Growing Up Latinx

Growing Up Latinx provides a rich ethnographic account of how racist nativism, immigration policy and enforcement, and dominant ideas about 'good citizenship' play out in the lives of Latinx youth from immigrant and mixed status families. Fernandez powerfully centers Latinx young people’s own critical interpretations of citizenship as a status, a right, and a set of practices. She recognizes these young people as a source of theoretical insight into the multiple and shifting meanings of citizenship, making innovative contributions to the fields of migration studies, Latinx studies, childhood studies, and citizenship studies. ~Jessica K. Taft, author of The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru's Movement of Working Children

Jesica Siham Fernández holds our hands tightly as we cross the borders into Growing up Latinx. With ethnographic care, she tells the stories of many young people and their immigration struggles at the border, including that of 6 year old Jesica, sin papeles, eager to spit up details to satisfy an intimidating border guard. Fernández gifts us a volume saturated in joy, resistance and justice. She insists that 'belonging is an inalienable right' and that citizenship must be understood beyond borders. Few scholars can write, across scale, like this, sketching young lives with grace, animating intimate moments of joy and fear, and accompanying readers as we consider our obligation to build a world not yet in existence. ~Michelle Fine, author of Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination

In Growing Up Latinx, Jesica Siham Fernandez disputes notions of children as 'citizens in the making' who are incapable of critical political understandings and actions.Taking us into the world of 9-12 year olds from mixed immigrant status, low-income families, Fernandez shows us that children are social and political thinkers and actors. This rich ethnography weaves a collective story of pain and possibility as children react to racialized nativism by engaging in acts of citizenship to demand dignity—and the right to belong—for themselves and their families. This book is a welcomed addition to scholarly works on children’s sociopolitical development as it underscores our responsibility to let children find their political voices and enact their political agency. ~Nilda Flores-González, author of Citizens but Not Americans: Race and Belonging among Latino Millennials

Fernández presents a conceptually thorough and substantively rich account of how Latinx youth embody and make meaning of citizenship…Along with Latinx youth narratives, Fernández grants us with a political vision and sociological future of what democracy will signify in the decades to come. ~Aaron Arredondo, Ethnic and Racial Studies

Precisely one of the values of this book is the author’s explicit valuing of the resilience and the strength of this community and, more specifically, its youth…Growing up Latinx also emphasizes the complex cultural and social identities that the adolescents must navigate. ~Yamile M. Martí Haidar, Feminist Inquiry in Social Work