This article explores the role of profanity and graphic humor in the bilingual wordplay of Latin@ middle school students. We highlight the creativity, skill, and communicative competence embedded in this transgressive wordplay, revealing how these youth employed profanity and graphic humor to index ethnic solidarity and construct bilingual…

In this article, I add to the critique of the myth of the American Dream by examining ethnographically the ways its dominant discourse is circulated to Khmer American middle school children of migratory agricultural workers. Drawing on social theories of discourse, I juxtapose the ideology embedded in the American Dream Discourse with the…

Based on a one-and-a-half-year ethnographic study of a desegregated urban middle school, this article investigates the ways in which administrators, students, and teachers multiply constructed race through a network of policies, pedagogies, and practices. Using a framework of cultural production theory and critical race theory, the article not…

As Mexican immigrants move from urban centers to rural, mountainous regions of the U.S. Southwest, their children are often measured by mainstream middle-class cultural ideals that value athleticism, extroversion, and English language proficiency. Based on a year-long ethnographic study undertaken in 1998-1999, this article explores how newly…

Based on a two-year ethnographic study at an urban middle school, this article describes the power that images created by and about Puerto Rican girls hold in shaping their schooling experiences. Using a black, critical, feminist framework, I show how dichotomizing the sexuality of Puerto Rican females against their intellectual development…