a radical act of inclusion that values unvalued others. The next two chapters focus on Succeeders’ caretaking; here, I primarily focus on how they attempted to signal the worth of parental care and its relationship to membership’s moralities. I show how Succeeders attempted to demonstrate their parents’ moral value through their own success and how students also reclaimed their parents’ value outside of success. I also attend to how in more challenging parent-child relationships students attempted to reframe those bonds in ways that showed their parents and their love as valuable. Finally, I show how youth saw their striving in terms of a lived justification of their parents’ pasts.

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Ultimately, Succeeders look to trade the current moralizations of belonging for those of kinship. In so doing, they offer a different moral system through which belonging can be judged. Parents’ ability to care as kin, in the form of good parenting, served as an alternative proof of the moral personhood needed to belong. Thus, the very things nativists excoriated Succeeders’ parents for—like immigrating without documents—became socially esteemed acts of parenthood. Kinship is not, however, without its own exclusions, particularly regarding these expectations for care and gendered familial roles. Nevertheless, as Succeeders came to recognize care and connection as valuable, they pointed to kinship as the basis for a better belonging than what they had experienced.

a dding “m or e va lu e” to immig ra n t Pa r e n t S th r o ugh ed u Cationa l S u CCe SS Before he reflected on the meaning of Latinidad over a thundering Zumba soundtrack, Sebastián described why his parents had left their struggling small town in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. The story centered on the family’s future: “They didn’t see a future for us, so they decided, ‘Let’s go. Let’s move out.’ ” The couple then migrated, without documents, to the United States. Sebastián’s understanding of his future’s relationship to his parents’ past choice to immigrate without documents illustrates the first part of a broader phenomenon I observed—how youth attempted to make their educational gains proof of their stigmatized parents’ value as national members. This act of proving still relied on success, but success itself would be remade from an individual achievement into a communal gain of inclusion. Sebastián and the other Succeeders often shared that they wanted to make their parents proud through their scholastic achievements. They hoped these achievements demonstrated appreciation for their parents’ immigration and hard work in the United States as immigrant laborers. As Jane-Marie succinctly put it: “Like, coming to the United States and suffering so much to make it here, was it really worth it? Well, like, I feel I might make it worth it for them [through attending college].” In these kinds of expressions, Succeeders, like generations of immigrant youth

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before them, described their educational success as a way to emotionally (and materially) repay their parents for the ongoing sacrifice of immigration, hard work, and settlement in the United States. This sense of obligation resulted in a unique responsibility: the responsibility to succeed. These are the kinship “expectations” Robert Smith terms the “immigrant bargain.”2 In his examination of the transnational lives of Mexican immigrant families in New York City, Smith argues that “the life-defining sacrifice of migration convert[s] it [the bargain] into an urgent tale of moral worth or failure” where youth’s success in school becomes the ultimate indicator of immigration’s value to a family, one’s own value as a good immigrant child who fulfills filial obligations, and the entire family’s inclusion in the nation.3 This obligation to succeed, Smith argues, is specific to the children of immigrants in their families.4 This uniqueness stems from their age: youth are positioned to harvest the fruits of their parents’ immigration and labor due to their access to education and other age-specific opportunities. While other nonimmigrant parent-child dyads might be freighted with similar expectations regarding children’s obligations to achieve in school, it is the radically life-altering nature of immigration— an act that physically removes one from home and family—that raises the stakes of achievement even higher in certain immigrant families.5 These stakes of success are also the stakes of collective belonging. Immigration both disrupts family ties and creates new webs of obligation that bind immigrant families together in novel ways, including through political activism, and changes the meaning of everyday actions.6 For example, in her work on the prenatal care experiences of Mexican immigrant women in New York, Alyshia Gálvez argues that these women see their motherhood and compliance with biomedical prenatal care as practices of superación or betterment. This betterment, worked out on the body of the immigrant mother, is for the entire family and particularly for the family’s incorporation into the shared lifeways integral to belonging.7 Gálvez argues that if the family is a site of political control, how women make decisions about motherhood can offer “new ways to conceptualize citizenship.”8 The same is true for how youth take up their responsibilities as the scholarly sons and daughters of hopeful immigrants looking to belong. The success of the family demonstrates the success of immigration.

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Moreover, family has also historically been both the symbolic and material ground where nations have looked to legally enshrine the national exclusion of immigrant and minority populations.9 The national family is directly tied to the natal one. Largely absent in immigrant bargain scholarship related to youth is this other “tale of moral worth or failure” that Smith points to and that I am concerned with in this book: the moralization of national membership.10 Success as youth’s unique kinship obligation is not just about making immigration “worth it,” as Jane-Marie stated, but also about showing one’s parents to be “worth” belonging in the nation. Sebastián’s reflection on his education’s singular role in showing his undocumented parents, Tomás and Paulina Aguilar, to be valuable members of the United States illustrates this very point. Part of a mixed immigration status family, Sebastián wasn’t shy—with me or anyone else—about the fact that his parents and his older brother, Carlos, were undocumented. His constant accessory, large diamond studs that were a gift from his parents, was physical proof that he and they also weren’t shy about their recent economic success in Nashville. It wasn’t always that way. In the late 1990s, Tomás and Paulina (with Carlos in tow) left their struggling small town and immigrated to Nashville for a “better future.” Specifically, they left for educational opportunity for Carlos and their future children. Sebastián didn’t remember his parents’ lean early years in Tennessee, but Carlos did. He described to Sebastián “the struggle” of that time—sharing meager meals of a single plate of beans for the entire family, sleeping on floors in acquaintances’ crowded apartments. The effect of Carlos’s story of familial sacrifice was chilling for Sebastián: “When my brother told me that, I was just like, dang, I went to my room and I got really sad. I thought—that’s messed up.” The Aguilars’ early struggles continued to weigh heavily on Sebastián as he plotted his future. Sebastián’s dreams “got crushed early,” he told me one afternoon as we walked out of a Succeeders club meeting. As we made our way through Gilead High’s meandering corridors, Sebastián described that he had initially wanted to be a forensic investigator. At age eighteen, he had abandoned this aspiration to follow his parents’ carefully crafted plan for him to become a dentist. While I suggested ways these career paths could (theoretically) be combined, Sebastián revealed that he

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was ultimately satisfied with dentistry and with his CSI-Nashville dream being “crushed.” He confidently told me that his main dream was to “make my parents proud.” Ultimately, he wanted to succeed in school and follow their intended career path for him “to repay them [my parents]. It’s physical stuff and emotional. If they see me graduate, they’ll be so proud, and, at the same time, I want to give them stuff.”11 His rendering of his goals aligns with the classic formulation of the immigrant bargain, but there was more to his striving. Mr. and Mrs. Aguilar, despite the challenges of being undocumented, owned several successful businesses in South Nashville—something that Sebastián took great pride in: You know, from being nothing, basically, from being from a little pueblito or from sleeping on the floor—or, like I said, eating from the same plate, on buckets—to now them making good income, to the point where they’re paying for my brother’s college. My brother, because he’s illegal, too, he didn’t get any scholarships, besides the Succeeders one, so my parents basically paid the full price tuition at Baldwin, and that’s $33K. For them to pay that, and now they’re going to pay mine, and to still make us live the way we are living today, I’m just proud.

In his description of his parents’ achievements, Sebastián began to mark their broader social value in a way that aligns with the moralized paradigm of the American Dream, success, and inclusion. Sebastián tracked a clear upward trajectory from poverty in Mexico, to struggle as undocumented immigrants, to economic prosperity in Tennessee, to his own and his brother’s access to education. The Aguilars owned businesses and a house. Their hard work made it possible for the family to enjoy the “way we are living today.” They made economic good on their immigration, and that made Sebastián proud. However, despite their success, Tomás and Paulina’s undocumented status would cast a criminal shadow over their right to belong. Their membership, despite meeting belonging’s successbased terms, was thus not guaranteed. It is notable then that Sebastián’s description of his parents’ success culminated in his and his brother’s schooling. In the broader ideology of success foretold in the American Dream, the literal buck stopped with their family’s “good income.” This narrative arc makes internal sense. It

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was undocumented immigration and labor in Nashville that made “the way” of middle-class living possible—not the brothers’ schooling. Despite his unabashed pride in his parents’ success and openness about their immigration status, Sebastián was also very aware of the trailing stigma of undocumented immigration and Latinidad, as described in chapter 2. Sebastián’s attention to his and his brother’s educational access points to his awareness of the powerful symbolic role that educational attainment could play in validating Mr. and Mrs. Aguilar’s valued economic worth and devalued, undocumented immigration.12 In Sebastián’s telling, it was not the Aguilars’ economic success that made them notable and noteworthy successes, but their ability to provide their sons with the respectable social good of education. His education, a moral good, could make his undocumented parents morally good enough to belong. In this way, he expanded the parameters of belonging to include his parents, his family, in the national family. Later, when I asked Sebastián why college was important to him, he cited economic stability aligning with the economic ends of the American Dream. He then turned back to his parents in a way that further signaled his understanding of the key role of education as a marker of respectability for him, and perhaps for them as well: My parents didn’t go to college. They come from Mexico and they’re doing just fine. [They have] four businesses, they’re creating jobs, they’ve been paying taxes for sixteen years. They do better than other people that did get an education. But, to me, as a person, I think education is important. It adds more value to you.

While the Aguilars were key economic providers, their labor did not add the same kind of “value to you” that an education can. While he seemed to suggest that his parents had less value without formal education, Sebastián also relied on loaded signifiers that he—a champion debater and avid student of American government—knew were used in politics to justify immigrants’ importance to the nation and their deservingness to belong to it. The Aguilars were “creating jobs” and had paid taxes for many years. They were not welfare cheats, but rather “job creators.” While the Aguilars might economically “do better” than those without an education, Sebastián’s statements suggest he knew the assumed high cultural value of an

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educated person and that it signaled something uniquely respectable about him.13 He also hoped his education would reflect on his parents. Through his education, he gained, and perhaps provided to his parents the slippery social “value” that their economic gains did not and that their undocumented status precluded. Sebastián’s family was notable in its level of upward mobility. However, his case is broadly illustrative of youth’s understanding of education’s moral valence for their parents. Moreover, his case shows how this understanding of education’s redemptive value holds true even where other normative markers of success, such as wealth, are present. Framing success away from the image of the lone, rugged, achieving individual and toward the effort, love, and care of family unmoors the individualistic, success-based terms of membership. In this way, youth draw parents into the national family, while being in accordance with the regnant moralization of success. Personal statements for college also often dealt with these same themes and shared a similar narrative frame to the one Sebastián used in his interview. These commonalities suggest the durability of the belief that youth’s education would redeem immigrant families, taking them from foreign others to national members in ways that reshaped belonging. These essays, a variation on the “moral minority” ones examined in chapter 3, also relied on alignment with the morality of the American Dream. These essays followed a standard narrative arc. Students first described difficult familial immigration journeys to Nashville, parents’ long hours at work, and the better lives parents were currently providing as prototypically hard-working, American Dream–believing immigrants. They then switched to the even better lives they hoped to gain for themselves, their parents, and their communities by working hard at their studies and seeking professional jobs. Essays closed with the broader significance of parental immigration for youth’s striving. Some youth cast educational success as the redemptive culmination of parents’ efforts to build a life in the United States, as Sebastián had. Others positioned parental immigration as youth’s motivation toward the social good of education in the first place. For example, after describing her parents’ difficult immigration histories, Lupita went as far as to state: “To be completely honest, if I wasn’t Hispanic, I’m not sure I’d have the drive to succeed.” In both

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modes, students positioned their striving as rooted in their kinship ties to parents. Alejandro, the International Day planner and aspiring trilingual, wrote a notably comic version of this kind of essay. In it, he played up the contrast between his daydreaming self and his more serious father. Alejandro also subverted the narrative conventions of the parent-focused essay by asserting his parents’ preexisting value outside of his educational aspirations. This essay might seem unexpected coming from Alejandro. He had been vociferous in his belief in education’s singular role in demonstrating Latinos’ value. Recall that Alejandro thought aspiring to college showed both that “Hispanics are trying to better themselves” and that they would no longer perform manual labor, like the landscaping job he cited. Alejandro’s parents—Timoteo and Marta Sandoval—were documented migrants. However, the Sandovals worked in the kind of low-status jobs that Alejandro highlighted as a foundational stereotype of Latinidad. Alejandro’s reflection on manual labor, paired with his essay, reveals that he was keenly aware of the vocational stereotypes that degraded and excluded his parents and other working-class Latinos like them. In his essay, Alejandro recounted that he had asked his father after a long day of backbreaking work in a concrete factory what he had aspired to be when he was a teenager back in his rural ranch town in Guadalajara, Mexico. Mr. Sandoval responded tersely: “a hardworking man.” He went on to suggest to Alejandro that the family should go back to Mexico so Alejandro could wish for the same. Alejandro then discussed his work in school and how he hoped his schooling would enable him to repay his parents—immigrant bargain style—for their lives of labor as American Dream-ing, “hardworking” immigrants who had sacrificed their very bodies for his life and education.14 By attending college, Alejandro aimed for a professional life that would both put an end their labor (by providing economically for them) and make them, as he wrote, “proud.”15 His essay then took a turn. After describing his abiding love and respect for his factory-worker parents, Alejandro closed his personal statement in a way that shifted the focus to his parents’ value beyond Alejandro’s good grades or their laboring contributions to the United States as potential claims on membership within it. He stated: “When I see how much they’ve struggled, I am motivated to succeed, not only in school, but in

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life [emphasis added].”16 He reflected that he, like his father, wanted be a “hardworking man,” which Alejandro described as a person who meets his interpersonal and family obligations. In his closing, Alejandro positioned his parents’ efforts to care for him and to meet their obligations to him as their child as what motivated his own pursuit of moral personhood or success “in life.” This positioning doesn’t suggest that Alejandro’s striving added “more value” to his parents, as Sebastián’s narration did. Instead, Alejandro declared that the Sandovals already had value because of kinship—because they motivated moral personhood, understood as meeting caring obligations. Alejandro showed his parents, through that care, kinship, and moral personhood, to be valuable according to an alternative measure of worth and worthiness.

“ my mo m h a d d r ea mS f or me” : re C la i m i n g g o o d Par entS a n d good i mmigration S Youth also linked their parents’ worth to students’ own educational aspirations in more overtly transformative ways. Such framings show how youth began to make even more radical claims regarding the inherent value of immigration and immigrants. To do so, Succeeders needed to appeal to another moral system: normative expectations of good parental caretaking—or parenting—that speak to both US and Latin American contexts.17 Youth often validated their fathers’ social worth through the latters’ ability to provide economically, as the first half of Alejandro’s essay demonstrated. Such a rendering of good fatherhood aligns with still-salient expectations of fatherhood as a primarily economic caretaking role in both white US and Latin American contexts.18 Youth also focused on crosscutting notions of motherhood and mothering. Such notions emphasized mothers’ roles as devoted nurturers who make sacrifices, including the sacrifice of immigration, to improve children’s futures.19 As Succeeders saw it, both these gendered acts of providing and sacrificing were acts of parental care made especially for the education of children, both formal and moral.20 Such familial care could show their parents to be worthy of belonging.

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This focus on education in relation to gendered immigrant parenting makes sense for two reasons. The first, as suggested in the introduction, is that education has long been viewed by immigrants and others as the key to social mobility for the entire immigrant family. The second relates to the stigmatization of Latino immigrant parenting specifically. Immigrants’ normatively good or bad parenting is held up by both politicians and “street-level bureaucrats”—like teachers and public health officials—as primary evidence for determining immigrants’ fitness for membership in everyday life.21 More specifically, Latino immigrant parents’ failure to align with unspoken US norms of family and familial care becomes the everyday instantiation of Latinos’ broader moral unfitness for membership.22 Thus, kinship was already part of deciding membership— albeit in terms that looked for deficits, rather than assets, among immigrant parents. As Saskia Bonjour and Betty de Hart write, “family norms play a crucial role in the production of collective identities, i.e. in defining who ‘we’ are and what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘others.’ ”23 Such norms are used by state actors and others “to govern and dispossess migrants” as outside of the national family.24 There are clear racial overtones to this moralization. White parenting practices serve as the baseline for inclusion, while Black and certain Global South practices occupy the position of immoral other.25 By being unfit parents, this reasoning suggests, immigrant parents are unfit national family members. The Succeeders looked to prove their families’ fitness for membership by showing their parents’ fitness as nurturers. One aspect of Latino parenting is particularly relevant here. There remains a lingering popular, and even scholarly, suggestion that Latino “familial deficits” are the reason for Latino youth’s school failures.26 Such an explanation ignores the structural inequalities inherent in the kinds of US schools immigrants and Latinos typically attend, as described in chapter 1. By focusing on education, the very thing that is held up as proof of Latinos’ failures as parents and national members, Succeeders reappropriated the negative narratives used to define them as outside of moral personhood and the nation. Marina, a Succeeders alum, was an adept adopter of this strategy of demonstrating parental worth through alignment with normative notions of good and caring parenthood, specifically parental involvement in her

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schooling. She also reclaimed the value of her mother’s immigration as an act of care. As part of an alumni panel, Marina spoke about what to expect from college life at four Succeeders clubs during the fall 2012 semester. Each meeting followed similar themes: the importance of managing time well, getting to know professors, keeping a calendar, not procrastinating, and the like. Central to Marina’s presentation at Jackson Hills High, however, was her narration of her education vis-à-vis her mother’s decision to immigrate to Tennessee from Mexico without documents. She stated: “My mom had dreams for me, that’s why I’m here. I’m not mad she brought me here. I have this dream [to go to college] because she did that.” Marina directly linked her own dream of education to her mother’s stigmatized immigration, as Sebastián and Alejandro did. In this case, Marina showed her mother’s undocumented immigration as an act of valuable motherly care and nurturance of her daughter’s future “dreams.” A good thing— striving—came from morally dubious undocumented immigration. Marina’s comments also demonstrate a refusal to accept the very premise that her and her mother’s undocumented migration should be morally stigmatized at all. Such a refusal is a powerful political statement, as it rejects the pernicious premise of good and bad migrations and immigrants that suffuses US immigration policy. In her work on emotions, Catherine Lutz argues that “moral ideas take what force they have from the commitment people learn to feel to them.”27 By refusing to be “mad” at her mother for their undocumented migration, Marina had no “commitment” to the “moral idea” of undocumented immigration as stigmatized immigration. Instead, she showed her “commitment” to the idea that her mother’s immigration was an act of parental care. She offered kinship as another moral system to judge her mother’s action against. Her mother’s stigmatized-as-criminal undocumented migration is, in this system, not criminal. Rather, it is an act of prized parental care that is to be lauded. If membership is premised on moral goodness, Marina’s mother’s morally good immigration can also be proof of her moral worth. She is not the kind of immigrant whose parenting is to be chided, but rather one whose parenting should be praised as it resulted in a positive end for her child. Good motherhood supersedes immigration status in Marina’s mother’s moral value.28

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In addition to being a stellar student who was involved in many campus extracurricular activities, Marina was also a prominent local immigrant rights organizer. The story she shared about her mother at Jackson Hills was at that time increasingly reflected in social media and other campaigns that called undocumented youth’s parents the “original dreamers” or the ones who “gave me the dream.” Rights activists, in campaigns using such terms, were reclaiming parents’ stigmatized immigration as an act of care that inspired their children’s educational goals.29 It was the immigrant parent who gave the citizen or DREAMer child the dream to succeed. Images and campaigns using phrases like #originaldreamers to describe immigrant parents on social media thus exploited the politicization of the family common in US politics and the rhetoric of the American Dream. They also made use of the family’s history as a potent political symbol in various Latino and Latin American contexts for organizing, making rights claims, and demanding inclusion in the nation.30 In these campaigns and in Marina’s presentation, youth’s education was politically positioned as a means to redeem immigration, given both education and parental love’s value as social goods. This mode of messaging allowed activists to include their “original dreamers”—parents who had moved for the betterment of their children—in their political efforts. By framing her mother’s care in the form of her immigration as moral, Marina also demanded her mother’s inclusion in the nation. Marina’s declaration of her mother’s value in the club was an act of protest that asked us to recognize her family’s precarity. Such messaging—in media campaigns and in Sebastián’s, Alejandro’s, and Marina’s words—pushes back against belonging’s exclusions and demands belonging be expanded to include parents in the national family. Clearly, vestiges of the old order of moralized membership remain. Parental inclusion is still, at least on some level, predicated on the good dream of educational striving even if parents are not the ones striving. However, Succeeders’ framing of success away from the individual toward the effort, love, and care of family revised the individualistic, success-based terms of membership to be more inclusive. Marina’s comments also began to suggest that while education can “add value,” parents and immigration are not without existing moral value.

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faili ng S tu d en t S , “b a d ” Pa r en t S : r e d e m P t i o n in SuCC eSS - a n d k in Shi P- ba S ed t e r m S The youth I have just discussed were all high academic achievers from families with little interpersonal conflict. These students were likely to access higher education and reap its material and figurative benefits for themselves and their loved ones. They would keep the bargain in its emotional, material, and moral forms. While about two-thirds of the Succeeders I worked with were average or high achievers, another third were below average and, in some cases, were struggling to graduate from high school. Nevertheless, the kinship obligations of the immigrant bargain— and, most centrally, the goal of morally redeeming the family as worthy of belonging through that obligation—still pulled at students even as they doubted their ability to succeed.31 For these struggling students, the strategy of asserting familial value through schooling was slightly different. Failing student Perla cast herself as the rebellious, slacker family outcast. In her telling, Perla alone was responsible for setting herself on a wayward path in her past. It was her own choices, not a “bad” immigrant family or parents who didn’t value education or were otherwise unfit in their parenting, that had led her astray.32 In distancing her poor choices from her family’s good ones, Perla looked to preempt moral judgment of her family by others. Perla’s positioning of her parents as caring and fit despite her academic slide also suggested that immigrants’ parenting to support academic success, even when that success doesn’t manifest, could be enough evidence of the moral worth necessary to belong. Janitza, whose case I describe next, shared with her classmate Perla a past peppered with academic failure and teenage rebellion. Janitza’s family situation and strategies for personal and familial redemption were slightly different than Perla’s because of the more difficult relationships in Janitza’s family. Janitza’s web of family ties, kinship, and achievement also revealed the potentially more painful stakes of moral and national redemption in families where the bonds of parental care stray far from kinship’s idealized terms. Janitza had a tough-as-granite exterior that initially made me nervous. I expected to be summarily dismissed. To my delight and continued

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gratitude, we forged a very close bond. A month before her high school graduation, Janitza waited for Liz and me at the end of the club meeting, a sure sign that a serious talk would ensue. As a gaggle of sophomores paraded out of the classroom, Janitza began to recount her most recent argument with her mom, Irene. It had ended in yet another threat of being kicked out of the family apartment. This time, though, she was sure that her mother was serious. Janitza’s steely reserve cracked. She uncharacteristically cried as she described her fear that she could not earn $520 in monthly rent money—to say nothing of covering other bills—for a studio efficiency in the family’s current apartment complex. She also worried her schoolwork would suffer if she had to put in more hours at work, just when she had gotten a handle on school. What made this situation particularly hard to understand, for me at least, was that Janitza’s grades and reputation among teachers had been improving. Janitza’s turnaround was a far cry from her sophomore year of high school when she had habitually skipped school, used drugs and alcohol heavily, gotten pregnant, subsequently miscarried, and almost dropped out—resulting in a further fractured relationship with her mother. Now Janitza, as she said, was “doing me” and doing it well. She was keeping the immigrant bargain. Where then was the loving attention from Irene that the immigrant bargain seems to suggest would be forthcoming? Janitza and Irene’s combative relationship was rooted not only in Janitza’s admittedly checkered teenage past, but also in Irene’s denial of Janitza’s childhood abuse at the hands of her then stepfather, Agustín. It was also rooted in the family’s subsequent, and unanticipated, immigration. Following Agustín’s imprisonment on child abuse charges, Irene’s sister urged Irene to immigrate out of El Salvador—without documents— for fear of retribution from Agustín’s angry family. Irene, Janitza, and Janitza’s younger sister Marikay then moved to the United States. Irene had not wanted to leave because of her love for Agustín. According to Janitza, Irene didn’t believe that Janitza had been abused. Janitza was haunted by her mother’s disbelief in her abuse and saw that as the crux of their contentious relationship. Tied to those hard feelings was Janitza’s perception that Irene was not fulfilling her mothering obligations. If immigration was an act of parental sacrifice, to be lauded as evidence of fitness of motherhood and membership, Irene’s reluctance spoke poorly

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of her on both fronts. Janitza didn’t understand her mother’s divided loyalties, which had led to a begrudging immigration as an act of collective preservation. As she told me: “That daughter came out of you. That guy is—he’s just going inside you. It’s the difference.” At the chaotic start of another Succeeders club meeting a week later, and in sharp contrast to the emotionally charged chat the previous week, Janitza spoke to me nonchalantly about her new domestic situation. As she whipped her straight-ironed, ink-black hair out of her heavily lined eyes, Janitza explained she had moved out. Yet even after moving out, Janitza continued to pay some of her mother’s bills. Covering her mother’s bills wasn’t the only way Janitza sought to repay, and redeem, her estranged mother. In our interview a few weeks later, and to my surprise, Janitza cited Irene as the reason she chose to refocus on school: “That’s always been my, like, my goal. Make her proud. If I go to college, she’s gonna be so proud. My mom has been a single mom since I was one. I was born in jail, and she’s been a great mom. It’s a way of me paying her back.” “Paying her back” through educational accomplishment was recognition of her mother’s sacrifices in leaving El Salvador; entering the low-wage labor market in the United States; and doing the best she could as a mother in the wake of failed domestic partnerships, imprisonment, abuse, undocumented immigration, lost trust, and teenage rebellion. The more I came to know Janitza and her mother, the more apparent it became that Janitza’s desire to make her mother proud through school was also a way to claim her mother’s affection and care, to make sense of the ongoing crisis of their relationship, and to show her mother as a normatively good one to others like me. She was not just redeeming her family and her family’s immigration as moral through education. She was also redeeming her mother as moral in terms of good motherhood. While parental care could be leveraged in happy families, Janitza would have to prove her mother was nurturing despite evidence to the contrary. All efforts had the end goal of repairing the family and their ties of belonging to each other and their new homeland. While all immigrants’ parenting is scrutinized as evidence of fitness for membership, mothers like Irene bear a disproportionate burden. Part of that burden stems from the symbolic link between the reproduction of the nation and the reproduction of children, which in turn stems from the

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commonplace assumption of primordial identity and culture as located in the mother.33 Latina motherhood has been especially surveilled. For example, as I noted regarding the skit on teen motherhood in chapter 3, Latinas’ supposedly uncontrolled fertility represents a demographic and cultural threat to the nation.34 Latina motherhood is compared not only to US norms but also to Latino and Latin American ones, where it is a potent political icon of resistance to exclusionary social policy.35 Sometimes Latin American and US norms intersect. The ideal of the sacrificing, caring mother—the mother Irene seemingly fails to be—is one such norm.36 The moral worth of Janitza’s mom was unclear to those who would judge it on two fronts. According to nativists, she, as an undocumented immigrant, was a criminal. Additionally, as a mother she failed to unquestioningly sacrifice for her child, as Marina’s mother had done. Janitza, however, sometimes framed her mother as a “great mom” and her reluctant immigration as something she did do, ultimately, for the safety of her children. In so doing, Janitza attempted to make her mother conform to both the striving immigrant and good mother roles that could prove her worth as both member and moral person. Janitza’s sense that she must do this for listeners like me suggests the tremendous hold these expectations of both immigration and immigrant kinship have on immigrant youth, including those with fractured families. Janitza sought to represent her mother in the way she assumed others would like her to be as an immigrant, a mother, and a potential national member. This case reveals that while kinship offers potential expansion of belonging’s terms, it too has its limits. While Janitza extended belonging to include her mother, it was hard won. Once youth move away from the idea of needing to redeem their parents and toward valuing connection as an important good unto itself, their leveraging of kinship toward a more transformative critique of membership is clearer.

bar g ai nin g f or m or e: in ter g e n e rat i o na l r edemPt ion a n d the Col l e Cti v e o r i g i n S o f S u CCe SS When I interviewed Jim for the first time back in 2012, he had yet to apply to college. Reflecting on my question about how being the first

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college-bound member of his family made him feel, he revealed some inner turmoil: At first it would make me feel angry, because I felt that there was too much on my shoulders, or that my parents were depending on me, or expecting a lot from me. And I thought ‘how can they expect this from me when they didn’t even do it themselves?’ And I would always dislike the pressure—and then not only from my parents, but from family that I have in Mexico. And I have cousins that didn’t go to college—as of now, I’m the first person to go to college, counting uncles and cousins and relatives. . . . Now, I’m actually proud that I feel like I’m the one—I feel like education has been a curse, and I feel like I’m the one breaking that curse and saying, “No, no—this isn’t gonna keep happening. We need education in our family.”

Jim’s role as “the one breaking the curse” of thwarted education in his family reveals the deeper origins of the immigrant bargain and of immigration itself. As he further discussed his family’s educational deprivations with me, he reflected on how his mother had been unable to attend school in Mexico. As he spoke, I was reminded of how Jim had introduced himself after a poorly attended Succeeders club at Gilead. He began by stating that his parents had immigrated, as an act of care, to give him “a better future, opportunities to be someone, when back in my country, maybe I wouldn’t.” Like Sebastián and Marina, Jim argued that day at Gilead that his aspirations for education and all it represented came from undocumented immigration. He was someone whose familial immigration defined him. In our first interview, he further elaborated on this introduction. While his parents had this goal for his future, he would be the one to justify their past. It was the connection between generations that ultimately mattered and made them belong to each other. Connection was what Jim valued. It would become the foundation of his and other Succeeders’ challenge to membership’s existing exclusionary terms, as I explore in the next two chapters. Two months after he finished college and four years after our first interview, I interviewed Jim again. This time, it wasn’t in a flex office space at Succeeders but at his new collegiate alma mater in one of the main library’s study rooms. We left his middle-school-aged sister in the sunny atrium with a cookie, an iced tea, and a young adult novel.

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About a month before this interview, I had traveled from Massachusetts to Tennessee to see Jim and the first wave of the Succeeders I knew graduate from college. I wasn’t the only “Jim fan” there that day. In addition to his very proud immediate family, Jim’s paternal grandfather had come up from the family’s small hometown in rural Mexico for the graduation. I was curious how Jim felt about graduating. He had done it. He had honored the immigrant bargain by finally gaining the long-hoped-for college diploma. To sweeten the experience, his father and grandfather were there to witness this accomplishment. He told me that having two generations present as he walked across the stage with his diploma was his “dream come true.” He then began to reflect on the intergenerational origins of his dream. Twenty-seven years earlier, Jim’s father, Mr. Rodas, had immigrated from the same small town where Jim’s grandfather still lived. An undocumented immigrant, Mr. Rodas hadn’t been back to Mexico in twenty years. The last time he was “home,” it was to get Jim and his mom. Jim vividly remembered the family making their way into Texas through a clandestine border crossing. Upon the family’s settling in Nashville, Jim’s father had worked as a landscaper—a job that, as fellow Succeeder Alejandro had stated, was commonly and negatively associated with Latino men in Nashville and elsewhere in the United States.37 Seeing the Latino landscapers who worked on his college campus’s carefully manicured grounds—who did the same undervalued job his father did—made an impression on Jim: I saw forty-year-old men, fifty-year-old men, thirty-year-old men, whose families were back home—back in Mexico, back in Guatemala, back wherever they were from. I think, for the first time, I was able to see a big picture. I saw someone’s dad, someone’s husband, working hard labor for a better life for their family back home to send money to sustain them. And when I saw that, I also saw the story of our family. . . . I just began to see a bigger picture of what an immigrant looked like here and obviously, it was also my story, it was also a story of my family. And so when I would walk by [the landscapers] and say hello, talk to them in Spanish and have a short conversation, I would walk off to class in the air conditioned rooms and everything was fine. I remember I would say to myself: “I am here in the name of my father and my grandfather, and my great-grandfathers. And for me to be here is for them to here. Today I am

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going to read for them, I am going to write for them, I am going to listen for them. I am going to come to class with them,” and it became something that I did for my family.

Jim’s connection of his everyday academic work to his family suggests a more collective meaning of educational attainment, beyond his individual ability to attend college or even to redeem the family through his achievement. It was a far cry from his teenage angst over being the first to attend college or even his nascent pride in that same role at the end of high school. His dream was more than meeting meritocratic measures of success and more than leveraging those successes toward the inclusion of his parents. It was about more than whether or not his father was a good father. Rather, his education was the culmination of an intergenerational process, one that carried and connected generations of care and effort, a process that he saw unfolding in the labor of the landscapers, his father, and himself. He continued: And so having them [my father and grandfather] at graduation was a fulfillment that I had within me, and it was also a sense that I had that I done it. Their name is also written on my diploma, my mom’s name is written on my diploma, my grandparents’ name is written on there. And so it was a dream come true.

Jim’s graduation was a “dream come true” not only for him, but also for his family. While Jim understood that the diploma was the physical manifestation of his individual attainment in the educational meritocracy, he imbued it with familial significance. It was not just his name on his diploma, his accomplishment, but “theirs.” They belonged to each other through it. His mother’s educational deprivation in Mexico was overcome. His parents’ deprivations as immigrants were redeemed. While his parents’ immigration was proven moral through this achievement, Jim’s ongoing reflections over time illustrate how the perception of the morality of success, immigration, and striving change. It isn’t just that Jim’s success was collectively won—though it was—but that his success was theirs. His success was fueled by the collective efforts of others. His family was already and is always a success. For Jim, having his family members’ names “written” on his diploma served as evidence of considerable personal and

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familial effort toward collective advancement and achievement. As he saw the “bigger picture of what an immigrant looked like” and saw his family’s story in it, Jim also connected his, his father’s, his mother’s, and his grandfather’s efforts to the “bigger story” of national membership. Tying the story of oneself and own’s own family to the stories of others and others’ families begins to untie the Gordian knot of uncaring exclusion and reknit belonging as fundamentally relational.

Co nC luS ion One Saturday morning, as I hopelessly tried to revive a dying office computer, I heard a familiar conversation between Sofía and an unfamiliarto-me Succeeder. In halting Spanglish, she told Sofía that she wanted to go to college to show “everybody”—teachers, bosses, and perhaps even politicians—that her family, and her parents especially, were buena gente. The phrase buena gente means well-mannered, kind, trustworthy people of upstanding moral behavior and standards.38 Like buena educación—the knowledge of what is “good or moral”—being buena gente is not tied to formal schooling but to norms of good personhood that prioritize respect, manners, and loyalty.39 As evidenced in this chapter, Succeeders linked their formal educational achievements and their parents’ parenting to their family’s status as buena gente. This link allowed youth to articulate their families’ value according to both kinship norms and the US moralization of success. Individual striving rooted in parental care came to stand for both the student and their family’s virtue and membership potential in the United States. This repositioning of success—as not individual but collective in origin, as not just meritocratic accomplishment but caretaking— was an act of defiance against dominant perceptions of belonging. Familial obligation and caring as modeled by parents became the raw material and idiom for youth’s lived critique of US moralized success and a nominal inclusion that devalues the caring, sacrifices, migration, and existing buena gente status of immigrant families. Sebastián, Alejandro, Marina, Perla, Janitza, Jim, and others attempted to flip the perception of their families, from “illegal’ and/or unskilled laborers, moral reprobates, or irresponsible parents to American successes whose children are

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educated, moral minorities. They did so in ways that both replicated and rejected existing terms of membership. These transformative and reproductive understandings and actions are neither contradictory nor unrelated to each other. Both stem from connection to kin and are in response to the present difficulties facing immigrant families’ inclusion in a context of nativism. Anthropologists Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham have coined the term “regeneration” to describe this kind of dynamic interplay between social reproduction and social change that is worked out in families.40 Family is not separate from the nation, but an important symbolic and material ground for defining the nation. It is not only the work of activists that makes inroads on exclusion, but also the unseen regenerative and inclusionary efforts of youth like Succeeders. As Succeeders quietly redefine success in fundamentally relational and kin-based ways, they boldly redefine belonging and provide an example of a potentially more humane social regeneration. Their parents aren’t the only generation Succeeders regenerate the terms of belonging for: they do it for their siblings too. And they do it through care.

