This study investigates 1 middle level student of mixed heritage and his siblings as they assimilated and achieved within a small urban community. The main case focuses on 1 adolescent's experiences both in and out of schools. How this middle grade student identified and was treated had vast effects on his educational performance, adding insights to the racial and cultural identity complexities of adolescents of mixed heritage. The ethnographic case study draws on interpretivist methodology, joining writing as inquiry and analysis through a poststructuralist perspective. A multicultural framework emerges by which the identity of the student can be better understood. The use of this framework, with reconstructions of identity toward social justice, also elucidates the student's identity experiences and may do so for other adolescents of mixed background. Inasmuch, it further demonstrates the strong yet contradictory relationship between assimilation and achievement to that of multicultural identity constructs. (Contains 1 figure.)