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Andrea Flores, "The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America" (UC Press, 2021)
01:07:49
An interview with Andrea Flores
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Podcast Intro Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jonathan Cortez
Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Latino Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Jonathan Cortez, the producer and host of today's episode. And today we'll be talking with Dr. Andrea Flores about her recently published book, the How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming what It Means to Belong in America, published by the University of California Press in 2021. Professor Andrea Flores is currently an assistant professor of education at Brown University. She's a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the anthropology of education, and her research interests primarily center on how education shapes immigrant and immigrant descendants, sense of self transitions to adulthood, and social belonging in the United States. Andrea, thank you so much for being on air with us today and welcome to the show.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Thanks for having me.
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Jonathan Cortez
I would wonder I was wondering if we could begin the interview by you telling us a bit about yourself, perhaps telling us a bit about where you grew up, where you went to graduate school, you know, who you worked with, and what were you inspired by. You Know, how did you come to be interested in the topic of Latino immigrant youth perceptions and belonging in educational institutions?
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Dr. Andrea Flores
So I grew up in the Boston, was born and grew up in the Boston area and, and.
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On my mom's side of my family. She is a first generation college student born to working class white Americans, Irish Americans and Canadian Americans. My grandmother, who passed away in 20, 20, 21.
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She was the daughter of an immigrant from Ireland and French Canada. And I saw in my mom kind of what it means to value education and what it means in a family way to do so, that how it's connected to these journeys of migration and settlement in the United States. My dad is an immigrant from Guatemala. He came here for educational training in medicine, met my mom and they stayed here. And so my interests in education and migration kind of come through my own family history and seeing it from my dad that I have a kind of cultural, linguistic heritage connection to folks from Latin America as a Latina woman. But seeing that the struggles of migrants in the past and in the present are similar.
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And that education becomes this kind of crucible through which each successive wave of immigrants kind of makes their way in the United States. So I was curious to see how that was happening in particular, being from the Northeast, we know a lot about migration in places like the Northeast or the Southwest or Florida, but we know a lot less about how people experience these transitions into. From migration and into educational institutions in places like the South. And so I was curious how, without the kind of.
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Long standing ethnic solidarity networks, how are people navigating these things that my family navigated in a city that was used to Irish and Canadian immigrants, or in a context for my dad coming to a place that knew a lot about migration generally. And I kind of. So there was that kind of personal angle of coming to the research. I studied at Brown in anthropology, but before then I worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at a place called Project Zero, working for Dr. Howard Gardner and Dr. Kerry James on projects related to young people ethics and new media. And it was my second job out of college. And it was a really transformative experience to me where I knew the role of education in my family and how that led to how my family saw itself. But here I saw it in a broader context about what the role of educational institutions are and how young people think about themselves and what major social role schools can play in brokering senses of belonging, in understanding oneself.
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And so that inspired me to pursue graduate work in anthropology, bringing together an interest that I had in kind of people in migration with this interest in schools. And so.
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That'S how I came to the project, or at least the background to it.
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Jonathan Cortez
Yeah, no, that's fantastic. I love to hear how so much of your personal history influenced how you saw the work. And I think you're so right. And your book makes it so clear that educational institutions have so much to do with how and who belongs in the nation. And I think that, you know, I'm interested in, you know, belong is in the, in the title of the book, so I'm interested in how you set that up in the introduction. Right. What does belonging have to do with. With not only educational institutions, but academic achievement broadly?
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Dr. Andrea Flores
I think in some ways, right. Belonging is this fundamental part of what makes us human. Right. It's about feeling like you are valued, that you have a community. And when you have a community where you feel valued, you're able to, I think, reach your potential. And so that's where it matters in school, right. Is if you feel like you are a respected member for whom there are expectations, and not just expectations, but high expectations, you can meet them. Right. And so because schools are often, as I mentioned in the introduction, they're often the first institutions that migrant families have sustained contact with in their new national home. Right. So it's this first place where.
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People are coming into sustained cross cultural contact. And that can be kind of an imprinting of how you feel about your place in the nation because it is a national institution. Right. It's not the practice of before, you know, you get to the real world. It is the real world.
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John Dewey, you know, to prove my educational cred here, right. He said.
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Education is not preparation for life, it's life itself. Or something to that effect. Right. And so I think we need to think about schools as not the place where we.
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Get ready to belong, but a place where we do belong or not, and that that has consequences for how we construct the nation and who is a success or not.
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Jonathan Cortez
Right, Right. I'm drawn to page five, where you say belonging isn't limited to a legal category, but is something that is reckoned in daily life through our contact with others and places like our neighborhoods and institutions like our churches, our workplaces and our schools. Right. Belonging and the construction of belonging is happening every day and especially in our schools. And I think you do it so well with thinking about how Latino immigrant youth are negotiating belonging in their own schools. So I'm curious as to like, bring us to the topic. Who are the succeeders?
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So I.