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“Education with Her Family” Caring for SiblingS and redefining SuCCeSS

“I’m doing this for my kids,” Isabel explained when I asked about her soon-to-be-completed college applications. I was surprised. Did she have children that I was unaware of after months of fieldwork? As I asked for clarification, Isabel quickly interjected: “My little brother and sister. Those are my babies. . . . I raised them. I changed their diapers.” Like many Latino immigrant families, Isabel’s parents worked long hours, had limited English-language abilities, and lacked familiarity with US schooling practices—making them reliant on Isabel for childcare and educational guidance for their younger children.1 Isabel went on to explain that her efforts—cooking dinner, checking homework, and even her own academic striving—were not for her. They also weren’t for her parents, as described in chapter 4. Instead, they were for her siblings. Through her scholastic example and the various modes of care she performed for her siblings, Isabel hoped to ensure their educational access and the inclusion that she and her family assumed education would bring.2 Painfully, undocumented Isabel understood that going to school and experiencing inclusion would be much easier for her “babies” than it would be for her because of both her care for them and their US citizenship. 131

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In mixed-status families like Isabel’s, family members’ different citizenship and immigration statuses create unequal opportunities and negatively affect all family members’ feelings of security, well-being, and belonging regardless of each member’s individual status.3 As Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz writes, “the very existence of a ‘mixed-status family’ suggests simultaneous inclusion and exclusion.”4 Such inclusions and exclusions are not just perceived. Looming over every mixed-status family is the threat of the physical removal of undocumented family members through deportation and the subsequent loss of familial coresidence. Isabel’s striving for “my kids” was how she tempered her family’s collective vulnerability. She sought to protect herself, and her family, from her potential deportation in a merit-based immigration policy context. Isabel pushed her siblings to achieve to ensure their family’s lasting success in a United States that valued her citizen siblings more than it valued her despite her many accomplishments. Although the brutal reality of deportation may seem to affect only mixed-status or undocumented families, the separation of some families hints at the vulnerability of all families. The lines of belonging are drawn, like those on the kinship charts of our anthropological forebears, through our relationships in our families. In this chapter, I pay particular attention to siblings because in managing this relationship, Succeeders also managed and made sense of an uncertain present. Through valuing their sibling caretaking, youth also critiqued belonging’s current limited terms and argued for a care-based belonging. This critique unfolds in siblingship because of this relationship’s unique importance in our lives.5 It can serve as a blueprint for our other relationships, influence our interpersonal behavior, and affect how we see ourselves.6 Siblings, as members of the same generation, are imagined as comprising the family’s hoped-for collective future. In immigrant families, the children of immigrants are the ones poised to bear the fruits of their parents’ labor and immigration, per the immigrant bargain. However, not all children of immigrants are equally positioned to enjoy the hoped-for future benefits of immigration because of age, gender, or immigration status. As Isabel deeply understood, youth grapple with the inequalities of belonging in and through their sibling relationships. It is also through these close relationships that they begin to question the logic of belonging’s

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exclusionary terms. Though Isabel understood the structural inequalities between herself and “my kids,” she also knew they were similar to each other because of their shared upbringing. The singular relationship of siblings—at once closely similar and disparate—enables youth to see the arbitrariness of exclusion. A sibling’s exclusion comes closest to one’s own. In chapter 4, I described how youth felt an obligation to secure their parents’ inclusion. To do so, they highlighted parental care as both what led to their own achievements and what proved their parents’ moral deservingness for US membership. In this chapter I show how Succeeders saw their own care for their siblings in a very similar way: as what led to their siblings’ and their families’ success and belonging. In this way, Succeeders saw themselves differently—as more like their parents—in that Succeeders were working on behalf of others’ thriving. While success here was still critical to inclusion, Succeeders’ focus was now on securing the success and inclusion of others. As they shifted focus from self to others, Succeeders fundamentally altered their notion of success and what belonging can and should be. Rather than valuing care as a means to the end of meritocratic success, Succeeders began to value care that nurtures the connection of family ties as the most important facet of their striving. It is the family making, or “kinning,” that care does—rather than the moral good of education or the racialized merit it creates—that mattered to youth and mattered most about them.7 This heightened meaning of caring and reformulation of success led the Succeeders to reject the existing terms of membership and instead proffer ones based in maintaining their relational ties in a political context that threatens them. This chapter proceeds with an overview of the practical ways that Succeeders cared for their siblings, including through their striving. I then turn to how youth came to understand care and striving-as-care as acts whose value stems from sustaining connection and familial welfare rather than good grades. As Succeeders valued their care as their most important accomplishment, they framed success and belonging as relational connection. Care mattered, not only because it produced meritocratic success but also because it affirmed their siblings’ and families’ collective value. Succeeders’ refashioning of success countered the moralization of meritocratic accomplishment and membership. It also stood up to the

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ever-present threats of deportation and separation that racially marked Latino families face every day.

r o uti neS of ev ery day a n d ed u Cat i o na l S ibCar e in S u CC eed er S ’ l iv eS Thus far, I have described the Succeeders almost entirely in terms of their striving for academic excellence. Yet beyond their commitment to their schoolwork, Succeeders’ days were filled with many obligations to their families, including to their siblings. Almost all of the young people with siblings whom I worked with engaged in direct sibling caretaking or what scholars call sibcare: “activities ranging from complete and independent full-time care of a child by an older child . . . as well as simply ‘keeping an eye out’ for siblings.”8 While sibcare is by no means unique to immigrant families, it is particularly common among them.9 Also particularly common to immigrant families is a specific mode of sibcare—what I term educational sibcare.10 Educational sibcare is the considerable effort elder siblings put into supporting younger siblings’ education, ranging from checking homework to high-stakes educational decision-making for siblings.11 An additional educational sibcare responsibility for the Succeeders is their own striving, which casts them as role models for good academic habits. In taking up all these commitments, older siblings can facilitate their younger siblings’ educational success.12 Thirty of the Succeeders I interviewed had siblings, and 77 percent of this group provided light to moderate caretaking for those siblings. This caretaking included noneducational modes like heating up dinner and less intensive educational sibcare activities like helping with homework. The remaining caretakers had heavy responsibilities—serving as primary, unsupervised caregivers for long periods of time, with major in-depth nonschooling and schooling-based responsibilities. These tasks included things like sole caretaking of an infant sibling or managing all schoolbased correspondence.13 Female Succeeders were twice as likely as their male counterparts to engage in sibcare at this highest level. However, some young men did, too. Pedro, the break dancer at International Day, had some of the most significant sibcare responsibilities I encountered

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among Succeeders regardless of gender. Pedro cared for his elementaryschool-aged brother after school, providing dinner, making sure he completed his homework, and getting him ready for bed. Pedro was also the sole caretaker for his infant brother while his mother worked the night shift and his stepfather slept following his day shift. Like Pedro, Lupita—who, recall, “had at least ten essays saying ‘I’m Hispanic’ ”—was one of the most intensive caretakers and ambitious students I came to know. While Lupita did more than a lot of students, her case remains a good example. Her responsibilities match both with the common ones that other Succeeders carried out and also how they thought about them. Tracking the ways these responsibilities unfolded shows why Succeeders reoriented their perception of both care and their striving’s value in terms of kinship and its attendant obligations. Lupita lived with her mother, a homemaker; her older half brother, Juan, who was born in El Salvador; and two younger siblings, aged nine and seven, who along with Lupita were born in the United States. After moving the family to Tennessee from the Northeast, Lupita’s father, Mr. Ortiz, moved back North in search of more lucrative construction work. He came to Nashville once a year for Christmas. In 2012–13 he came a second time—for Lupita’s high school graduation. He hoped that his higher wages could enable his family to have a middle-class lifestyle in Nashville and to support his children’s higher education. Lupita was eleven when Mr. Ortiz moved, and she saw this as the turning point when she began to take on a more parental role. She stated: “I feel like, when I was eleven, that’s when I started filling in his role and I started taking over more of the house.” Her “taking over” involved paying the bills, serving as Mrs. Ortiz’s “little translator,” helping to discipline her siblings, watching her siblings when Mrs. Ortiz was out, guiding homework, and directing her siblings’ schooling. On this last point, Lupita had recently enrolled her younger brother in the “feeder” middle school of a magnet high school that had high rates of admission to selective universities. By engaging in these generalized and educational sibcare routines, Lupita and other older sibling Succeeders facilitated their younger siblings’ overall well-being as well as their educational attainment, potentially improving their siblings’ mobility and school success.14 As an example of this latter point, despite her parents’ hope that the Southeast would

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provide mobility for their children, Lupita remembered her schools in the North as “more advanced” than those she attended in Tennessee. Lupita’s efforts to enroll her younger brother in a magnet school were meant as a way for him to have a smoother and more rigorous educational path than her own had been. These sibcare practices are equally consequential for the caretakers. Sibcare and household labor endow older siblings with confidence, academic success, and favored status in their families.15 Lupita acknowledged these facts. She took pride in her familial role and saw it as how she built the skills that helped her become a high scholastic achiever. Consequently, she “felt bad” that her siblings had not had the same opportunity. While sibcare can be positive, it is not without its challenges. Time devoted to siblings’ educational success often comes at the cost of time devoted to one’s own striving. Such time-intensive commitments outside of one’s own schooling can result in lower grades for caretakers. There are also other inequalities present besides age. Elder siblings, especially older sisters, perform a disproportionately greater amount of care work than their younger siblings.16 This was certainly true of Lupita and her siblings. Juan, Lupita’s older brother, had attended college in El Salvador before reuniting with his family in the United States as a young adult. Though he had hoped to make use of his higher education upon his migration, he could not, and instead worked as a landscaper. While Juan wanted to be helpful to his family and encouraged Lupita to prioritize her schooling, he could not provide the same kind of guidance to their mutual younger siblings that eldest sister Lupita could because of her firsthand knowledge of American schooling. In many ways, Lupita’s enrolling her siblings in the magnet school was a corrective both to her experiences in underperforming Nashville schools and Juan’s inability to leverage his education in Tennessee. Thus, while sibcare results in some positive outcomes for elder siblings, uneven caretaking clearly benefits younger siblings. This result is especially the case when such caretaking is coupled with other advantages, like being born in the United States or immigrating at a younger age. While Juan benefited from being able to migrate with documents, his immigration as an adult aged him out of the same kinds of educational opportunities native-born Lupita was able to access. Elder siblings’ institutional knowledge gained from school success (and failure) is passed down to

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younger ones, advantaging those who “inherit” hard-won institutional knowledge.17 Such was the case for Juan and Lupita’s younger siblings. In these ways, we see how legal status intersects with other intragenerational inequalities born by youth seeking to care for younger siblings. Lupita’s and others’ efforts to care for their siblings and their educations show how Succeeders turned away from their own achievement to encourage the success of another person. It also shows how they came to see their own success as based on chance, as some siblings were more structurally advantaged than others. Given the high value of individualistic success in the United States, the Succeeders’ shift in perspective is significant. It was an everyday act of defiance and refusal, a way they put care above individual accomplishment and thus rejected the moralization of success as the sign of their ultimate worth. How did ambitious Succeeders youth, like Lupita and Pedro, square their dreams of personal success with the realities of intensive caring for others’ success? As they balanced their achievements against ensuring others’ success, how did youth understand their roles in their families, their own academic achievements, and their caring kinwork? What immense value did they see in their care that made them willing to potentially jeopardize their own academic attainment and belonging? Some of the answers to these questions came in the form, once again, of skits.

th e mea n in gS of e d uCationa l S i b Ca r e : r o le mo d el a n d ly nC hP in of fa m i li a l S uCC eSS “School is important, but family is number one. What Elena did was put her education with her family,” Raquelina said from the back of Mrs. McCann’s classroom. Now that her mother had changed shifts at work, Raquelina’s younger brother was in tow and snacking on Takis, a hugely popular snack of spicy, rolled tortilla chips akin to hot Cheetos. His bright white polo shirt was covered in the delicious red dust. Raquelina’s comment from the cheap seats was in response to students’ skits on effective communication. Liz and Sofía designed the “Effective Communication” curricular unit (introduced in chapter 3) to build students’ skills in talking with

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educational gatekeepers like admissions officers, but also to improve their communication with friends and family. As mentioned previously, students were organized into small groups and given a scenario, such as passing on clubbing with friends before an exam, asking a teacher for help, or leaving a voicemail for an admissions officer. Students then devised both effective and ineffective versions of the scenario and performed them for the larger group. The skits can be understood as students’ performances of what they thought was the morally right thing to do in a given scenario and how they showed themselves to be upstanding Succeeders. Their talk within the skits was a way they showed themselves aligning with the moralities they performed. After each skit, Liz and Sofía directed semistructured, large group discussions about the scenario. That afternoon, the final skit and discussion at Hickory Heights High was about caring for younger siblings while parents are working. The complication was that they had to study and their sibling needed help with homework. As I watched, the student sitting next to me, Guy Fieri fan Alix, whispered that this was a good skit for Elena, one of the performers, since she cared for her younger brother and “doesn’t respond well” to it. In the ineffective version of the skit, the usually staid Elena yelled at her “mother” about having to watch her “brother,” her mother’s indifference to Elena’s studies, and the prioritization of her brother’s needs over her own. Andrés, who was often responsible for his special-needs brother, played Elena’s brother, fake-crying when she lashed out at him. In contrast, in the effective version Elena lovingly explained to Andrés that they could study and succeed together, hugging her “mother” before her shift. At the three different schools where I saw this activity, all of the students’ discussions of the skits—and their home lives—revolved around the supremacy of helping siblings for the good of the family suggesting that, at least in public, youth viewed their care for siblings in this way.18 Indeed, at Edward Maloney High, the ineffective skit involved ignoring the sibling and studying alone behind a closed door—a clear example of how individual success was considered the wrong kind to strive for as Succeeders. Raquelina’s comment, and her brother’s presence, gave spoken and material insights into how the Succeeders negotiated these obligations alongside their own striving and achievement in meaningful, everyday ways that prioritized the bonds of family over individual success.19

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While aiding a sibling was of paramount importance, youth firmly believed that sibcare could also serve their own ambitions. Indeed, Succeeders frequently cited being an example for younger siblings as a main motivation for their striving in the first place. This example was akin to how Succeeders viewed their parents’ immigration and settlement, as described in chapter 4. Only this time it was the Succeeders’ efforts that were laying the groundwork for their siblings’ success. Like Isabel and her “children,” Succeeders allied themselves with their parents’ sacrifices. When discussing her mother’s centrality to her goals for academic success, in almost the same breath, Janitza said that her younger sister Marikay motivated her in precisely this way: “And what keeps me going, it’s that I might be the first one [to go to college], but I know I’m not gonna be the last one. I know my sister is behind me.” This was not idle chatter for Janitza. Much to Marikay’s chagrin, Janitza closely monitored her less-than-studious sister to make sure she would graduate from high school. She dragged Marikay into Succeeders program meetings as part of this surveillance, including an incident when Janitza grabbed Marikay from the bathroom (where she had been illicitly smoking) and physically brought her into the meeting room. Janitza rather loudly told Marikay to “fuck off ” if she didn’t like Janitza’s hands-on approach to educational sibcare and school success. In such efforts, the responsibility for others—and responsibility to succeed oneself—become linked. Through enabling siblings’ success by role modeling and making concerted interventions, youth could achieve while also making the path to success visible for others. Such efforts, while relying on meeting conventional measures of success, did push the needle on success’s meaning: it was now also about enabling another person’s achievement. Such a framing counters the individualistic terms of US belonging. Youth involved in more intensive and long-term educational sibcare than Janitza saw it in a similar way. They began to see their efforts as linked not only to siblings’ success but also to what those siblings’ success suggested about their broader families’ worth and the Succeeders’ roles within their families. By ensuring their siblings’ achievement through intensive sibcare, these youth believed they were cementing a successful settlement for their immigrant families and thus marking their families as deserving members of the nation. The achievement wasn’t a “one off,”

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but rather a sustained reflection of their entire family as moral achievers and ideal US members. Succeeders were both successful and enablers of success—the lynchpins of their families’ national incorporation through merit-based means. This positioning of self and kinwork allowed youth to make sense of how their divided attention to their own achievement could still be counted as valuable. For example, if Succeeders did not achieve the academic heights they hoped for, they saw their care to ensure their siblings’ success as an equally if not more valuable achievement. Thus, they elevated their role in their families’ stories of success to the progenitor of that success. Such a rendering of their care also attempted to make sense of the inequalities— of gender, immigration status, caretaking responsibilities, and disparate experiences of immigration and settlement—that position some youth as those who pioneer paths and others as those who follow them. Returning to Lupita, her understanding of her care worked in exactly this manner. Reflecting on enrolling her brother in the magnet school, Lupita revealed that she wished she had an older sibling who could have done the same for her. Notably, she did not place the responsibility for garnering educational opportunity with her parents. Instead, she stated that this situation was a “wish-I-had-my-older-sibling-do-for-me kind of thing.” She believed that sibling-sibling care, and not parental-child support, was the labor necessary for educational success and mobility within the family unit. One chilly afternoon, as we marooned northerners drank Dunkin’ Donuts hot cocoa and tepid coffee, Lupita further reflected on her family role, her sibcare, and the delicate balance of this sibcare and her schoolwork. Lupita unceremoniously told me that she “knew if I had gone there [the magnet school], my life would be different and I would probably be going to Vanderbilt,” a selective private university in Nashville. She would instead attend a less-selective public college—and not South, the white majority, semiselective school she had hoped to attend, as described in chapter 3. Lupita’s wistful musings on her future revealed how she saw herself and her achievements. As a first-generation college student, she was likely on her way to a higher socioeconomic status than her parents. She would fulfill the immigrant bargain and show that her parents were worthy of inclusion. Her reference for success was not her parents, or her

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older brother who had not finished college, but her younger siblings. In reflecting that her “life would be different” had an elder sibling enrolled her in a better school, Lupita revealed that she thought herself distinctly less advantaged, and potentially less successful, than her younger siblings for whom she cared intensively. Lupita, however, quickly pivoted from her self-perceived lack of highest achievement and reclaimed the value of her siblingship and educational sibcare. She believed that through her educational sibcare she had “set them [the younger siblings] up” for middle-class status. Her siblings were obliged, based on Lupita’s expectations, to achieve what she and their brother Juan could not. Her perceived disadvantage became her siblings’ advantage, remaking her failure to achieve elite higher education at South or Vanderbilt as a step toward success for her siblings. Her efforts, her “failures,” would enable them to avoid languishing in underperforming schools and missing opportunities, as Lupita thought had occurred in her own educational trajectory. Lupita’s sense of the impact of her enrollment efforts and the importance of her insider knowledge suggests an understanding of the sibling-sibling dyad as crucial for the family project of successful immigration. Education becomes a practice that not only enables mobility for an individual, or redeems parents, but also creates and maintains lasting success for all family members. Sebastián saw his education in a similar way. This commonality suggests that despite gender differences in sibcare responsibilities, youth had consensus around their roles as enablers of sibling achievement. In addition to his sense of obligation to his parents, as discussed in chapter 4, Sebastián, like Lupita, saw his success in terms of his older brother, Carlos, and younger brother, Santiago. Differentiating Sebastián’s case from Lupita’s was his family’s mixed-immigration status. Sebastián was well aware of how immigration status directly and arbitrarily dictated the terms of his brothers’ success and belonging. Undocumented Carlos was the first of the three boys to attend college. In describing his own path, Sebastián explained that he had learned from Carlos’s mistakes. Carlos, in contrast to Sebastián, had only buckled down in high school toward the end of his second-to-last year, did not prepare for the ACT, and had been involved in few extracurricular activities. Sebastián hinted that this lack of preparedness for college admission stemmed

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from Carlos believing that as an undocumented student he could not go to college. Seeing how hard it was for Carlos to gain admission to college and understanding the benefit of his US citizenship, Sebastián did things differently. He prioritized his extracurricular involvements, good grades, and standardized test preparation significantly earlier than Carlos had. Sebastián was “on” his little brother to prioritize such things even earlier still, buying Santiago an ACT prep book when he was just finishing elementary school. Sebastián had high hopes that Santiago—whom he made dinner for every night—would follow his good example. He also hoped his younger brother would “beat me [him]” on the ACT and go to an even better college. In contrast to Lupita, Sebastián was not wistfully saddened by the different outcomes between the brothers but seemingly energized by them and what they represented for his family: he could apply the knowledge he and Carlos had gained to improve his little brother’s educational chances. During a case management meeting with Liz and me in Gilead High’s tiny, claustrophobia-inducing library, Sebastián made this even clearer when discussing his brothers’ college options vis-à-vis his own. Sebastián would attend the large, public state school that his older brother Carlos had wanted to attend but couldn’t because of the prohibitive cost of outof-state tuition charged to undocumented Tennesseans. Sebastián felt he was getting the experience Carlos had not: the big stadium football games, the vibrant on-campus life, and dorm living. In some ways, Sebastián saw his enrollment as fulfilling undocumented Carlos’s own frustrated educational goals. Sebastián hoped his younger brother would go to a highly selective college, like New England University, which had been Sebastián’s dream school. Despite its status as his dream school, Sebastián did not even apply to New England University. His perception that his standardized test scores were low inhibited him from even applying and resulted in his decision to buy the test prep book for a very young Santiago. Before I could ask him what he thought of this line of success in his family, Sebastián sensed my percolating questions and gave me the answer: “Andrea, that’s how it should be, each brother doing better than the last.” Here, Sebastián openly described a kind of relational version of individual success that was latent in Lupita’s narrative, an intragenerational success story to mirror the intergenerational American Dream. Sebastián saw

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himself as the lynchpin of familial success. While each brother individually achieves, each also builds on the accomplishments of the last—and perhaps makes up for the structural disadvantages that arise in a mixedstatus family. In some ways, this framing of each brother building on the last is also how Sebastián made sense of the inequality that his family’s immigration built. Carlos, born in Mexico and undocumented, was effectively barred from the access Sebastián had as a result of being born a few years later in Tennessee. In turn, Sebastián’s and his older brother’s efforts in school could make their younger brother’s future even brighter through their academic examples. As youth see their labors for their siblings as enabling familial success, they begin to position their sibcare as something vitally important to the family. Through positioning their sibcare as success, as Sebastián started to do, they also begin to transform success’s meaning for themselves. It is, of course, critical to take into consideration the limitations around what people say. As Summerson Carr reminds us, while US speakers often understand language as a straightforward representation of self and values, there are gaps between what people say and those words’ broader meaning.20 Sebastián may have been straightforwardly narrating his beliefs about how he and his brothers built on their accomplishments. He also may have been making “excuses” for his and Carlos’s foiled ambitions. Further still, he may have been relying on familial norms of good brotherhood to burnish his reputation as a brother. Whether or not there is one actual “true” meaning behind the story he told me and himself about family success, Sebastián’s reflections point to the dense layers of meaning underneath his emergent understanding of what he strove for as he worked toward collegiate success for himself and his brothers. The next example further highlights how success, and the terms of membership, were redrawn by the Succeeders.

S ibli ngS , a n ew m ea n in g of S u CCe SS , and a ne w mea nS to bel on g Eleven years older than her sister, Camilia had long been the only daughter in her family of four US-born children. She initially felt displaced by

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her new sister Anita. In the intervening years, Anita had become Camilia’s shadow. Camilia’s weekday after-school routine involved picking up Anita from school, helping with homework, going to Anita’s and her own afterschool events, cleaning, and cooking dinner. Camilia was also directing Anita’s education, as Lupita did for her siblings. Camilia had recently lobbied her parents to place Anita in a costly Catholic primary school, having read that high-quality early childhood education was beneficial to long-term academic outcomes. Camilia tried volunteering there but found it hard to balance that commitment against her own extracurricular activities. She often brought Anita with her to Succeeders meetings, where Anita sometimes joined me in the back of the room as I scrawled notes and she colored. As she considered enrolling at an out-of-state university, Camilia revealed that her motivation to leave Tennessee was the weight of her responsibility for Anita’s education: It hurts to say I don’t want that responsibility anymore. Or “Can you please take that responsibility away for at least a moment?” But, ultimately, I think that what was pulling me over there was that I sometimes just don’t want that responsibility of having to deal with my sister’s school stuff. And, you know, “Camilia come do this, or do that, or look she has to do this for school.” I’m like, “Okay”—sometimes I’m just, like, it’s too much. I shouldn’t even be dealing with this. I don’t have kids of my own, but then again, I don’t mind.

Camilia showed her ambivalence about her educational sibcare even as she accomplished it with seeming ease, from my perspective. As she justified her decision to go out of state for college, Camilia returned to her pivotal kinship role in a broader familial success story: “You know, I want her to have the best. And she is like my daughter. So, if I succeed I can help provide for her education. . . . [I]t seems selfish, but it really isn’t.” Since Anita was like Camilia’s daughter, her choice to leave Anita to provide for her future can be seen not as “selfish” or as a denial of responsibility, but as a deep acceptance of it. She showed this acceptance through her appeals to normative views of sacrificial motherhood—the kind that Marina had invoked, as described in chapter 4. Camilia’s understanding of her responsibility in these terms also makes her educational success something she ultimately did for her sister and not herself. In the end, Camilia decided

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to go to the commuter school. Going out of state was something she “gave up” for Anita, she told me. Some years later, when she was on the brink of finishing college, Camilia and I met for velvety chais at a hip coffee shop that seemed to signal impending gentrification in immigrant South Nashville. Camilia told me she was glad she hadn’t gone out of state—she was there for her sister, helped her grow, and kept her interested in school. I asked her what she was most proud of accomplishing over the past five years while she had been in college. Camilia told me that she was most proud of her relationship with the now tween-age Anita. That relationship—not Camilia’s own diploma and not Anita’s many “A” grades—made Camilia feel truly successful and fulfilled. Camilia refused to prioritize individual striving over family obligation and instead insisted on including her sister in her striving efforts. As Raquelina had stated that afternoon at Hickory Heights, Camilia put “education with her family” first by taking Anita to Succeeders club meetings, making educational decisions (like enrollment in private school) for her, and even commuting to college. Camilia modeled how one’s own educational accomplishment and the guidance of another’s education was a mode of care that supported the collective family endeavor of success and belonging. Beyond Anita and her own continuing academic success, Camilia marked her relationship with Anita as the thing that made her most proud. Again, such a framing might be true at face value—this relationship may be what Camilia was most proud of achieving. However, she may also have been masking her disappointment at not going out of state by appealing to notions of the “good Latina daughter” as the one who prioritized her familial relationships.21 Then again, all of these interpretations may be partially true. Regardless, the story of what Camilia saw as success—and the story she would tell me—changed between high school and the end of college. Success was her kinship with Anita, not her own diploma. Echoing the comment that “family is number one” from that day at Hickory Heights High, Camilia revealed that family, and the ties built there through caring, were for her what marked her as successful and valuable. As Guadalupe Valdés argues with respect to Mexican American families, individual notions of success are often less valued in Mexican (and,

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I argue, more broadly Latino) family contexts than “people’s abilities to maintain ties across generations.”22 In tying academic success to the maintenance of both intergenerational ties with parents, as explored in chapter 4, and intragenerational ones with siblings, as described in this one, Succeeders fashion a unique kind of success story. This story creatively blends personal achievement; familial intimacy; caring; and the future, past, and present. In short, it blends formal education and moral educación toward inclusion. It turns the terms of belonging away from merit to care. In this shift, youth like Camilia do not merely claim that “people’s abilities to maintain ties” within their families are more important than individualistic success: they live it.23

“ wh at kind of S i Ster w ou l d i b e ?” : S tr iving , Ca r e, a n d b el on gin g If success was defined in terms of relational connection, what did that reimagining of success do to youth’s notions of belonging? While I take up that question in more detail in the next chapter, here I wish to point to how youth began to see care as a way to preserve and forge belonging. Perla, the once-struggling student described in chapter 4, is a particularly dramatic case of this understanding. Her experiences are the most extreme ones I witnessed that linked individualistic educational striving, educational sibcare, and inclusion. Despite being an extreme case, Perla’s story echoes others I have described and others I observed. For Succeeders broadly, personal educational attainment became a way to care for siblings that created success for those siblings. This relational understanding of success could be further transformed. As in Camilia’s case, care itself could be an important social good. It could also become an alternative way to belong. As they looked out for another’s well-being, Succeeders showed that care for another, rather than measurable merit, was the social glue that could stand up to a hostile, nativist state that polices immigration on the backs of immigrant families. The youngest of three girls, Perla was poised to be the first to go to college. Her oldest sister, Reina, a high academic achiever, was misled by school personnel who thought undocumented students could not go to

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college. Consequently, Reina had worked under the table in a beauty salon since her high school graduation, her college aspirations forgone. Seeing Reina’s trajectory, the middle sister, Flor, did not attempt to be a high academic achiever or pursue college. Flor worked with Perla at a Mexican grocery store. Unlike her sisters, Perla got into trouble in high school and partially joined a gang. She skipped school, did drugs, and failed classes. Her family motivated Perla’s turnaround during her third year of high school. A pregnant, incarcerated friend told Perla during a supervised visit that Perla was lucky to have a nice family and that if Perla really did “care” about them, she should give up gang life and recommit to school. Here, Perla’s friend positioned striving in school as a way to show care for and attachment to family. Her suggestion demonstrates that the notion of educational striving as a mode of care for one’s family was meaningful beyond the Succeeders. Three weeks after their talk, Perla’s friend and her unborn baby were killed in prison. Following the death of her friend, Perla decided to change, “for my family.” This change meant recommitting to school. In November of her senior year, Perla—a talented artist—began thinking about college and pursuing a career at the intersection of art and technology. Perla’s educational striving emerged as a way she cared for her family, especially her sisters. She reflected on this shift: Now both of my sisters see me and they’re just always talking to me. It’s just like, “Man, I’m really proud of you. Look at you. You’re talking about going to college.”. . . That’s the reason why now . . . I can truly speak up and be like, “I’m really proud of myself.”

Before Perla’s recommitment to school, Reina and Flor mostly chided Perla and felt confusion over her actions. Perla, in turn, felt like the proverbial black sheep of her family. Her educational striving became a way for Perla to regain a sense of kinship with Reina, Flor, and the rest of her family after long believing she couldn’t really “belong to” them because of her delinquency. Through striving as care, Perla demonstrated her commitment to them. She could belong to the family by caring about school to show she cared for them.24 In January 2013, Perla came to the program’s open office hours to talk about the cosmetology program at the community college she was

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planning to attend. Despite Perla’s ever-changing hair color, she never seemed that interested in studying cosmetology—art and boxing were her true passions. Soon, however, her motivation became clear. The salon where Reina worked had been inspected for licensure violations. The inspector told Reina that she could have been arrested for working without a cosmetology license. Furthermore, recognizing Reina’s immigration situation, the inspector obliquely informed Reina that getting a certificate of licensure—even if it weren’t hers—would make future inspections less of a potential problem. Perla was scared. At the time of the inspection, rumors were circulating in the community about a spate of deportations. Students, mostly boys, were being routinely pulled over for minor traffic infractions, such as pulling into a turn lane too soon or driving with impaired vision (driving while wearing a hoodie or hat). Perla understood that an inspection could quickly become a raid and lead to her sister’s deportation. Perla further realized, as this situation unfolded, that she could benefit from DACA, which would provide her with a social security number and work permit. She also recognized she could enroll in the cosmetology program and likely get licensed with her DACA status in hand. With these realizations, Perla decided to trade her educational access to care for and protect her sister. In describing what had prompted her interest in cosmetology to Liz and me, Perla mentioned that her art teacher had already counseled against sacrificing her educational dreams for her sister. Her teacher argued that Reina could find her own way, and that Perla would be committing fraud. Perla wasn’t convinced: “I know that, but what kind of sister would I be then?” Perla saw her education as a way to care for her sister by giving her false work papers that could prevent her deportation. Such an act would enable her family’s survival and national presence (if not belonging per se) through the educational access only she as a documented and educated person could provide. Her definition of being a good sister was directly tied to how she would use her education and status to care for Reina and maintain the family’s coresidence. Her education was not something that was valuable to Perla in and of itself. What mattered to her was how her education could be leveraged to care for her family and support their coresidence. The “kind of sister” she could be was more important to Perla than the kind of student she could be.

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Perla’s case also illustrates the catastrophic familial consequences of undocumented immigration’s stigmatization and criminalization. Were Reina “caught” as an undocumented immigrant, the family would lose their ability to be together. When I began this fieldwork in 2012, DACA had just been introduced. Deportations were also happening in record numbers resulting in the separation of families—Latino families in particular. Core to these policies’ dissonance was whether family ties or merit—that is, the chances of an individual’s being economically successful in America—should be the basis for membership. Current attempts to curb immigration suggest that merit is winning out. Paired with the expectations of the achievement-oriented immigrant bargain, educational attainment emerges in this context as a logical way for Perla to resist Reina’s deportability, care for her kin, and meet kinship obligations. While not a grand spectacle of resistance, educational striving can be “implicit activism” and a mode of caring for and protecting family while working around the ever-tightening policy ligatures of a hostile, nativist state.25 Perla’s education is, in this way, a kind of familial crucible for immigration reform. As anthropological demographers and other scholars have shown, the family, and who has rights to one, is a critical way that state power is enacted. Families are not symbols of the nation or of defiance against the nation: they are the nation. What happens to families, and what families do about it, become how belonging is worked out in the day to day of people’s lives. Moreover, as political scientist Amalia Pallares argues, the immigrant’s right to a family has become a central vehicle for appeals regarding who has the right to citizenship and inclusion.26 Perla’s education emerged as a merit-based means to a familial end, illustrating how the two strands of immigration—merit and family—cannot be untangled. Perla’s case also illustrates how youth manage the politicization of the family and the state’s attempts to regulate it through their kinship obligations. Perla’s family remained unscathed by deportation. Reina became a stay-at-home mother to mitigate deportation threats. Perla didn’t attend cosmetology school or any other program. The cost proved prohibitive because youth like Perla, who were undocumented or were DACA recipients, could not access affordable in-state tuition rates. She still works in the grocery store, saving up for college or whatever comes next. There has,

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however, been good news for the family in recent years. The sisters’ parents, who had immigrated out of Mexico City because of extortion and threats of violence, were able to have their status adjusted. The three sisters are cautiously optimistic that their “turns” will come, as their cases for relief were made alongside those of their parents. It wouldn’t be merit that would preserve the family, but their shared familial vulnerabilities. As immigration courts and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement decide their cases in law and practice, the worth of family is decided. Many other families are not so lucky. Nevertheless, youth nationwide, like Perla, look to protect their families through their care for them and undertake that care with a sense of hope for a day when more lasting belonging that values their families is possible.

Co nC luSion Emerging from youth’s relationships with their siblings are new ways of thinking about success and the meaning of belonging. Youth, like Lupita and Sebastián, pointed to the greater heights of success that their younger siblings could reach as evidence of their families’ collective worthiness for inclusion. They also positioned their work helping siblings achieve such heights—their sibcare—as a more lasting kind of success, one that fosters connection. As seen in Camilia and Perla’s cases, the relationality of that success and care’s ability to maintain ties became even more elevated. For Perla, most dramatically, educational success became a mere tool to achieve family unity and maintain the ease of everyday belonging in the home and in the nation. It is important to remember that people work “to manage the present and to reproduce desirable and livable futures” in contexts of social changes, like immigration, by mooring themselves in their intergenerational relations.27 Intergenerational family relationships are where changing macro circumstances and inequalities are intimately translated. As Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham write, these translations occur “in decisions about specific relationships . . . in the negotiations of people’s everyday obligations and relationships.”28 Caring between older and younger generations in a family, described in chapter 4, braids past

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histories and deprivations with hoped-for better futures. Care between siblings—family members who are part of the same generation—reveals the contingent nature of the future supposedly shared by siblings as the next generation. For example, undocumented Carlos had different advantages than citizen Sebastián, and caretaker Camilia had different ones than cared-for Anita. Yet emerging from this care is not just the intimate translation of inequality, but how people look to remedy it. By seeing their care as a corrective to corrosive differences and challenging times, youth positioned caring as their answer to powers that would disrupt immigrants’ relationality and a sense of mutual belonging to each other and the United States. As they took this care beyond the bounds of family—to friends and even unknown peers, as I explore next—Succeeders further critiqued a merit-based model of inclusion and achievement as the way to belong.

