This practitioner inquiry article examines the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in the U.S. Co-written by two of the youth who participated in this research, alongside the fellow immigrant activist who designed and carried out the year-long study, this paper analyzes a subset of qualitative data from…

Although research on minority youth has established the value of coethnic spaces for safe ethnic identity exploration, research has seldom examined how youth in these spaces draw ethnic boundaries or offered appropriate frameworks addressing boundary-setting. This study uses Berry's acculturation framework to explore ethnic boundary-setting within…

This article draws from a 23-month ethnographic study conducted in mixed-status Mexican homes to detail the particular methodological concerns that arise when conducting research within these legally complex and vulnerable families. Specifically, the analysis illustrates when and why undocumented parents in one focal family asked the ethnographer…

In this article, we grapple with possibilities and dilemmas of activist scholarship in the struggle for education justice and political power. As activists and scholars, our social movement praxis seeks to produce knowledge that shifts the dominant neoliberal policy discourse, exposes racism inherent in neoliberal education policies, and supports…

Policy around the legal status and social rights of the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants is unresolved, making it imperative that PK-12 schools and educators prepare for challenges to undocumented students' educational access. In 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appeared near an elementary school, which required…

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) and arts-informed approaches reflect a source of critical resistance at the intersection of theory and practice (praxis). Our discussion draws upon "Mestizo Arts & Activism" ("MAA"), a participatory action research collective made up of young people who focused their research on the educational rights of…

This paper engages with conversations with two teachers who each build socially just pedagogies and engage in minor gestures in response to the socio-educational-political reality they were confronted with -- namely, a pupil disappearing from the classroom when her parents' application for immigration was rejected. In an assemblage connecting the…

Stella M. Flores writes about how she learned to participate in the American political process through lessons from her immigrant family. As a quantitative scholar, she documents the commitment to rigorous, evidence-based research on equity noting that not all datasets are without politics or bias. From this perspective, the story of the Latino in…

This paper draws from four sets of four in-depth interviews and one subsequent focus group to examine how undocumented Mexicana students navigate identities and the meanings of race, gender, class, and legal status. We mobilize a critical race theory framework to center and explore the content of students' counterstories. While majoritarian…