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In preliminary fieldwork for this project, I was figuring out what I was going to do. I was talking with a lot of different nonprofit groups. I wasn't sure exactly what group. I knew I wanted to work with young people based on my work with Project Zero, but I wasn't quite sure how that would. What form that would take. And I, you know, going to various community meetings, I got to know the women who I describe in the book under the pseudonyms Liz and Sophia. I got to know them and started doing some ACT standardized test prep with the group and just saw that it was this quiet, you know, under the radar nonprofit that was going into public schools in Nashville that had high Latino enrollment rates but low graduation rates. The program was run by these two women, but touches touched the lives of about 500 students a year. And they were a mix of young people who were high achievers, run of the mill students and low achievers. But they were all there to kind of grasp at education and what it meant to them. Most of these young people were.
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About half of them were undocumented young people.
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Another sizable chunk had family members who were undocumented or came from what we call mixed status families. And the other half were citizen or documented youth. And primarily they were from. Their families were from Mexico and Central America, which have been the major sending regions and nations that have gone to the Southeast in the last 20 or 30 years or so. And what was remarkable about these young people was that I think we hear a lot about the extraordinary kid who gets in, the undocumented kid who gets into Harvard, or.
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The flip side of that coin about.
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Undocumented gang members or dropouts. But here were kids who were kind of, as I said, under the radar, just quietly transforming their communities and, and grasping at education in a way to kind of make their families lives better and to contribute to their community. And that this was a story that we don't often see because it's not the exceptional case. But I wanted to draw attention to the fact that these young people are remarkable. Right. And that the quiet work being done on the educational periphery matters to all of us and to what's happening in our schools, but also what's happening in our nation.
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Jonathan Cortez
Yeah. And I think you're exactly right that it's so important to understand how these students are redefining and shaping what it means to, to care for others. And we'll get into that. But I'm curious to. In order to like, set the foundation for our listeners, you know, what, what, what, what do you make of. And how do you Define things like the Latino threat, the American dream, and, and, and respectability politics that will come up in, in our interview later.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah, sure. So you've, you've mentioned some of the major kind of topics that I'm grappling with in the book. And so building on Leo Chavez's conception of the Latino threat, right, where we see how the demographic transition away from.
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A white imagined white nation, right? Kind of ignoring the black white racial binary, but looking at how the US has been defined.
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As this kind of white, settler, colonialist nation.
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That in the Latino thread, in the, in the media that I kind of alluded to before about Latinos as gang members or dropouts or teen pregnancy rates, right? Here we see how Latinos are positioned as this problematic turn away from whiteness, away from this imagined cultural core built in white, Protestant, mainline, main, kind of a mainline view of white Americans.
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And looking at how these young people, seeing how these young people get constructed as this threat, right? That they are potential delinquents or criminals in waiting, welfare cheats, et cetera, right? And so that this is, and part of that is created in the media.
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By our politicians, most clearly, but predating my work with the succeeders most clearly in Donald Trump's harmful rhetoric, especially as I mentioned in the book, like when he announced his candidacy for presidency, right, it was about Mexicans being rapists.
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And so that's kind of looking at this, this kind of naughty ball of stereotypes that get propagated at the highest levels. And also, you know, every day that these students encounter in their classrooms, when teachers say, like, oh, well, you don't belong in this math class, that doesn't, you know, go unnoticed by the students, that they might be the only, you know, brown face in the classroom.
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And so that's kind of how I'm using the Latino thread, is looking at how young people make sense of those constructions of themselves as less than desirable to the nation.
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When I'm looking at questions of the American dream, in particular, I'm looking at how this, you know, when we think about the American dream, it's right, the idea that an individual can triumph in the United States due to their own hard work, right? Or their various other good kind of very moralized.
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Capabilities, like someone who's able to work hard and put off immediate gratification, and they become a success, right? And that success becomes a sign not just of achievement, but they have the right stuff to be a valued American, right? And so that looking at that narrative, the American dream against the Latino threat, right, we see that this is powerful brew that's going to motivate these young people to achieve in school. Right. Again, school, not as the.
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Practice ground for success, but here, you know, a very clear, like a college student is a good. Has achieved. Right. A high school graduate is a graduate, not a dropout. Right. I mean, even the language around dropping out, rather than being pushed out, for example. Right. We see how we construct those who fail in our educational systems and not that their educational systems failed them.
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And so the other what's. What's kind of across both of those topics is this notion of respectability of like performing this type of hyper successful, moral Latino self that deserves the respect of those who don't respect them. Right. And that can be.
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Teachers. Right. It can be. You know, I think students aren't necessarily looking for Donald Trump to respect them. Right. But they want to be seen as, you know, as mattering. Right. That gets back to that question of belonging, that feeling like you're seen as a valuable person. Right. And what I find in the book. Right. Is that sometimes that collides with having to degrade what it is to be Latino for these young people.
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Jonathan Cortez
Yeah. I think one thing you do so well in the book, and we'll definitely touch on it later, is, is when they're kind of negotiating respectability and what it means to be respected and claim respect, it's often in relationship to.
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What is the Latino threat. Right. What is the negative stereotype surrounding Latino identity in popular culture? And I think you do that incredibly well.
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So going into chapter one, part one is context of belonging to chapter one titled A City of Living and Learning in Music City. You touched briefly on why Nashville was so important to you as a location in the US South. But what is happening in Nashville for the last few decades that makes this such a rich. Such a rich, rich location.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So I think, you know.