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Somos Una Familia tranSforming belonging and making friendS into family

Liz, Sofía, and I were waiting for Baldwin College’s facilities crew. Soon they would arrive with the tables, chairs, and linens necessary for the total transformation of the basketball arena. That night, about forty students and their families would come to the college campus for the end-of-the year dinner celebrating students’ receipt of Succeeders program scholarships. Liz and Sofía took advantage of the lull in setup to reply to frantic texts from that night’s student volunteers. Passing on the discomfort of the bleachers, I walked around the arena to take in what had been accomplished and what still needed to be done. Along the perimeter of the gym, where we imagined the tables would go, we had arranged easels upon which perched gold poster boards inscribed with quotations from students’ essays. Penned in Liz’s loopy left-handed script, the concluding words of Enrique’s essay stood out: “They [Liz, Sofía, and friends from Succeeders] are not strangers anymore, or mentors. They have become family, and in our culture, there is no stronger bond than a family bond.”1 At first glance, this comment seems a passing nicety speaking to the perceived importance of family in Latino communities. In most of my interviews and in many chats, however, students described the program similarly. They noted that the club was a “family” or “like a family.” David 152

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even said “Succeeders means family.” Students also remarked that Liz and Sofía were like knowledgeable older relatives (“like a sister” or “my mom”) and that peers were like siblings. This familial language was also exchanged endlessly among students, teachers, and staff through the phrase that serves as this chapter’s title: Somos una familia (we are a family).2 When I asked students to elaborate on why the program was una familia, they said they felt cared for, understood, and accepted in ways similar to how they felt, or wished they felt, at home. Rereading Enrique’s words on the shimmering poster, I thought about how his essay built up to this concluding declaration of family ties. He described the time and effort Sofía put into his college access, his fellowship and conversations with other striving students, and the encouragement he received from everyone. He also told of the important acceptance that he, an undocumented student, felt within the program. As discussed in the introduction, kinship or relatedness is produced through precisely these acts of care where social ties are forged, interdependency acknowledged, and valued personhood recognized. In his essay, Enrique tracked the acts of care—including striving together—that made the Succeeders “family.”3 Somos una familia is more than a passing nicety. As demonstrated in chapters 4 and 5 and in Enrique’s statement, family bonds are loaded signifiers. For Latinos, family has long been a rallying point for organizing, making rights claims, and demanding inclusion in the United States.4 Family has also historically been both the symbolic and material ground where nation-states have legally enshrined the exclusion of immigrant and minority populations.5 Family has moral meanings as well—our moral personhood is often assessed by others through our ability or inability to meet family obligations. By extending the term family to their fellow Succeeders in name and practice, the students did critical social work: they stated what belonging could be through a powerful vernacular term. They demanded a reconsideration of their moral worth and worthiness through their creative stretching of that term’s meaning. Asserting family ties, and building them through care, are about the “quiet politics of belonging” that fight against the din of national and local exclusion.6 In declaring and caring for each other as family, Succeeders like Enrique were making an acutely

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political assertion of their value. They were worth caring for and worth caring about. This assertion is no small feat in a country that uncaringly unmakes Latinos’ worth by deporting families, stigmatizing Latino students as “at risk,” and defining undocumented youth like Enrique as disposable in policy and practice. Chapters 4 and 5 showed how Succeeders had an evolving view of care, kinship, success, and these categories’ relationship to the moralized and racialized terms of belonging. Succeeders demanded parental inclusion by pointing to how good parental care leads to student success. This success, enabled by socially stigmatized parents, served as proof of parents’ moral deservingness for membership. Youth also saw how they could secure inclusion by caring for their siblings’ success in school. Through sibcare, they also began to see care itself as having worth. In their care for their peers, Succeeders tied together the loose ends of their critique of US belonging’s exclusionary, moralizing, and marginalizing terms. As they stood by “at risk” and underachieving racially marked peers, they articulated the value of Latino personhood outside of the context of meritocratic success. As they saw their relationships as being of paramount importance, they defined caring for others as family as the basis of belonging. While merit may still matter to membership politically and legally, Succeeders came to see care and the relatedness it creates as central to their notions of the valued person and valuable community. This chapter explores the family-making care exchanged among Succeeders. In particular, I focus on how youth cared for each other in acts of support, educational guidance, and communicative practices. Regarding this final point, I highlight Succeeders’ passing encouraging words, active listening, and mutual disclosures of the hopes and fears that came from striving and living as a Latino striver in nativist times. Such actions are what Lynnette Arnold terms “communicative care,” the “linguistic practices” people use to meet “another’s material and affective needs.”7 Youth’s stretching of what care does and what relatedness is indexes a better world and better belonging within it. Through these small, hopeful, nurturing acts Succeeders expanded the bounds of family, belonging, and value for us all. I start, however, with a case of exclusion from the Succeeders family. Here we see the work care could do to remediate exclusion and reclaim Latino youth’s value regardless of academic merit.

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la Rampa : Ca r in g f or k ith On a dreary February afternoon, only six students were at Jackson Hills High’s Succeeders meeting. Attendance had been low for a month or so, but today was the nadir as the facilitators almost outnumbered the students. The waning numbers were getting to Ms. Verett, the teacher sponsor. As Liz scrambled to change up the planned small group activities in light of poor attendance, Ms. Verett exasperatedly interjected: “Where are the rest of you? There are a lot of Latino students in this school.” She repeated her question pointedly: “So, where are the rest of you?” She turned to her school-issued PC, quickly looking up the school’s enrollment—her fingers loudly and emphatically punching the keys as she searched. “There are 490 Latinos in this school. Where are the other 384?” Raven answered by bringing up the la rampa (the ramp) Latinos. La rampa was the term students used to describe the academically lowachieving—and school-defined “at risk”—Latinos who congregated on a small ramp in the cafeteria during free periods and lunch. Each school I went to had a similar group of “at risk” Latino students, some of whom also attended Succeeders.8 Raven stated that these students wanted to “be the cool ones,” the ones who chose to disengage from decidedly uncool academic striving. According to Raven, la rampa Latinos didn’t “care” about school. Here, she made a kind of moral judgment about la rampa students: their “failure” was due to their moral failure of not working hard. Moreover, her logic went, they weren’t like the Succeeders who did care and work hard at school.9 While Ms. Verrett demanded that the Succeeders answer for their coethnic peers’ absence, Raven’s response drew stark lines between la rampa Latinos and Latino Succeeders. Here, striving, rather than an act of care that promotes kinship, was an act of divisiveness. It served to maintain boundaries between good Latino youth in Succeeders and bad ones outside the program. While the skits explored in chapter 3 drew these distinctions with imaginary Latino others, here students were drawing them with real people they knew. Ana, one of Raven’s closest friends, argued with Raven about her interpretation of la rampa Latinos. She instead contended that la rampa students often didn’t know about things like Succeeders. Since they “don’t

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know what is out there,” Ana concluded, they disengage academically. In Ana’s account, students disengage not because they don’t care about school, but because teachers and peers have retracted their care for them in the form of failing to share information about school-based opportunities. Araceli, an infrequent participant in Succeeders, suggested another dearth of care. La rampa Latinos lacked relatable Latino role models and thus did not see how they could be successful in school. Ricardo, whose girlfriend Arlette was a frequenter of the principal’s office, la rampa, and Succeeders club meetings, had been quiet. His frustration barely contained, he stated that la rampa Latinos might be facing other obstacles than merely a desire to be “cool,” lost academic knowledge, or a lack of available Latino role models. Weighty household responsibilities for siblings and much-needed jobs might explain their absence, he suggested. La rampa students were busy meeting other material caregiving needs, inhibiting their engagement in school. Ms. Verett’s repeated question—“Where are the rest of you?”—asked the assembled students to answer for their peers in a way that resulted in a provocative conversation about structural advantage and the caring, or lack thereof, that governs Latinos’ educational trajectories.10 The conversation demonstrated the cogent ways that students analyzed their social worlds. It also showed how Succeeders saw themselves as distinctive from la rampa Latinos through their striving, even if Ms. Verett’s question assumed that all Latino students should be able to account for each other as coethnics. Ricardo’s girlfriend, Arlette, and her absence from the Succeeders meeting also suggested that the lines between strivers and nonstrivers were perhaps not as stark as Raven suggested. Sofía then asked a simple but equally provocative question that shifted the conversation’s tenor: “What are you doing for them—los de la rampa (those on/of the ramp)?” Sofía’s question didn’t ask Succeeders to account for la rampa students as coethnics, as Ms. Verett did. Nor did she ask what might be prohibiting the students from coming to club, a question that the students had freely riffed on together. She thus removed the possibility of Succeeders asserting their difference in terms of striving or structural advantages. Instead, she asked what Succeeders were doing about it. She asked how the Succeeders were caring for los de la rampa.

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Breaking the uncomfortable silence that hung around an authority figure’s pointed question, Raven stated that she was doing something. Ana laughed and vouched for Raven’s efforts. Raven would leave her cafeteria table to go and hang out with la rampa Latinos during lunch. She had known many of these students since middle school or even longer. She knew intimately that they were often “hard on themselves” and did not think they could achieve scholastically. Even though Raven thought la rampa Latinos wanted to be cool, she still wanted to encourage them in school, she explained. Wondering how this had been received, I asked Raven how exactly she encouraged them. She told me that she had invited them to come to the club, told them “they are worth it” (the effort of investing in school), and explained how they could go to college. She had told them she was there for them, even in the form of a ride home from the Succeeders meeting, if they wanted. Running out of concrete examples, she concluded by glossing that her efforts were “what a friend would do,” because, she said, “I am their friend.” Though I have been highlighting the importance of kinship and relatedness, friendship is a distinctive relationship. It is important to not ignore when people make distinctions between friends and family and the different degree of relatedness they entail, as Raven did with la rampa Latinos. For “by subsuming friendship under a general category of relatedness, we miss what friendship does differently to kinship for the people who practice it” and, importantly, we miss people’s understandings of these differences.11 Raven, like other Succeeders, likened the club to a family, but she didn’t do so with la rampa Latinos. In declaring la rampa Latinos “friends,” she thus signaled their exclusion from the Succeeders family. These moments, when some kith can be kin and others cannot, reveal the fault lines of belonging. Here, “what friendship does differently to kinship” is to mark exclusion through striving rather than inclusion through it.12 The myths of the American Dream, educational meritocracy, and the model minority student maintain that there are innate moral and racial differences between strivers and nonstrivers that supersede structural inequality. By this logic, the logic Raven used, Succeeders were fundamentally different from la rampa Latinos. Succeeders were moral minorities and deserving of care and attention from their teachers and communities. They were worthy of belonging in and out of school because of their hard

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work and moral fiber. In their striving, Succeeders reproduced these fallacious logics and thus looked to show themselves as dissimilar to the failures, to la rampa Latinos. They marked them as outside of the family. Such an impulse to distinguish oneself disrupts potential solidarity between youth who together face crumbling schools and hardening racism and nativism. Raven’s familial exclusion, however, was noticeably different than the distancing I described Lupita charting in her college essay as she marked the distinction between herself and what she termed “the typical Hispanic.” In claiming friendship with la rampa Latinos and in engaging in a modicum of care with them, Raven split the difference between the familial intimacy of Succeeders and the complete otherness Lupita created in her essay.13 Raven instead saw la rampa students as potential strivers and thus potentially the same as her. This perception of potential similarity is significant. In her analysis of friendships between girls in a London high school, Sarah Winkler-Reid demonstrates how perceived “sameness,” that is, congruity between “personal aspects of similarity, tastes, styles, and orientations to formal education,” among girls became a core criterion for establishing friendships between them and for judging individuals’ moral personhood.14 By performing carefully calibrated degrees of sameness and appropriate individuality, youth show themselves to be good friends and good people. In naming la rampa Latinos her friends, Raven began to suggest sameness and thus shared moral personhood. Through that suggested sameness, she also recognized la rampa Latinos’ personhood beyond the labels of la rampa and “at risk” ascribed to them by peers and authority figures. She thus opened an opportunity for a closer bond between her and them that statements like Lupita’s—and modes of uncaring striving—foreclose. Friendship can be a bridge between otherness and kinship that can create the conditions for enhanced inclusion. That is, as students become friends, they may be on their way to being family and the belonging that family entails. We also might think of Raven’s friendships with la rampa Latinos as a mundane act of resistance. Elora Chowdhury and Liz Philipose argue that friendship across purportedly intractable differences, like those between achieving Succeeders and “at risk students,” “is an important impulse that counters fear and speaks truth to power in a unique way . . . in friendship, then, is our resistance to the divisive and fragmenting lies of structural

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power.”15 The high school divisions of la rampa and Succeeders were not rehearsals for the national exclusion of some Latinos and not others, but the everyday practice of it. School-based exclusion is national exclusion. In the students’ discussion of la rampa, we see how students are not just encountering normative discourses of “performance based deservingness” but are at the forefront of reproducing them.16 At the same time, both Raven’s maintenance of friendships with students she had known since childhood and Ricardo’s romantic relations with Arlette illustrate Succeeders’ partial refusal to accept the “divisive and fragmenting lies of structural power” that make some Latino youth achievers and others failures, even to each other.17 A month or so after the conversation about la rampa, I was back at Jackson Hills one evening proctoring placement exams for the adult ESL program where I volunteered as a teacher. As the adults studiously worked through the tests, I saw la rampa without the students. The black railing isolated it from the rest of the cafeteria, a metal divider of space and people. As I walked onto la rampa myself, I saw a Succeeders meeting poster on the wall directly across from it. I wondered if Raven had put it there. Later that week, I asked her if she had. She said it was possible—she had been postering—but that she didn’t remember if she had hung up that particular poster. At any rate, I knew a Succeeder had put it there. Students were the ones responsible for postering for their clubs in the cafeteria. Calling la rampa Latinos friends, encouraging them during lunch, and even the unseen anonymous act of postering across from the infamous rampa were the smallest of the small acts of care. They were acts that created relatedness and began to break down the fallacy of striving as the grounds for merit-based inclusion. Here, students began to challenge the terms of belonging by suggesting that belonging within the Succeeders “family” was not limited to the few who conformed entirely to striving.

S tr iving t ogether : bu il d in g b e lo n g i n g and fam ily thr ou gh Ca r e As the distinctions regarding la rampa made clear, striving was the raw material of “sameness” that drew the Succeeders into each other’s lives

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and first bound them together.18 It was, however, Succeeders’ care for their academic striving, and eventually care beyond the academic aspect of their lives, that deepened these ties. A particularly potent form of that care came in the form of sharing and listening to each other about the struggles of striving particular to Latino and/or undocumented youth. These acts of emotional support served as a kind of communicative release valve. Through these communicative practices students started to see they weren’t the only ones facing these circumstances.19 Succeeders listened and disclosed to each other the unseen but deeply felt anxiety, fear, and other emotions that come with striving. Together the Succeeders also contended with the stereotypes they faced and internalized. These ongoing, recurring conversations became a mode of “communicative care” that, in turn, forged strong bonds between the Succeeders.20 In the mutual recognition of shared struggle, youth gained a sense of collectivity in their striving. They began to care not only in support of striving, but also in support of the family and community they were becoming. It bears mentioning that striving was extremely stressful.21 As we talked about her collegiate plans one early evening before her night shift at the outlet mall, Pamela listed who she felt “good pressure” from to strive in school. She mentioned her mother; her father; her brother; her younger cousins; the underclassmen in Succeeders; her friends; her teachers; and the congregation at her Evangelical church, including, but not limited to, her youth group. I wondered just how Pamela managed all this “good pressure.” When I asked her, she replied: It’s an honor. [Laughs.] It’s—how can I explain this? Life changing. It’s a good feeling. [Laughs.] It feels awesome. [Laughs, then cries.] I feel like people are going to look up to me. They’re going to be like, “Oh. I want to be that girl one day.” People are going to—people do look up to you.

Pamela’s sense of honor, her laughter, and her tears bursting through her words suggest the emotional contradictions and affective tumult of striving.22 Her striving, she also told me, would disprove stereotypes of Latinas as “getting pregnant” rather than getting “A’s.” I have previously discussed how the desire to not be read as a stereotype motivated striving. Here we see more of stereotypes’ weight: it wasn’t just her brother, parents, or

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youth group that Pamela felt beholden to, but her ethnicity. The pressure to be “that girl” was daunting. There were few outlets within Pamela’s school, church, or family for her to share her stress and ease the burden of striving to be a role model of Latino achievement.23 There was, however, Succeeders. Pamela relied on Alicia, her best friend and fellow Succeeder, in precisely this way. These two young women were together whenever possible. Pamela stated that what she actually liked about the Succeeders program was that she had the opportunity to be with Alicia, whom she otherwise didn’t see during the school day. Within the program, and outside of it, they often talked about the pressures they felt to succeed as Latinas. They disclosed to each other and their fellow Succeeders the struggles they felt being, as Pamela put it, “the only browns” in certain academic spaces.24 They also both disclosed their undocumented immigration status within the program and shared with peers how they worried about their immigration status’ effects on their academic trajectories. For undocumented students, the ability to disclose status within Succeeders was critical to their sense of support and connection, as schools were often not equipped to help these students navigate the complexities of applying to college.25 The case of Neveah, Pamela and Alicia’s classmate, is an example of how such a disclosure can facilitate a sense of collective connection. Neveah had kept her status secret following an incident in middle school and her parents’ subsequent advice to hold her tongue when it came to immigration. Upon joining Succeeders, Neveah quickly revealed her status to Liz, Sofía, and the club members, including those with documented status or US citizenship. Neveah told me a major reason she joined Succeeders was to gain a sense of relief in encountering “finally someone who understands” both her status and her desire to strive. Moreover, these people— peers and staff—could support her striving. Neveah also told me that, as a result of being able to disclose her status and receive support from peers and staff, she “just [felt] connected” within Succeeders in a vastly different way than she ever felt in school.26 In Succeeders, Pamela, Alicia, Neveah, and others could process these feelings and struggles together, support each other’s striving and well-being, and find fellowship and practical resources.

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The experiences of Marisela, a college student and former Succeeders program participant, illustrate the enduring value of these connections and care. They speak to how recurring acts of “communicative care” give students a sense of mutual understanding and solidarity over time.27 As they come to value these connections, students illustrate how mutual care can stich a supportive, enriching community together. Marisela was at Gilead to fulfill some volunteer hours and drum up interest in Newmantown State, the large, semirural public college in Tennessee that she attended. Her informal chat about her school moved from describing the highlights of Newmantown State’s dining halls to sharing about being the only person of Latino descent in her science courses. Sometimes, she told the Succeeders, she was the only Latino person many of her classmates and friends had ever met. To her surprise, she found her non-Latino classmates often first thought of her in terms of negative, Latino stereotypes. Worried Succeeders asked how Marisela faced that issue, particularly how she managed to not look “dumb” in her classes and thus reinscribe negative Latino stereotypes. More directly, they asked whether being the only Latino was “hard.” Some students did not ask questions. They instead voiced their own fears about attending nondiverse colleges. They worried about finding friends who would “understand” their families, their responsibilities, and what motivated them to achieve in the first place. In response, Marisela shared her feelings about the need to achieve as the lone Latino in her classes. She also assured students that support from their fellow Succeeders would be critical to their individual success in the college classroom and to coping with attendant stresses outside of it. Marisela told the Gilead High Succeeders that she was getting by through texts and calls with friends from her Succeeders club at her old high school: acts of care. Before students left the classroom, Marisela urged the Succeeders to come to Newmantown State so she wouldn’t be the only one any more. She also told them she would help them when they got there. Marisela, Pamela, and Alicia all felt the difficulty of striving as Latinos. The imposition of stereotypes and stigma on Succeeders by their schools, their fellow learners, and the mere fact of being the lone Latinos/as in the classroom, were how youth were learning—in their schooling—that the

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existing terms of belonging didn’t account for them. Such school-based experiences, again, are not simply mirrors of larger national exclusion happening outside of school, but rather actual enactments of that exclusion. When youth begin to build spaces of belonging and care for each other within their schooling, they disrupt these exclusionary terms of belonging. It is worth noting that this collectivization of individual striving still reproduced the logic of needing to prove membership through merit. Though accepting performance-based terms for membership, the shift from individual to collective is still important. An integral part of dismantling the moralized and racialized terms of belonging is accounting for one’s own precarity and recognizing shared vulnerability within the Succeeders family. The caring support of Succeeders provided youth with a sense of relatedness to each other that informed their revision of the very terms of success and inclusion. No longer would they accept terms that would have them otherwise turn their backs on los de la rampa or each other.

linki ng fateS a n d u n l in k in g e xC lu S i o n : lear ning the l imitS of mer it - b aS e d i n C lu Si o n This sense of collectivity can have far-reaching political effects. The notion of “linked fate” or “an acute sense of awareness (or recognition) that what happens to the group will also affect the individual member” is instructive here.28 Originally developed by political scientists to describe Black populations’ bloc political behavior, linked fate explains the shift that Succeeders made from reproducing existing terms of belonging that failed them as learners and members to challenging them.29 This shift occurred when students recognized two truths hidden just below the surface of the discussion about la rampa, Raven’s friendships, Ricardo’s romantic life, and Alicia and Pamela’s bond. The first was that the Succeeders organization itself contained both strivers and nonstrivers. The second was that the line between success and failure was razor thin, constantly sharpened through the ever-changing terms of merit and membership. The shift to linked fate came in recognizing that what happened to those on la rampa and those who were the “only browns” was not so different.

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Jenny’s consideration of her college going vis-à-vis that of the other club officers at Gilead is one illustration of this shift. Jenny was one of four club officers: laconic president Jim, loquacious vice president Emma, and serious secretary Melissa. In this quartet, Jenny played the balancing role of effervescent listener. The four students were all doing well in school and seemed the very definition of collegebound. The quartet was also representative of another larger pattern within the Succeeders program: half were undocumented. Academically successful undocumented students like Jim and Emma are often highly engaged in school and well liked by their teachers and fellow learners. Yet these students still felt pangs of exclusion in their school communities because their well-meaning teachers, friends, and guidance counselors did not understand how undocumented immigration status would affect students’ postsecondary school lives.30 A space like Succeeders chipped away at that sense of exclusion for Jim and Emma and provided much-needed inclusion alongside citizen peers like Jenny and Melissa. However, as college application due dates loomed, so too did the sense of a return to exclusion for undocumented students. Jim, Emma, and many other undocumented students became increasingly reluctant to discuss post-high-school plans because of their fears regarding how their status would affect their chances for admission to and their ability to pay for college. As undocumented students, they were ineligible for state and federal aid.31 As they faced the inability to attend college, they also faced what Roberto Gonzales terms the “transition to illegality,” wherein students leave the shielded comfort of contingent belonging and legal protection in school and become fully part of the undocumented population.32 In failing to achieve college access, they would thus lose the shaky foothold of belonging that education had provided for them.33 Facing the transition to illegality meant also facing the fallacy of both merit-based inclusion and the American Dream. Despite their being moral minority strivers, the fact that Emma and Jim still might not be able to go to college and access the mobility and inclusion that educational achievement seemed to promise revealed that merit-based inclusion was a moving target. Jim and Emma would qualify for some merit-based aid at their semiselective colleges, but there would be a significant gap in funding that

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could ultimately make their higher education unattainable. Despite doing their best, they were finding their best wasn’t good enough. Both Melissa and Jenny found the process of watching two of their closest friends face the hurdles of applying to college while undocumented painful. So too was the truth that merit could not always undo exclusion. Jenny, in particular, shared this sentiment: “I dunno, it’s kinda hard to see, like, some of my friends can’t fill out the FAFSA. They won’t be able to go to college: they want to go.” Beyond feeling sympathy for her friends’ potentially thwarted dreams, Jenny began to see her own college going differently, and in the process began to see the flaws in the logic of educational striving: I don’t wanna throw that opportunity [to go to college] away, ’cause some people can’t—don’t—have that opportunity. And that’s another thing that pushes me to go to college, because if, like, you know, I have the chance to go to college; there’s people out there who don’t have it and want to have it. So I’m not gonna let that chance go to waste. It just hurts me seeing, like, my friends that are undocumented, like, I dunno. It’s hard seeing them. (emphasis in original)

Jenny recognized her advantage in that she had “that opportunity,” but in shifting her words from “can’t” to “don’t” with respect to her undocumented friends’ more limited opportunities, she illustrated her awareness that the difference between her and their college going was structural rather than a difference in effort, desire, or individual morality. In contrast to the comments about la rampa, Jenny began to see the arbitrary nature of structural disadvantage when striving is kept constant, evidenced in her use of “chance” in comparing her college going to Jim’s and Emma’s experiences. She continued: And, like, sometimes even though I am a citizen, I still feel like—not like an immigrant, but—I dunno—it just makes me want to help people more, like, and go out there and just—serve the Hispanic community. ’Cause I don’t wanna be like, “Oh I’m a citizen. I don’t have to worry about that.” No, I wanna be like, “I’m a citizen. I can help you. And you don’t—even though you don’t have papers you—there’s still a chance out there” and just— I dunno—lifting their spirit up, I guess.

Jenny’s shift from her discussion of Jim’s and Emma’s troubles in applying to college to her own citizen status signaled just how tightly tied the

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politics of education and the politics of belonging are for all immigrantorigin Latino youth. Jenny voiced a sense of solidarity with undocumented immigrant youth like Emma and Jim that informed her sense of self as not quite a citizen. Seeing the striving connection between herself and her friends suggested to Jenny that their vulnerability was hers too. Their fates were linked. That solidarity resulted in her desire to “help” and lift up the “spirits” of her community and peers. These are sentiments of care that can be seen as “implicit activism,” as Jenny supported her friends when they applied to college.34 Supporting undocumented youth’s access to college is an act of political disruption to a system that denies these students’ rights. Through Jenny’s growing realization of the unfairness of her friends’ experiences of applying to college, her notion of access as something “deserved” was unmoored. While all four youths were meritorious and deserving of access, only two could be included due to the exigencies of citizenship laws. Jenny now recognized that merit cannot be the basis for inclusion. It wasn’t just undocumented students in Succeeders who started to shy away from discussing their post-high-school plans. Academically lowachieving, low-income students often began to clam up or even, in more extreme cases, to disengage from Succeeders altogether. Think back to la rampa: the relevant stigma there that Raven identified was not immigration status, but rather striving status. For Succeeders students who had citizenship or an aid-eligible immigration status but were low achieving, the end of high school didn’t herald the “transition to illegality” and the harsh stripping of belonging and rights.35 Instead, it was potentially a transition to other stigmatized Latino identities, like uneducated low social status laborers, that loomed just as ominously as the financial costs did. Striving may have enabled low-achieving Succeeders to mark their distinctiveness from the disengaged students of la rampa, the dropouts they imagined in their skits, or undocumented adults. Yet as college drew close, low-achieving students in Succeeders were increasingly aware of how they too would become marginalized, not by law but by practice. Naturally, the most vulnerable were those who were doubly marginalized: low- or average-achieving undocumented students. These doubly marginalized Succeeders faced not just a sense of becoming “illegal” but also a sense of how the “divisive and fragmenting lies of structural power” have artificially broken solidarities within undocumented student

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communities on the basis of academic attainment.36 High-achieving undocumented students, so these “fragmenting lies” go, are worthy of inclusion.37 Low-achieving undocumented students are not. The growing awareness of this logic, while painful, also pointed to how youth began to reimagine the parameters of belonging in terms of care and relatedness. Alicia’s support of Pamela illustrates this point. As noted earlier in this chapter, the two young women were best friends, a relationship enabled in part by their support for each other and their striving, nourished in Succeeders. Furthering their connection and seeming inseparability, they also carpooled to school in Alicia’s bright blue mini-SUV. Pamela’s younger brother Ignacio was relegated to the back seat. All three youth were undocumented and well aware of how their lives were impacted by their status: this included their awareness of the risk of potential deportation they all took when driving.38 While they shared the same risks of undocumented status, the bonds of striving, and the desire to achieve to take the sting out of stereotypes, college going was simply going to be far easier for Alicia than for Pamela. Alicia had an ACT score that placed her in the top percentage of performers nationally. She was a top student at Edward Maloney High. Pamela, however, was not. While Pamela studied hard, she was a middling student who couldn’t crack a 19 (out of 36) on the ACT. As they watched their older undocumented Succeeders program peers chart the way to college, both women knew that merit was often the only means for low-income undocumented students to access college and the continuing inclusion it promised. As due dates for college applications rolled by, Pamela, like Jim and Emma, had not yet applied to college. After one club meeting, Pamela informed Liz and me that she did not intend to pursue college, sensing that her low ACT scores were not going to be good enough for entrance and private financial aid. While Liz and I counseled her against this plan, she was not budging. A few weeks later, however, Pamela told Liz and me that Alicia had convinced her to stay the academic course. Alicia did so by putting a question to Pamela. If Pamela didn’t go to college too, “what were they working for?” As Pamela told the story, Alicia interjected. She explained that it wasn’t enough to go to college herself: “It all [striving and going to college] wasn’t worth it” if Pamela didn’t go too.

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Alicia, as a high achiever, was not dependent on Pamela, a low achiever, for her individual success. However, Alicia saw her academic success as fundamentally relational: it meant less if Pamela could not achieve as well. Here, in not leaving her low-achieving friend behind, Alicia shifted the logic of achievement as the pathway to success and inclusion. Hers was a claim to a different mode of success predicated on caring for and about the success of others. While individual success was to be lauded, Succeeders like Alicia seemed to argue that it was not enough. Rather, individual success only marked that one had overcome Latino stereotypes individually. To achieve in a lasting way, it was a responsibility and a requirement to bring that knowledge back to the community. While achievement is still at the fore in this definition of success, it is transformed to a more relational mode that serves as a social corrective to narratives of individualistic success like the American Dream. Returning to the scene of la rampa illustrates how this refashioning of success worked collectively. The 2013 Jackson Hills seniors—Camilia, Isabel, Alejandro, and la rampa ambassador Raven—returned to their high school frequently during their college years. Raven took photographs for annual reports, Isabel chaperoned field trips, and Alejandro and Camilia presented to clubs.39 Their collective goal in this continuing effort, they explained, was to rebuild the small club from the low point of the la rampa day. During a trip to Nashville a few years ago, I caught up with them, and they regaled me with tales from college and their most recent stints back at Jackson Hills. I asked why they continued to go there. It must be difficult for them to balance working, going to college (in Alejandro’s case, out of state), and their continuing at-home responsibilities. Alejandro suggested that if the club disappeared at Jackson Hills, their own individual success would mean a little less. As he further explained, it wasn’t enough if it ended with them. Here, like Alicia, the Jackson Hills students saw their individual success as dependent on others attaining the same goal. In positioning their achievements this way, they too pushed back against notions of success as individualistic. Their collective efforts suggest an increasingly relational understanding of what it is to be successful. They also suggest an understanding that seemingly individual success is itself the product of communal efforts, like their own at their alma mater. However, in each of these efforts, merit continued to play a

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central role in their definition of success and inclusion. For merit to be unsettled further, candy was needed.

S tar bur St S a n d S uCC eSS : Ca r i n g f o r ot h e r S and th e r ema d e r el ationa l te r mS o f i nC lu Si o n Teenage love was blooming across South Nashville on Valentine’s Day 2013. At least that’s how the officers at Gilead High made sense of the sparsely attended Succeeders meeting. Based on the shabby attendance, the club officers, Liz, and I decided—as we did in the face of dwindling numbers generally—to scrap the planned curriculum. Instead, we would assemble the candygrams the students were selling for a Succeeders fundraiser. Using the dingy beige linoleum floor tiles as a guide, we placed equal numbers of Reese’s peanut butter cups, Jolly Ranchers, Starbursts, and assorted sugary treats in forty-six squares. As students did so, they teased each other about their Valentine’s Day plans (or lack thereof ); chatted about the trials of AP art; laughed; ate candy; mocked each other for eating their potential profits; and speculated about what their Succeeders sponsor, Ms. Millerton, and her fiancé were doing for the holiday. Conversations swung wildly—from applying for DACA, to what to do about gossiping friends, to which teachers were fair ones, to educational sibcare. The students were a mix: there were the like minded (like the studious club officers), but also students who, were it not for Succeeders, would never have become friends. Working and chatting together, for instance, were hyperorganized straight “A” student Melissa and the exceptionally laid-back, academically struggling soccer star Jane-Marie. Liz and I joined the students on all fronts—including eating the candy and Liz shouting to ask Ms. Millerton what her “boo thing,” as students referred to him, would be doing for her that evening. As we worked, chatted, and laughed, Edwin, a very tall sixteen-year old with equally oversized orthodontic braces, was surreptitiously chatting with Jim. In contrast to soft-spoken and reserved Jim, Edwin gabbed incessantly and loudly to the group—about his favorite bands, about Jim’s hipster style and tight jeans, and about the trials of being the eldest of his siblings. Beyond styles and loquacity, the young men also differed in their

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Figure 3. Succeeders sorting Valentine’s Day candy at a club meeting. Photo by Liz.

academic achievement. Jim was a model student, and Edwin was not. For example, today Edwin had spared no detail as he recounted his recent decision to stop wearing his unstylish gym uniform to class. His sartorial preference was the reason he was failing that particular class. Since he had started coming to the club in December 2012, Edwin had become Jim’s shadow. Despite his frequent ribbing of Jim and his bouffant hair, it was clear that Edwin admired Jim’s easy confidence and looked to him for advice. Advice was, in fact, the focus of Jim and Edwin’s secret conversation. It was not, however, advice about how to pass gym, though Jim, Melissa, and Jane-Marie all told Edwin to wear his uniform. In their whispered exchange, Jim was coaching Edwin on how to write a candygram note to a girl Edwin liked. Jenny was also in on it. She would hand deliver the coauthored Valentine to the object of Edwin’s affection. In addition to love advice, Jim had also given Edwin his JROTC tie, since Edwin needed it for his dress-for-success-themed public speaking class the next day. Jim, in his now more casual uniform, read and edited Edwin’s note as Edwin nervously fiddled with the tie. Jenny patted Edwin on the back and told him not to worry. Jim had him covered.

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As I wrote up my field notes that evening, they seemed to contain mostly teen gossip and plotting—not exactly what I had hoped to find “in the field.” Yet when reconsidering the Valentine’s Day club—the scrapped curriculum, the love note, the candy, and the pervasive feeling of amity— I realized that Valentine’s Day was representative of the transformative yet ordinary care that transcended difference, made Succeeders students like a family, and quietly forged social critique in everyday life.40 In attending to the mundane and the pleasant details of our interlocutors’ lives, it is possible to acknowledge that “injustices, inequalities, and exclusions are . . . alive in the everyday,” but also that our interlocutors are not “crushed by those destructive forces.”41 More than not being crushed by them, youth like Edwin and Jim make sense of and make livable their structural vulnerabilities through the productive force of the enjoyable everyday. Care can be enjoyable and, through that joy, can shape social relations for the better. For example, on Valentine’s Day—like every time I saw Jim in his allAmerican JROTC uniform—I was reminded of his precarious undocumented status in the United States and how that status affected his even more precarious dreams for higher education. Yet Jim just plainly enjoyed wearing his uniform and the sense of pride it gave him.42 Perhaps he even liked the authority the uniform lent as he wrote the love note. More directly, through the caring and fun work of teasing each other’s fashion choices, writing love notes, and encouraging academic success, Succeeders articulated what mattered to them and about them. Pleasurable experiences are critical to how people live. Moreover, they are productive of subversions of the unequal sociopolitical systems that make them vulnerable. Bearing this important role of fun in mind, what did it do for Jim and Edwin? How did it inform their remaking of success? To start, because of the Succeeders’ open door policy, students who otherwise might not have interacted with each other because of academic tracking and the peer-based divisions of academic achievement evidenced in the case of la rampa were building bonds. While Succeeders became friends who were like family through a stated interest in striving, they also became friends across achievement levels and found that “in friendship [there] is a sense of belonging” if not always perfect similarity.43 While Raven positioned striving as something that made the Succeeders family, as students spent

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more unstructured time with each other in the Succeeders program they saw that their sameness went beyond academic striving to their linked fates as Latino learners and young people. Jim’s love note efforts provide an example of these cross-achievement bonds and collective efforts that extend from academic success to personal life. In that slight shift toward relatedness rather than achievement, students made claims for inclusion on their own terms—the terms of relatedness and care. These twin projects—academic and personal wellbeing—transformed students from friends who simply shared common interests to kin who were invested in each other’s making good across various dimensions of their lives. This shift, from shared educational pursuits to personal connection, from distant friend to close kin, squares with the definition of the ideal family Succeeders described: family as caring, understanding, and accepting of each other regardless of academic achievement. Returning to Edwin makes clear this connection and its implications for inclusion. Edwin, despite his affable ways, was gaining a bad reputation in school. He was teetering from “at risk” to actual risk. Teachers were retracting their interest in him—except for Ms. Millerton, who was steadfast in her care for Edwin. Jim wasn’t losing interest in Edwin either. Educational scholars have pointed to the central role of peer relationships and their caring in motivating academic success for Latino youth.44 Indeed, I saw how Jim’s mentorship of Edwin gave Jim more confidence in his own ability to go to college and spurred Edwin toward moderate compliance with the gym uniform rules. Caring, family-like relationships between peers allow learners to access the essential cultural capital and emotional and informational support contained in these networks for personal development and academic achievement.45 These are the kinds of supports Jackson Hills students gestured toward in their suppositions regarding what caused la rampa students to disengage scholastically. For that hard-won knowledge about the Latino educational pipeline to be trustworthy, however, students must build the kinds of intimate, trusting relationships that come from little acts of caring, like helping with a Valentine. In other words, before any of that helpful information or positive role modeling can occur, peers must come to like and trust each other—to slowly build closeness through caring in the free space of Succeeders.

