Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship

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Rich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders

As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Every year thousands of youth leave Latin America for the United States and Europe, and often the young migrants are portrayed as invaders and, if able to stay, told to integrate into their new society. Border Thinking asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth.

Working in the United States, Spain, and El Salvador, Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Seplveda III use participatory action research to collaborate with these young people to analyze how they make sense of their experiences in the borderlands. Dyrness and Seplveda engage them in reflecting on their feelings of belonging in multiple placesincluding some places that treat them as outsiders and criminals. Because of their transnational existence and connections to both home and host countries, diaspora youth have a critical perspective on national citizenship and yearn for new forms of belonging not restricted to national borders. The authors demonstrate how acompaamientospaces for solidarity and community-building among migrantsallow youth to critically reflect on their experiences and create support among one another.

Even as national borders grow more restricted and the subject of immigration becomes ever more politically fraught, young peoples identities are increasingly diasporic. As the so-called migrant crisis continues, change in how citizenship and belonging are constructed is necessary, and urgent, to create inclusive and sustainable futures. In Border Thinking, Dyrness and Seplveda decouple citizenship from the nation-state, calling for new understandings of civic engagement and belonging.

Reviews

"Border Thinking offers critical insights into how Latinx youth speak back to racializing, colonial discourses that frame them as outsiders. It is theoretically sophisticated, engaging, and methodologically innovative, offering new insights into participatory methodologiesbut its true contribution lies in how it reveals young peoples creative imaginings of transnational forms of citizenship and belonging that are too often silenced by integration initiatives focused on national assimilation."Reva Jaffe-Walter, author of Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth

"A notable title in an age when border restrictions have become near-absolute."The Know, Denver Post

"Dyrness and Seplveda engage in critical methodologies, such as participatory action research and the use of testimonio, to uncover an array of unique but often overlooked perspectives."Anthropology & Education Quarterly

"Scholars interested in action research, transborder, migration, and citizenship studies will find these contributions very helpful."Gender, Place & Culture

"On its face, the book appears to be an excellently written contribution to a specific literature focused on immigration and Latinx youth. But the book is also a contribution to the broader discussion of how societies and communities incorporateor do notpeople from places different than the home context and the crater-sized impacts these seemingly everyday minute choices can have."Great Plains Research

Author Bio

Andrea Dyrness is associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is author of Mothers United: An Immigrant Struggle for Socially Just Education (Minnesota, 2011).

Enrique Seplveda III is assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is coeditor of Global Latin(o) Americanos: Transoceanic Diasporas and Regional Migrations.