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Right. We see. We see a lot that people say what happens in California, prestigious. What's going to happen in the nation? And so. But I think we could also look at a place like Nashville and say, what happens in Nashville? Nashville actually matters for where the nation is going as well. Right. So based, you know, the economic boom of the 1990s in places like Nashville, where the south was going from a period of, you know, out migration through the 1970s to now, you know, large companies having their base there kind of under the radar. Especially Nashville, which has quite a few of the managed healthcare, biggest managed healthcare corporations in the United States. It has regional and national headquarters for various Fortune 500 companies. And so as these, it started to draw a lot of internal migrants and.
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Industries like tourism and construction.
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Needed other types of migrants, right? And so people who had originally settled in places like California and Texas that had kind of.
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You know, a tight labor market, people started moving to the south and Nashville was one of those places. And then it was as news got out about this being kind of a place with low cost of living, high availability of work.
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There was primary migration coming from Latin America as well. And so the population kind of goes up dramatically to 10% of the population of the city.
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In 10 years, right. From 1990 to 2000, so to being about 65,000 people in the city. And what's interesting is to think about what does that mean in a place, again, where we think about the Latino threat and whiteness as definitional to American ness, right. What is the presence of a new minority group do locally? And what, you know, talking to locals, seeing that there was an initial kind of ignoring of the presence of Latino people in Nashville to hostility in the early 2000s, and that corresponds with, you know, going from solitary workers to families and students going into the schools, right, where that initial contact is between.
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Local populations and foreign born ones. And due to incredible activism by local.
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Migrants and their allies.
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The city went from a period where it was.
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Kind of highly nativist, including trying to pass legislation to make city services English Only in 2008 to one that was, you know, in 2012, President Obama came to Nashville to say what a great job they're doing in terms of creating a welcoming community. Right. And so.
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As this, you know, and as I was doing the research there, Nashville was kind of having a moment, which it still is, but where it puts on kind of this show of, you know, honky tonks and bachelorette parties, and I believe the NFL draft was there recently, where it seems like this fun tourist destination, but underneath the surface there, there's this story of migration and story of remaking the United States, where the population is changing. And the story of the city's success is in part due to the labor of these migrants who came in and are working the hospitality jobs and the construction jobs and the contestations over those their children's rights puts into question what does it mean to be a city of success, right? And do we measure it through the tourist dollars that come through or the fact that Latino high school students aren't graduating? And.
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How does a city like Nashville that's growing, how does it choose to invest or not in its population? It's kind of looking at Kind of that chapter tries to set up.
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The educational problems in the city. Right. That puts itself as this growing, fastest growing place or whatever, but that, you know, the college readiness indicators by things like standardized tests or graduation rates are. Are telling a different story, that the city is failing its most vulnerable residents.
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Jonathan Cortez
Right. And I think I'm going to read here from page 38 where you write, 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. And I'm so interested here because later on in the book, you talk about one student where, you know, her dad had left whenever she was 11 years old to work in, like, the Northeast, and he only came back for Christmas. Right. But it was. It's. It's cheaper to live in Nashville.
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And. And it presented a kind of. A kind of homeliness that perhaps other, you know, major metropolitan destinations didn't.
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Yeah. And so, so, so thank you so much for. For laying all that out for us.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
And so, yeah, I mean, for that young person, too. Like I think I mentioned in the book, like, her dad comes home twice the year that she graduates high school. Right. So it's like that was the dream achieved. That's why he went to the Northeast to work, so that his daughter could have those opportunities, have a backyard. Right. And not live in a cramped urban area. Like, she lived in a, you know.
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Post Post World War II kind of starter home. That. That wouldn't have been possible for them if they had stayed in the north, but came at tremendous cost to the family interpersonally. Right, right, right.
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Jonathan Cortez
So in chapter two, you spend the first part kind of outlining how the six years, through their own ethno racial identity, negotiated what Latinidad was and is.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Right.
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Jonathan Cortez
Can you talk to us a bit about how they understood their Latino identity?
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So I.
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You know, this idea of the Latino threat that we. We talked about, right. Of these negative stereotypes.
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Those were important to these young people because a lot of the ways that they were defining themselves as Latino young people were saying, I'm not this. Right. I'm. I'm not a gang member. I'm not gonna drop out. I'm, you know.
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I'm not, as one student said, I'm not that kind of Latino person. Right. So a lot of defining their Latinidad had to do with the negative depictions of it that they encountered on tv, in the news from the teachers, et cetera. Another kind of strand of it was in some ways celebrating.
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The kind of most easily graspable notions of what it means to be Latino that, you know, one student said, we have a lot of culture, right? Like this idea that, you know, music, food, the kind of like, easy, multicultural.
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Like badges of honor in a way. Right. That, like, that were permitted in their school. Right. With things like I start that chapter talking, or in that chapter I talk about International Day where students brought snacks, wore costumes.
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Did dances, had little posters about their nations that they were representing. And so it's all a very, like, permitted form of difference, right. Not one that talks about, you know, American imperialism in Latin America or, you know, anti blackness within Latin American communities. Right. But one that says, you can bring your food and your dances and your music and that's enough. Right. And so I also think that we could think about that in terms of the Latino threat that, like, this was what was permitted. And if you don't want to define your Latinidad in terms of a Latino threat, defining it in terms of celebratory aspects can be protective for you. Right. I don't want to say that those aren't valid, Right. Because those are part of the ways I define being Latina. Right. Or like, the foods I eat and the music I like.