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We can position that intimacy as a step toward success, measured in the increased college going of Succeeders participants. However, that only tells part of the story. We must also reexamine becoming “like a family” as a success in itself, because the Succeeders saw it that way. By caring for Edwin as a student and as a person at a time when others seemed largely not to because of his academic performance, Jim showed Edwin that he was worth caring about regardless of the letters on his report card. When students care for each other beyond educational attainment, beyond being “at risk,” or undocumented, they refuse to abandon each other in service of themselves. In the process, they position relatedness and care as more important measures of selfhood than merit. Jim and Edwin’s and other students’ relationships were based not only on the shared aspiration of going to college but on shared experience beyond school. The topics that were casually discussed in the Valentine’s Day club—weighty home-based responsibilities to younger siblings, DACA requirements, and the trials and tribulations of young love—attest to this point. Students’ relationships with each other were also a source of mutual support for negotiating these experiences, a source of caring interest in each other’s lives. As they built these caring supports, we can see Succeeders’ actions as an everyday critique of the terms of belonging and power that separate Latino youth like Jim and Edwin from each other on the basis of merit. Later in the school year, once Jim had applied to college and had been accepted, he and I talked about his idea of success. His musings echoed those of the Jackson Hills alums. Jim was going to college, but that didn’t mean that much unless people came after him, people like Edwin. However, Jim took his definition a step further and voiced his concern for youth like Edwin beyond purely academic success. He said that he wanted to “make a difference in not only the school, but at least the life of at least one person.” By reframing and redoing success in this way, students like Jim make an important claim to success on their own terms. The Succeeders also made a radical, but quietly enacted, political claim. There is a contraction of caring for Latino youth in the present—evidenced in both the negative experiences of Succeeders in their schools and most exceptionally in the ongoing tepid national response to the fates of unaccompanied immigrant minors. The Succeeders demonstrated through their caring for each other that they were worthy of care. By placing care at the center of

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their notion of success—care enacted through mentoring, encouragement of academic effort, love advice, and making a difference to each other— these youth made a claim not only on success, but also on the recognition of their personhood’s value beyond it. That recognition was based not in their achievements, but in their ability to care for others. And that caring occurred not just because they occupied vulnerable subject positions, but also because it was what mattered to them and was enjoyable for them. By reframing success in this way, students argued for inclusion on their own terms, the terms of being “like a family.”

Co nC luSion I close this chapter by turning my attention back to Enrique, the author of the family quotation enshrined on Liz’s gold poster. He was a quiet young man with what I initially interpreted as a flat affect. As I reread the line about Succeeders as family, I was more than a little shocked by this unusual outpouring of emotion. Enrique had attended the club and events, but he was never at the front of the pack. He always stood close to his friend from school, the also ever-silent Aarón. Sofía often talked to both boys in the quiet moments on field trips. Many times I saw her with them, bringing up the rear, hearing them engaged in hushed or laughing conversation. She had also met with Enrique’s parents, as she and Liz did with many families, working together on how Enrique would pay for college in Kentucky. In his essay, Enrique had highlighted this parental meeting as well as the Succeeders campus visit at Kentucky Blue Hills College as examples of what the Succeeders family had done for him in his essay. For it was at Aarón and Sofía’s urging that Enrique came to the college tour, applied to college when he had thought he couldn’t because of his undocumented status, and secured a way to pay for his further education. Enrique and Aarón both attended Southwest High, home to a small Succeeders club where there were no official club officers. It was, as Sofía positively spun it, a “growing” club. As the year went on, I noticed an increasing number of Southwest students on weekend field trips. They joined Aarón and Enrique in the now more talkative rear of the snaking

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group formation. I knew that the two boys, in their reserved ways, had promoted Succeeders in their school. The year after I left, the year the boys both went to college in Kentucky, Southwest’s club became one of the biggest Succeeder clubs, thanks in part to the young men’s efforts at recruitment. In the fall of Enrique’s freshman year of college, Sofía sent me a text with a blurry picture of Enrique, who was acting as a tour guide for the Succeeders “familia” on his college campus in Kentucky. Aarón was also pictured, giving the tour a thumbs up. Perhaps Enrique positioned Succeeders as “like a family” to make sense of Sofía’s interest in his life or to gain greater support for his educational striving from her and Aarón.46 However, it is also possible that Enrique positioned Succeeders in this way to make sense of his interest in the club, his care and dedication to the program’s continuance in the lives of future Southwest students. He called the organization a family, not to shift obligations of caring about future students’ success to the Succeeders scholarship committee, but to take them up as his own, filtering them through his understanding of what a family does. He also identified the organization as family to mark his success as the product of the family-like care he had received from Sofía, Aarón, and others. His success was, as he wrote in his essay, due to the caring interventions of others—which he took up as his own through small acts like leading a tour group for his “familia.” In this chapter, I have argued that small acts of caring matter and can be political. In particular, little acts of caring for peers that may seem insignificant are powerful ways that youth remake success and the terms of inclusion. The Succeeders are aiming for success in the American educational meritocracy—a fait accompli of the contemporary cultural politics of immigrant inclusion. However, as they aim to be “like a family,” they also attempt to move the needle on those terms.47 There is a power in caring that can be harnessed by the caregiver and the care recipient toward both individual and social recognition of valued personhood and belonging. Through recognizing and belonging with each other when others seem not to or when that recognition and belonging are predicated on meeting merit-based standards, youth reject the terms of their unmaking as valued people and members. These acts of forging relatedness are also acts of “implicit activism” that demand we take into account how youth, at the periphery of the education system and at the core of ethnoracial

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anxieties stemming from immigration, shift the terms of national belonging even as they conform to them.48 When friends care for each other “like family” and gain relatedness, they embody a commitment to each other that affirms that their moral value comes not from being successful individually, but by supporting each other, recognizing the care of others, and expressing hopeful belonging with each other across dehumanizing and exclusionary terms applied to them like “illegal” or “at risk.” Like all actions examined throughout this book, these efforts are uneven and sometimes end up reproducing exclusion. However, it is also possible to see that through these small, hopeful acts—and the naming of each other as kin—Succeeders expand the bounds of belonging for us all. Expansive belonging is possible when we see care as the cornerstone of belonging. That, in turn, is only possible when we see each other in terms of a national “family” and not as national threats.

Conclusion graduationS

Each graduation began and ended the same way. At the start, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance blasted over the audio system of whichever municipal or collegiate arena was hosting the ceremony. Alongside Liz and Sofía in the nosebleeds, I could see graduates pouring in as a mostly faceless wave of robes and bobbing mortar boards with jauntily swinging tassels. Younger siblings kept vigil in order to spot their elder sibling in the sea of shiny polyester robes. Once given the signal by their juvenile scouts, parents snapped blurry photos from high up in the stadium seating. Principals and valedictorians made speeches about the future, audience members let out whoops and hollers after the announcement of every graduate’s name, and faculty distributed diplomas with surprising alacrity. Pomp and Circumstance’s reprise accompanied a far less orderly, but even more joyful, recessional after Succeeders and their classmates were turned into graduates. Liz joked we were “like old ladies counting lottery numbers” or playing Lotería Tia (Aunt Lottery, after the bingo-like game lotería) as we hunted for the Succeeders during and after the ceremonies. I visited with graduating Succeeders in the mob of giddy families, teachers, and friends that crowded the exits at the ceremonies’ end. Mylar balloons that had been 177

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tucked under seats so as not to obscure others’ view of the proceedings now rose high in the Nashville sky while anchored to graduates’ wrists. As they floated above the crowd, the balloons became homing devices for separated graduates and families. Cards and stuffed animals, themselves in graduation caps, were heaped on graduates. Bouquets wrapped in crinkly plastic sheaths quickly wilted under the sun’s early summer rays. Beaming students held up this bounty of gifts—and their hard-won diplomas—for family photos that stretched the limits of the iPhone’s zoom-out function. This crowded scene wasn’t always the case, as I was reminded whenever Liz, Sofía, and I were the only ones present to see some of the Succeeders take part in the great graduation ritual. Regardless of the numbers of their adoring public, when I would hit Lotería Tia and find a Succeeder in the sweaty crowd of well-wishers and graduates, they were happily overwhelmed. All students were eager to take a large number of pictures and receive my perspiratory hugs. They had done it. It is fitting to consider the broader arguments of this book in terms of the graduation ritual. Rituals are about both what is seen and unseen, what one is and what one hopes to become. The same is true for striving— the hopeful, everyday acts of loving care, scholastic work, and determined emotional effort undertaken toward the imagined future. The preceding chapters have tracked the overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings of striving and belonging for the Succeeders. We have seen both what the Succeeders believed their striving did for them and their loved ones and also what their striving said about them, their families, and Latinos’ place in the nation. While these ascribed meanings have symbolic purchase, the social work youth do through their striving is real, with real political consequences. The Succeeders came of age during the conflicting immigration and racial politics of the Obama administration. The exclusionary terms of belonging that shaped Succeeders’ lives, however, have existed for much longer. These racialized and moralized terms have animated national politics and the ebbs and flows of exclusion since the nation’s very founding. These terms have also fueled generations of neighbors, teachers, and employers to hold lowered expectations for minorities and immigrants. For more than four hundred years, since the nation’s early days as a colony, US membership has worked in ways that allow for some, but not

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all, to belong. While slowly expanding over time, each group that differs from those in power has consistently had to fight for their right to belong and the acknowledgment of that right. This fight for belonging occurs not only in law but also in the practice of all community members. For it is in the practice of daily life that the lines of belonging are drawn and redrawn. It is in practice that belonging is experienced. This book has traced the mundane struggles and triumphs of youth living in, working between, and navigating through their contradictory times and the exclusionary terms of belonging that are as old as the nation itself. Succeeders’ efforts show that inclusion is something we make and unmake through our own efforts and our own striving for success, a better nation, and a more just world. Succeeders creatively drew from and leveraged the limited terms of belonging and myths foundational to the United States, such as the American Dream and the educational meritocracy. Striving was early proof of one’s present and future capability to achieve and to reveal oneself as the upright achiever-cum-member that US belonging demands. For Succeeders, striving and becoming a “moral minority” worked against the marginalizing stigmas ascribed by those in power to those who are not in power. Success could mean respect in a context where minority personhood is derided. Striving thus made sense as a strategy for inclusion and for validation that one was, in fact, “somebody.” Succeeders’ moral minority status was signaled not only through their scholastic effort and starchy graduation gowns. It also came through in their communicative practices—skits, talk in club meetings, the college essay, and the ways they performed who they were to others—including to me. Succeeders defined and performed their Latinidad and striver status across contexts in distinction to the negative stereotypes of Latino youth as immoral underachievers. As Succeeders did so, they reproduced the very same stereotypes they sought to avoid. In the process, they reinforced the idea that other Latino youth, including their peers, aligned with these stereotypes and were undeserving of merit-based inclusion in their schools and nation. However, Succeeders did not merely parrot the logics of racialized and moralized exclusion. They also adeptly pushed the boundaries of these discourses, challenged them, and subverted them. They did so by asserting the supremacy of care and relatedness as the basis of inclusion.

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Their notions of Latinidad, for example, also meant kinship across national borders. At a time of entrenched nationalism, deep and lasting ties to people in countries other than the United States flout the “national order of things.”1 Youth also reframed both their striving and their parents’ undocumented status or otherwise stigmatized immigration in terms of meeting kinship obligations. Parental immigration itself was reframed as an act of care. While kinship obligations are also cut through with stereotypes, asserting kinship’s value illustrated youth’s attempts to draw from other frames of the valued person—those of family. Succeeders reframed their parents as moral US members even if they were supposedly reprobate “illegals” or disposable workers. As Succeeders made sense of another kinship relationship, siblingship, they refined success: it meant to care for others. Educational sibcare revealed to youth the harsh limits of academic success for themselves. It also revealed the intragenerational ways that success and social change, including belonging in a new nation, are worked out over time through caring. This notion of caring-produced relatedness as another mode of success and as an alternate bedrock of membership extended beyond the boundaries of the natal family. It became how youth understood their ties to another stigmatized group: academically underachieving, undocumented, and “at risk” friends. Youth’s refusal to leave peers behind and their commitment to care about them beyond academic success was more than kindness. It was a refutation of a merit-based inclusion that ignores the lasting social ties of linked fates forged in care. In other words, individual success was not enough to create a satisfying sense of belonging, but caring for and with others was. Such an understanding is also an assertion that rather than accomplishment, family, forged in care, can be the tie that binds the nation. Striving is clearly uneven in nature. It works in exclusionary and inclusionary ways. It is a path to both individual success and collective attachment. Striving is also not entirely one or the other—reproductive or transformative. For example, in attempting to leverage their striving for the inclusion of others, youth drew from the merit-based terms of membership. It was, after all, youth’s status as meritorious students that they believed would enable parental inclusion. Striving, in all its internal contradictions, emerged as youth’s way to cope with the dueling demands

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of respectability and relatedness while building the futures they dreamt of for themselves and their families. Youth’s striving was not only about constructing a better future and making do, but also about making sense. Through striving, youth grappled with the present and managed its exigencies and everyday emergencies. Youth strove to achieve, to grasp the brass ring of academic achievement. They also strove to care for others and to manage others’ precarity at the same time. Striving was how youth agentively enabled their loved ones to get by and thrive in uncertain times. It was how they belonged to each other and for each other. It was how they modeled what belonging could be. In the remainder of these pages, I move away from reviewing the rough contours of the arguments I have made to asserting their broadest implications. These include the supposedly shifting contexts of nativism that animate America’s recent past and, at the time of this writing, its present; and the enduring role of education in national debates over belonging. In both, we see youth as hopeful interpreters of and actors in their complicated times. At the conclusion’s end, I turn to another set of graduations— those from college—to show how the lessons of schooling and belonging extend beyond the classroom.

Car i ng in nativ iS t ra CiS t time S When I attended the graduations described at the start of this conclusion, I didn’t imagine that those would turn out to be halcyon days. DACA had been rolled out nationally that prior June. The most virulently antiimmigrant and racist provisions of Arizona’s SB 1070 had just been struck down by the US Supreme Court. Nashville’s English-only battle was an increasingly distant memory. The reelection of the first Black president, some suggested, heralded a “post-racial” nation. While those years may have been the calm before the storm of the Trump era with respect to immigration, they were still less than ideal. Locally, Latino youth were heavily surveilled and racially profiled as they drove through their streets. The University of Tennessee still had an unofficial ban on the admission of undocumented students. Succeeders feared that they or their families would be “caught” and deported in the course of daily living.

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Even President Obama himself wasn’t safe. The birther movement, led by Donald Trump, continued to challenge the legitimacy of President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate and his US citizenship in the run-up to the 2012 presidential race.2 Even if someone strove hard enough to become president, nativist racists would still contend that the racially marked children of immigrants were always “irreducibly foreign.”3 All of these circumstances suggested that the state’s long familiar, and familial, modes of cruelty were still present in the bright moment of 2012–13. In 2020, when I revised this book, immigration policy and procedures had become even harsher. Additionally, the then president was stoking racial animus via Twitter, policy threats, and puffed-up press conferences.4 DACA had been rescinded in 2017 but was weakly upheld by the Supreme Court in 2020.5 More troublingly, the Trump administration had inflicted blunt force on protesters who demanded that the nation finally recognize that Black lives matter in the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd—the latest victims of deadly white supremacy.6 If 2012–13 was a bright spot, 2016–20 was largely its inverse. At the local level of immigration politics, deportation orders in Tennessee had increased by almost 50 percent since 2016.7 In 2018, ICE performed the largest workplace raid in ten years at a meat-packing factory in Bean Station, Tennessee. As a result, ninety-seven people were arrested and deported.8 Collectively, these policies and actions have far-reaching but also mundane effects. For example, the day after the Bean Station raid, there were 534 absences from local schools.9 Individual families will continue to bear the ugly consequences of nativism in the daily tragedy of parents separated from children, husbands from wives, and siblings from each other. When looking at the “then” of this fieldwork and the “now” of my writing, there are common threads of racist and nativist hostility. These threads suggest that these two points in time—and those that come after it—are not that distinct from each other, but rather are part of a longer history of nativist and racist exclusion. Trump’s Muslim ban is yesterday’s Chinese Exclusion Act. Together, in a shorter frame of reference, these supposedly distinct time points of hopeful 2012 and hostile 2020 suggest that the United States was in a particular period of contracted opportunities for belonging, one that likely began post-9/11.10 Some US members wondered

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in 2001, 2012, and 2020 if the immigrant next door was a terrorist, a moral wrongdoer, a welfare cheat, a carrier of some new virus, or someone stealing their spot at an Ivy League college. The same was true for their predecessors in the heady nativist times of 1882, 1917, and 1924.11 In 2021, when this book was published, we waited to see what was next as a new administration made promises to beat back the latest in nativist animus. I point to this longue durée of nativism, and its most recent incarnation, because a longer historical view allows us to see that nativism is an omnipresent social force. Sadly, the Succeeders and their critiques of the terms of membership will always be instructive in how to combat nativist exclusion, because there is likely to always be nativism. There is, however, danger in only tracking persistent nativism over time. Doing so erases the transformative expansions of belonging that tear down exclusion. Exclusion acts are repealed; quotas are raised. The immigrant becomes an in-law, the foreigner a friend. Nativism does contract over time—as belonging expands over it. I have argued that belonging is an always unfinished process we all take part in that is enacted through small daily acts of inclusion and exclusion. Chief among these acts is caring. In this latest, and all periods of contracted belonging, care seems a scarce resource. State actors’ caring for immigrant and minority youth is increasingly limited. High rates of minority juvenile incarceration and the deportation of unaccompanied Central American teenagers to face certain death also demonstrate this truth. There is instead an abundance of fear and, as Ghassan Hage states, “a scarcity of hope” that “creates citizens who see threats everywhere” to the nation.12 In such a context, Succeeders’ care takes on heightened significance. In acts as banal as placing a poster across from la rampa, Succeeders valued Latino lives. These kinds of unseen or unheralded acts do the daily work of refusing a membership that uncaringly leaves behind vulnerable others. Succeeders’ valuing of their stigmatized mothers’ and fathers’ care is likewise significant. It is a demand that parents’ moral personhood be recognized in a nation that sees Latino threats where Succeeders see mom and dad. Caring for related and unrelated others is not separate from big questions of national inclusion and nativism. It is, rather, central to them. As

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noted in the introduction, the family has long been a symbol of the nation, but also the material site of its governance. The deportation of undocumented family members attests to this fact. However, the figurative attachment to the “motherland” or “fatherland” that leaders assert is often not about care, but rather about control: control over the family and who is, and can be, part of the national family.13 As the furor over family separations at the border and in detention suggests, the family will continue to define American immigration politics as both symbol and harsh reality. Succeeders’ making family of their peers through care and asserting their natal family’s value suggest that the national family can be broadened. When they cared for these others, Succeeders affirmed their and our own relational attachments’ significance to who we are and who we can be. At its core, what Succeeders’ care did is connect in a time of division. These are claims for the inclusion of all our family, in its most expansive forms, in the national family. The Succeeders, and other minority and immigrant youth, creatively work around the boundaries of nativism and other stigmatizing expectations regarding their personhood, abilities, and citizenship. They successfully harness the loaded vernacular terms of family, success, and care to show themselves and their loved ones as worthy of membership. They may do so in unexpected places—like on la rampa or at the kitchen table while siblings complete homework. Just because their acts of care are not always on the ramparts does not mean they are not political. Anne Ríos-Rojas argues that the adult-centered perspectives of most belonging scholarship “miss out on the creative ways in which youth are also speaking subjects and agents of knowledge who may express important critiques of normative forms of citizenship and of what it means to belong in our modern world.”14 Throughout this book, I have sought to foreground the sense making of the Succeeders themselves, illustrating that youth are critical actors in making and unmaking national orders. This making and unmaking occurs in the mundane comings and goings of lives defined by the political order. An approach that only focuses on the long history of nativism, politics, and how these forces affect youth like the Succeeders presents only one part of the story. The other is how these youth fight back through small acts of caring relatedness. I have drawn attention to such acts in this book to amplify these trenchant, lived critiques of our time that may go

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unnoticed because of Latino youth’s age, their ethnoracial backgrounds, or their operation in the mundane spheres of life. The Succeeders show us how the subjects of nativism can be its undoing.

eduCatio n ’S Pol iti Ca l S ta k eS f o r lat i n o im mi gra n t a n d immigra n t d eSC e n da n t y o ut h In August 2017, in the now all-too-familiar to me sticky heat of an August Nashville afternoon, I participated in a protest supporting the DACA program’s continued existence. I marched with Isabel, who had long been an outspoken activist; supportive educators; and many former Succeeders, including Neveah. As we all marched from Legislative Plaza to the Convention Center, we chanted, “Down, down with deportation, up, up with education,” and youth carried bright signs stating, “Education not Deportation” or phrases like “I’ll Save Your Life—Future Nurse with DACA.” At stops along the way, students shared their stories of struggling to go to college, studying while balancing jobs, graduating from college, and working as professionals in their fields or applying to graduate school. We all cheered as they listed their academic and professional accomplishments, with especially loud cheers at the mention of any graduation. Neveah had told me she would share her story as we waited for the protest to begin. She would give her speech in both English and Spanish— her dad had helped her translate it. We practiced a Spanish word that felt unfamiliar in both our mouths, laughing at our gringo-accented Spanish. Her speech chronicled her success as a high schooler, her struggle to attend college as an undocumented student, her triumphant college graduation, and her current goal to attend law school. As I have shown, immigrant youth like Neveah strive and perform the model, achieving student as a way to claim membership in and beyond school. As this book attests, I am sharply critical of educational merit as the measure of youth’s fitness for membership in the nation—even though I cheered for graduations on our protest’s route. However, Succeeders’ academic success is about more than merit in a school system where 30 percent of Latino students do not graduate from high school. It is a meaningful inroad into a system not designed for their achievement or

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Figure 4. Discarded sign at 2017 protest for DACA in Nashville, Tennessee. Photo by author.

belonging. Striving, persisting, and achieving in an exclusionary system in dark political times is an everyday triumph that deserves consideration as a deeply political and transformative act. Neveah’s telling of her story—of her personal educational triumph in a fractured school system—was the first time she shared her story in a formal act of protest. Neveah had regularized her status since graduating from college, but since her regularization she had become more outspoken on undocumented youth’s rights. Now she felt the need to speak out publicly even more. I asked her why. As we sat in coveted shade on the hard granite steps of some state building or another, she explained her reasoning. It felt ridiculous to her that she now somehow belonged more as a legal resident and college graduate than she had when she was an undocumented student. It was now her responsibility to fight for others still stuck in status limbo. It was also her responsibility to point out the fallacy of belonging only through legal status and professional or academic accomplishment.

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While the caps and gowns that still characterize immigrant youth activism were absent that sultry afternoon, education, graduation, and continued educational striving loomed large as youth and allies fought to preserve DACA. The fight was successful: in 2020, the Supreme Court upheld its legality—but also left room for its closure. Educational attainment and striving are still positioned by youth activists and allies as proof that undocumented youth deserve membership. As I have shown in the prior chapters, they are also the primary way that youth far from protests on the streets prove their belonging in everyday life. Through their college admissions essays, through avowals to go to college, through simply saying they want to become “somebody,” youth enact their belonging through their education. These youth are working within the system while also critiquing it as Neveah did—speaking, in part, to the uneven nature of their efforts. Neveah’s reflections regarding her shift from undocumented student to graduate and legal permanent resident reveal that youth are also keenly aware that their education makes them no more deserving than others. Neveah’s undocumented parents; her fellow DACA recipient sister Gina, Gina’s Nashville-born baby, and her citizen fiancé; and the young women’s citizen siblings came to the protest. They came to hear Neveah speak, to hear her praise her parents’ undocumented immigration, undertaken lovingly for her and her siblings. In Neveah’s speech, education, immigration, and kinship were blended in an artful way that made the case for her family’s collective inclusion as Americans, regardless of status, in the registers of both academic success and kinship. Education has figured prominently in immigration and cultural politics. From the DREAM Act’s educational requirements, to battles for instate tuition for undocumented students, to current calls for an end to affirmative action, education serves as a battleground where the entitlements of membership, and who are deserving of them, are worked out. This centrality of education to questions of membership and its entitlements exists because, as Amy Stambach writes, “education is a social field on which the future is imagined, and temporalities concerning youth are emblematic of wider concerns about opportunities and obstacles.”15 These “wider concerns” for the future include those related to a demographically shifting nation and the way this change affects what it means

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to be American. Schools are the institutions where that demographic change is made most visible. Contestations over school resources, as I discuss in chapter 1, are not just rehearsals of broader debates about who deserves the entitlements of belonging, but their first instantiation. As Thea Abu El-Haj points out, despite their centrality to national projects of exclusion and inclusion, the everyday mechanisms of that exclusion “are central, and underexamined, aspects of contemporary educational research in the United States.”16 Following Abu El-Haj’s call, I have also shown that quotidian actions—like Lupita’s “at least ten essays saying I’m Hispanic,” Camilia’s enrollment of her sister in a Catholic school, and Natalia’s linkage of a “good person” with college attendance in a skit—are the “quiet politics of belonging” of the nation worked out in its schools.17 Through their educational striving, youth both conform to and challenge the national imaginary’s borders of respectability as they demand respect as equal members of the nation. These challenges can come from unlikely sources, like Lupita. In high school, Lupita was keen to conform and not be “the typical Hispanic.” Instead, she reproduced those harmful stereotypes for others. Here, educational attainment would replicate the extant terms of belonging— education would exclude. Her experiences at a large public state university made her see things differently and articulate a direct challenge to the narratives of belonging that she had eagerly reproduced as a high schooler. Her experience speaks to a side of education I have not focused on in this book: education as liberation. One afternoon, a year before she graduated from college, Lupita and I ate at a burger joint halfway between her parents’ and my in-laws’ homes. We had lingered there long enough. Just next door to the strip mall, we found an inviting gazebo at the center of a new planned condo community. As we sat on the bare floor and hoped not to be hassled by security guards as gazebo intruders, Lupita reflected back on her first year at college. She had carried that high school sense of herself as not the “typical” Latino with her when she first arrived. She told her new collegiate friends that she was a Republican and “a nontraditional Hispanic.” She told me why she had done this: “because I felt like I was above my demographic because I was in school, and I felt like actually I had a future and stuff.” As Lupita adjusted to the primarily white space of her college campus, she

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began to see that non-Latino peers still judged her despite her proclamations of being “a nontraditional Hispanic.” They still saw her as “that kind” of Latina. While she thought education would shield her from these judgments, it did not. She had conformed to the respectability of education’s cultural politics, but found that her conformity brought her no respect. Her perspective began to change when she chanced onto a student environmental group led by a trans student called Riley. Through Riley, Lupita was exposed to various causes on campus like Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, Living Wage campaigns, and the undocumented immigrant rights movement. Through her campus involvement, Lupita began to notice that “Riley didn’t fit in.” Through that realization, it dawned on her that she “wasn’t alone” in being judged according to dominant social norms. She saw her struggles as a low-income Latina in college in solidarity with others marginalized socially and in school. She saw a linked fate beyond Latinidad. Lupita took this interest into her classrooms. She took classes in political science, added new words like ableism to her vocabulary, and learned about the role of US imperialism in her mother’s homeland of El Salvador. She wrote about her mother’s illiteracy in a course on “developing countries.” She also sought out ways to make her college campus more inclusive for people like her and Riley through her campus life work. Her growth in knowledge and exposure to others in another institution of education made Lupita question the very things she had been so certain of in high school. Here, education transformed her and what it meant to belong. When Lupita graduated from college the next year, she was even more reflective on the role of her education, stating that she had entered as “a self-loathing Brown girl that rationalized her experiences by hating her community and neighborhood.” She emerged from college as someone who valued not only her education, but also herself. Her exposure to people different from herself, her opportunity to study her history, and her ability to see her life in line with others’ lives made Lupita challenge the terms of belonging and respectability. Educational institutions will always remain major crucibles for national inclusion in the United States because of their social role within the nation. Even as educational institutions and their value face unprecedented threats, they maintain their status as key sites where belonging

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is worked out. Students can and will forcefully articulate alternate means to belong, just as Lupita did in her curricular and cocurricular efforts. As students make their way through these institutions, their efforts transform both their schools and their nation. Education itself can be transformative, as Lupita’s in-class experiences show. Lupita’s educational trajectory and shifting perspectives on the role of education and her identity reveal that the transformative and reproductive ends of education wax and wane over time in the unfolding of individual students’ lives and learning. Education is reproductive, but it is also transformative—both ends are the products of our efforts to learn and unlearn while we are schooled. I return to graduation as further evidence of this point.

em ma and Ja n itza : Commen Cin g li f e In the months leading up to her high school graduation, Emma had struggled. As previously mentioned, many undocumented students like her became increasingly withdrawn at the end of school, faced with the reality of exiting the institution that had given them “an experience of inclusion atypical of undocumented adult life.”18 Emma, as I have noted elsewhere, procrastinated over applying to college. Her emotions swung up and down with the slings and arrows of financial aid and admissions.19 I knew from text messages we shared on graduation day’s sunny morning that Emma was full of nerves—including worries that her family wouldn’t find good seats in the arena. When I finally got to see her in the thinning crowd, she was jubilant. Gone were the worries of the morning and the heavier ones of the prior two months. All she could say to me was: “This isn’t the last one [graduation]. This isn’t the last one, Andrea. And you better come back in four years!” I came back significantly earlier. I visited Emma on the last day of her first year in college. It had not been without trouble. In November, she had thought she would have to drop out because she was behind on payments and it was, as she put in an email, “too much stress” to be worried about money all the time. However, with some creative accounting, she was able to enroll for spring semester. In celebration of completing her first year, I took her to a southern meat and three restaurant that sits on the edge of

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the beautiful Baldwin College campus—her “dream school.” As we feasted on fried catfish, corn salad, mashed potatoes, buttery sautéed vegetables, and not-quite-tart lemon meringue pie, she talked through the highs and lows of the year. She loved her classes, but it was hard to balance them with her job at a jewelry store and her family obligations. Rather than take the requisite twelve credit hours, she was taking eighteen, figuring that she should get as many credits in as she could now while she had the money. She had become involved in the Latino student organization and enjoyed it, but she was having difficulty finding time to participate on campus as a commuter student. She was grateful for the scholarships Baldwin had given her and the financial aid office’s patience with her when her father’s payments for college fell through. However, she worried about the money, constantly thinking it would “kill” her. College wasn’t turning out to be the golden opportunity and answer to all her problems she had thought it would be. Yet without qualification, she told me she was thrilled to have her friends from Gilead High’s Succeeders club—Jim and Jenny—there with her. The three were becoming even closer friends and even greater supports to each other in college. Jenny and Emma studied together frequently, and Jim and Emma were actively involved in Succeeders as alumni. Both were enjoying staying close to new Succeeders. She told me that going to club meetings and talking about college helped motivate her to continue even when she felt overwhelmed. It reminded her that she was part of a community. She knew she belonged there even as she struggled to find that belonging on her college campus. Three years later, after almost transferring, almost dropping out, and almost working herself into hospitalization with three part-time jobs, including the graveyard shift at a Waffle House, Emma graduated from college. She was just as happy the second time around. While the college graduations were even bigger and harder-to-see affairs than the high school ones, the Succeeders were easier to spot this time during the ritual’s proceedings. They wore serape style stoles that proclaimed their Latinidad in brightly woven colors. Some even noted their status as “undocugrads.” They decorated their mortar boards with messages like “I carry resilience in mi sangre” (my blood), “Lo logramos. Gracias Ma’ y Pa’ ” (We did it. Thanks Mom and Dad), or “¡Sí se pudo!

Figure 5. Proud and grateful Latina college graduate showing off her cap and gown. Photo by author.

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Gracias Ma y Pa” (Yes, she could. Thanks Mom and Dad). In these messages, in yet another reworking of the sartorial symbols of academic success, Succeeders made visible the lessons they had learned beyond school. They articulated, in plain sight, the collective nature of their achievements, their pride in their Latinidad, and the deep ties to the past that informed their futures. They valued not only education, but themselves. In the years since 2013, there have been more happy graduations. Neveah, Jim, Jenny, Lupita, Alejandro, Alicia, Pamela, Sebastián, and others have all graduated from college. But Perla didn’t. Nor did Fernando, Janitza, Angelito, Javier, and Jane-Marie. Some, like Gina and Angel, started and stopped. Some are still working on their degrees, one course, one payment at a time. Some never started. These students are also successes. When Gina and Janitza make wise choices for their daughters’ futures or even foolish ones—as they care for them—that too is a profound success. Critically, the Succeeders—including Janitza—also see their lives that way. The summer after she graduated from high school, Janitza got pregnant and moved in with her fiancé, Paco. When we met up the following summer, she with a now six-month-old little Paloma in tow, I asked Janitza how she was doing. As she carefully cut up a pupusa for her daughter and cooled it by blowing gently on it, Janitza smiled. She was disappointed to be putting off college, but she told me she was “very proud” to be the kind of mother she was becoming. While some day she hoped to be “chilling with my kids, my diplomas on the wall over my big couch,” she told me about how her own motherhood gave her a new perspective on her mother’s struggles, how she still didn’t understand her mother’s choices but could now forgive them, and how she was breaking the cycle in her own motherhood. About two years after the birth of their daughter, Janitza’s now husband was killed in a random act of violence. When we met up shortly after his death, Janitza knew higher education was further off the table than ever before, but that her mothering would be even more important now that her daughter’s very involved, loving father would be absent. She was saving up money to move out to a neighboring county—a place where she thought her daughter would be safe and have access to “a better school than I had.”

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For Janitza, there would be no cap and gown on her horizon, but she told me that it didn’t matter now. What was most important to her “being a success” was Paloma. Janitza might have said such things to cover up her lack of credentials or her disappointment about the lack of her aspired-to diploma. She instead appealed to another personally and socially fraught way to judge moral personhood: being a good Latina mother. Even if such proclamations are covers, they are nonetheless important counterstories of success for those who tell them to others in a merit-obsessed time and nation. It is also Janitza’s story: the story of her care and its hopeful repair of her world. It is her story of being “somebody.” In the wake of an even harsher political and cultural context, the Succeeders continue on. They have graduation parties and weddings. They celebrate being the employee of the month at the used car dealership. They send their own children to better schools with hopes and dreams they dared not wish for themselves. They protest. They don’t protest. Whether or not they are going to school or struggling to get by, each Succeeder is building their own kind of success through the unfolding projects of their young lives and those lives’ connections to others. While I have them, I do not offer any specific policy prescriptions here—not for immigration reform, not for education. Policy is one way politics are done, but it is not the only way. All of our actions are critical in creating the world we want to see. We do not need to wait for our politicians and policy makers to catch up with us. As the Succeeders demonstrate, we have the power to change our world by changing each other’s lives. A kinder and united society is ultimately what stands to be lost if US inclusion, in policy and practice, is not predicated on caring relatedness with others. These are the hard-won lessons that the Succeeders have learned—and now have taught.

aPPendix  The

Succeeders Program

Program hiStory As mentioned in chapter 1, Succeeders was founded in 2002 as an occasional allages enrichment program housed within a local nonprofit. Through the Succeeders staff’s interpersonal relationships with local educators, the program deepened over time and began to move into local schools. By the time of my fieldwork, the program had formal partnerships with six MNPS high schools. The setting up of a Succeeders club in one of these schools came down to an educator reaching out to the program. Following that initial contact, the staff, teacher, and school principal would meet to formalize the school-based programming. These partnerships were at the level of the school, not the district. However, the umbrella nonprofit that oversaw and housed the Succeeders program did have a district-level commitment—making the Succeeders program more of a known commodity locally. In 2009 Sofía became director of the program after her predecessor’s sudden, unexpected departure. This change led to a revamping of the extant programming. Sofía began her work by setting up more formal recordkeeping that tracked how students were doing in school, whether or not they were on track to graduate, and how many students were participating in the programming. Sofía felt little support from her superiors at the umbrella nonprofit that the Succeeders program was housed within: I was told to figure it out. I was never told to talk with “so and so” that she or he can explain or you can see this or that. It has been like the assumption that I am

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supposed to know all of these things. I, in a way, felt shame because of this. I am in this position supposed to know all of this information and therefore because I do not know this information does that mean I am not suited to be in this position?

Shamed or not, Sofía created a “How to Make a Succeeders Program” binder and began drafting materials. The shame Sofía felt came not only from being thrust into the directorship, but from her own educational history. Sofía is from Central America and had yet to attend college in the United States. Inspired by the Succeeders, she would eventually complete her interrupted college education, and earn a graduate degree, in Nashville. At the time she took over the directorship, Sofía had shifted careers from the world of business to that of youth programming. While she had “a heart” for direct service, she was also not initially comfortable with the programming, given her lack of US-based educational experience: When I started, like I said, I knew we were supposed to go and talk with the students about college, the college going process, there was no guideline that it was like, you know, no structure like “this what you do in week one and this what you do in week 2.” . . . It is just like “today we are going to talk about communication.” You talked about nuts and bolts of you know you need a transcript, GPA. It was really basic.