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But we also have to understand them in that context of.
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Negativity. The other way that I kind of try to focus in here is how they think about it in terms of their families. Right. And I think this is a major form of. Of that's kind of a major corrective to. To the negative images that they encounter where it's about being connected to your family. Right. And it's, you know, one student, when I asked, you know, like, define what does it mean to be Latino to you? She was very upfront and saying, it means you have a parent from Latin America. Right. And so it was about kind of forging this connection to these other countries. And if we think about a United States that's incredibly nativist.
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And demands a singular type of loyalty, asserting your connection to another country is.
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A radical act. And so these young people were very proud of their family's nation of origin or where they migrated from. And I think that that was another way that they kind of made sense of who they are.
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But I think motivating a lot of their academic striving.
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Was unfortunately, these negative depictions, which, again, speaks to thinking about how we construct who's valuable. Right. And how that's drawn on ethno racial lines.
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Jonathan Cortez
Yeah. I find it fascinating how when you were talking and writing when. When I was reading the International Day.
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Part of this chapter. And you even make the connection that this International day mimics what's happening at the sort of citywide level of an acceptable multiculturalism.
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That is like, this is proper, this is good, this is acceptable. As you said, it's digestible.
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And so I'm so interested in continuing this line of thinking as to, like, what, what. What gets played out as good and bad Latino? What gets how in these specific educational institutions, how do these succeeders register what is a good Latino and a bad Latino? And here I'm thinking about.
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I'm thinking here about duck, duck, goose, if maybe you can talk about. About that game as well.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So in the. The duck, duck, goose game, it was kind of a getting to know you activity that students were doing where.
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You know, a caller would yell out like, some. Some fact about that the students might have in common, right? Like, and that students would get up, run around, and try to sit in a new spot.
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That. And then the person who was left out, it would then become a new caller and name out a new characteristic. And so students were naming things like bands they liked, clothes they were wearing, how many siblings they had. And then one student got up and said, if you're illegal using the I word. And, you know, it kind of cast a pallor over the group. And kids got up.
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And then Liz, the program coordinator, kind of looked at me nervously, and then she interrupted to become the new caller and said, you know, who wants to go to college? Then every student got up and ran around, right? And so I included that in the book because status became immigration status, and it's. And its stigmatization was really important to these young people to kind of the things that were around Latinidad, often, you know, whether or not someone had citizenship status there was the conception that all Latinos were undocumented, right? And that when we've seen kind of not just the criminalization of.
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Of undocumented status, but the negative moralizations around it, right? That this. That someone who would migrate without papers is somehow morally bankrupt, right? That that was ever present in the minds of these young people, and they look to counteract that general perception of all Latinos as immoral.
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Through appealing to the moral value that we invest in education as a society, right? That. That this person cares about this and they're doing it the right way and they're going to be a contributing member of society because they're getting their education, right?
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And so I think that, that, you know, that the way that young people are responding to that, right, of like, what. What it means to be a good Latino or not are.
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Rooted in these notions of illegality, its relationship to morality for young. I talk in the book a little bit, too, about another thing that Leo Chavez already did, right. Which is talking about the kind of reproductive politics, right. That for young women, there was a particular stigma around.
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Early and often being pregnant.
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That was something else they were responding to. One girl was very.
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Adamant, saying, like, I'm not gonna get pregnant. Right. But again, I try to point out and. And when I asked her, like, what does it mean to be a good Latino? She was like, it means being. It means you're not undocumented. It means you're gonna go to school. It means you're not gonna get pregnant. It means you're gonna be a professional. Right? And so it was just everything that the stereotypes are not. Right. But that becomes very tricky, as I point out, when. When, as one other young woman pointed out, she wanted to be the first to graduate college and was high school, was afraid of getting pregnant like all her cousins had, Right. So these stereotypes, some, you know, if someone is a young mother, right, that can be your cousin. And do you think of your cousin who you grew up with and love? Do you think of them as immoral and a stereotype, or do you think of them as your cousin that you love? Right. And so young people were kind of grappling with that as they kind of sorted out how they would frame their aspirations.
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And also. Sorry, go ahead. I think that that was ultimately, this question of who's a good and bad Latino wasn't an abstract one. It was one that was built on how do you think about yourself versus your cousin? Making it a much grayer area.
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Jonathan Cortez
Yeah. I mean, on page 64, you write as they. Speaking about the succeeders, as they strove to distinguish themselves as proper Latinos. These efforts also illustrated how those most vulnerable to exclusion from belonging can reinforce its limited terms. End quote. Right. And thinking about how this, like, the succeeders were linking academic achievement with belonging, and through that, reinforced terms of belonging. Right. Success, you say again? Right. Success became a way towards belonging. And I'm so interested in this snippet of Ms. Hinojosa's presentation at the parental gathering. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.
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Dr. Andrea Flores
So this was a mom of a student who. This was kind of at the beginning of the school year when they're trying to drum up people to come to the club. And at this one high school, they brought in a mom to talk to the other parents, and she, you know, had had a son who had difficulty, and they helped him get into college. And she had two other sons who were, you know, on their way, and she was, like, nervously reading off her script. And then she kind of, like, just decided, I'm just going to talk to you mom to mom, but was saying, I tell my kids, don't be a dishwasher. I already have one. I am one. Right. And so it wasn't just like that. Students were seeing their.
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You know, their cousins in this. In these kind of terms. Right. Or people that they loved and knew who didn't conform to it. Like, their own family members were kind of saying that. Right. Like she's saying, don't do the unvalued work. I do. Right.
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Don't be the stereotype. I am. Right. Which, you know, so it's something that's coming from a bunch of different angles where we see kind of the harmful internalization of that. It's also the story of, you know, parents wanting more for their children. It made me think about the fact that my mom would always say that her father, who was a factory worker, would say to them, you don't want to end up like me. Right. You don't want to be in a factory. And, you know, that's a. Obviously, it's a way that parents are trying to motivate their young person, but it also is degrading the value of that care work, and that arduous physical labor. Right. That Mrs. Hinojosa is doing as a dishwasher who works many hours in a Mexican restaurant. Right. And I think that those moments are ones where young people have to think, who. Who do I value and why? And if I'm holding myself up as, look at me, I'm the student, and I did it. What labor does that? What care work does that obscure?
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And I think the critique that these young people make when they say, like I'm doing, we need to see that when they say things like, I'm doing this for my mom to see that as a critique of broader social norms that would criminalize someone like Mrs. Hinojosa or see them in terms of a stereotype and not someone who's making tremendous sacrifices to raise her children.
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Podcast Intro Host
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- [39:37]
Jonathan Cortez
Yeah, and you draw that out so beautifully in the in the third part of the book.
- [39:43]
But chapter three, sort of continuing with this line of line of how the succeeders presented themselves as remarkable and worthy of inclusion.
- [39:54]
In chapter three, you kind of hark more on that and you coin moral minority, which is such a fascinating term and I want to hear more about it.
- [40:04]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah, so I was thinking about these kind of moralized presentations of self that these young people are making in contrast to these stereotypes. And.
- [40:14]
It also came, you know, this is in the context of a college access program, right. So these young people are applying to college and you know, one of the things that you have to do right is Create this curated.
- [40:27]
Applicant profile, right? Whether it's through the essays, through potential interviews, right? Through the. There was one student who wrote over a hundred who applied to over 100 scholarship applications. You know, so it's like all those different presentations of self. Right. And so you're asking these young people to present this coherent narrative of themselves and their achievements or explaining away if there are moments of non achievement. And so when I was talking to students as they were trying to. The essay was often the thing they left last. And they would talk about writing a being Mexican essay that kind of conformed to these damn. Kind of damaging narratives, I think we could say about oh, the struggle of being a migrant or growing up poor.
- [41:17]
Jonathan Cortez
Or.
- [41:21]
Dr. Andrea Flores
The kind of again, the narrative of, in some ways reproducing an American dream narrative of here's this immigrant in poor circumstances who through their own efforts becomes a success and goes to college. Right. And so I coined the term moral minority to kind of look at that type of narrative that young people end up creating where they.
- [41:46]
Where they're emphasizing both their minority status, right. But the, the moral effort it took for them to achieve. Right. To get to the American dream that they're not. And it's, it's playing on, right. The idea of the model minority, right. That the person who can achieve often used to talk about Asian Americans academic achievements in the United States. But also these ideas of the, the, you know, moral minority, moral majority, moral minority, these kind of contestations over.
- [42:18]
Religious conservative movements, which is, you know.
- [42:23]
Which gives it that tone of the concerns with the moral right. But that these young people are presenting themselves again in terms of these particular narratives of respectable Latinidad, right here, that you, that the moral minority is the one who is worthy of access to college and thus full access to a vaunted American institution. Right.
- [42:46]
Jonathan Cortez
And so you sort of observe this in two main ways in this chapter. One is through the effective communication skits. And the other is by being on a panel of a scholarship panel by this, by the succeeders. And so I'm curious how you observed this sort of moral minority figure in both instances.
- [43:09]
Dr. Andrea Flores
So in these effective communication skits that Liz and Sophia were asking students to do, it was designed to really work on students communication with teachers or college admissions officers or sometimes interpersonal communication. And in those skits, how young people interpreted what it meant to be a good communicator, I noticed, layered on to these notions of the moral minority which where in one case a student was like, oh, I misinterpreted this idea and I thought it was about being a good or bad person, right. So there already they've layered communication onto.
- [43:49]
Or the display of certain modes of communication onto moral status. And in the skids, students often adopted.
- [44:02]
A kind of either African American vernacular English or plaquecent, right. To portray the bad communication. Right. So here we see youth actively, you know, racializing good, good and bad minorities.
- [44:17]
And you know, according to normative conceptions.
- [44:23]
And, and here that they would kind of present the students who want to go to school as good folks and that they were often speaking non accented English, right. The student who thought that it was about good or bad people made the decision in her skits to show dropouts as bad.
- [44:49]
And the.