When the prior director departed the program, Sofía felt the “knowledge was gone” about how the program should work. Beyond her recordkeeping, Sofía began mapping out curriculum for the school-based meetings. By writing down the programming, she believed she had made the program itself sustainable beyond herself and her tenure. Sofía relied on then college intern Liz for guidance on US higher education in drafting the curriculum and leading the clubs. Liz was not from Nashville, but from elsewhere in the upper Southeast. She was fluent in Spanish because of her studies and time spent in a Spanish immersion study abroad program. Although Liz did not share a common immigrant experience with the Succeeders as Sofía did, Liz felt a kinship with the Succeeders based on her own family history. Her father was the child of European immigrants who had prized education. Through his striving, Liz’s father had gone on to a successful career and had kept the immigrant bargain. Sofía hired Liz full time upon her graduation. The women both described their work as a calling. It was frustrating, emotionally demanding, and time intensive, but they saw it as an essential obligation for reasons of faith, family, culture, and love for the students and their families.

Program StruCture As mentioned, the Succeeders program was part of a larger nonprofit that ran several community outreach programs in Nashville. Succeeders was the only

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one focused on the Latino community. While the parent nonprofit ran similar programming in other cities, the iteration Sofía and Liz created was unique. This pattern of engagement was common among other area youth- and immigrantyouth-focused nonprofits working with MNPS, but dissimilar to national nonprofit curricular interventions like AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) that train school-based teachers for in-school enrichment and elective courses. As part of their parent organization, Sofía and Liz were afforded office space, structural support like payroll services, and benefits packages. However, they had to subcontract other services provided by their parent organization, like transportation for field trips. They were not, however, able to subcontract with cheaper outside vendors to cut their budgets, an illustration of the internal bureaucratic complexities that Liz and Sofía faced. They were also expected to fundraise separately from the organization for operating costs, including their own salaries. Tight central budgeting and increasing fundraising demands were often points of tension between the two women and the nonprofit’s administrators. A central concern for these nonprofit administrators was the generation of revenue by programming, including programming like Succeeders that serves low-income populations. The goal mandated to Sofía and other youth program heads at the time of this research was to generate all of their budgets from outside sources. In this way, even if the programs were not generating a profit, they would not be operating at a loss. In comparison with other youth programs in the organization, Succeeders was at the top level of self-funding due to the sponsorship of several corporate funders with a local presence in Middle Tennessee that Sofía had recruited. In 2013–14, 81 percent of the $185,500 operating budget was from corporate sponsorship and private giving (compared to 70% in 2012–13, when its umbrella organization had provided more funding). The Succeeders program only answered to the parent organization’s vice president of youth programming. However, it also had an advisory board, composed largely of local Latino professionals (including representatives from Succeeders’ corporate sponsors), that provided advice and fundraising support.

Programming In 2012–13, the program had been running in its current form for four years under Sofía’s directorship. As mentioned in chapter 1, Succeeders was a targeted, biweekly, in-school program using the college access and leadership development curriculum developed jointly by Sofía and Liz. Given the unique environments of each school, each club had its own internal structure beyond the standard curriculum. At Gilead, a committee system

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was in place—with students engaged in smaller groups focused on community service, fundraising for school-based events, and program advertising. Hickory Heights had active officers who planned soccer tailgates, additional community service, and other programming. Programming at Jackson Hills and Edward Maloney was more limited in scope, but both schools had very active participants in the extant Liz- and Sofía-driven programming. Attendance varied at schools. Hickory Heights had the largest club; Jackson Hills the smallest. While Edward Maloney had relatively low after-school attendance, it had some of the most consistent participants week to week. Clubs ranged in size from ten to eighty-six students, with most having between ten and forty members who attended three or more club meetings in a year. Each school club also had a teacher “sponsor” who served as the point person for that school and whose classroom was the site of after-school club meetings. Some sponsors were longtimers: Ms. Verett, Mrs. McCann, and Ms. Carmen had been with the program since its founding and/or the program’s early days in their schools. Ms. Millerton had inherited the program from a previous sponsor. As she described it, her colleague offered it to her after seeing that she was one of the few teachers who “cared about Latino students.” Most of the sponsors were EL instructors or Spanish instructors, with the exception of one sponsor who was a humanities teacher. When I asked the white teachers (all but one of the sponsors were white) what motivated them to sponsor the program, I found that their interest mostly grew out of their appreciation for Latin America gained through travel, study, or missionary work, as well as their personal commitment as educators of Latino learners. The lone Latina teacher’s sponsorship came down to her own educational experiences as a Latina learner. While the teachers were sponsors, Liz and/or Sofía ran club meetings. Other novel programming included field trips to colleges and workplaces, community service opportunities, fall and spring school break activities, and a college fair for students. While the after-school programming was concentrated in six schools, other aspects of the program remained open to all students in any Nashville-area high school. A major part of the program, in terms of staff time and student impact, was individual case management. This ranged from Liz and Sofía conducting formal meetings with students about academic progress during the school day to informal drop-ins at the office where students shared information about their broader personal lives. Liz and Sofía accompanied families to financial aid offices, attended baby showers and graduations, and were constantly available to students over the phone. Sitting with either Liz or Sofía for any amount of time involved watching them text back and forth with students. It is hard to describe the relationships formed between Sofía, Liz, and the students in the program. Students saw Liz and Sofía as “family”: people who care about them and are close to them. The

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culminating programming of each school year was the scholarship program for Succeeders students, which disbursed $40,000–$60,000 per year to between thirty and fifty students. This money was fundraised separately from the operating budget.

StudentS in SuCCeederS For students, joining Succeeders meant going to a meeting or field trip or stopping by the office. At that time of my fieldwork, there were no prerequisites to membership and no requirements for being in good standing as a Succeeder. Students found out about the organization through advertising in school or from older siblings, cousins, friends, and upperclassmen in their high schools. While it began with a handful of students in the early 2000s, by the 2012–13 academic year the program was working with 594 students, with 183 being consistently engaged (defined, again, by Liz and Sofía as attending three or more events). The program served about 500 students for the next four years, until a new program administrator pushed for tighter requirements for participation. These more stringent requirements were exactly the kind that Liz and Sofía had consistently fought against. They saw the program’s mission as serving any student at any time. It was a just-in-time intervention for some and a four-year- college access plan for others. Importantly, the program was not merely a collection of academically motivated students; rather, a central feature of the program was that it brought together a wider swath of young people. High and low academic achievers, star athletes and artists, troublemakers and model students were all among the Succeeders.

outComeS I have made the case that the ultimate success for the Succeeders was a durable sense of belonging based in their community of solidarity. This outcome matters as much as their diplomas in the Succeeders’ lives. With respect to its programmatic goal to increase Latino high school graduation and college matriculation rates, the program is a success. In 2013, 94 percent of participating students graduated from high school (as opposed to the Latino graduation rate of 74 percent in a composite Succeeder high school). Some 85 percent applied to college, and 64 percent enrolled in college (see table 5). Students who enrolled full time in higher education did so largely in local, private, Christian colleges. Additionally, many students attended

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Kentucky Blue Hills College. A few others attended the local community college, mostly on a limited part-time basis, that is, one class a semester. In terms of completion, 55 percent of the Succeeders interviewed for this project graduated from a four- or two-year college (see table 6). Table 5 First College Enrollment Patterns of Focal Study Participants, 2013–2014

No. of study participants

Bachelor’s Degree

Associate’s Degree

Technical Certification

No College

21

2

2

6

Table 6 College Completion of Focal Study Participants, 2020

No. of study participants

Bachelor’s Degree

Some College/ Associate’s Degree

Vocational Training

No College*

17

1

5

8

*Two students initially enrolled in college but ultimately did not attend.

Notes

introduCtion 1. Latino and Hispanic are meaningful identifiers. While my interlocutors used them interchangeably, I use Latino/s/as for uniform reference. In the past few years Latinx has been adopted in community, activist, and academic circles as a term that (unlike Latino/a) is genderless and thus more inclusive of nonbinary genders. The Latino/a Studies Association has advocated for Latinx’s scholarly usage. At the time I conducted this research, the students neither used nor identified with the term. To respect how my interlocutors identified themselves, I do not adopt Latinx in reference to them, while recognizing its importance as a symbol of broader inclusion and as a term I use to identify myself. 2. All individual, school, university, and organization names are pseudonyms. 3. Mateo used American to refer to nationals of the United States of America. As scholars in Latin American studies have asserted, America is the name of the islands, two continents, and the isthmus that joins them. Using American to refer to a person who is from the United States of America or as an adjective meaning related to the United States is a jingoistic denial of the continents and Caribbean. However, the Succeeders used American as Mateo did, as shorthand for a US national or related to the US nation. The Succeeders also often referenced a specific kind of American: white, middle class, with no room for ethnic/racial difference, class dissonance, differences in ability, queerness, or other markers of identity. I replicate these usages in my use of American. As I acknowledge, they 201

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and I are referring to American as related to both the US and this reified notion of who the American can, and cannot, be. 4. Scholars who have encountered this and similar turns of phrase have pointed to such phrases’ ties to low-income youth’s desire for economic mobility (Wexler 1992) and migrant, low-income youth’s motivations for achieving scholastically as a familial mobility strategy (Suárez- Orozco 1987; for a gender perspective see Luttrell 1997). Like the authors of these previous studies, I take the phrase to stand for more than just the desire to achieve; rather, it is an indication of what youth believe are the ends of this achievement. While economic mobility is central to becoming somebody—I heard that driving an Escalade could make you somebody—I focus not only on mobility but also on social inclusion and forging kinship. 5. Nativism refers to the political ideology of supporting the legal and economic interests of so- called settler natives to the nation over those of recent immigrants. A form of extreme cultural and economic nationalism, nativism has particular US roots in the mid-nineteenth century, as poor Irish and German Catholics immigrated to the nation. Nativists sought to maintain Anglo-white Protestant political, cultural, and economic domination and to stamp out the supposedly inferior traditions and more radical political views of these recent immigrants (Levine 2001, 467–468). This early period of nativism reached its apogee with the founding of the Know Nothing Party, whose members ran on an explicitly nativist platform (Levine 2001). Today there is a resurgence of nativism, evident in anti-immigrant legislation, calls to “protect American workers,” restricted immigration, and the vilification of immigrants as cultural threats. 6. Striving is partly what Arjun Appadurai terms the “capacity to aspire” (2013, 289). It is also similar to what João Biehl and Peter Locke refer to as “becoming”—that is, the ongoing, “unfinished” “work of creation” of self and social worlds that “invokes the capacities of people to endure and live on as they reckon with the overdetermined constraints and resources of the worlds into which they are thrown, while also, crucially, calling on their ability . . . to imagine worlds . . . that do not—but may yet—exist” (2017, 9). Striving is building—one dream, one standardized test, one night at the kitchen table tutoring a sibling at a time—the person and life one hopes for in spite of the obstacles that threaten each step forward. 7. I use the terms immigrant- origin and immigrant- descendant rather than the more common terms 1.5 and second generation when referring to youth who immigrated as children or for the children of immigrants. I use generation to mean “a principle of kinship descent,” not an age cohort or immigration wave (Kertzer 1983, 126). I do so to underscore the role of specific kinship relationships (sibling-sibling, parent- child) in immigrant families and in youth’s lives. Additionally, the use of generation in immigration studies (as in first, second,

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1.5 generation) prioritizes the proximity to the act of immigration as the most important condition of life, rather than kinship relationships or immigrant youth’s broader lived experiences, and suggests that immigration itself is heritable (cf. Leinaweaver 2013). 8. Belonging could also be glossed in terms of assimilation. A mainstay in the sociology of immigration since the 1920s, assimilation describes the processes through which immigrants become incorporated into their receiving nation through participating in national institutions, social life, and economic hierarchies (cf. Massey 1981 and Alba 1995). A notable iteration of assimilation theory is segmented assimilation, which describes how immigrants may be incorporated into certain racialized and economic social classes. Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou (1993) argue that those immigrant youth—the children of middle-class immigrants—who assimilate with whites find upward mobility. Those whose parents are low-skilled laborers will instead have “a ticket to permanent subordination and disadvantage” as they incorporate into the social circles of low socioeconomic status Blacks and native-born minorities (1993, 96). Assimilation has been vilified as a unilateral process of “Americanization” or as an overly determinist paradigm that ignores the social capital of nonwhites— a claim made about segmented assimilation in particular (cf. Aparicio 2006). Catherine Ramírez (2020) argues that assimilation has also largely been examined separate from racialization, despite the fact that the two are inextricably linked. Rubén Rumbaut suggests that assimilation need not be understood as a “zero- sum game” but rather as processes that “involve the inventiveness of human agency” (1997, 505). However, much of literature using assimilation as a theoretical frame looks at how immigrants, and particularly their children, doff their ethnic differences, measured through common metrics like intermarriage rates with whites, the use of English as a primary language, and leaving coethnic neighborhoods (cf. Waters and Jiménez 2005). In other words, the reference point is always the dominant frame of white Americans. Moreover, these operationalizations leave out the affective dimensions of incorporation. I use belonging and the active processes of inclusion and exclusion as my theoretical frame instead. Doing so enables me to draw attention to the emotional aspects of incorporation, the racialization and moralization inherent in incorporation, and the ways immigrant youth speak back to and thus reform what it means to belong. Though the “inventiveness of human agency” is present in assimilationist frameworks and the scholarship that centers them, belonging and its attendant processes serve to foreground the subjective and not just the subjectifying process of immigrants’ inclusion in the nation (Rumbaut 1997, 505). 9. Yuval-Davis (2006, 197); cf. Bosniak (2006), Ong (1996), and Soysal (1994). 10. On institutions as brokers of membership, see Chauvin and GarcésMascareñas (2014), Coutin (2000), Ho (2009), and Gleeson and Gonzales (2012).

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11. I draw attention to juridical belonging and citizenship when these categories emerged as ascendant in youth’s lives. Primarily, however, youth were looking to validate feelings of being “at home” in the nation and to gain social recognition of their claims to this shared national home. 12. This definition of belonging could also be glossed as citizenship in the sense that T. H. Marshall partially points to in his notion of social citizenship— that is, the ability “to share to the full in social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” ([1950] 1992, 72)—or the sense of “cultural citizenship” developed by Aihwa Ong (1996), which explores how citizenship is a set of practices that replicate shared norms and values that are born from specific national power hierarchies. Others, including Renato Rosaldo, have pointed to how cultural citizenship can also be “the right to be different and to belong” (1994, 402), or the right to express cultural difference from dominant terms in order to claim further rights. Alyshia Gálvez (2010) expands Rosaldo’s sense of the term by arguing that to be an act of citizenship, the expression of difference need not be connected to specific rights claims. I am not using any of these terms, or citizenship, because of the tight association of citizenship with legal status. However, I recognize the category of belonging as I use it has consonance with these terms. 13. Horton and Barker (2007) and Gálvez (2011) are excellent examples of these cases. 14. Moral here—and throughout the book—refers to the possession of “virtue ethics” rooted in vernacular, practice-based understandings of right and wrong or good and bad. In the last fifteen years, anthropologists have turned their attention to morality, ethics, and systems of deciding what constitutes the good life and good person (see Laidlaw 2002; Robbins 2013; Lambek 2010; Faubion 2011; Throop 2010; Mattingly 2012, 2014). My concerns are related. Succeeders are attempting to live in line with a system of pseudo-secular morality—that of success embodied in the American Dream—that demands certain virtues (like personal responsibility) over others (like collective care practices) to demonstrate moral goodness as a person. Centrally, youth come to find that their compliance with American success ethics competes with the moralities of family and care. 15. This is not to say that narration is not an action. Rather, I am drawing a rhetorical distinction between acts of care and acts of language, which can, of course, also be modes of care. 16. It is important to note that such experiences of alienation are not unique to Latinos or migrants. W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk ([1905] 2012) powerfully outlined how Black Americans experience insidious deficit constructions of their racial identity (see Carter 2007 for a more recent treatment of Black learners’ experiences of deficit constructions). Women, nonmigrant minorities, and other “others” are often marked strategically by a variety of institutions

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(including educational ones), political actors, media, and individuals for any number of projects of marginalization, especially in the midst of competition for resources or access (for school-based cases see Luttrell 1997; Bettie 2003; Jackson 2005; Carter 2007; and Pascoe 2011; see also Adams 2013). The Succeeders’ experiences are part of a broader process of marginalization that has long operated in the United States. 17. Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas (2014, 427). 18. While they primarily focus on immigrants and their children, their insights are broadly applicable to the membership experiences of structurally vulnerable populations broadly. 19. Gálvez (2010, 22, 21). Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas have made similar claims, focused on how immigrants’ work proves their worthiness as ideal members, for “gainful employment, self-sufficiency, and the performance of reliability within precarious labor markets, are also framed as key civic duties, for citizens as well as for noncitizens” in the contemporary and volatile economy (2014, 427). 20. Willen and Cook (2016, 96). 21. Willen and Cook (2016, 98). 22. Washington Post Staff (2015). 23. See Okamoto and Mora (2014) for a review of the concept of panethnicity. 24. See Tuan (1998), Devos and Banaji (2005), and Louie (2012). 25. Roediger ([2005] 2018) is one example that tracks the conflation of whiteness, success, and to some extent morality. See Greenbaum (2015) for a more contemporary example. 26. Chavez (2008, 2). 27. Chavez (2008, 3). Following the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, US migration was opened up to the Global South, resulting in significant migration from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, away from past European migration streams that historically—but not without controversy—characterized immigration patterns to the United States (Taylor and Pew Research Center 2014, 7). In the wake of the Hart-Cellar Act, today’s immigrants—around 53 percent of whom hail from Latin America—account for 12.9 percent of the US population (Grieco et al. 2012). These highs in the foreign-born population are matched only by the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century migration waves to the United States, when largely Southern European migrants accounted for 14 percent of the US population (Gibson and Lennon 1999). In 2019, Latinos comprised 18 percent of the US population (Krogstad 2020). By 2050, when the Succeeders enter their fifties, Latinos are expected to be 28 percent of the US population, whereas white and Black Americans’ proportions of the US population are expected to decrease or to maintain current levels, respectively (Taylor and Pew Research Center 2014, 30). 28. In the next chapter I discuss the particularities of belonging in Nashville as one of these “new destinations.” For now, it is important to note that fear

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about widespread demographic change, and the socio-cultural “browning” of the nation it suggests, resulted in the negative images of the Latino threat narrative. 29. See Huntington (2004) for an example of Latino threat discourse in popular academic discourse. For more on Latinos’ othering in journalism and law see Santa Ana (2002) and Haney López (2015). See Valencia and Black (2002) for an overview of “deficit thinking” and its circulation when it comes to Latinos and education. In terms of popular culture, a 2014 report on the “Latino media gap” finds that despite growing demographic significance, Latinos are largely absent in the entertainment media in leading roles or in media production (Negron-Muntaner et al. 2014). When Latinos are present on screen, 24.2 percent of their appearances are as criminals and 23 percent as law enforcement (Negron-Muntaner et al. 2014, 16). Latinas have also portrayed 69 percent of all domestic workers in film or television since 1996 (Negron-Muntaner et al. 2014, 19). Seventy-two percent of Latino characters are “law enforcers, criminals, blue- collar workers, sexy women, and other minor stereotypes such as ‘member of a big Latino family’ ” (Negron-Mutaner et al. 2014, 18). Taken together, these basic statistics indicate that Latino youth find themselves portrayed in media as stereotypes. 30. Since 9/11, migrants have been cast as potentially dangerous—as terrorists in waiting or the physical manifestation of a weak and porous border that leaves America vulnerable to a breach of national security or increased crime. See Rana (2011) regarding the conflation of Muslim migrants and terrorists; see De Genova (2013) on the border. All Latinos—undocumented, authorized, and citizen—face the stigma of illegality as a mark of a risk to the nation. As Hillary Parsons Dick (2011) has argued, illegal has come to stand for Latino—regardless of individuals’ citizenship or documentary status. See also Flores and Benmayor (1997). Furthermore, as Mae M. Ngai (2004) asserts that immigration policy from 1924 to 1965 shows, moralizations about migrant illegality and its relative risk to security and national identity do stem from a longer project of racialized exclusion in the United States. Twentieth- century policies like exclusion laws, nation of origin quotas, and the increase in border controls worked to codify quotidian race-based exclusion and cast Latinos, Chinese, and other ethnoracially marked migrants as “permanently foreign and unassimilable” (Ngai 2004, 8). 31. Latinos are by no means the only immigrant group painted as morally incompatible with US and Global North membership. In the wake of 9/11 and the ongoing global war on terror, Muslims have been cast not only as religiously incompatible with a Judeo- Christian Global North, but also as lacking shared liberal values. 32. DACA was rolled out in June 2012. Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), introduced in 2014, was intended to do the same and align with the

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family reunification principle that has historically defined American immigration policy. 33. DHS (2012). 34. Rizzo (2018). 35. The Public Charge Rule, in different forms, has been in place since the nineteenth century. In its incarnation under Trump, self-sufficiency was defined more stringently than previously. See USCIS (2020). 36. Willen and Cook (2016, 96). 37. As Jim Cullen states, the Dream has been a diverse American population’s ideological tie that binds and one “that envelops us as unmistakably as the air we breathe” (2003, 10). See Johnson ([2006] 2015) in particular on the centrality of the belief in meritocracy to the American Dream. Scholars have also long asserted that there are other ties that equally bind. Alexis de Tocqueville (2000, 489–492) outlined an early American ethos rooted in both individualism and a commitment to collective social and political action. As sociologist Claude Fischer states, “There is an American cultural center; its assimilative pull is powerful; and it is distinctive—or ‘exceptional.’ The historical record speaks for itself” (2010, 15). Fischer, like de Tocqueville, focuses on Americans’ belief in voluntarism—an individual’s ability to voluntarily forge ties with others toward a common end—as the defining characteristic of American society. See also Bellah et al. (1985), Putnam (2000), and Huntington (2004) for other treatments of “core” American traits including individualism, voluntarism, and shared moral values. 38. The term American Dream first appeared in Walter Lippman’s Drift and Mastery ([1914] 1985) but was popularized in historian James Truslow Adams’s most famous work, The Epic of America (1931) (Jillson 2004, 6). Adams defined the Dream as “that American Dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank” (1931, viii). Here, the Dream is set out as mobility (“better”), wealth (“richer”), personal fulfillment (“happier”), and equal inclusion (“for all our citizens of every rank”). In this fabled frame—and more concretely by the Succeeders—success means financial, social, or any other status advancement. While Adams may have first defined and historicized the Dream, as an ideology the Dream predates the 1930s. As both Cullen (2003) and Jillson (2004) argue, the idea of the American Dream was built into the nation from colonization. Cullen (2003, 10) argues that the instantiation of the Dream shifts over time—be it home ownership in the mid-twentieth century or personal fulfillment in the twenty-first—but is fundamentally rooted in the idea of individual agency. Jillson sees the Dream in more “remarkable stable” terms as the notion that the United States “offers citizens and immigrants a better chance to thrive and prosper than any other nation on earth” with, again, emphasis on the individual’s

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effort, agency, and merit as the precursors to achievement (2004, xii). For a deeper historical overview of the American Dream, see Cullen (2003) and Jillson (2004); for a history traced through popular discourse, see Samuel (2012); and for an education-specific view of the Dream, see Johnson ([2006] 2015). See also Cawelti (1965), Huber (1971), Newman (1988), Hochschild (1995), Decker (1997), Noguera (2003), Knight, Roegman, and Edstrom (2015), and Rosenbaum (2017) for explorations of the American Dream in everyday life, schools, and workplaces. 39. One could also gloss these American Dream moralities as neoliberal ones (Muehlebach 2012). While I recognize how success’s alignment with virtue has neoliberal resonances, this success morality of the American Dream has a longer “durée” than the close of the twentieth century and extends to the foundation of the American nation. See Cawelti (1965) for classic explorations of moralized success in American history and literature; see Michael (2008) for a counterreading of American identity as one grounded in failure. 40. Perhaps the most notable literary examples of this idea of success resulting from proper morality are the infamous Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches paperbacks and, even earlier, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and aphorisms from his almanac. Texts like these not only chronicle an individual’s pathway to success but also provide moral guidelines for readers on how to follow it (Decker 1997; McAdams 2013). 41. As anthropologist Katherine Newman writes, “success is not a matter of luck” to Americans, “but is a measure of one’s moral worth. . . . [I]t is this equation of . . . success and inner or moral qualities that rebounds [on “failures”] making him or her feel not just unsuccessful but worthless” (1988, 77). 42. Jennifer Hochschild argues that one of the core tenets of the Dream is “the association of success with virtue. . . . [I]f success implies virtue, failure implies sin” (1995, 30). See also Carr (2011, 25) and Greenhouse (2011, 75–106) for more on this point. 43. Scholars have long demonstrated how national identity and US citizenship are tied to whiteness both in law and practice. On the legal side of citizenship and in the law, whiteness was a prerequisite to citizenship from 1790 to 1952 (Haney López [1996] 2006, 31). The right to own property—and not to be property—was also dependent on whiteness (Harris 1993; Lipsitz 1995). It was this “possessive investment” in settler colonials’ whiteness and whiteness as property that enabled the colonization of the American continent and the exploitation of Native, African slave, and immigrant labor that built and continues to build the United States (Lipsitz 1995). 44. Jillson (2004, 8). Jillson emphasizes the policy and institutional levers that precluded the Dream, especially for women, Black, and Indigenous Americans. 45. For examples on the image of the welfare queen see Cruikshank (1999) and Hancock (2004).

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46. See Roberts (1997), Cruikshank (1999), Hancock (2004), Chavez (2008), and Greenbaum (2015) for fuller treatments of this issue. 47. Pérez Huber et al. 2008. 48. This strategy is well established. In the nineteenth through twentieth centuries, the expanding boundary of Americanness and the American Dream was largely predicated on immigrants both conforming to an idea of success as moral and investing in their own whiteness. At the same time, these immigrants invested in others’—namely, Blacks’ and newer immigrants’—nonwhiteness and immorality. For example, see Roediger ([1991] 2007), Ignatiev ([1995] 2009), and Brodkin (1998). Today, whiteness may not be the only pathway to American inclusion, as recent scholarship suggests; however, it remains a tried and true one in line with dominant political and social values. See Ramos-Zayas (2007) and Itzigsohn (2009) on the role of Blackness and Latinidad as the basis for American identity. 49. Gálvez (2011, 22). 50. Gálvez (2011, 155). 51. Angela Valenzuela (1999) describes this process as subtractive schooling: a process wherein educators seek to subtract Latino students from their cultural resources and support because educators see those resources as deficits. As educators do so, often with good intentions, they divest learners of protective practices that could have enabled academic success. 52. This phenomenon was classically defined by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990). This production and reproduction of hierarchies of exclusion happens through the formal curriculum. For example, who and what are included in history classes indicates who and what are socially valued as worth knowing. It also happens in the transmission of values, norms, and “cultural forms” that take place more informally in the classroom, hallways, teachers’ asides and student gossip, and the everyday social spaces of school (Levinson and Holland 1996, 14). Clearly these productions of hierarchies and national orders also happen structurally. For example, it was expressly prohibited by law for African slaves to learn to read or write starting with the South Carolina Act of 1740 (Rasmussen 2010). As another example, boarding schools for Native Americans were designed and run not as sites for the achievement of full membership, but rather to be “laboratories for a grand experiment in cultural cleansing, Christian conversion, and assimilation of laborers and domestic laborers into the workforce,” otherwise known as Indigenous people’s “Americanization” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2006, 4). 53. As Levinson and Holland state, schools are thus “sites for the formation of subjectivities ” (1996, 14). 54. Thea Renda Abu El-Haj calls this phenomenon “everyday nationalism . . . the discourses and practices through which the nation is imagined and constructed in everyday life” (2015, 6, 9).

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55. The public school is “the primary state institution through which young people from im/migrant communities encounter normative discourses of citizenship and belonging” and are “invited to become citizens” or not (Abu El-Haj 2015, 3, 6). See Louie (2004), Coe (2005), Sarroub (2005), Shankar (2008), Maira (2009), Fong (2011), Gonzales (2015), and Jaffe-Walter (2016). 56. For popular takes on tech and mobility, see Wakabayashi (2015) and Leskin (2019); see also Kline (2019). On debt and the middle class see Zaloom (2019). 57. For example, see Munro (2020). There has been backlash among the right regarding this anti-intellectualism; see Bartlett (2020). 58. In the Black community, W. E. B. DuBois (in contrast to Booker T. Washington) pushed elite Black men’s academic rather than vocational educational attainment as the key to achieving full membership in the American nation (DuBois 1903; Washington 1903). Black women were equally invested in academic education as an engine of equality, with community leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries positioning Black women and their education as “essential, even paramount to African American progress” (Higginbotham 1993, 21). The same idea was widespread among contemporary immigrants. For example, in Mary Antin’s 1912 immigrant success autobiography The Promised Land, education is also positioned as “the key to immigrant uplift and assimilation in America” (Decker 1997, 65). Marcelo Suárez-Orozco early research (1987) in the 1980s among Central American refugee youth found that such a narrative regarding education continued into the near present. Among the Latino immigrants he worked with, there was a “folk system” of status mobility and incorporation through education (1987, 290). 59. Higginbotham (1993, 15). 60. Nicholls (2013). The movement’s very identity—the DREAMers—is in name tied to the outsized, shared cultural idiom of the American Dream. DREAMERs are named for a Senate bill the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, first proposed as S. 1291 in 2001. 61. For example, T. E. Woronov’s (2015) examination of vocational schools in contemporary China shows how failure in the high-stakes exam system marginalizes youth as failed national promise. 62. See Pribilsky (2001), Cole and Durham (2007), Boehm (2012), Coe (2016), and Dossa and Coe (2017). 63. Smith (2006, 125). Success enabled through schooling is unique to youth, as mobility through education is not always open to parents for reasons of age, language, and stage of life. Educational striving and success as a kinship obligation to one’s parents has long been noted by scholars working in the United States; see Suárez-Orozco (1987), Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1995), Louie (2004, 2012), Nicholas, Stepick, and Dutton Stepick (2008), and Katz (2014). See also Yoo and Kim (2014) for adult children’s obligations to parents.

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64. See Pribilsky (2001), Cole and Durham (2007), Boehm (2012), Coe (2016), and Dossa and Coe (2017). 65. Valdés (1996, 125). 66. Lee (2013, 10). 67. Lee (2013, 11). This linkage of family and nation is also being highlighted by contemporary anthropologists. As Thelen and Alber argue, early anthropologists viewed kinship as the precursor to the political state, and as such kinship and political organization were seen as “part and parcel of the evolutionary paradigm that predicted . . . different forms of social organization” (2018, 6). In the mid-twentieth century, kinship and political anthropology became increasingly separated, and the family was seen as a separate domain from political organization (Thelen and Alber 2018). Thelen and Alber suggest that a productive way to reunite the two fields is to consider “bridge concepts” like embeddedness and belonging and how they cut across subfields and lived contexts (2018, 13–17). We may also consider, in a Foucaultian vein, as Horton and Barker (2009) and in some ways Lee (2013) do, how families are always an object of the state’s disciplinary arm and the foundation of the state’s legitimacy. 68. Such a conflation of nation, ethnicity, and citizenship reached its terrifying apogee under Hitler’s Third Reich, where citizenship under the Nuremberg Laws was defined by Germanic, Aryan heritage (Brubaker 1992; Palmowski 2008). 69. Children born abroad to US citizens attain US citizenship through jus sanguinis. 70. Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011, H.R. 140, 112th Cong. (2011). 71. For example, see Kligman (1998), Howell (2006) Luibhéid (2002, 2013) Greenhalgh (2008), Gálvez (2011), Leinaweaver (2013), and Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018). 72. As Amalia Pallares (2015, 24) rightly points out, before the McCarranWalter Act of 1952 there were no formal immigration pathways through family policy; indeed, both the Bracero Program and the Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly denied family-based immigration pathways to the relatives of Mexican and Chinese immigrants living in the United States. 73. Pelosi (2019). 74. See Mervosh (2019) for a case of citizenship denial to the child of a gay US citizen. 75. See Pallares (2015, 2) for an excellent overview of how the family becomes a “political subject” through which immigrant rights activists make claims to membership. 76. Lee (2013, 6). The racialized, and moralized, restrictions of who could have a family defined the nation’s demography in terms of ethnoracial difference. As Lee shows, supposedly morally superior Japanese male migrants at the turn of the twentieth century could reunite with family, whereas the Chinese,

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who were understood as morally inferior, could not, resulting in a robust nativeborn population of immigrant descendants earlier for Japanese Americans (Lee 2013, 49–73). It is also no surprise, given the moralization of success, that the Japanese—who were more economically valuable at the time—were deemed the most likely Asian ethnicity to be seen by policy makers as moral. Ultimately, in such familial exclusions, we see how families are intimately tied to projects of national identity. 77. Care has been operationalized as ethical imperatives (Noddings 1984; Tronto 1987, 1993), as modes of labor (Colen 1995; Parreñas 2012), as means to producing kinship (Borneman 1992; Biehl 2005), as methods of domination (Wood 1991; Kröger 2009), and as a form of governance (Ticktin 2011; Fassin 2012). As Heike Drotbohm and Erdmute Alber claim, care’s “conceptual meaning” has expanded, as has the “fuzziness and imprecision in the use of the term” (2015, 1). 78. Conradson defines care as “proactive interest of one person in the wellbeing of another” and “the articulation of that interest in practical ways” (2003, 508). 79. Carsten (2000). Relatedness describes the feeling of mutual support, dependence, obligation, and belonging to one’s social connections outside of the more formal categories assumed to make kin, like birth, marriage, and adoption. 80. Howell (2003), Weismantel (1995), Carsten (1997), and Lambek (2011) explore how these three acts create kinship. 81. Pallares (2015). 82. Hage (2003, 3). 83. Horton and Kraftl (2009, 21) and Askins (2015, 475). 84. Askins (2015, 475). 85. Focal students chose their own pseudonyms, with amusing results. Lupita chose hers because it was “the most Mexican,” and Courtney hers because it was “a white girl name.” 86. When I conducted preliminary research with social service providers over about four months in 2010 and 2011, I interviewed nonprofit providers, teachers, immigration activists, and educational specialists and attended a variety of public and professional development meetings on immigration. This approach allowed me to see the contestations over demographic change resulting from Latino immigration that were happening across Nashville’s classrooms, doctor’s offices, and local government. It was also in this preliminary fieldwork that I met Liz at a painfully awkward community meeting and that I first learned about Succeeders. 87. I conducted participant observation with both the subset of students I interviewed and the much larger population of all student participants at club meetings and weekend events, allowing me to situate these learners in the context of their peers.

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88. These more formal interviews were conducted at a flex office space near the Succeeders’ office or at a location of the individual’s choosing, such as at McDonald’s over fries or outside school in the warming heat of a Nashville latespring afternoon. Interviews lasted one to four hours. 89. I assessed demographic profiles through the use of a survey with a broader group of Succeeders program participants. Questions included how long their families had lived in Nashville, familial nation of origin, age, and gender. Social class was gauged from the free and reduced lunch rates at the schools Succeeders attended, parental occupation, and students’ self-reports on their class. Socioeconomic class status ranged from below the poverty line to middle class. 90. The rest were native-born citizens, naturalized ones, or the holders of other special immigration statuses. 91. Academic ability was assessed through student self-reports, the reports of staff and teachers, and my own observations of students’ grades and academic outcomes. 92. See Briggs (1986) on the limitations of the interview as a method. 93. With Liz and Sofía, the interviews focused on the program and their involvement in it. Teachers were asked to ref lect on their involvement in the Succeeders program and the changes they perceived in the organization over their tenure as sponsor. Admissions officers were asked about their relationship with the Succeeders program and the admissions policies and protocols of their respective universities. 94. See also Wolford (2006, 339).