- [44:52]
Non Latino student who sometimes came to club portrayed a, who was a, a young male student. He portrayed a female pregnant student by putting a backpack under his shirt. And she says to him, they, you know, he's dropped out or she has dropped out. And the student who was, who was encountering her says, but you can still be a good person and go to college for your baby. And so that was the way that young people were playing it out to each other, right. These notions and reinforcing it to each other.
- [45:33]
And in the admission and in the scholarship essay.
- [45:39]
And in the broader college admissions essays, generally we see young people performing that notion to gatekeepers, right. And that they have to carefully calibrate that because in, in the case that Succeeders ran its own small scholarship committee and one of the, the women who, who was on it that year, you know, said, oh, I didn't cry this year. Like this wasn't the right type of narrative. You know, she was tired of reading about their experiences of hardship or, you know, performing that being Mexican essay. And that woman's response that she didn't cry this year also made her not want to give money. So it kind of showed how young people have to figure out which audience is going to respond to which narrative. And they practice them with each other, right. In the communication skit. But in the essays, you know, most of the time the being Mexican skit was what schools were looking for, right? And kind of college admissions officers told me that they want to know what makes them different or if they've faced any setbacks. And sometimes, you know, the admissions officers I spoke to were very honest, saying, like, look, if I know a student's undocumented, I can fight for more money for them, but if they don't tell me that, I can't. So there were. And you know, and that admissions officer did do that. But at the same time, it's predicating, you know, receiving that type of moral minority narrative to. To get that help.
- [47:08]
Jonathan Cortez
Right. And you even mentioned one student who, you know, has 10 essays explaining, you know, how. How she is, you know, Hispanic. And so that's, that's, it's really. Yeah, yeah. So, but I mean, there's so much to talk about here, folks. If you, If. If you can buy the book, read the book. It's fantastic. But I want to get into the third part. I want to get into the third part of the book where you really start to see how the succeeders are also pushing against notions of belonging, or rather altering notions of belonging and notions of success and how it's including extended. Extended kin networks. Right. So in chapter four, you talk about their relationship to their parents, and in chapter five, you talk about their relationships to their siblings. And so those are the two chapters I want to focus on moving forward because I think they're. They're really important.
- [47:58]
And so, so I'm really interested, you know, in chapter four where you say, you know, quote, succeeders can also transform what it means to belong. But this can easily be missed because they seem apolitical. However, they transformed their individual position as moral minorities into one of collective good. I found that to be such an important part of your book. And so can you talk more about this transformation into a collective good?
- [48:25]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So I think it kind of in some ways goes back to this, how we define success, right. And its link to. To the American dream and thus belonging in the American nation, that these young people.
- [48:39]
Kind of, as I mentioned, with how they might think about their mom or their cousin as important to them. They also start to see the labor of their parents.
- [48:51]
And those close to them as important to their success. Right. And that their success is not this individual achievement, but the product of collective sacrifice and care. Right. To sustain them and their academic achievements. And so part of that, in the chapter on parents, I kind of look at how young people just make that claim, right? Like, I'm doing this for my mom. My mom gave me this dream. And that those are moments where in sharing their achievement with their parents, they move the needle on what success and belonging can be to be. Not just about what the individual can get, but that the individual is a product of the people around them, and therefore what the individual does, those who supported them do too. Right. And I think that young people were making those claims in small. I mean, I say that they go unnoticed because they seem just related to. Oh, that's What a nice kid, right? Like, oh, they love their mom. But again, when we think about those broader stigmatizations about Latinos and the Latino family, right. That it's this, there's too many of them, right. This demographic threat saying that they value these people in a society that doesn't seem to value them is defiant. Right. And that sort of, you know, the title of that chapter, their Name is Chapter 4 is from a student. He says their name is also written on my diploma. When he talks about his grandfather coming up from Mexico, his dad who had come, you know, had not been home in 20 years to Mexico. And him realizing that this was connected to something bigger than him. And he also had reflected about, you know, his dad was a landscaper. He would talk to the landscapers on his college campus and he started to see how his story of individual achievement was linked to what the other landscapers on campus, what they wanted for their own families. And he started to see kind of solidarity across.
- [51:03]
Across those groups. So that his achievement, as he said, their name is also written on my diploma. Right. And so that's, I think that's important. Right. And I think we should think about that type of everyday social work as something that changes the local communities in which people live, which hopefully adds up. And then with the, with their siblings, I kind of focus on how, especially for older, older siblings, they're often asked to do a lot of caretaking. Right. Because parents are working long hours or their children have better language skills and can interface with their younger siblings. Schools and you know, young people struggled with this responsibility, but they also saw it as a way that they were kind of building their individual success into their siblings success. Right. And creating a broader cemented achievement for their family. But they also started to see their own care work for their siblings, much like they saw the care work their parents gave to them and started to see that as something that was more lasting and valuable. Right. So again, in the parent chapter is kind of looking at how they're leveraging the, their individual success towards valuing their parents work. And then kind of interestingly, I think in their relationships with their siblings, they start to see themselves a little bit more like their parents and say actually like, yeah, it's great that I have this diploma and that I've gone to college or I'm going to go to college, but what really matters is that my sibling is doing okay. Right. That they start to offer family and collective well being as what success could be and therefore what it could mean.