ChaPter 1. City of SuCCeSS 1. Cavendish (2019). 2. Winders (2013, 13). 3. Winders (2013, 140). See also Chavez (1992) regarding the invisibility of undocumented immigrants specifically. 4. Winders (2013, 36). 5. Winders (2013, 36). 6. Garrison (2014). 7. Severson (2013). 8. Founded as Fort Nashborough in 1789 by European and Black Americans (both enslaved and free), Nashville was a sleepy business center and a relatively small player in the urbanizing nineteenth- century “New South,” dwarfed by Atlanta to the south and Memphis to the west. Nashville only surpassed West Tennessee rival Memphis’s population in 1879 (Rushing 2009, 14). Nashville emerged as an economic and population center in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, most of the Southeast was sputtering economically and

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experiencing out-migration, particularly of its Black population f leeing Jim Crow. Southern out-migration was a result of both the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South in the early twentieth century and poor white migration westward and northward in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s (Gregory 2005). While the Southeast experienced widespread out-migration from about 1910 to 1970—especially of its Black population—metropolitan Nashville largely kept growing, and internal migrants kept coming. Between 1950 and 1960, Nashville’s population declined only 2 percent. However, between 1960 and 1970, the population increased by 149 percent (Doyle 1985, 273). See Doyle (1985) for a comprehensive history of the city from the 1920s. 9. Beginning in the 1940s and stretching into the 1970s, Nashville’s governmental and industrial elite pursued infrastructure improvements amenable to economic growth, including the construction of the airport and highways, the razing of Black slums under the guise of urban renewal, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s electricity program, and consolidated government (making the city and county governments and services one and the same) (Doyle 1985, 108–129). The movement toward consolidated government would prove critical especially when considered against the economic stagnancy of nonconsolidated cities, including state rival Memphis. As Wanda Rushing relays, former Nashville mayor Bill Purcell (served 1999–2007) stated that “the decision to become a metropolitan government was the single smartest thing that Nashville has ever done” largely because, according to Purcell, it reduced governmental inefficiencies and property taxes, which enabled Nashville to surpass Memphis in West Tennessee and Knoxville in East Tennessee in terms of growth and urban development (2009, 192). From the 1970s onward, the South (particularly Florida, the Carolinas, and Georgia) pursued economic deregulation policies, corporate tax exemptions, and industrial subsidies aimed at attracting the movement of corporate finance, manufacturing, and people (including professionals) southward. Though Nashville had continued to grow in the South’s lean years, it (along with the state of Tennessee) also pursued these economic strategies, which were amenable to growth, and made calculated business and industry- friendly planning improvements that harnessed the will of elites, utility providers, and to a lesser degree unions in pursuit of growth and profit (see Doyle 1985 on Nashville’s economic strategy; see Hawkins 1966 for one of the first reviews of metro governance; see Cobb 1993 and Lassiter 2006 regarding the Southeast’s strategy more broadly). Unsurprisingly, this period of prosperity from the 1940s onward was unevenly distributed, with whites benefiting more than Blacks across the region (Cobb 1993, 261). 10. Winders (2013). 11. Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce (n.d.). 12. Winders (2013); Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce (2019).

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13. See both Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce (2019) and Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation (n.d.). These documents, put out by the Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Board, not only speak to these indicators but are excellent examples of the kind of messaging about the city as a site of success to which I am referring. On locals’ love-hate relationship with certain kinds of growth, see Hale (2017). 14. Severson (2013). 15. There were Europeans immigrants to the city in the 1880s; however, prominent Nashville conservatives were “opposed to an influx of foreign workers” (Lovett 1999, 98). Instead, these leaders preferred to rely on native-born Black labor. The owner of Belle Meade plantation stated: “I do not think we would gain by exchanging the negro for the SCUM of the old world [Europe]” (Lovett 1999, 98). In the early decades of the twentieth century it was poor, rural, Black and white migrants who moved to the city for work in its highly segregated banking, insurance, service, and shipping industries (Kyriakoudes 2003, 73–115). 16. See Sassen (2001) for an explanation of the bifiraction of urban growth with financial sector and other “high-skill” employees on the one hand and the working class who meet their daily needs like house building, cleaning, and cooking on the other. See Doyle (1985) for an overview on the city’s growth until the 1970s and Winders (2013) for an overview of the late 1990s to early 2000s. 17. Winders (2013). 18. Mayor’s Office of New Americans (n.d.); Hance (2017). In 2013, when this research was conducted, the city’s foreign-born population stood at 12.2 percent. The world regions where the foreign-born populations were born were Asia (31.7%), Africa (14.1%), Latin America (45.7%), Europe (6.4%), and North America (2.1%) (US Census Bureau 2013). 19. US Census Bureau (2013). 20. For an overview of this shift see Zúñiga and Hernádez-León (2005), Smith and Furuseth (2006), Odem and Lacy (2009), Massey (2008), and Jones (2019). 21. Odem and Lacy (2009, xiv). 22. Winders (2013, 15). 23. Odem and Lacy (2009, xviii); Winders (2013, 19). As scholars have argued, these numbers may undercount the undocumented population. 24. U.S. Census (2010, 1990). Tennessee’s enumerated Latino population (concentrated in Nashville and to a lesser extent Memphis and Knoxville) increased by 848 percent from 1996 to 2006 (Odem and Lacy 2009, xii). For a sense of what that translates to in hard numbers, there were 32,742 Latino residents in Tennessee in 1990 and 187,747 in 2006, a 437.4 percent increase (Odem and Lacy 2009). 25. Odem and Lacy (2009, xiv). 26. Elaine Lacy’s interlocutors deem this fact the tranquilidad (tranquility) of southern living (2009, 5).

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27. As she would recount, a major influence on Jane-Marie was the shooting of her sister and her sister’s Brown pride–affiliated boyfriend by a rival Sureño gang member in her neighborhood in Nashville. 28. In my small demographic survey of a subset of Succeeders, I collected data on when their families arrived in Nashville and whether they came to the city from their nation of origin or elsewhere in the United States. The earliest arrivers were in 1994, with the mean 2002 and the mode 1998 and 2004—meaning that most Succeeders’ families moved to Nashville during the major migration boom. The vast majority (88%) had settled elsewhere in the United States first, mostly California and New York/New Jersey, a phenomenon called secondary migration. 29. Winders (2009). The employment coordinator at one nonprofit provider suggested tight ties between local labor needs and resettlement, stating that the Tyson meat processing plant and Opryland Hotel had an “understanding” with the Tennessee Office of Refugee Resettlement about receiving enough refugee referrals to meet their staffing needs. Another resettlement caseworker believed that about seven hundred adults, around 30–50 percent of the total NepaliBhutanese refugee population, worked for Tyson. 30. TORR (2012, 1). 31. There is also a sizable nonrefugee Coptic Egyptian population. The Coptic Egyptians I got to know gained entry through the Diversity Visa (DV) program, also known as the “Green Card Lottery.” One English student I worked with, Fady, gained entry to the United States at age thirty, after applying to the lottery annually since age eighteen. 32. As a state capital, Nashville’s metropolitan politics is always charged, as the city is also the site of state political power. Indeed, several popular mayors of the city have gone on to become governor. As a Democratic Party stronghold, Nashville stands almost alone in Tennessee. For example, in the 2016 presidential election, only Nashville, Memphis, and Haywood county (besides Memphis, the only county with a Black majority) voted for Hillary Clinton (Politico 2016). There is thus a tension between the state’s politics and that of the city—for the liberal hopeful, Nashville is a bellwether of potential state- (and perhaps region-) wide movement to the left, and for others the divide is one more incarnation of a growing fierce political split between the urban and rural. 33. On driver’s licenses and identification see Armenta (2017, 40–44). While 287(g) had ended in August 2012 in Nashville, Secure Communities replaced it in October—effectively continuing similar, if not the same, patterns of targeted stopping and processing that can lead to deportation. Researchers have demonstrated that Nashville’s 287(g) program racially targeted Latinos as “characteristics about foreignness such as country of origin, language use” gained more salience in arrest reports than they had prior to 287(g)’s implementation (Donato and Rodriguez 2014, 1697). See Armenta (2017) for a an excellent

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examination of both metro police’s and the Nashville Latino community’s experiences with 287(g). 34. English only took the form of a vetoed bill (2007) and later a defeated ballot question (2009). Such English-only initiatives, while almost as old as the country, gained steam in the 1980s particularly in sites of widespread Latino immigration like Florida and Arizona. In these initiatives, ethnoracial linguistic discrimination rears its ugly head in the form of supporting a monglot language ideology—meaning the prizing of single language use and f luency over multilingual fluency and use (see Silverstein 1996). English has been the official language of Tennessee since 1984, an example of an early adopter of the contemporary English-only movement that began in the early 1980s (Albakry and Warden 2013, 2). 35. Albakry and Warden (2013, 1, 15). 36. When put to the ballot in 2009, the English-only charter amendment was defeated, 41,752 votes to 32,144 (CNN 2009). 37. Recent state-level anti-immigrant legislation included 2019’s HB 0614, which would have made renting to an undocumented immigrant a crime, and HB 0662, which in opposition to the jus soli principles of birthright citizenship, would have refused birth certificates to the children of undocumented mothers unless the father was a citizen who asserted paternity and a willingness to financially support the child to age eighteen. 38. Other narratives, of course, were also at play. The robust and active immigrant advocacy and rights organizations, churches, and nonprofits emphasized social unity, universal human rights, and a religious commitment to “welcome the stranger.” 39. Luke was referencing SB 1070, which included the infamous “show me your papers” provisions that allowed local police to stop and arrest any person law enforcement thought might be undocumented, de facto permitting the racial profiling of Latinos. In 2012, the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States decided that this provision and three other provisions of SB 1070 were invalid because they intervened in federal immigration law. 40. Gálvez (2010, 22, 21). 41. Perhaps the most notable incarnation of this attention was the fact that President Obama traveled to the city in 2014 for a town hall on immigration. He did so to highlight Nashville as an example of the kinds of efforts toward inclusion he hoped to foster nationally. 42. See Peacock, Watson, and Matthews (2005) and Peacock (2007) regarding the South and globalization writ large. 43. For example, in her examination of a Washington, DC, neighborhood, Gabriella Modan illustrates how “diversity” quickly became a “commodified resource,” or a literal selling point for cities (2008). Such a strategy is not entirely new to Nashville, as the city’s economic growth has also long been “cultural” in

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its origins. Nicknamed the Athens of the South in the nineteenth century, Nashville “was richer in cultural amenities and intellectual diversions than many American cities . . . particularly in the less affluent South” in that period (Doyle 1985, 3). It thus became a regional draw for southern scholars, writers, artists, and musicians due to perceptions of the city as sophisticated. The city was home to highbrow culture (like the Agrarians and Fugitives authors); the site of famously populist forms like The Grand Old Opry and country music; and a center of Black cultural, academic, and activist life throughout the twentieth century (Doyle 1985, 4–18; Lovett 1999). The Opry, a cultural touchstone of rurality, was tightly tied to the city’s economy, suggesting this close tie between cultural and economic institutions. The radio station was owned by the Nashville-based National Life and Accident Insurance Company, and both it and the program served as a way to sell life insurance to rural populations (Kyriakoudes 2003, 11). In fact, the station’s call letters, WSM, stood for the insurance company’s slogan, “We Shield Millions.” As Kyriakoudes states, “the rural elements of the Opry disguised a very modern business strategy” (2003, 11). In these ways, Nashville’s urbanity was a lever of growth, as its universities and most prominently the music industry were key to its booms then and now. 44. Mayor’s Office of New Americans (2014). 45. Other festivals include Celebrate Nashville (begun in 1995 at the ScarrittBennet Center as Celebration of Culture; renamed in 2011) and the Día de Los Muertos festival at the private Cheekwood Estate (1999). 46. See Hage (1998, 47). 47. My sample was both small and a convenience sample, meaning I recruited people around me in the Succeeders program who were “convenient” to me as a researcher. Given these limitations, my data on how the Succeeders saw their city are limited to those I interviewed and may not be representative of the entire pool of Succeeders or (for that matter) a broader population like Latino youth in Nashville. 48. As Americanist historians have noted, American schooling has been critical to nationalist projects of assimilation and cultural control over immigrants and minorities (Tyack 1967; Lassonde 2005). For example, settlement houses’ “American” enrichment programming, “steamer” English classes, curriculum designed around preparation for domestic service and the factory f loor, and a casual repudiation of any value in students’ homes and home culture were educational institutions’ nationalist assimilation approach in the early twentieth century (cf. Reese 2011; Steffes 2012). In these efforts, schools aimed for students to avow white American lifeways and disavow home cultures in the process of becoming assimilated Americans through schooling. In his memoir of his own education as an Italian immigrant in New York schools during this period, educational pioneer Leonard Covello describes how students understood this message of assimilation in its direct and indirect transmissions: “We soon got the idea

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that ‘Italian’ meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization. We were becoming Americans by learning to be ashamed of our parents” (Covello with D’Agostino [1958] 2013, 32). While the goals of American education now may not be quite so explicitly about nationalistic assimilation, this messaging remains a central component of immigrant youth’s educational experiences in today’s educational settings, as much recent scholarship, and the Succeeders’ school experiences, make clear (Bourgois 1996; Abu El-Haj 2015). 49. Yuval-Davis (2006, 197). 50. Sharing in the key socializing institution of schooling, however assimilation focused, can afford youth a positive sense of belonging and a sense of themselves as not interlopers in the United States but members/students (Gonzales 2011, 608). See also Abrego (2006) and Gleeson and Gonzales (2012). 51. Hall and Held argue that citizenship, or more broadly membership, is about the ability to access and practice rights. Without equality of practice, membership becomes simply “paper claims” and devoid of meaning (1989, 185–187). 52. School desegregation and equal access to high- quality education, for instance, was one of the first victories of the civil rights movement. Indeed, school desegregation was one of the first successes for Nashville’s local civil rights activists, many of whom were students in the city’s illustrious historically Black colleges and universities. The “Nashville Plan” for school integration was painfully gradual (integrating schools one grade level per year) and thus faced legal pushback from local Black lawyer-leaders Z. Alexander Looby (one of the two Black city councilmen elected in 1951) and Avon Williams Jr. (Doyle 1985, 240–242). Desegration of Nashville schools began in 1957; the lunch counter sitins did not begin until 1960 (Doyle 1985, 243). 53. Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) went from a school system with few emergent bilinguals to having at least 22 percent of the total system formally identified as such (Hubbard 2010). Educators with whom I worked suggested that the actual student population is significantly higher. In 2010, 10,692 students were Spanish speaking; 1,749, Arabic speaking; 999, Kurdish speaking; 546, Somali speaking; 489, Vietnamese speaking; 215, Lao speaking; 187, Chinese speaking; 176, Nepali speaking; 169, Burmese and Karen speaking; and 154, Amharic speaking (Hubbard 2010). 54. Winders (2013, 13, 140). 55. Clare, the family outreach officer at the elementary school with this program, recounted its impact on parents: “And you know, I’ve had parents cry and say ‘I can’t do this, I can’t read in Spanish, I can’t. . . .’ And I said, ‘but you can hear a story and you can retell it in your own words and you can show the pictures. No one is going to know that you aren’t reading.’ I tell you those parents, some of my illiterate parents, have walked out like they have just graduated from a university. ‘They listened to me, they really liked the story, they clapped when

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I was finished.’ ” Clare faced some opposition when implementing her extensive parental education programming. One teacher, Clare remembers, commented ‘Why have anything? They [migrant parents] are all illiterate anyway.’ [She commented] that they were lazy and didn’t want to be there.” This attitude from teachers, Clare believed, trickles down to the parents, who in turn “feel like a failure.” In her work with them, Clare strove to “tell them they have so many great qualities to offer their child.” Bettie, a nonprofit educational support professional, told me about her efforts which, unlike Clare’s, failed. She proposed “Culture” Day in a school in which she worked. Bettie proposed a celebration of the different cultures in the school. However, the event was canceled due to low interest and, in some way, confusion. Parents and administrators assumed that “this would just be for the Hispanics,” assuming that culture was something that only migrants have. Bettie said “I prefer to laugh about it,” for if she really thought about it, she said, she would be “too depressed.” 56. Winders (2013, 140). 57. See Angela Valenzuela (1999) on the “politics of care” in school. 58. I do not wish to present Mrs. Keohane or the educators of MNPS as racists. Students did have negative experiences with educators, yet they also had teachers like Succeeders’ teacher sponsors, who were well-known advocates, and agitators, for immigrant students, families, and their fair treatment and teaching in MNPS. My work with these and other educators, and my secondhand hearings of students’ positive experiences with teachers overall, suggest that MNPS’s teaching staff is increasingly attuned to the affordances diverse students bring to learning. I bring up Mrs. Keohane as illustrative of another, less common, but deeply problematic strain of immigrant reception in Nashville’s schools that still exists despite the best efforts of the excellent educators, and nonprofit allies, I worked with and heard about during my research. 59. Mrs. Keohane then told me of a specific case of being “respectful” to immigrants that was, to her, a failure. Her school had recently purchased the language learning Rosetta Stone software so “they could learn English.” The software was largely unused. Further questioning about the Rosetta Stone initiative revealed no childcare, and no computer training for parents, were provided as part of the effort. 60. These partnerships suggested schools’ tighter alliances to local communities, if also the local iteration of a larger trend toward using public-private partnerships to meet educational needs. Schools relied on migrant nonprofits for professional development on cultural literacy for teachers, parental programming, tutoring, socio-emotional learning opportunities, emotional support, and outreach for students and parents. For more on the outsourcing of social welfare to the nonprofit sector, see Hall (1992, 66–82) and O’Neil (2002). See Bartlett

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et al. (2002), Wong (2008, 2010), Harris and Kiyama (2013), and Flores (2015) for more on nonprofit partners with schools. 61. This nonprofit landscape had its own issues. As nonprofit administrators shared with me, an additional wrinkle for Succeeders and programs like it was that it was also more difficult to gain financial support for Latino-specific programs. The CEO of another prominent nonprofit put it this way: “If I need a hundred thousand dollars for a refugee mentoring program it’s easy to get. If I need a hundred thousand dollars for a Hispanic mentoring program, there’s nobody to talk to.” 62. The early iteration of the program had college readiness components for high school and middle school students, as well as English classes for parents. In this way, the program was more of a Latino family, rather than exclusively teen, resource center. 63. See Rose (1991) and Legg (2005) for a critique of quantitative measures and their political power. 64. I have not included the graduation rates of the schools the Succeeders attended for reasons of identifiability. 65. Cf. Lee (2001), Louie (2004), Conchas (2006), and Wortham, Mortimer, and Allard (2009). 66. Obviously, community is not the same thing as national membership. I also asked students what it meant to be a citizen and if they felt like citizens. I report on the community findings here because in my analysis, the community question got to the lived experience of inclusion. Central to students’ understanding of community was a sense of mutual support (see Angel’s comments), connection, and, as Emma put it, “unity” of purpose and mutual respect. 67. Mrs. McCann is an example of what Judith Kleinfeld (1975) first termed a “warm demander”: a teacher who blends care with high academic expectations. 68. Both contexts were also a place where students liked to be. Sybil expressed a similar sentiment with respect to Succeeders as her community: “My Succeeders. They’re my community. I like being there.”

ChaPter 2. mowing the lawn and getting Pregnant 1. Beaner is a racial slur, largely ascribed to Mexicans and Mexican Americans. 2. See Itzigsohn and Dore- Cabral (2000), Itzigsohn, Giorguli, and Vasquez (2005), and Flores- Gonzales (2017) regarding the conf lation of whiteness and Americanness. 3. Latino is a contested, “ambiguous invention” that nevertheless can produce unity (Suárez-Orozco and Páez 2002, 3). Like Sebastián, all but one interviewed student identified as Latino/Latina/Hispanic. None used Latinx. The notion of

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a pan-Latino identity is a US-specific one, the product of various commercial interests (Dávila 2001, 2008); activist efforts (Mora 2014; Mora and RodríguezMuñiz 2017); political strategies (Gonzalez 1993); and multiple modes of contact, solidarity, and coalition building between Latino populations (Ramos-Zayas 2012). See also Oboler (1995) and Flores and Benmayor (1997). 4. See Okamoto and Mora (2014) for an extended review of the panethnicity concept; see Oboler (1995) and Mora (2014) on the Latino/Hispanic categories of panethnicity specifically. 5. Anthropologists have long demonstrated that ethnicity—like any other mode of communal identification—is f luid and changeable, with no one presentation being more “authentic” than the other. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff write: “Ethnicity is, has always been, both one thing and many, the same but infinitely diverse” (2009, 1). Ethnicities are “concrete abstractions variously deployed by human beings in their quotidian efforts to inhabit sustainable worlds” (21). Operationalizing this understanding of ethnicity as mutable, I look to see how youth creatively deploy aspects of their lived experiences to define Latinidad for themselves in order to “inhabit sustainable worlds” in an unrelenting context of popular nativism, political hostility, and social animus toward Latinos (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009, 21). 6. As mentioned in the introduction, most Succeeders were Mexican and Central American in origin. There were, however, a small number of Puerto Rican, Colombian, and Venezuelan students. There were fewer than five Afro-Latinos. There was one young Guatemalan woman, Marta, who spoke K’iche’ as her first language—what her two best friends referred to as “her special language.” Most Guatemalan students were, however, an ethnic mix, in the local-to- Guatemala racial category of Ladino. Sometimes Central American students complained to me—a fellow Central American American—that most people assume they are Mexican. Such a complaint reveals the underlying national tensions in a panethnic label. 7. Shankar (2008, 120, 121). See also Hall (2002). It is nearly impossible to present inequality and intragroup difference in a five-minute dance routine and a snack; however, moments like Palestine’s equal presentation with Israel suggest a potential to subvert established orders. While not developing critical consciousness, International Day was deeply meaningful to students and their families, who rarely got to assert difference in state-sponsored public spaces in celebratory ways. 8. To participate in the marquee event, students made choices about Latinidad that prioritized some aspects over others. For example, in choosing Spain, Pedro defined language as central to his own identity as Latino. He also articulated language as a part of a pan-Latino identity more broadly and let go of national origin as a critical identity marker.

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9. Succeeders’ notions of language as a marker of Latinidad were contested. Compare Emma’s and Natalia’s responses. For Emma, being Latino meant that “you should know at least the basics [of Spanish] . . . because that’s what unites Latinos is the language.” In contrast, Natalia’s statement suggested that Spanish can be unmoored from Latinidad over time and generations: I disagree so much when people say, “Oh. [Spanish.] That’s a big part of being Latin.”. . . That means that you’re saying that my niece is not Hispanic because she doesn’t speak Spanish. That sucks. She is Hispanic and she is Latina. . . . Being Latina means being, just having that blood flow through you and being part of that culture and saying, “Yeah. I’m Latina and I’m able to experience those foods, culture, even if I don’t talk Spanish.”

10. These kinds of responses cited the practice of traits and dispositions that have positive connotations, like being family oriented, religious, and above all, hard working. 11. Gálvez (2010, 22). 12. Dávila (2001). 13. Chavez (2008). 14. Gonzales (2015). There were many times like this one when illegality and other negative Latino stereotypes were referenced by youth as integral to their sense of self. Sometimes it was done jokingly, such as during a get-to-know-you activity when Alondra answered the question “What would you ask President Obama?” with “When you gonna legalize me?” 15. Suárez-Orozco (1987, 290) and Nicholls (2013). 16. A chola in the US context refers to a Latina young woman who is either affiliated with a gang or dresses/is styled like a person who is (cf. Bettie 2003; Mendoza-Denton 2008). 17. See Way et al. (2013). 18. Scott Kiesling (2004) also describes how the term dude relates to normative notions of heterosexuality and sexuality. 19. See Rosa (2019) on the perceptions of Latinos through their language. 20. Progenitor of new kinship studies David Schneider (1980) argued that American notions of kinship are rooted in “biogenetic” connection identified through shared “substance” or blood. “Code,” or how someone voluntarily treats and defines as family someone who is not biologically related, is the other way to make kin in the United States, according to Schneider. For example, I determine how “sisterly” I treat my brothers-in-law, and in so doing I define them as related to me as brothers or not—which, if they are reading this, is (rest assured) as brothers (Schneider 1980, 92). Schneider (1977) argues that this understanding translates to how Americans see nationality. Alejandro’s articulation of his naturalized American and Mexican national identities illustrates this understanding of substance and

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code-based nationality: “At first I didn’t want to consider myself an American, even though I am, not by blood, but by paper. . . . I’m 100 percent Mexican, and I am by blood.” Alejandro draws a distinction as an American through code and not substance (“not by blood, but by paper”) and as a Mexican through substance (“100 percent . . . by blood”). Kinship scholars have also identified how other broadly biological substances (milk, food, sexual fluids), and more critically the social sharing of them, shape kinship and the production of relatedness between genetically related and unrelated people. See Carsten (1997, 2004) for an overview of substance’s significance to kinship. 21. Such ideas of the link between blood and membership evoke the notion of blood quantum, a contested mechanism for determining tribal membership among Native Americans in the United States (Sturm 1998, 2002). With the advent of at-home genealogy testing, the metaphorical meaning of blood ties and their purported link to cultural and historical circumstances and family histories have been drawn back into the history of “race science,” reducing kinship and race to DNA (TallBear 2013). 22. Hypodescent “originally provided economic and social utility to supporters of American slavery and white supremacy by ensuring that mixed children would be considered black and therefore ineligible for participation in the benefits of whiteness” (Spencer 2004, 362). 23. Spencer (2004, 361). 24. Leinaweaver (2013, 67). 25. The youth seemed to suggest that origin in another nation coded as Latin American was necessary to be Latino. Puerto Rico is obviously a special case, as Puerto Ricans are US citizens and do not go through immigration processing when they move to the mainland. As a result of this colonized territorial status, Puerto Rico also holds a unique place in the conceptualization of Latin American national ties as a prime shaper of Latinidad. Within Latin America, there is contestation over Puerto Ricans’ membership in a broader Latin American community of nations because of both the privilege of, and suspicion regarding, Puerto Ricans’ American citizenship (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003, 2004). For Succeeders, Puerto Ricans were included in their general sense of Latinidad. This lack of tension may be due to the fact that the city’s Latino population is relatively new and potentially more united as a result. 26. Leinaweaver (2013, 67). In the shared substance understanding of nationality, membership in one’s natal family means membership in the national family. It is precisely through this naturalized connection between national and kinship ties that family and nation become intertwined objects of political abstraction and policy, ranging from jus sanguinis citizenship, to family-focused immigration policy (Lee 2013), to family planning (Greenhalgh 2008; Kanaaneh 2002; Kligman 1998), and even, when nation, family, and racial purity are linked, to

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extreme modes of nationalism itself (Harvey 2004; Rupp 1977). For some Succeeders, being Latino/Hispanic meant the same thing to them as being Mexican, Guatemalan, or Venezuelan. For others, being Latino was complementary to but not the same as familial nation of origin identities. 27. Such understandings of citizenship were common in Europe during the nineteenth century’s period of increasing nationalism. These views rested on an understanding of family as the site of not just the reproduction of nationals, but also ethnicity (Rupp 1977; Brubaker 1992; Harvey 2004). This linkage of parentage, membership, and ethnicity reached its zenith in the twentieth century in the German Third Reich, where the Nuremberg laws defined membership through shared ethnicity and Germanic roots only (Palmowski 2008). 28. This linkage of Latinidad to Latin American nations and migration may be especially salient in a place like Nashville, with recent steady migration flows from particular nations but without a long-standing US-born Latino community. Rather than creating “replenished ethnicity,” familial immigration from Latin America is what makes Latino ethnicity for Succeeders (Jiménez 2010). 29. Leinaweaver (2013, 67). Similarly, when Courtney stated she has “flavor in my blood,” or Angel defined being Latino as “having power in their blood,” they may have been reflecting a sense of Latinidad not only as shared descent or the practice of culture as forged through kinship ties but as something—power, flavor, culture—encoded in and beckoning from Latino blood (Schneider 1980, 107). As Native studies scholar and anthropologist Kim TallBear (2013, 63–64) asserts, for many people there can be slippage between genetic determinism and lineage in ideas of blood; this may be the case here for Angel and Courtney. As noted previously, in recent years genetic testing for the purposes of recreational genealogy has spawned a cottage industry of testing services and television shows that promise to unlock the genome, reveal deep national origin, and generate pharmacological interventions into race-based medicine. See Bolnick et al. (2008), TallBear (2013), Nelson (2008), Koenig, Lee, and Richardson (2008), and Fullwiley (2007) on genetic ancestry and its perils and promises. 30. While Javier doesn’t use the language of “blood,” he does track his Latinidad and Mexicanidad genealogically—through his blood ties. 31. Yosso (2002, 59).

ChaPter 3. “your Story iS your tiCket” 1. Linguistic anthropologists refer to these socially recognized versions of self as “personae” (cf. Moore and Podevsa 2009). This notion of performing a kind of self to others is aligned with Erving Goffman’s (1959) theorization of how we signal who we are or how we want to be seen by others. Goffman uses the metaphor of the theater to explain this process. He points to how individuals (as a kind of

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actor playing the part of themselves) seek to guide—in their talk, bodies, consumption habits, etc.—those around them to accept a certain view of who they are corresponding to how the individual wishes to be seen. Given that when meeting someone their moral character and “innermost feelings” are not immediately obvious, Goffman argues that the speaker’s audience (i.e., those meeting an individual) rely on this signaling from the speaker to form interpersonal judgments about the speaker’s true self (Goffman 1959, 249). It is here that morality and impression first meet. For in these interactions, “communicative acts are translated to moral ones” as “the impressions that others give tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have moral character” (249). In other words, the selves one presents—at least in the US context—are presumed to be a kind of moral compact between the speaker and listener of the speaker’s self—as the speaker presents that self. Clearly, Louis Althusser’s ([1971] 2001) interpellation is a critical intervention here—as all speakers do not have the same ability to control how they are interpreted. 2. See Silverstein (2005) regarding interdiscursivity. The idea of interdiscursivity has a long genealogy. There are echoes of it in Vološinov’s (1986) insight that any instance of language draws from past usage of language; in Bakhtin’s (1981) interest in dialogic literature/language (literature/language referring back to another language reference point); and in Kristeva’s (1980) “intertexuality,” which locates the meaning of a given text in the past texts it invokes. Scholars use the “primordial term” interdiscursivity to emphasize that these kinds of relationships are not just in literature, per Kristeva’s interest, but in everyday acts of language and speech (Silverstein 2005, 7). Silverstein theorizes two modes of interdiscursivity. One is type interdiscursivity, referring to similarity between language events in “form and function,” for example, two narratives are connected through a similarity of genre (Silverstein 2005, 6). For example, we see a similarity between the genre of moral uplift narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and certain parts of students’ essays. In both, the successful individual outlines a path to success drawn from education, a belief in virtue ethics, and certain kinds of sacrifices. In the other form of interdiscursivity, token, language events are linked because they rely on similarities on the level of a specific discursive event, for example, related through quotation of one text in another (Silverstein 2005). For example, when Roberto, the Succeeders board president, came to the club to present about his pathway to success, he quoted the Oakland Raiders motto (Commitment to Excellence) as his personal motto and gave away Dale Carnegie’s book (How to Win Friends and Inf luence People). In both “token” acts, he linked his speech on success to these other speech acts and the kinds of success and values they ref lect. Succeeders youth used both modes in their talk. See also Dunn (2006) for a discussion of these modes of interdiscursivity in practice. See Wortham (2005) for an example of interdiscursivity and the production of academic identity as an example of how

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this concept has been used in education-based research discussing the interplay of schooling and identity. 3. I am referencing two strands of Evangelical politics. First, and perhaps more familiar, is the “moral majority,” the term Paul Weyrich used for the umbrella political action group he and televangelist Jerry Falwell founded in 1979. Ascendant in the 1980s, the Moral Majority was a conservative body whose social agenda was in opposition to abortion, LGBTQAI+ rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment. They supported heteronormative patriarchal “family values” and active proselytizing. Second is the “moral minority,” the term ascribed to Evangelical progressives in the 1970s. The moral minority was opposed to the Vietnam War, American imperialism, and economic inequality, among other causes. See Swartz (2012) on the moral minority and Harding (2000) on the moral majority. Both terms have resonance with Nixon’s “silent majority,” the label he gave to those members of the US electorate who were conservative leaning and did not speak out against the Vietnam War or in support of progressive causes. 4. Here I am using performative in Austin’s sense ([1962] 1975) in dialogue with Butler’s usage ([1990] 2007). For Austin, a performative utterance is a speech act where someone “is doing something . . . rather than reporting something” ([1962] 1975, 13). One of Austin’s classic examples includes the speech act of christening a ship, for example, “I dub this boat the Succeeders Ship.” For Austin, these kinds of statements are not referencing the act of christening but are—as words—doing the act of christening. They are not an instance of referential speech (“that ship is the Succeeders Ship,” where my words are telling what that ship is), but an action (with these words, I accomplish the naming of this ship). Butler ([1990] 2007) took up Austin’s notion to describe how gender is constantly performed through the body, our speech, and so forth. In those performances, a particular gender presentation can become socially accepted as a given normative gender presentation. For Butler, “that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” ([1990] 2007, 23). In the Succeeders’ case, they hoped their words that espoused the values of the American Dream’s idealized striver- cum-member made them members. They performed as certain upright, successful selves and hoped that this performance made them those selves. At the same time, they reinforced that this “expression” was the accepted way that successful, moral people behave. 5. See Goffman (1959) for the original articulation of this language ideology; see Carr (2011) for a more contemporary update. 6. Carr (2011, 124). Language ideology, at its broadest, is “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989, 255). Linguistic anthropologists and allied scholars have taken up this issue in a variety of social contexts: examining language policy (Lippi Green 1994, [1997] 2012); literacy (Heath 1983); language’s link to nationalism (Anderson 1991; Faudree 2013); and most critical

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here, the unspoken assumptions about language’s relationship to the speaker, her thoughts, and her identity (see Woolard and Schieffelin 1994 for an excellent overview of prior efforts in the field). This last category relates to how Americans understand language’s purpose. Carr (2011) argues, following others, that Americans prioritize the denotive, or referential, function of language (see Silverstein 1976). With this understanding, language about the self is assumed to denote true states of the self. While acknowledging that Succeeder youth are (for the most part) bilingual and thus participate in multiple language communities, I hold that their narratives are interdiscursive with American moralized talk related to success. Moreover, students’ beliefs in what their narratives can do follow a Euro-American model of language’s relation to the self. 7. Carr (2011, 124). Such an understanding presupposes a unitary, stable self. For example, in her study of language policing at an addiction program in Chicago, Carr demonstrates how “therapeutic talk” was seen as a main step on the pathway to recovery. Carr argues that the program worked according to an assumption that a language of sobriety would remake the addict into a sober individual. 8. Carr (2006). 9. Other scholars have pointed to how skits, model dialogues, and so forth are vehicles for transmitting and contesting ideologically laden discourses regarding the model citizen. An excellent example is Susan Ellison’s treatment of the conversatorios (model dialogues) meant to “model peaceful negotiation . . . in contradistinction to confrontational forms of politics” and the “contestatorios or talkback” made by conversatorio participants against the neoliberal politics and citizenship that foreign-backed democracy assistance aid demands (2018, 67, 66). 10. Such fears regarding how students’ vernacular language would be interpreted by educational gatekeepers are not without precedent. Academic tracking within schools, for instance, often conflates linguistic ability with academic ability; for example, English Language Learners (ELL) or Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students are tracked into less academically challenging tracks more frequently than their English-proficient peers (cf. de Marrais and LeCompte 1999; Oakes [1985] 2005). From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s (culminating in Oakland’s adoption of African American Vernacular English [AAVE], or Ebonics, in its curriculum), there have been debates about affirming and equally valuing students’ linguistic traditions; imposing Standard English as the “correct” way to express oneself; and allowing students to access what Delpit (1988, 283) calls the “culture of power,” including the ability to learn Standard English (see Smith 2002). Speakers of AAVE and non-native English speakers are assumed, by those in power who use Standard English, to lack linguistic capital because AAVE and non-native English is assumed, again by those in power and sometimes by marked speakers, to be fundamentally lacking (cf. Delpit 2002; Wynne 2002; Flores and Rosa 2015).

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11. Flores and Rosa argue that there is a conflation of Latino bodies with “linguistic deficiency unrelated to any objective linguistic practices”—meaning that even when Latinos talk in the most standard of English, there is still an assumption that they aren’t proper speakers of English because of their perceived racial difference (2015, 150). As Rosa argues, “race is socially constructed through language, but also . . . language is constructed through race” (2019, 7). As a result, Succeeders youth must navigate a complex web of racialized language as they speak for themselves about themselves. 12. Ghetto, rather than referring to a place, is a “slang term that is commonly used to categorize a person or behavior as ignorant, stupid, or otherwise morally deficient” (Jones 2010, 9). In her work with working- class Black girls in innercity Philadelphia, Jones focuses on how these young women “astutely worked the code between the equal and opposing pressures of good and ghetto” (2010, 10–11). 13. Both “dream girls’ like Alicia and those Succeeders who used the ghetto speech in their daily lives also replicated this pattern of linking bad communication with ghetto speech. When students like Alicia used ghetto style, they got the biggest laughs from their audience, who were surprised by these students’ facility with the style. The inverse was true for usual ghetto-style speakers: their use of Standard English also got audience laughs. 14. Newman (1988, 9). 15. Anthropologist Andrea Muehlebach argues that today “the acquisition of certain attitudes . . . [is] central to becoming an ethical being” and ultimately a valued national member (2012, 7–8). “Personal responsibility” has become the attitudinal sine qua non of a valued citizen in nations like the United States with neoconservative, neoliberal governance. The very phrase has even made its ways into US laws governing citizenship and its entitlements, such as The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 and The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Such names obviously highlight responsibility as a national virtue, but they also tap into negative tropes of the unsuccessful welfare recipient and potentially criminal immigrant as those to be excluded. It goes without saying that these two figures are also often racialized as nonwhite. The welfare recipient and the immigrant are, in the laws’ naming, by default irresponsible. They are thus morally undeserving of the entitlements of citizenship (in the form of social safety nets) and belonging (in the form of citizenship as a legal category). See Muehlebach (2012) on how the moral underpinnings of neoliberalism have come to define the valued political subject. See also Cruikshank (1999) on responsibility; see Comaroff and Comaroff (2000) and Greenhouse (2011) on neoliberalism. 16. Carr (2006). 17. For explorations of AAVE see Labov (1972), Fordham (1999), and Delpit (2002).

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18. The skits spoke to a fund of cultural capital in the club regarding selfpresentation. While the skits mocked ghetto communication, this is not to say that students who spoke and self-presented in such ways were ostracized from Succeeders meetings. Often those students were the most vocal participants when it came to activities like this one. They also thoughtfully reflected on how others had come to interpret them based on their appearance, speech, or social lives in the club or with Sofía or Liz in case management meetings. 19. See Roediger ([1991] 2007). 20. At the time I conducted this research, Rich—and a Somali student, Diric— were the only non-Latinos to attend Succeeders. There was a push for a Kurdish version of the program. In recent years there has been an inf lux of immigrant Coptic Egyptian students into the Succeeders program. 21. Chavez (2008, 74). 22. Willen and Cook (2016, 97). 23. Harry Bauld, former admissions officer and the author of the popular essay guide On Writing the College Essay, echoes Lainie’s description (and language) of the essay’s value: “The essay can be your ticket out of the faceless applicant hordes . . . and unlike everything else in your application . . . you have real control over your writing” (2012, xvi). 24. This feat is accomplished through sharing something Lainie loosely termed “meaningful” that shows a Succeeder’s “character and spirit.” 25. Carr (2011, 124). From my interviews with admissions officers, there seemed to be no skepticism among them about whether students could be “faking” a real self. The fear was quite the opposite: that students were not revealing enough of their true selves, in particular their struggles and structural obstacles. 26. In some selective schools, including Baldwin, college admission is not based solely on measurable academic achievements, but also on a holistic judgment of the applicant as an individual and their interpersonal fit with university gatekeepers’ vision of the school (Stevens 2007; Posecznick 2017). For more on admission, see McDonough (1994), Paley (1996), and Vidali (2007). 27. See Urciuoli (2003, 2009, 2016) for more on the circulating value of diversity in higher education. 28. Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas (2014, 427). 29. Willen and Cook (2016, 96 and 98). 30. Other essays that caught her attention usually explored family dynamics, inspirational figures in students’ lives, and students’ identities as first-generation college students. 31. For some nonselective schools, when students failed to meet minimum requirements, an essay was required as a kind of last- ditch effort for admission. The admissions officer from one such school highlighted the essay similarly to Lainie, stating that it revealed the “real” student and therefore forged an

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interpersonal connection that made the officer feel more connected to the student and willing to fight for their admission. 32. Other gatekeepers, like the Succeeders’ staff, students’ teachers, and others, encouraged students to write about their “unique” backgrounds—usually prompting an essay about their immigrant origins. A white, female, fortysomething Succeeder board member instructed students: “Don’t just tell me you need the money, but why you deserve it.” She clarified this by stating that she wanted to know about students’ volunteer efforts and the ways they had demonstrated their knowledge of the importance of values like responsibility and hard work. Furthermore, the prompts themselves directed students to certain kinds of disclosure. At one public college, the prompt for a general scholarship application was “How do you demonstrate good moral character?,” which led one student and me to sit looking at a blinking cursor in existential writer’s block. Some prompts were subtler in their ask, such as the 2013 common application prompt about diversity: “Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” 33. See Paley (1996), Vidali (2007), and Keene (2016). 34. Lubell (2014) and Harvard Crimson Staff (2010). While Succeeders largely do not use these popular guides, it is constructive to investigate them as grammars for the college essay genre. In fact, the Harvard guide is organized around four genres of the essay: “1) The Survivor: Overcoming Challenges and Adversity; 2) One Among Many: Presenting a Unique Applicant; 3) Story teller: Experiences that Illuminate Character; 4) Through their Eyes: Finding Yourself in Others” (2010, 9). The authors of the Harvard guide and Bauld point to other subgenres such as the immigrant story (where an immigrant youth describes their heritage), the travel essay (where students learn about other cultures), success stories of high school accomplishments, and the to- be-avoided D essay. Foremost is to “tell a story” that entertains the reader with its prose while revealing something unique about the applicant, their interests, or their character as the “storyteller” subgenre indicates (Bauld 2012, 64; Harvard Crimson Staff 2010). 35. As a friend who worked in admissions at a highly selective college told me, “grit” and “growth mindset”—which speak to responsibility in the face of adversity—and the state of being “bridge builders”—code for diverse applicants— were the kinds of terms admissions professionals were applying to essays. 36. Willen and Cook (2016, 96). 37. Willen and Cook (2016, 98). 38. See Flores (2016) on aid for undocumented students. 39. Since I was a late addition to the scholarship committee, my position on it did not, as far as I am aware, affect my relationships with students. The

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scholarship meeting happened at the very end of the school year; thus, I had already formed relationships with students prior to being part of the committee. 40. Willen and Cook (2016, 98). People like Ines and Lainie and institutions like Baldwin and Succeeders, positioned to help Succeeders navigate the murky waters of access and inclusion, also introduce their own constraints, challenges, and interpretations of the good student, good member, and good Latino, developed through how they too have internalized and reacted to dominant notions regarding success, diversity, and morality (cf. Urciuoli 2016). 41. In contrast, Harvard accepted 5.92 percent of applicants in 2012 and is in a category I deem highly selective (Caldwell 2012). Eastern Tennessee State College, with an acceptance rate of 88.2 percent, was less selective than South (Tennessee Higher Education Commission 2013). According to Clinedinst and Patel (2018), the average acceptance rate across the nation’s colleges was 63.9 percent in 2012. 42. Since the 1960s, depictions of Latinos’ life experiences in a more academic, literary, and activist vein tend toward the testimonio genre, which openly discusses racism, marginalization, and structural inequality (cf. Anzaldúa 1987). Students writing about their legal status or institutional racism produced essays that were in some ways consonant with the testimonio genre. 43. Willen and Cook (2016, 96, 98). 44. While Neveah was a woman of profound faith, it is also critical to note that she only applied to Christian colleges, where this message would be particularly applicable. 45. It is not just youth’s narratives that matter here. Admissions officers’ choice to invest—or not—in these youth and their futures is shaped by our collective language ideologies, understanding of success and the American Dream, and the valued Latino person. 46. Willen and Cook (2016, 98). 47. McAdams (2013, xiii).

ChaPter 4. “their name iS alSo written on my diPloma” 1. Conradson (2003). 2. Smith (2006, 125). See also Suárez-Orozco (1987), Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1995), Louie (2004, 2012), and Nicholas, Stepick, and Stepick (2008). Alternatively, as Suárez-Orozco and Páez (2002) show, some youth can disengage from their studies under the burden of these expectations. From the broader anthropological literature on the gift, we might also see the immigrant bargain as a kind of “entrustment” as the bargain “implies an obligation, but not necessary an obligation to repay like with like as a loan might imply.

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Whether an entrustment or transfer is returnable in kind or in radically different form—be it economic, political, symbolic, or some mixture of these—is a matter of cultural context and strategy” (Shipton 2007, II). 3. Smith (2006, 126). Here, Smith is foregrounding an understanding of the moral as the fulfillment of kinship obligations and, specifically, the obligations unique to immigrant families that result from the life-altering decision to immigrate. See also Pribilsky (2001, 260–261). Educational striving and success as a kinship obligation to one’s parents has long been noted by scholars working in the United States; see Katz (2014), Louie (2012, 2004), Nicholas, Stepick, and Stepick (2008), Suárez-Orozco and SuárezOrozco (1995), and Suárez-Orozco (1987). See also Yoo and Kim (2014). 4. Leinaweaver (2008) also examines superación, but on the level of individually circulated child rather than the family. 5. As noted in the introduction, immigration can destabilize existing patterns of family life, resulting in the rise of distinct modes of transnational parenting (Hondganeu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreñas 2001, 2005; Schmalzbauer 2004; Priblisky 2007), bicultural and bilingual youth’s newfound role as cultural and linguistic brokers for parents and caretakers for siblings (Song 1997; Abel Valenzuela 1999; Suárez- Orozco and Suárez- Orozco 2001; Orellana 2009; Hafford 2010; Katz 2014), heighted differences between siblings due to immigration status (Dreby 2015; Flores 2018; Castañeda 2019), and rearranged elder care formations (Lamb 2009; Leinaweaver 2013; Yoo and Kim 2014; Coe 2016; Dossa and Coe 2017), to name but a few examples. 6. See Smith (2006), Dreby (2010), Coe (2016) and Pallares (2015) for examples of how family relations change and how obligations, including the obligation to achieve in school, care, and politically engage, shift in relation to immigration. 7. Gálvez (2011). 8. Gálvez (2011, 47). 9. See Kligman (1998), Luibhéid (2002, 2013), Howell (2006), Horton and Barker (2009), Greenhalgh (2008), Lee (2013), Leinaweaver (2013), Thelen and Alber (2018), and Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018). 10. Smith (2006, 126). 11. Vivian Louie points to similar findings with respect to Chinese American youth who pursue “Asian fields,” preprofessional tracks like dentistry, at the behest of their parents (2004, 137). In an extension of Smith’s immigrant bargain, Louie’s interlocutors argue that dispensing with their interests is but a small sacrifice in comparison with their parents’ lives as immigrants in the United States. In weighing career fulfillment against other kinds of fulfillment, such as making immigrant parents proud, Louie’s interlocutors and Sebastián err on the side of meeting obligations to immigrant parents. As Louie further asserts, it is hard to untangle where parental ideas about education end and students’ begin. 12. Levinson et al. (1996).

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13. Cf. Levinson, Foley, and Holland (1996) and Stambach and Hall (2017). 14. Andrés also pointed to his parents’ physical labor: “They work really hard and they’re wasted physically because they work really hard, and just to have food in our plates and have lights and stuff and, you know, and that’s not even enough, you know.” For Andrés, the lesson in that work was to aim toward white-collar work: “To live better than my parents did before, to just—to not—to struggle but not to struggle the struggles that you could avoid, like working like what my parents work, and not to kill your body, you know.” 15. Melissa, whose father worked in construction, echoed this sentiment in her narration of how her and her sisters’ educational attainments and eventual, hoped-for white- collar labor would aid her father: “I mean, there’s been times when my dad’s job isn’t as good and things like that, so you see that and you don’t want [him] to go through that forever. He’s not gonna be able to work for much longer, so we have to help in some way.” 16. Other youth shared frustrating stories about parents’ educational paths in their nations of origin and how that experience motivates students to achieve now, in order to gain the value of education lost on prior generations. Cammarota (2004, 63) points to similar findings with respect to Latinas who frame their motivation to succeed as predicated on the struggles of previous generations of women. Unlike some of Cammarota’s interlocutors, I find the same holds true for Latinos; that is, Latino boys often pointed to the sacrifices of mothers and mothers’ thwarted educational aspirations as motivation for them to succeed in the present. 17. Youth did not attempt to show similarities between their Latina mothers’ strategies and those of Black Americans (Stack 1974; Collins [1990] 2000; Mullings 1997) or political motherhood (Fuentes 2013). This choice speaks to youth’s perception of whose parenting and motherhood strategies lead to social inclusion: that is, those of middle-class Euro-Americans. 18. For Latin American norms of fatherhood, see Rodríguez (2009) and Priblisky (2012); for notions of the American breadwinning father, see Townsend (2002) and Broughton and Walton (2006). See Pleck and Pleck (1997) for a historical overview of American norms of fatherhood over time. 19. On Latina motherhood and the importance of mothers’ nurturing, sacrificing, and providing moral development and bright futures for their children through practices as diverse as advice giving, proverbs, and silence, see the following examples: Gándara (1995), Villenas (2001, 2006), Gomez (2010), and Silva (2011). On Euro-American notions of the importance of nurturance in related ways, see Leira (1992), Hays (1998), and Ragoné and Twine (2000). Leinaweaver (2012) and Stockey-Bridge (2015) explore similar understandings in Canadian and Australian contexts. 20. This strict gendering of motherhood and fatherhood, while most commonly used in youth’s framings, was not universally applied. For example,

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Sebastián credited his mother as the “brains” behind the family businesses, and Andrés cited his father as his emotional nurturer. Regardless of how youth mobilized gendered expectations of good parenthood, common across framings was that immigration is an act of parental care that leads to educational achievement. 21. Street-level bureaucrats is a term coined by Michael Lipsky ([1980] 2010) to describe direct-service workers in the public sector who do the work of the state. See Villenas (2001), Luibhéid (2002, 2013), Chavez (2008), Horton and Barker (2009), and Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018) for examples of how street-level bureaucrats make judgments about immigrant parents’ fitness for US membership based on their parenting. 22. Horton and Barker (2009) describe the role of dental hygiene. 23. Bonjour and De Hart (2013, 62). 24. Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018, 21). 25. Ramos-Zayas (2020). 26. For more on the genesis and application of this deficit model, see Valdés (1996) and Valencia and Black (2002); see also Villenas and Deyhle (1999). As critical ethnographies of Latino families and their experiences in the educational system have shown, much of that deficit approach was rooted in a debasement between the home-based strategies of supporting education (cf. Valdés 1996; Villenas 2001) and “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al. 1992) common in low-income immigrant families that misalign with Euro-American norms of parenting and educational guidance. 27. Lutz (1988, 213). 28. See Pallares (2015). 29. Much of the early DREAM Act activism focused on portraying undocumented youth as studious exemplars, evidenced in the use of graduation caps and gowns in protests (Nicholls 2013). As the movement developed, organizers attempted to move away from a call for status regularization through moral uprightness toward regularization based on the shared experience of being human (Escudero 2020). It also, most centrally, relied on images of family (Pallares 2015). 30. Rodríguez (2009, 2). See Baca Zinn (1975) for the original formulation of this notion, as one of the first to examine the use of family as a point of Latino (in this case Chicano/a) activism. In recent years the family has become a rallying point in Latinos’ immigration activism, especially salient given the rise of mixed-status families and families fractured by deportation. For more on the use of the family in activism, see Martinez (2010) and Pallares (2015). For more on how Latino and other immigrant families are affected by deportation and mixed statuses, see Yoshikawa (2011), Boehm (2012), Abrego (2014), Dreby (2015), and Gomberg-Muñoz (2017). 31. Clearly, some students can “reject the narrative” of filial obligation and feel resentment toward family members who don’t understand their unique problems

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as minority students (Smith 2006, 126). For more on this sense of resentment, see Suárez- Orozco and Suárez- Orozco (1995), Suárez-Orozco and Páez (2002), Nicholas, Stepick, and Stepick (2008), Shankar (2008), and Trieu, Vargas, and Gonzales (2016). 32. Perla’s rendering of her lacking achievements thus also aligns with the notion of personal responsibility integral to the American Dream of success. 33. See Yuval Davis (1997). See also Kligman (1998), Kanaaneh (2002), and Luibhéid (2002, 2013). 34. Chavez (2008). 35. Baca Zinn (1975); Rodríguez (2009); Martinez (2010); Fuentes (2013); Pallares (2015). 36. On the sacrificing mother, see Ragoné and Twine (2000), EspinozaHerold (2007), and Bermúdez et al. (2014). See Silva (2011) for a collection of testimonios and scholarly ref lections from the social sciences and literary and cultural studies on Latina motherhood that explores the multifaceted transformative and socially reproductive aspects of Latina motherhood. 37. See Hondagneu-Sotelo (2014, 106–116) for an overview of this association. 38. Buena gente, translated literally as “good people,” is an adjective in the form of a modified plural noun. However, the phrase can refer to an individual’s moral status. Such usage is akin to “good people” in AAVE—as in “she’s good people.” This grammatical peculiarity is a kind of metaphor for Succeeders’ redefinition of success as collective in its origin and results for membership, as explored in this chapter. 39. For more on this concept of buena educación, see Valdés (1996, 125); see especially Angela Valenzuela (1999) and Villenas (2001). 40. Cole and Durham (2007, 17).

ChaPter 5. “eduCation with her family ” 1. Katz (2014); Orellana (2009); Suárez- Orozco and Suárez- Orozco (2001); Abel Valenzuela (1999). 2. Isabel’s rendering of her striving thus aligns with an understanding of care as something undertaken in support of another’s welfare (Conradson 2003). 3. For further exploration of the role of status difference in families, see Dreby (2012, 2015), Yoshikawa (2011), Abrego (2014), Enriquez (2015), GombergMuñoz (2016, 2017), and Castañeda (2019). 4. Gomberg-Muñoz (2016, 343). 5. Despite recognition of siblingship’s importance, intergenerational dyads, like parent- child or uncle-nephew, and not the supposedly status- equal relationships between siblings, took analytical prominence in early anthropology, as descent and alliance were seen as most critical to families’ futures (Nuckolls

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1993, 29–32; Thelen, Coe, and Alber 2013, 1–2). Recent approaches to kinship account for siblingship’s vital social and socializing role in childhood (de Leon 2015; Maynard and Tovote 2010; Reynolds, Dorner, and Orellana 2010; Rogoff 1990) and adulthood (Roth 2014; Thelen, Coe, and Alber 2013). 6. On siblingship’s blueprint importance to other relationships, see Maynard and Tovote (2010), and Joseph (1991); on interpersonal behavior, see Gaskins (1999); and on self-concept, see García-Sánchez (2014) and Song (1997). 7. Howell (2003). 8. Weisner and Gallimore (1977, 169). 9. Older sibling Succeeders’ elder status, dual cultural and linguistic references/abilities, and extant experiences with local educational systems made them logical caregivers and guides. 10. Flores (2018). 11. Other scholars have shown how elder siblings—most often sisters— navigate educational bureaucracies, translate with teachers (Orellana 2009), close gaps between school and home (Volk 1999), provide academic support for younger siblings, and plan siblings’ educational trajectories (Espinoza 2010; Stanton-Salazar 2001). 12. Alfaro and Umaña-Taylor (2010); Katz (2014). 13. Those who did not provide care were the youngest child, lived separately from siblings, or were a middle child with older siblings already fulfilling these obligations. In households with siblings, there was significant heterogeneity, which undoubtedly affected youth’s positions in and feelings about their families. However, I did not systemically sample for different family compositions and cannot reliably discuss the impact of these differences. 14. Alfaro and Umaña-Taylor (2010); Katz (2014). 15. For academic success, see Dorner, Orellana, and Li- Grining (2007); for favored status, see Song (1997). 16. See Katz (2014, 97). Older sisters being tasked with more responsibility than brothers advantages brothers with free time, even as it advantages daughters with a favored position (cf. Song 1997). 17. Katz (2014, 108). 18. This activity was not conducted at Gilead High School. 19. The Succeeders program likely influenced students’ perspectives, including on siblings. However, this influence should not be overstated. First, there is alignment between these cases and others on Latinas’ sibcare and their ambivalences about it outside of curricular interventions (e.g., Ovink 2014). Additionally, while Succeeders may have inf luenced students, most youth—including Lupita—were tasked with educational sibcare before program participation, suggesting parents’ reliance on their elder Succeeders predated their children’s involvement in the program. 20. Carr (2006, 2011).

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21. Espinoza (2010) and Ovink (2014) explore the idea of the good Latina daughter in greater depth. 22. Valdés (1996, 170). 23. Valdés (1996, 170). 24. See Angela Valenzuela (1999) for a similar understanding of caring about school. 25. Horton and Kraftl (2009). 26. Pallares (2015). 27. Cole and Durham (2007, 3); see also McKinnon and Cannell (2013). 28. Cole and Durham (2007, 6). For example, the family’s future is often planned through intergenerational care: parents paying school fees (Sykes 2001), children circulated to older relatives (Leinaweaver 2008), or parental migration that prioritizes children’s advancement (Suárez- Orozco, Suárez- Orozco, and Todorova 2008).

ChaPter 6. somos una familia 1. The claiming of unrelated others as family is not without analogues. Family ties in Latin America are flexible and widely extended to nonkin through the practice of compadrazgo or godparenthood (Mintz and Wolf 1950; Van Vleet 2008). Compadrazgo can become an essential reserve of resources and resistance, just like kin- claiming in the Succeeders family. As Ellison (2018) demonstrates, extended compadrazgo serves to unite (and sometimes divide) people in precarious times and political realities. Family ties that are made outside of strict descent and affine- defined kinship can be the basis for conflict, but also for solidarity when people are faced with structural inequality. The Succeeders’ claiming of unrelated others as family is also akin to Weston’s (1991) examination of how, for queer people, fellow queer friends take the place of biological families who have rejected their queer children. 2. In J. L. Austin’s ([1962]1975) sense, Enrique and others were making kin through a performative utterance. 3. A classic and instructive example of how unrelated others become kin through care is Carol Stack’s work with the Black residents of The Flats in the American Midwest. Stack demonstrates that unrelated friends and neighbors became and declared each other “kinsmen” through being “those you can count on” for caretaking and support (1974, 58). 4. Moreover, Richard T. Rodríguez asserts Chicano/a queer and feminist activists’ broadening of the family has expanded “the bonds of belonging” within the Latino community and nation(2009, 18). Maxine Baca Zinn (1975) was one of the first to examine the use of family as a point of Latino (specifically, Chicano/a) activism. In recent years, the family has become a rallying point in Latinos’

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immigration activism, especially salient given the rise of mixed-status families and families fractured by deportation. For more on the use of the family in activism, see Martinez (2010) and Pallares (2015). For more on how Latino and other immigrant families are affected by deportation and mixed statuses, see Yoshikawa (2011), Boehm (2012), Abrego (2014), Dreby (2015), and Gomberg-Muñoz (2017). 5. See Kligman (1998), Luibhéid (2002, 2013), Howell (2003, 2006), Horton and Barker (2009), Greenhalgh (2008), Lee (2013), Leinaweaver (2013), Thelen and Alber (2018), and Luibhéid, Andrade, and Stevens (2018) for examples of how family and immigration policy intersect. 6. Askins (2015, 475). 7. Arnold (2016, 12). 8. The distinction between la rampa students and Succeeders is reminiscent of MacLeod’s “hallway hangers” and “the brothers”: the two groups of striving and less-striving male students he tracked from high school to midlife ([1987] 2009). The persistence of the striving dichotomy and the tracking these kinds of students face speaks to the value placed on striving in schools for both students and authority figures. 9. This logic echoed what Angela Valenzuela (1999) observed between teachers and underachieving Mexican American students in a Texas high school: if students were not invested in their schoolwork as strivers, then teachers were not invested in them as learners or individuals. The seemingly logical parallel in Raven’s argument was that if la rampa Latinos didn’t strive, then Succeeders would not care about or account for them. 10. Angela Valenzuela (1999). 11. Killick and Desai (2010, 5). 12. Killick and Desai (2010, 5). 13. Compare Raven’s notion of friendship to Liz Ellis’s conceptualization of kithship. Through her etymological sleuthing, Ellis (2017, 3) finds that the word kith derives from the Old English cýðð, meaning a sense of knowledge and recognition based on shared regional ties. Kith can be friends, but do not have to be— they just need to have a “connection of knowingness going back in time” (4). When Raven traced her knowledge of the la rampa students to childhood, she marked a kithship with them based in her knowledge of them. Ellis sees this kind of social tie as a Deleuzian “rhizomatic relationship” that “can help support feelings of connection and support” (6, 18)—which is precisely how Raven positioned her relationship to and care toward la rampa students. 14. Winkler-Reid (2016, 171). 15. Chowdhury and Philipose (2016, 3). 16. Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas (2014, 427). 17. Chowdhury and Philipose (2016, 3). I say partial given that Raven parroted the logic of retracting care from nonstrivers initially, and Ricardo asserted that la rampa students do care and are therefore akin to the Succeeders.

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18. Winker-Reid (2015, 171). 19. Nira Yuval-Davis argues that “specific repetitive practices, relating to specific social and cultural spaces, which link individual and collective behavior, are critical for the constructions and reproduction of identity narratives and constructions of attachment” (2006, 197, 203). These acts of listening, sharing, and working together are such practices. 20. Arnold (2016, 12). 21. In his ethnography of students in suburban upper-middle- class high school, a far different context than the Succeeders, Peter Demerath (2009, 130– 151) illustrates how the pressures to succeed in school and maintain social class advantage often leave upper- class youth chronically stressed, fatigued, and burned out. 22. In distinguishing between the emotional and affective here, I wish to signal that her responses are both the product of culturally mediated emotions (Lutz 1988) and the “presubjective” but not “presocial” reservoir of feelings that are experienced in the body (Mazzarella 2012, 291). 23. The interviews I conducted with students, I came to find, were also a space where students could express these feelings—as Pamela’s outpouring attests. 24. Academically striving peer networks like Succeeders are positively linked to Latino youth’s awareness of academic pathways, development of social and cultural capital, improved academic outcomes, increased college going behavior, and a sense of school-based belonging that aids academic engagement. See StantonSalazar (2001), Stanton-Salazar and Spina (2003), Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova (2008), Riegle-Crumb and Callahan (2009), and Enriquez (2011). 25. Generally, for many undocumented youth, including for some Succeeders, family members forbid the sharing of their immigration status outside the family for fear that disclosure could have dire consequences. One mother of undocumented youth entrusted her signed permission slip to Sofía only when Sofía promised that she would not share the slip with anyone, as her children “no tienen papeles” (they don’t have papers). Potentially, through sharing something that was only shared within family and having that confidence be understood, Succeeders became family for undocumented Succeeders. 26. These kinds of high-stakes disclosures, the burdens of striving and status, are significant tests of the relative closeness of youth’s relationships and the trustworthiness of others. As trust research suggests, youth form trusting relationships with each other through continuing assessment of a person’s “performance”—that is, the sum of their interactions with that person (Rundle et al. 2012). In general, Rundle and colleagues found that youth scale up; some of their subjects suggested that they tested friends and others with small secrets and waited to see if those secrets were shared to determine whether friends were trustworthy. In sharing a secret with significant consequences, such as undocumented immigration status, youth demonstrate high levels of trust.

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27. Arnold (2016, 12). 28. Simien (2005, 529). 29. Simien (2005, 529). For formulations of linked fate, see especially Dawson (1994) and Tate (1994). Before arguing for the importance of considering gender in linked fate analyses, Evelyn Simien remarks that “lived experiences, specifically day-to-day encounters with race oppression and class exploitation in public spaces and private domains,” are what lead to the existence of linked fate in the first place (2005, 529). 30. However, some Succeeders revealed they also felt open hostility directed toward them as undocumented students, which kept them from disclosing their status. Neveah, for example, was a high-achieving, undocumented student who, despite having many friends in her AP classes, felt disconnected from her peers and school. She traced that back to an incident in the eighth grade: One time in the eighth grade, they [students] were talking about immigrants. . . . [T]his dude turned around and he was like, “Are you an illegal immigrant?” And I was like, “No.” And he was like, “Good. ‘Cause if you were, I’d shoot you right now.” I was like, “Okay.” [Laughts.] I just rolled my eyes and I was like “all right.” I was like “whoa.” And every time someone would talk about an illegal immigrant, it was really like mean and stuff like that. It hurt my feelings, so I don’t want people to know [my status as undocumented].

See also Abrego (2006), Gonzales (2011), and Enriquez (2011) for examples of undocumented youth’s struggles to belong in school. 31. See Olivas (2009, 2012) for reviews of financial aid policies and their impact on undocumented youth. See Flores (2016) for an extended discussion of Emma’s case. 32. Gonzales (2011). 33. See Abrego (2006), Gonzales (2011), and Flores (2016) for more on how K–12 educational settings provide a sense of belonging for undocumented youth. 34. Horton and Kraftl (2009). 35. Gonzales (2011). 36. Chowdhury and Philipose (2016, 3). 37. Chowdhury and Philipose (2016, 3). 38. See Armenta (2017). For further discussions of Alicia’s and Pamela’s status and its relationship to their driving and awareness of the consequences of illegality, see Flores, Escudero, and Burciaga (2019). 39. As Succeeders scholarship recipients, they were required to do twenty hours of service to remain eligible for another scholarship. Yet they went above and beyond; in one year, Raven tripled her hours. 40. Robbins (2013), Thin (2009), and others (e.g., Mathews and Izquierdo 2009) have critiqued how recent anthropological work places “the suffering subject . . . as a privileged object of our attention” (Robbins 2013, 450). Robbins (2013, 457–458) further argues that with a singular focus on suffering,

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ethnographers lose the ability to see how people conceptualize a “good” life and hope for “good” ends and futures. A further danger is that this approach reduces the lives of those we work with to only suffering. In failing to account for how young, structurally vulnerable people like Jim and Edwin experience happiness as part of their everyday lives, ethnographers fall into the representational trap we fear most: the extreme “othering” of ethnic, working poor migrant youth. Robbins suggests that one way out of this representational trap is to examine how acts of care refocus our attention on how people “foster the good in their social relations” (2013, 458)—though such an approach could ignore the ways that care is informed by harsh realities (see Dahl 2015 for elaboration). There is, of course, further danger in attending to the pleasant and emphasizing it: the danger of ignoring how an unforgiving immigration system and an unequal system of education shape Jim’s and Edwin’s futures. 41. Back (2015, 832). 42. See Pérez (2015, 59–101) on the symbolic power of the JROTC uniform. 43. Chowhury and Philipose (2016, 20. 44. See Gandara and Contreras (2009) for an overview. 45. See Williams and Kornblum (1985), Nettles (1991), Stanton- Salazar (1997, 2001), Stanton-Salazar and Spina (2003), Angela Valenzuela (1999), Conchas (2006),Wong (2008, 2010), and Enriquez (2011). 46. Cf. Enriquez (2011). 47. In João Biehl’s examination of the Brazilian woman Catarina’s experiences in the Vita asylum, he tracks how her personhood and belonging to family and nation is “unmade and remade” in the wake of both a lack of care from her family and the state and the limited care of the asylum and the biomedical system (2005, 21). In Biehl’s extreme case, and in other works focused on care’s relationship to personhood and inclusion (e.g., Ticktin 2006, 2011; Han 2012; Muehlebach 2012), there is a critical insight applicable to Succeeders’ peer caring: care matters for our personhood and belonging. 48. Horton and Kraftl (2009).

ConCluSion 1. Malkki (1995). 2. In The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics, one of Roger Sanjek’s interlocutors, Phil Pirelli, made the very same point I am making here when reflecting on neighborhood change: “People say the ‘good old days.’ They weren’t so good” (1998, 235). 3. Nicholls (2013, 53). 4. As examples of his incendiary racist rhetoric, Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,

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termed COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” and referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.” Beyond the expansion of the public charge rule, the ascendancy of merit over family ties in determining policy, and the separation of undocumented families, there have also been other draconian immigration policies under Trump. Two are the barring of entry to individuals from Muslim nations (the Muslim ban) and the denial of asylum to anyone, including unaccompanied minors, who traveled through another country on the way to the United States (the asylee transit ban). This latter ban largely affects Central Americans, who are escaping violence and poverty that has its roots in US imperial exploitation. While these policies are new, they retread the nativist racism of the nineteenth- century Asian immigration bans, beginning with the 1875 Page Act, that were not fully lifted until 1965. 5. Department of Homeland Security et al. v. Regents of the University of California et al., 18-587 U.S. (2019) 6. Vance (2020). 7. Reicher (2018). 8. While the federal government deemed meat-packers essential workers in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, the ninety-seven undocumented, racially marked immigrants in just such a factory in 2018 were essential, but ultimately excluded, workers. 9. Blitzer (2018). 10. Among the general public, anti-immigrant sentiment rose during the 1990s, following 9/11, and after the 2008 economic downturn (Sanchez 1997; O’Neil and Tienda 2010; Muste 2013). States passed stridently anti-migrant legislation, such as Arizona’s SB 1070 (2010), which contained the infamous (and now less legal) “show me your papers” provisions that allowed local police to stop and arrest any person law enforcement thought might be undocumented, de facto permitting the racial profiling of Latinos. Closer to Tennessee, in 2011 Alabama passed an Arizona copycat law, which among other things attempted to ban undocumented youth from attending public schools, a right guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plyer v. Doe (1982). 11. The Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted in 1882. The 1917 Immigration Act created a literacy requirement and barred all Asian immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act, the Johnson Reed Act, created Border Control and national origin quotas that looked to reduce Slavic, Jewish, and Southern European immigration. 12. Hage (2003, 3). 13. For example, the Nazi regime’s terming of the nation as the Vaterland (fatherland) suggests just how cataclysmically harmful control of the national family can be. 14. Ríos-Rojas (2011, 67).

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15. Stambach (2017, 2). 16. Abu El-Haj (2015, 6). 17. Askins (2015). 18. Gonzales (2011, 608). 19. Flores (2016).