- [52:55]
Jonathan Cortez
Yeah, thank you for that. I want to pause on two different parts in this chapter. So in chapter four, you talk about one Succeeder alum, Marina, and you say on page 120, on page 120, you say, quote, her mother's stigmatized as criminal. Undocumented migration is in this system, not criminal. And when you say in this system, you're talking about the system of.
- [53:21]
The succeeders and how their relationship to their parents, right. You say, 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 be proof of her moral worth and thus her worthiness for inclusion and belonging. End quote. So you. You really say, like, in chapter four, you say, like, the succeeders relationships with their parents and the claims of, you know, their name is on the diploma as well is a. Is a quite radical.
- [53:56]
Statement about how they also, their parents also should be included and should belong to this. This larger sort of framework of. Of the US Nation state, right? If. If the succeeders are en route to. To towards success, towards belonging, their parents should be there as well.
- [54:16]
So I'm curious as to specifically Janitza's story, which is she has a much more kind of contentious relationship with her mother. Can you talk about. Can you talk about her story?
- [54:28]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So Janitza was a young woman who was not academically doing well in school.
- [54:35]
But had started to kind of achieve more. And in contrast, when I talk about Marina, she, you know, she was a model student. And it's very much falling into this. Like, my parents sacrificed, and we have a happy. And I appreciate that sacrifice, therefore I achieve. And we have this happy family, right, where everyone cares about each other. And in Janita's relationship with her mom was. Was fractious, right? And that.
- [55:04]
You know, partially because of Janice's behavior in as kind of a wild child, but also due to, you know, her mom's disbelief of childhood abuse that happened to Janitza and.
- [55:19]
You know, some simmering resentments around the decision to migrate, that it was to get away from this abusive.
- [55:28]
Family member. And, you know, that there was. There was tension there. Janitza, though, and her mom kicks her out of the house. But Janitza still wants to pay her mom's bills and still says, I'm doing this for my mom. Right? And so in her case, you know, and she would say to me, like, my mom's a good mom, right? And I, as an observer, was like, super mad at her mom, right? And didn't feel like she was holding up her. Her duties. Right. But I think she was aware that people would have that perception of her mother. Right. And was appealing to say, no, I do value her. Right. And.
- [56:12]
Trying to counteract moralizations around her mother by achieving so. Not just redeeming the kind of selfless acts of migration like Marina had done, where she said, my mom had dreams for me. I'm not mad she came here without documents.
- [56:31]
The story of Janitza's family migration was not. Was begrudging. Right. And that there were tensions throughout the settlement process and in her mothering. But Janita was still trying to leverage her, you know, nascent academic achievements as kind of a reformed student to say, look, my mom does still have value. Right? And so.
- [56:56]
It'S. So in some ways, the students are trading one moralized system of. Of determining worthiness or goodness for another. Right. Going from success to kind of kinship and normative notions of what makes a good mom. But I think we also see in there that these. In Genitza's case, that not just.
- [57:22]
The value that these critiques go beyond what, again, the kind of star student might make or the narrative that they can piece together, but the way that, you know, this is happening in.
- [57:39]
Complex ways that still matter, that even if they're not conforming to the ideal narrative of belonging or success or motherhood.
- [57:49]
That young people can still attempt to make these critiques about who is valuable. Right. When. When socially, politically.
- [58:02]
Those closest to them, despite whether or not you have a close relationship to them or if you. She still says that she thinks her mom's a good mom, and she asks me to see her that way, too. And in doing so, she's asking to see value. Right. Where too commonly we don't.
- [58:23]
Jonathan Cortez
Yeah. And I think it's so fascinating to read how the succeeders.
- [58:30]
Were taking care and love and.
- [58:37]
Repositioning care and love as success. Right. It wasn't just meritocratic academic achievements that was success, but it was in addition to that. How can I pay my mom's bills? Even though our. You know, our. You know. So I think that's. That.
- [58:52]
Dr. Andrea Flores
That.
- [58:52]
Jonathan Cortez
That follows through in the fifth chapter, where you talk about sibling relationships because you say on page 133, you say, quote, care mattered not only because it produced meritocratic success, but also because it affirmed their siblings and family's collective value. End quote. Right. So the succeed years were refashioning success through care and thus refashioned accomplishment and belonging. And I think I found that so. So, like, powerful. And so I'm Curious if you can talk more about what you talk about in chapter five, education SibCare.
- [59:28]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah. So as I mentioned, right, These young people were often asked to take care of their younger siblings. And a lot of that care had to do with navigating educational pathways, right? Where it's.
- [59:47]
You know, something as simple as notes from a teacher, you know, translating those for their parents. But also, you know, for some students it was, you know, enrolling them in the magnet school, magnet middle school, that would get them into the better high school, right. And so that students relied on their insider knowledge of the educational system that they had just gone through.
- [60:14]
To make better or, you know, potentially better educational decisions for their, for their siblings. And I argue that those efforts to kind of, you know, they're not just tasks, right? It's not just like do this, do that. There are ways that these young people see themselves as caring for their siblings and trying to.
- [60:37]
Improve these siblings outcomes and lives. Right. And that.
- [60:43]
As they go through that care work, they start to value it itself as something that matters. Right. And I think that.
- [60:53]
When we think about care work, we do often think about things like feeding or watching or.