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Index

Note: Pseudonymous interlocutor and place names are italicized. 287(g) program, 40 2000s, early, 40, 70–71 Aarón, 174, 175 absenteeism, 51, 52 Abu El-Haj, Thea, 188, 209n54 abuse, childhood, 123 academic achievement: balancing with sibcare, 136–37, 144; belonging through, 2, 14–15; debunking stereotypes through, 3; failure of, 122–23, 155–59; motivations for, 111, 143; student outcomes, 51; through educational sibcare, 139–40; as value of immigration, 112 Academy, the (alternative online school), 54 acceptance of immigrants, 40 access, to educational institutions, 1, 5, 44–45, 49, 92–94, 114–15, 131; of undocumented students, 164, 166–67 See also college admissions access, to opportunities, 1, 16, 82–84, 98, 112, 143, 148–49, 172 See also tuition, affording activism, implicit, 21–22, 149, 158, 166, 175–76, 238n4

activists, immigrant 40–41, 44, 121, 187 ACT test scores, 50tab, 95, 141–42, 167 admissions officers, 1, 93–94, 95, 101, 230n25, 232n45 advice, peer, 170 advocacy, school-based 46–47 African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 89, 228n10 Aguilar, Paulina, 113–15 Aguilar, Tomás, 113–15 Agustín, 123 Alabama bill HB 56 (2011), 42 Alberto, 95–96, 102 Alejandro, 58, 66, 72–75, 117–18, 168, 193 Alicia, 80, 87–89, 91, 98, 161, 167–68, 193 alienation experiences, 203n16 Alix, 56–57 allies, supportive, 47, 49, 54–55, 58, 187 American Americans, 64, 65, 77–78 See also whiteness American Dream, 1; anti-Blackness in, 89; components of success narrative, 84, 95–96, 97–98, 101, 103; defined, 10, 207n37, 207n38, 208n42; economic aspects of, 115; educational achievement

279

280

index

American Dream (continued) in, 14, 71–72, 80, 114; in educational materials, 26; history of, 208n39, 209n48; ignoring structural disadvantages, 11; immigrant bargain and, 16, 117; immigrants striving toward, 116; importance of responsibility in, 88; as national myth, 104 Americanness, 11, 209n48 American term, 201n3 American values, 3 Ana, 155–56 Angel, 55, 57, 193 Angelito, 193 Anita, 144–46 anthropology, ethics of, 24–25 anti-Blackness, 89 anti-immigration laws and policies, 40, 42, 217n37, 243n10 applications, college. See college applications applications, scholarship, 96–98 Arizona, 43 Arizona bill SB 1070, 41, 42, 181, 217n39 Arlette, 156, 159 Arnold, Lynnette, 154 Asian Americans, 84–85 Asian stereotypes, 73, 84–85 Askins, Kye, 22 aspirations, 117–18, 139 aspirations, educational, 1, 101–2, 113–14, 118, 148 assimilation, 44, 202n8, 218n48 Atkins, Mr., 55 “at risk” youth, 154–59, 172 author, background of, 24 Baldwin College, 56, 93–94, 114, 152, 191 Bean Station, Tennessee, 182 behaviors, labeling, 13 behaviors, morally “bad,” 90 behaviors, to include or exclude, 5–6 “being Hispanic,” 98–103 belonging: in America, 10, 99; as assimilation, 202n8; as caring connections, 3, 111, 118, 126, 145–46; collective, 112; complexity of, 81, 115; defining, 4–7; deservingness of, 12; despite exclusionary terms, 176; enacted through education, 187; exclusion inherent in, 121, 132–33, 178–79; expanding terms of, 3, 21, 130, 176, 180, 183, 189; experiences of, 39–40, 56–59; of families, 149; hindered by

labels, 13; meaning of for Succeeders, 178; moral criteria for, 84–85, 119, 122; narrow conceptions of, 80, 186; paths toward, 4; politics of, 22, 165–66; reproducing terms of, 109; right to, 178–79; in schools, 35–36, 56–59; sibling caretaking and, 132; Succeeders worthiness of, 157–58; through academic achievement, 2, 17, 79, 84; through care and connection, 17–22, 146; through friendship, 171–72; through kinship, 76–77, 128; through relatedness, 172; through striving, 65; youth creating, 184, 188 bigotry, 44 bilingual students, 35, 45–46, 219n53 birther movement, 182 birthright citizenship, 18 Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011, 18 Black America, 14, 210n58 Black Americans, 89 Black Lives Matter movement, 182, 189 Blackness, anti-, 89 Blackness, images of, 14 Black respectability politics, 14–15 blood relations, 75, 224n21, 225n29 Bonjour, Saskia, 119 book, organization of, 27–30 book learning, moral value of, 17 buena gente, 129, 236n38 See also good people Camilia, 82–83, 98, 143–46, 168 care: as activism and resistance, 118, 129, 153–54, 159, 163, 166, 179, 184, 194; collective, 3, 17–22; value of by Succeeders, 4; communicative, 154, 162; definitions of, 19–20, 212n77; despite academic achievement, 173; expansion of belonging, 183; for family connections, 133; gaps in school, 47; immigration as, 110; from Succeeder peers, 162, 168–73, 175 career paths, 99, 113–14, 147 caring professions, 72 Carlos, 113, 141–43 Carmen, Ms., 47 Carr, E. Summerson, 85, 94, 143 Cavendish, Steve, 33 Celebrate Nashville festival, 42, 218n45 Chauvin, Sébastian, 7, 94 Chavez, Leo, 8, 69, 92 Chinese Exclusion Act, 182, 243n11 Chowdhury, Elora, 158 Christianity, 102, 232n44

index citizenship, juridical, 5, 18, 149, 165–66, 203n12, 208n43, 225n27 Clay County, Tennessee, 41 Cole, Jennifer, 130, 150 collective identities, 119, 168 collective striving, 163, 168 college: inclusion promised by, 167; moral transformation through, 17; self-learning at, 2 college admissions, 79, 230n26; difficulty for undocumented students, 141–42, 164–66; diversity in, 94; institutional belonging and, 104; proving equality through, 99; rates, 232n41 college admissions essays: as form of representation, 104; guides for, 231n34; importance of, 92–95, 230n23, 230n31; moral minority stories told in, 98–103; resonance of, 96–97, 230n30; struggles with, 100; themes of, 116–17, 232n42 college application rates, 54tab college applications, 131, 164, 166–68 college decisions, 144–45 college enrollment rates, 54tab college experiences, 142, 190–91 college graduations. See graduations college readiness indicators, 52 college tours, 93 communication practices, 179 communication skills, 86–87, 89–90, 98, 137–38 communicative care, 154, 162 community, definitions of, 56–57, 221n66 community, national, 5 See also national membership community college, 147–48 connection, valuing, 125–26, 161–62 Conradson, David, 19 control, of membership terms, 184 control, of personal stories, 93–94 Cook, Jennifer, 7 Courtney, 59, 67–68, 82–83, 85 crime, 38 cultural norms, 14–15, 48, 125 cultural politics, 60, 187 cultural respect, 48 cultural responsiveness in teaching, 46 cultural sensitivity training, 49 Culture (capital C), 66, 74 data, school success, 52 David, 57, 152–53

281

Dean, Karl, 42 debate, between Succeeders, 82–83 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 9–10, 148–49, 169, 181–82, 185–87, 186fig, 206n32 de Hart, Betty, 119 demographic changes, 33–36 demographics of Succeeder program schools, 49, 50tab deportations, 9–10, 19, 149, 154; orders for, 182; protests against, 185, 235n30; threat of, 132, 148, 167, 181; of undocumented family members (more), 184 desegregation, of schools, 219n52 deservingness to belong: for college admissions, 93–95, 101–2; narratives of, 105, 115; performance-based, 7, 94, 179; proved through parenting, 133, 154; proving, 12, 99; racialized exclusion of, 103; reliability as evidence of, 7; resisting frame of, 85 differences, ethnoracial, 99–100 discrimination, 43, 59, 97 diversity, celebrations of, 42 diversity in schools, 44, 45–46, 94, 100, 102 DREAM Act, 187, 210n60, 235n29 driver’s licenses, 40 dropouts, school, 90–91 Duck, Duck, Goose game, 69–70 Durham, Deborah, 130, 150 Eastlake High School, 64 economic growth in Nashville, 35, 36–37, 41–42 economic provision, family, 115, 118 Eduardo, 90, 91 educación vs education, 16, 146 education: cultural value of, 115–16; as equalizer, 71, 119; as liberation, 188–90; meanings of, 16–17; perpetuating stereotypes through, 81; questioning value of, 13–14; as social inclusion pathway, 70–71, 73–75, 91; value of to Succeeder parents, 78–79, 117, 126, 148 educational achievement: as belonging strategy, 12, 92, 109–10, 113; deeper meanings of, 2; for family unity and belonging, 150; logical flaws in, 165; role of in American Dream, 14; symbolic value of, 13; worthiness despite, 173 educational decision-making, 134–35, 144– 45 See also sibcare, educational

282

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educational settings and institutions, 12–13, 92–93 Edward Maloney High School, 47, 49, 58, 87, 138, 167 Edwin, 169–70, 172 Effective Communication curriculum, 86 Efrain, 91 Elena, 137, 138 El Salvador, 68–69, 123, 135, 136, 189 emergent bilinguals, 47, 52, 54 See also bilingual students Emma, 43, 164, 190–91 emotional attachment in belonging, 4 See also belonging emotions of striving, 160 See also striving English as a Second Language teaching, 34–35, 46 English-only amendment (services), 40, 181, 217n34 English speaking, 59 Enrique, 152–53, 174–75 equality, proving through college admissions, 71, 99 equality of opportunities, 11, 56, 98, 219n52 equal treatment, 56–57 essays. See college admissions essays ethnic identity shaping, 63–64, 73, 80, 103, 222n5 ethnography, 27 ethnoracial status, 76 exceptionalism, 81, 94 exclusion: arbitrariness of, 133; aspiration and, 79–80; awareness of, 59, 101; as a behavioral choice, 6; cycles of, 45; moral terms of, 178; nativist, 183; patterns of, 11; policies for, 40; racialized, 103; reproducing terms of, 102, 109, 110; school-based as national, 159, 162–63, 188; striving leading to, 3; systemic of Latino students, 54–55; terms of, 178; through stereotypes, 92; via undocumented status, 164 expectations, of parents, 112, 118, 126 extended family, 19 FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), 165 See also tuition, affording failure: binary of, 113, 163; la rampa students, 155; morality and, 10–11; personal responsibility and, 88, 98; school, 35, 45, 55–56, 88, 122; stereotypes of, 81 families, immigrant: effects of conflict within, 122; importance of education for, 119,

127; separation of, 182; separation of at border, 19; striving for belonging of, 109–12; unique burdens of, 15–16 family: care and belonging within, 17–22, 153, 238n3; education status of, 125–26; extending belonging to, 128; friends becoming, 158, 172, 238n1; importance of to youth, 133, 139, 145; Latinidad and, 75, 153; Mexican and Latino values of, 145–46; as national building blocks, 18, 113, 121, 130, 180, 184, 211n67, 211n76, 224n26; parents and children, 109–10, 124; politicization of, 149; prioritization of, 145; process of becoming, 152–53; rights to become, 149; stories of, 127; migration of, 38; norms of, 119 family outreach coordinators, 54–55 fathers, 118, 127–28, 234n18 fear, role of in nativism, 183 fear of admissions essays, 95 Fernando, 43, 193 field trips, 49 financial aid, 164, 165 See also tuition, affording first-generation college students, 140 Flor, 147 food stereotypes, 78 foreign investment, 41–42 Freddy, 75–76 friendships, 24, 157–59, 165, 169–73, 176, 180 fun, role of, 171 Gálvez, Alyshia, 7, 12, 112 gangs, 147 gang stereotypes, 69, 72 Garcés-Mascareñas, Blanca, 7, 94 gatekeepers, of higher education, 96–98, 100, 137–38, 231n32, 232n40 gender, 72, 118–19, 134–35, 141, 234n20 ghetto schools, 51, 58 ghetto-style language, 87–88, 89, 90, 229n13, 230n18 ghetto term, 229n12 Gilead High School: Emma as Succeeder alum, 191; Jenny as Succeeder club officer at, 164; Jim as Succeeder club president at, 46–47; Jim at, 126; Lupita at, 99; Lupita’s description of, 51; Marisela at, 162; Sebastián at, 113, 142; as study site, 49; Valentine’s Day at, 169 Gina, 87–88, 98, 187, 193 Gomberg-Muñoz, Ruth, 132

index Gonzales, Roberto, 164 good brotherhood, 143 good Latina daughter, 145 good motherhood, 120, 124–25 good people, 90–91, 129 See also buena gente good sisterhood, 148 governments, local, 44 graduation rates, 52, 53tab, 54, 54tab, 185 graduations, 1, 127, 177–78, 190–91, 192fig growth mindset, 95, 231n35 growth rates as success measures, 52 Guatemala, 24, 43, 127 güey term, 74 Hage, Ghassan, 21, 183 Hart Cellar Act, 205n27 heritability of nationality, 76 Hickory Heights High School: communication skits at, 90, 138; discrimination experience at, 59; immigrant student inclusion at, 55–56; Latino identity at, 75; Mrs. McCann’s Succeeder classroom at, 51; parent information session at, 78; research study at, 49; sibcare skits at, 145 hierarchies, 13, 209n52 high achieving students, 15, 58–59, 95, 99, 122 higher education. See college higher education crisis, 13–14 Hinojosa, Mrs., 78–79 Hispanic Americans: Mateo’s perspective on being, 2; moral perceptions of, 8; stereotypes of, 3, 9; writing about being, 98–103 Hispanic term, 64, 201n1 homeless students, 55 homework, 3, 131, 134–35, 138, 144, 184 See also sibcare, educational Horton, John, 22 hypodescent, 76, 224n22 identity, national, 5, 18, 208n43 Ignacio, 167 ignorance toward immigrants, 40 illegal term, 70, 101, 114, 166, 176, 206n30, 223n14 immigrant bargain: in admissions essays, 116–17; career paths and, 233n11; definition, 15–16, 112–13; educational motivation and, 234n16; impact on siblings, 132, 140–41; keeping, 122–24, 127–28; origins of, 126; research on, 232n2 immigrant-owned businesses, 42

283

immigrant parents: conforming to family norms, 119; as original dreamers, 121; school outreach to, 46, 54–55, 78–79; teacher perceptions of, 48 immigrant rights movement, 19, 41, 44, 121, 185, 189 immigrant reception, 38, 39-44 immigrants: belonging of, 7; ignorance and intolerance toward, 40; services for, 49; in South Nashville, 33–36; US perceptions of, 182–83, 206n30 immigrant students: belonging experiences, 57–58; care of peers, 20; nonprofits supporting, 49; teacher experiences with, 47; underserved in Nashville schools, 45–46 immigrant youth. See immigrant students immigration: as care, 112–13, 120–21, 123– 24, 126; effects on families, 112, 233n5, 233n6; history of, 205n27; merit-based, 149; reasons for, 111, 150; as uprooting, 15 immigration law and policy, 16, 18–19, 40, 120, 132, 182 immigration politics, 178, 182, 187 immigration reform, 149 immigration status, 94 imperialism, 189 inclusion: into Americanness, 12; assessing in Nashville, 39–44; care and relatedness as basis for, 179; changes in over time, 60; creating terms of, 105; definitions of belonging, 4–7; fears of losing, 166–67; increased through Succeeders program, 50–51; institutional, 57, 189; local, 43; merit-based, 151, 164, 166; parental, 121, 127–28; as a political act, 22; role of teachers in, 47–48; securing others’, 133; striving for, 3; through education, 70–71, 167; through language, 87; of whole family, 139–40, 154; youth perceptions of, 234n17 income, 114 individualism, 3, 88, 116, 121, 180 inequality, cycles of, 45 Inés, 97–98 inner reference, 85, 94, 96 institutional invisibility, 34, 46 institutional knowledge, 136–37, 141–42 See also sibcare, educational institutions: educational, 12–13; inclusion in, 5, 57, 189–90 interdependence, 153 interdiscursivity, 95–96, 103, 226n2

284

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intergenerational kinship, 15–16, 126–28, 145–46 See also kinship internal migration, 37 InterNASHional Food Crawl, 42 International Day, 66–67, 74, 222n7 interviews, 25–26, 39, 48, 63–64, 66–69, 74, 124, 126–27 intimacy, 172–73 intolerance toward immigrants, 40, 43 intragenerational inequalities, 132–33, 137, 142–43, 145, 237n9, 237n13 Irene, 123 Isabel, 44, 131–33, 139, 168, 185 Jackson Hills High School: ESL program at, 46, 159; International Day, 66–67, 74; research at, 49; Succeeders alumni, 168; Succeeders club leadership, 82; Succeeders meeting, 155 Jalisco, Mexico, 39 Jane-Marie, 38, 75, 111, 113, 169, 193, 216n27 Janitza, 68–69, 121–23, 125, 139, 193–94 Javier, 67, 77–78, 193 Jenny, 72, 164, 165, 166, 191, 193 Jillson, Cal, 11 Jim: college attendance of, 173, 191; college graduation of, 193; discrimination experience of, 59; friendship with Edwin, 172; interview with, 125–29; as model student, 169–70; proactiveness of, 46–47, 51; Succeeder club president at Gilead, 164; as undocumented immigrant, 171 Juan, 135–36, 141 judgment of belonging, 7, 189 June, 54–55 jus curandi, 19 jus sanguinis, 18, 76, 211n69 jus soli, 18 Kentucky Blue Hills College, 174 Keohane, Mrs., 48, 220n58, 220n59 kinship: American ideas of, 223n20; belonging through, 118–19, 125–29; vs. friendship, 157, 239n13; national substance passed through, 76; navigating stereotypes in, 79–80; political rhetoric of, 17, 18; produced through care, 19–21, 111, 153, 238n3; as site of social change, 150–51, 211n67; Succeeder ideas of, 180; through blood relations, 75, 77; valuing inherently, 133 Kraftl, Peter, 22

labels, social, 13, 56, 158, 176 labor markets, 37 Lainie, 93–94, 97 Lalo, 2, 13 landscaping jobs, 117, 127, 128 language: of achievement, 86; appropriation of “illegal” term, 70; English-only services, 40; exclusion through, 29, 84–85, 89–91; of family, 153; ideology, 227n6; Latinidad and, 223n9; in Latino identity, 64, 67, 68, 69; learning, 34–35, 74; moralizing, 103; slang use and stereotypes, 74 la rampa students, 155–59, 239n8, 239n9, 239n17 la sangre llama, 76–77 Latina graduates, 192fig Latin American immigration patterns, 37 Latina women, stereotypes of, 67–68, 79, 91–92, 125, 193–94, 223n16 Latinidad: conceptualizations of, 63–68, 80, 179, 225n29; family and, 153; presenting, 222n8; pride in, 191, 192fig, 193; stigma of, 115, 117; through family ties, 76–77; youth self-perceptions of, 75, 81, 111 Latino/a term, 64 Latino identity, 63–64, 66–68, 77, 80, 145– 46, 201n1 Latino media gap, 206n29 Latino parenting, 118–19, 122, 124–25, 129 Latino respectability politics, 14, 15, 65 Latino stereotypes, negative: about education, 100; about pregnancy, 91; in admissions essays, 97; concerns about becoming, 166; encountering, 162; Latino threat narrative, 68–71; refuting, 101, 102, 117, 119, 188–89; reinforcing, 179 Latino stereotypes of men, 72, 74 Latino threat narrative, 8–9, 15, 68–71, 80, 102, 205n28 Latin@ term, 64 Latinx term, 64, 201n1 Lee, Catherine, 19 Leinaweaver, Jessaca, 76 linked fate, 163, 166, 189, 241n29 Liz: author’s friendship with, 24; in case management meeting, 142; as like a relative, 152–53; on Valentine’s Day, 169; debriefing skits with, 92; Effective Communication skits initiated by, 86, 137–38; facilitating student debate, 82–84; initiating Duck Duck Goose, 69–70; initiating Succeeders at Hickory Heights High

index School, 56; interviews with, 26; leading after school programs, 49; at parent information session, 78; on scholarship committee, 97; Succeeders program coordinator, 2 Los Angeles, 38 Lutz, Catherine, 120 Luke, 40–41 Lupita: assessing Nashville on immigrant welcome, 43; on college admissions, 99–101; college essay of, 116, 158; college graduation of, 193; describing Gilead High School, 51, 58; education as liberation, 188–90; on Latino stereotypes, 69, 71; on meaning of Latinidad, 67; sibcare of, 135–37, 140–41 magnet schools, 135, 136, 140 majority-minority learners, 47, 51 manual labor stereotypes, 72, 117, 127–28, 234n14, 234n15 marginalization, 13, 35, 44–45, 166, 189 Marikay, 139 Marina, 119–21 Marisela, 162 Mateo, 2, 8, 10–11 McAdams, Dan, 104 McCann, Mrs., 51, 55–57, 78, 137, 221n67 Mead, Margaret, 27, 82 media campaigns, 121 Melissa, 39–40, 43–44, 105, 164–65, 169 membership: judgment of, 14–15; making of, in schools, 45; redefining, 133, 139; terms of, 42, 77–78, 110, 116, 130, 149, 163, 219n50 meritocracy: as cause of social separation, 173; in definitions of success, 4, 16, 80, 84–85, 128, 154; immigration and, 18–19, 132, 166; individualism in, 88; national membership and, 185; persistence of, 168–69 metalinguistic labor, 85 methodology, research, 22–27 Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS): bilingual students in, 219n53; diversity in, 58; graduation rates of, 52, 53tab; resource distribution in, 46–47; underserving immigrant students, 45–46; teachers in, 35 Mexico: Alejandro from, 74, 75, 117; author’s family in, 24; Carlos from, 143; Javier from, 77; Jim’s family from, 126–28;

285

Melissa’s parents from, 39; Pedro from, 66; Perla from, 149–50; students in research from, 25; students’ parents from, 38; US-Mexico border, 10 Millerton, Ms., 1, 34–35, 37, 40, 169, 172 minorities. See moral minorities mixed-status families, 1, 132, 141–43, 147–48, 187 model minorities, 15, 56, 73, 84, 109, 157 money, 74, 83 moral failings, perceptions of, 11, 119, 155 moral ideas, formation of, 120 morality: connection to success, 91, 100, 128; definitions, 203n14; of education, 91, 116; indicated by speech, 86–87, 90; of parental care, 120, 121; responsibility and, 88; understandings of through skits, 138 moral majority, 227n3 moral minorities: in admissions essays, 98–103, 105; becoming through success, 179; definition, 84; Emma and Jim as, 164; performance of being, 86–87, 89, 93–94, 129–30 moral personhood: claiming for family, 125, 129, 183; claiming through religious belief, 102; connection to education, 65, 115; connection to language, 90; connection to success and belonging, 104–5; criteria for, 103; Janitza’s relationship to, 194; of Latino peers, 154; as meeting family obligations, 153; recognized through care, 174, 175; shared with la rampa students, 158; tied to success and belonging, 10–12, 88–89; widening scope of, 20 moral transformation of education, 17 moral values in belonging, 5, 8–10, 84–85, 105, 118 motherhood, 123, 125, 193–94, 234n17, 234n19 mothers, 118, 120, 123, 125, 193–94 multiculturalism, 48, 66 Muslim ban, 182, 242n4 Muslims, 206n31 mutuality, 110 narratives of belonging, 6–7 narratives of failure, 11 narratives of success, 103–5 Nashville (musical soap opera), 36 Nashville, Tennessee: attitudes toward immigrants in, 38–39, 215n15; background

286

index

Nashville, Tennessee (continued) on, 33–36; cultural politics of, 28, 35; demographic changes in, 37, 38, 216n31; desegregation of schools, 219n52; diverse schools of, 58, 217n43; economic growth of, 36–37, 59; experiences of belonging in, 59–60; history of, 213n8, 213n9, 215n15; immigrant reception in, 39–44, 60, 220n58; immigrant students underserved in, 45–46; immigration in, 9, 37–39; politics in, 216n32; protests in, 186fig; as site of study, 1; success-focused culture of, 56; success of immigrants in, 113–14; turning point in welcoming, 43 Natalia, 73, 75, 90–91 nationalist curricula, 44 nationality, 17, 224n25, 224n26, 225n28 national membership: built on families, 149, 153; earning for parents, 111, 115, 125, 129; heritability of, 76; history of, 178–79; moralization of, 113; parenting and, 119; via higher education, 14, 85, 92, 99, 101, 185, 189–90; whiteness and, 208n43; youth involved in creating, 184 national substance, 76–77 nativism: challenge of for immigrant families, 130; of Donald Trump, 8; of early 2000s, 40; as form of exclusion, 3, 110; history of, 182–83, 202n5; resisting, 80; Succeeders’ experiences of, 101, 125, 184 neighborhoods, 43 neoliberalism, 88, 208n39 Neveah, 58, 95, 101–2, 161, 185–87, 193 new destinations, 9 New England University, 142 Newman, Katherine, 88 Newmantown State University, 162 New York Times, 36 nonprofit organizations, 49, 221n61 nonprofit-school partnerships, 49, 220n60 nuclear family, 19 Obama, Barack, 10, 178, 181–82 obligations: morality of meeting, 153; of parents to children, 123; rejecting, 235n31; resulting from immigration, 233n3; of youth to immigrant parents, 112, 118, 122, 124, 129–30, 180, 191; of youth to siblings, 134 obstacles, triumph over, 94–96, 101 opportunities, equality of, 45, 165 Ortiz, Mr., 135

Ortiz, Mrs., 135 otherness, 158 Paco, 193–94 Pallares, Amalia, 149 Paloma, 193–94 Pamela, 160–61, 167–68, 193 parental care, 110–11, 118–19, 120, 122, 133, 154 parental pride, 111, 114–15, 117, 124, 127 parent-child relationships, 123–24 parenting, expectations of, 118–20, 122, 124 parents, immigrant: moral value of, 121, 124; outreach and engagement to, 46, 78–79, 219n55; stigma around, 119; teacher perceptions of, 48 parents of Succeeders: achievements of, 114; attending outreach sessions, 78–79; inclusion of, 110, 133; parenting of, 123; worth of, 118–19, 180 Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), 48 Pedro, 66, 102–3, 134–35, 137 peer support, 20–21, 154, 170, 173 Pelosi, Nancy, 18 Pérez Huber, Lindsay, 11–12 performance-based deservingness, 7, 105, 159, 179 Perla, 16, 122, 146–50, 193 personal choices, 122 personal statements. See college admissions essays personal stories, 93–96, 98–99 Philipose, Liz, 158 pleasure, 171 politeness, 87 political action, 21–22, 185–86 political rhetoric, 18 pregnancy, 68–69, 74, 79, 91–92, 100–101, 160–61 See also reproduction pride in ethnic identity, 63–64 Public Charge Rule, 207n35 public schools. See schools, public Puerto Rico, 75–76, 83, 224n25 race, graduation rates by, 53tab racial hierarchies, 11, 74 racialized speech, 90 racial politics, 178 racial profiling experiences, 97 racism: American Dream ignoring, 3, 14; as an excuse, 98; anti-Black, 89; experiences of, 58–59, 64, 99; history of, 182–83; in

index moral narratives of belonging, 119; nativist forms of, 8, 11–12, 18, 182; overt, 43; as structural problem, 81; success as a way of avoiding, 65, 72, 84–85, 99–100; as term of exclusion, 178 Raquel, 98–99, 105 Raquelina, 137, 138 Raven, 155–58, 168, 171–72 readiness, college, 96 redemption, 122–29 refugees, 38–39 regeneration, 130 Reina, 146–49 relatedness, 172–73, 176, 212n79 religious salvation, 102 reproduction: of nation and children linked, 18, 124–25; stereotypes about, 68–69, 74, 79, 91–92, 100–101, 160–61 resources, school, 45, 50–51, 188 respectability politics, 14–15, 65 responsibilities: perceptions of, 2, 87–89, 168, 186; for sibcare, 135, 144 responsibility, language of, 88 responsibility, taking, 89, 98, 122, 229n15 responsibility to succeed, 16, 112, 139 Ricardo, 156, 159 Rich, 91 rights to belong, 178–79 Riley, 189 Ríos-Rojas, Anne, 184 Roberto, 97 Rodas, Mr., 127 role models, lacking, 156 role models, Succeeders as, 134, 145, 160–61 Ruiz, Dr., 55, 56 Sandoval, Marta, 117 Sandoval, Timoteo, 117 Santiago, 142 Sarai, 79–80 scapegoating of Latino students, 54–56 Schneider, David, 76 scholarships, 94–98, 152, 231n39, 241n39 schooling, access to, 44–51 school resources. See resources, school schools: academic failings of, 58–59; desegregation of, 219n52; as locations of community, 56–57; student love for, 56–59; unequal resources of, 45, 50–51, 188 schools, public: assimilation in, 218n48; belonging and, 44–51; discovering belonging in, 210n55; diversity in, 58;

287

graduation rates of, 53tab; inclusion in, 13; increasing immigrants in, 34 Sebastián, 43, 63–64, 75, 80, 111, 113–16, 141–43, 193 Secure Communities program, 40, 216n33 segregation, school, 44 segregation, neighborhood, 34, 39 self-awareness, 92, 97–98 self-conception, 12 self-knowledge, 84, 225n1 Serena, 63, 80 Severson, Kim, 36, 37 Shankar, Shalini, 66 Sharon, 38–39 Shugri, 54–55 sibcare: benefits and challenges, 134–36; of Camilia, 144; for future success, 151; in immigrant families, 15, 131–34; morality of, 138; as reason for academic struggle, 156; research on, 236n5; Succeeders attitudes toward, 138, 180; as success itself, 150; valuing, 140 sibcare, educational, 51–52, 134–44, 180 sibling relationships, inequalities in, 132–33, 137, 142–43, 145, 237n9, 237n13 siblings, commitment to, 148, 177 siblings, mutual influence of, 147, 150 siblings as caregivers. See sibcare similarity, perception of potential, 158 skits, 86–92, 98, 137–38, 228n9, 230n18 slang, 74 Smith, Robert C., 15, 112 social change, 130, 180 social class, 83, 116–17 social equality, 99 socialization, 12–13 social mobility, 79, 116, 119, 135–36, 141 social networks, 83 social reproduction, 83, 130 Sofía: author’s friendship with, 24; Effective Communication program of, 86, 137–38; interviews with, 26; as like a relative, 152–53; at parent outreach session, 78; program curriculum development, 49; question about la rampa students, 156; as a role model, 72; on scholarship committee, 97; Succeeders program director, 24; supporting students, 129, 174 solidarity, 166, 189 South College, 99, 140 South Nashville, 33–36, 43, 145 Southwest High School, 174–75

288

index

Spanish language, 59, 67, 75, 77, 127, 223n9 speech, racialized, 90 Standard English, 87, 89, 97, 228n10, 229n11 standardized test scores, 52, 141, 142 statistics, school, 52, 53tab, 54tab stereotypes, 9; debunking through academic achievement, 2, 71, 73–75, 79, 80, 162; dishwasher, 79; gendered nature of, 72; Latino threat narrative, 68–71; positive, of Latinidad, 66–68; reinforcing, 101, 179, 188–89; self-perception through, 65; “spicy,” 67; socially acceptable, 66; strength of, 92; weight of, 160–61 stigma, 70, 91, 102–3, 115, 119–20, 154, 166 street- level bureaucrats, 235n21 stress of striving, 160–62, 240n21 striving: to achieve moral inclusion, 65, 85, 110, 120; act of serving to exclude, 109; as an active process, 91; to avoid stereotypes, 100–101; to be “good people,” 8; on behalf of siblings, 131, 134, 137, 145, 147, 149; benefits of, 240n24; contradictions of, 180–81; definitions, 3, 202n6; to disprove stereotypes, 69–71; as family obligation, 20; listening to experiences of, 159–60; meanings of for Succeeders, 178; as political action, 185–86; rooted in ties to parents, 116–17; stress of, 160–62, 240n21; strivers vs nonstrivers, 157–58; for success, 16; support in, 161; as uncool, 155 structural disadvantages: American Dream ignoring, 11; within immigrant parenting, 119; Latino students experiencing, 156, 165; performing, 95; between siblings, 132–33, 136, 137, 140–43; Succeeders discussing, 83 struggle, experiences of, 113, 160–61, 241n40 struggle, narratives of, 94–96, 101 student advocacy, 93–94 student improvement, 123 student removal from schools, 54–56 students, struggling, 122, 146–47, 166 subtractive schooling, 209n51 Succeeders: academic outcomes of, 54tab; adults supporting, 26; appreciation for parents, 111; avoiding stereotypes, 79–80; backgrounds of, 25–26; becoming family, 152–53, 169–75; belonging strategies of, 12; care for la rampa students, 156–57; celebrations of, 194; college application submissions, 98–99; college essays of,

95, 100; college graduation of, 127, 193; defiance of belonging narratives, 3, 154; domestic situations of, 123–24; enacting exclusion through language, 85; fostering community belonging, 191; high school graduation of, 177–78; home lives of, 123–24; ideas about Latinidad, 65; parents of, 78–79; perceptions of care and family, 20–21, 139; piñatas of, 67fig; pride in identities, 80; reinforcing stereotypes, 72–74, 101, 103, 157–58, 179; reproducing exclusion, 109; as role models for siblings, 134; scholarships for, 96–97; success stories of, 146; understanding of admission essay functions, 95–96; understanding of cultural politics, 60, 69, 92, 156; valuing care and connection, 4, 173–74 Succeeders program: alumni involvement of, 119–20, 121, 162, 168, 191; club sponsor classrooms, 51; functions of, 50–51; history and description of, 49–50; measuring success of, 52; as nonprofit partner, 49; office of, 22, 23fig; program description, 1–3; providing inclusion experiences, 57–58; scholarships, 152; sponsors, 54–55; students disengaging from, 166 success: adhering to narratives of, 101, 103–4; as an obligation to parents, 110; as caring connections, 146, 168, 180; connection to morality, 91, 96, 110, 128, 208n40, 208n41; disrupting ideas of, 20; drive toward, 116–17; as educational success, 114; immigrant parents providing chance for, 121; indicators, 52, 54; individual notions of, 145–46; mentality for, 83; narratives of, 103–4; opportunities for, 82–83, 98; perceptions of in United States, 2–4, 10–11; redefining, 12, 21, 109, 145, 168; responsibility to strive for, 16, 112, 210n63; securing others’, 133, 140, 143; self-knowledge leading to, 84, 97; as a way of avoiding racism, 65, 99–100 superación (betterment), 12, 112 support, from teachers, 57–58 suspension rates, 51 tablet program in MNPS, 46–47 teachers: bias in, 47–48, 59; impressions of school performance, 48–49; supporting students, 57–58, 156, 221n67; teaching practices of, 46; turnover, 51 technology administrators, 46–47

index teen pregnancy, 91–92, 193–94 See also pregnancy Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, 42 terms for identity, 64, 201n1, 202n7, 221n3 test accommodations, 47 time management, 120 tolerance, 42–43 traffic stops, 40 “transition to illegality,” 164 translation services, 46 Trump, Donald, 8, 181–82, 242n4 tuition, affording, 149, 187, 190–91 undocumented immigrants: ban on at University of Tennessee, 181; deportations of, 9–10; difficulty of college acceptance for, 146–47, 174, 185; disclosing status, 94–95, 101–2, 161, 240n25, 240n26; enforcement levels and, 38; family structures of, 113; “illegality” term use, 70; importance of merit for, 167; Isabel as, 131; lack of understanding about status, 164; as majority in Succeeders program, 1; Mr. Rodas as, 127; policies and law against, 40; stigma of, 115, 148–49; struggles in belonging of, 56–57, 241n30; students in Gilead Succeeders club, 164; youth movement, 14–15 universal equality, 102 University of Tennessee, 181

289

unstructured time, 172 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 150, 182 US-Mexico border, 10 US Supreme Court, 10, 181, 187 Valdés, Guadalupe, 16, 145 Valentine’s Day, 169–71, 170fig value, inherent, 117–18 See also worthiness Vanderbilt University, 140 Verett, Ms., 46, 54–55, 155 vernacular moral register, 7, 10, 96, 97, 101, 228n10 violence, in-school, 51 whiteness, 8–9, 65, 99, 208n43, 209n48, 234n17 white supremacy, 182, 242n4 Willen, Sarah, 7 Winders, Jamie, 34 Winkler-Reid, Sarah, 158 women, 11, 67, 72, 112 workplace raids, 182 worthiness of belonging: of family, 117–20, 122, 125, 129, 139; of self, 193; of Succeeders vs. la rampa students, 157–58; through creating family, 153, 184 xenophobia, 1, 40 youth. See Succeeders; individual names

California SerieS in PubliC anthroPology The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is lived beyond the borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public debate—transforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with new insights, new framings. Series Editor: Ieva Jusionyte (Brown University) Founding Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacific University) Advisory Board: Catherine Besteman (Colby College), Philippe Bourgois (UCLA), Jason De León (UCLA), Paul Farmer (Partners In Health), Laurence Ralph (Princeton University), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (UC Berkeley) 1.

Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, by Margaret Lock

2.

Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel, by Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh (with a foreword by Hanan Ashrawi)

3.

Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton (with a foreword by Kenneth Roth)

4.

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, by Paul Farmer (with a foreword by Amartya Sen)

5.

Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, by Aihwa Ong

6.

Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society, by Valery Tishkov (with a foreword by Mikhail S. Gorbachev)

7.

Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison, by Lorna A. Rhodes

8.

Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope, by Beatriz Manz (with a foreword by Aryeh Neier)

9.

Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, by Donna M. Goldstein

10. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century, by Carolyn Nordstrom 11.

Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, by Alexander Laban Hinton (with a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton)

12. Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It, by Robert Borofsky

13. Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson 14.

Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor, by Harri Englund

15.

When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa, by Didier Fassin

16. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World, by Carolyn Nordstrom 17.

Archaeology as Political Action, by Randall H. McGuire

18. Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia, by Winifred Tate 19. Transforming Cape Town, by Catherine Besteman 20. Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks, and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa, by Robert J. Thornton 21. Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg 22. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti, by Erica Caple James 23. Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, by Paul Farmer, edited by Haun Saussy (with a foreword by Tracy Kidder) 24. I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone, by Catherine E. Bolten 25. My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize, by Jody Williams 26. Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction, by Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico 27. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, by Seth M. Holmes, PhD, MD 28. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe, by Ruben Andersson 29. To Repair the World: Paul Farmer Speaks to the Next Generation, by Paul Farmer 30. Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health, by Salmaan Keshavjee (with a foreword by Paul Farmer) 31. Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb, by Rachel Heiman

32. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil, by Erika Robb Larkins 33. When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands, by Shaylih Muehlmann 34. Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA, by Juan Thomas Ordóñez 35. A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering, by Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman 36. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, by Jason De León (with photographs by Michael Wells) 37. Living with Difference: How to Build Community in a Divided World, by Adam Seligman, Rahel Wasserfall, and David Montgomery 38. Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South, by Angela Stuesse 39. Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation, by Deborah A. Boehm 40. They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Injury, Illness, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers, by Sarah Bronwen Horton 41. Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border, by Ieva Jusionyte 42. Lives in Transit: Violence and Intimacy on the Migrant Journey, by Wendy A. Vogt 43. The Myth of International Protection: War and Survival in Congo, by Claudia Seymour 44. Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class, by Noelle Stout 45. Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US–Mexico Border, by Jeremy Slack 46. Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis, by Kimberly Sue 47. Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture, by Andrew Orta 48. The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State, by David Vine 49. The Spirit Ambulance: Choreographing the End of Life in Thailand, by Scott Stonington 50. Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America, by Mara Buchbinder

51.

Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children with Disabilities, by Aaron J. Jackson

52. All I Eat Is Medicine: Going Hungry in Mozambique’s AIDS Economy, by Ippolytos Kalofonos 53. The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America, by Andrea Flores

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