- [61:00]
Nurturing. And those were certainly things that the succeeders did with their siblings. But I think these concerted efforts to intervene in their siblings educations, you know, sometimes that gets a bad rap is like helicopter parenting. But here we see that these were acts of care where they're looking to protect their siblings from some of the.
- [61:21]
Negative things that might happen to them in schools and to give them a better shot and often the shot that these older siblings wish that they had, had.
- [61:32]
Jonathan Cortez
Yeah, and I think you do that so well with thinking about, you know, Claudia story, Perla's story, like these are such gripping examples of, of what they were willing to do for their siblings and sacrifice for their siblings.
- [61:48]
And in a way that, that, that, that showed that they were. You know, there's one part in, in the book where you talk about how they saw themselves similar to how they saw their parents, like as the progenitors of success, right? They were setting, they were setting future generations up for success. And I find that so, so fascinating and so relevant to when I think about my own education or my friend's education. But in wrapping up with the book, Andrea, is there anything you kind of want to leave the listeners with?
- [62:19]
Dr. Andrea Flores
I mean, I think that in. When I think about the generosity of the succeeders to share their lives with me during this time and to continue to share their lives with me today.
- [62:32]
I wanted to, in the book do justice to that generosity and show again how youth that don't often make it to our screens or our newspapers.
- [62:44]
How they are also changing their worlds and changing our nation in ways that kind of can go unacknowledged because they are taking care of a sibling that maybe even your teacher doesn't know their teachers don't even know about. Right. But that those are, you know, when we think about social change, it has to. It's not actorless. Right. And so.
- [63:09]
These small actions matter. Right. They are ways that we individually can make our worlds better. Right. And as I've watched the succeeders and had the good fortune to watch them, you know, move into adulthood, they continue to do that in large and small ways. And as they have their own children to see that continue to play out. So I really wanted to pay attention in the book, and I think, I hope that it does this by showing that, you know.
- [63:41]
Young. Young people who seem vulnerable, right. Aren't just vulnerable. They have critiques of the world that they live in. They want them to be better. They. And there's not. They're not always neat, right. That, like, these young people can reproduce stereotypes. When Lupita says, I'm not that type of Mexican, she's assuming that there are those types of Mexicans. Right. And saying, I'm distinguishing myself from them. But when she also takes care of her siblings, you know, she's. She's. It's an uneven critique, but one that she's making and that we need to value those as socially productive and not ignore them as.
- [64:21]
Just the work of youth. Right. Or the work of, you know.
- [64:27]
Those not in power. Right. They're powerful acts of critique that deserve our attention and deserve our valuing of them as such.
- [64:39]
Jonathan Cortez
Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for that. That was really powerful. Andrea, thank you so much for talking to us about how you came to write this experience. Cedars. We have taken up valuable time, but before we go, one last question here on New Books Network is what are you working on now?
- [64:57]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Yeah, so I am. I'm doing a collaborative project right now that is. Hold on a second, let me. Your phone just fell out again. My dad must have very big ears. Okay.
- [65:12]
So right now I'm working on a. Two different projects. One is a collaborative project with Kate Mason at Brown University and Sarah Willen at University of Connecticut that's looking at the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on first generation college students.
- [65:31]
Educational outcomes and their caretaking practices. And the project makes use of Sarah and Kate's Pandemic Journaling project, which was founded in May of 2020.
- [65:47]
That that allowed people to go on and journal about their experiences. And so we're the project will kind of pull together a parent and a child and they'll journal, we'll interview them, they'll interview each other to see, you know, how many of the themes that I've talked about in the book, like how are they conceptualizing the value of education in the light of.
- [66:12]
A world altering pandemic. Right. And how are they managing to take care of each other or how are family dynamics changing? So it's very much related to a lot of the issues and themes that I've looked at in this book. And the succeeders were first generation college students. And so this will.
- [66:35]
There will be a similar population here in many respects, but it'll be not only Latino students, but others as well. And then the other project I'm working on is looking is still in the kind of higher ed arena, but here looking at folks who are foreign born students.
- [66:59]
Graduate students in the life sciences, who at the end of their training are deciding whether or not to stay in the United States, return home or migrate to a third country. And they're also deciding whether or not to stay in science or go into.
- [67:14]
Consulting or industry. And again, this kind of takes up another theme of the project about how educational experiences impact.
- [67:25]
Your understanding of your place in a society. Right. And here how these educational experiences make you want to stay in the United States or not. Right. And that project is also going to be kind of a variety of foreign born folks.
- [67:44]
But both projects kind of continue my interest in what does education mean and how are educational institutions important to our notions of belonging and our notions of family?
- [67:59]
Jonathan Cortez
Wow. I mean, both of those are so incredibly important. And thank you to you and your collaborators for embarking on those because I mean, I'm excited to see what you all, what you all find. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. I incredibly enjoyed it. And for those of you listening, if you haven't already by the end of this episode, please go out and get the succeeders. How Immigrant Youth are Transforming what It Means to Belong in America by our guest today, Andrea Flores. Andrea, thank you so much. And please take care.
- [68:31]
Dr. Andrea Flores
Thank you, Jonathan. Take care as well.
- [68:45]
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