Anti-Racism Research & Resource Guide

palabra., Spanish for “word,” is an endeavor launched by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists last year. The site’s aim is to “cover stories and communities that have been disregarded in larger news outlets based on the ideology that Latino news is only a minority issue, and not a human issue.

Latino Rebels is part of the Futuro Media Group, which also includes the long-running NPR show Latino USA. In addition to episodes of the podcast, the site includes news and politics coverage on the U.S. and Latin America, and opinion pieces.

Founded in 2009 at NYU, “Latin America News Dispatch produces original news stories about Latin America, the Caribbean, U.S. foreign policy and Latinos in the United States.

Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.

Race exists not as a genuine biological distinction but as a social construct reinforced by the legal system and other institutions. Racial divisions clearly exist as they have been imposed on peoples and as people have used to define community identity. Contemporary biological studies have shown that there is no physical distinction between races. As social constructs, individuals and communities have the ability to affect and deny race distinctions.

This article provides ethnographic evidence of how Latinx undocumented youth navigate racialization processes. The research occurs in a focal state in the New Latino South, a highly restrictive and hostile context toward immigrants broadly and undocumented ones specifically. The author situates this research in Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas' call for the racialization of immigration studies, considering notions of race and racism in the study of undocumented youth experiences of identity, discrimination, social isolation, and belonging, and how processes of racialization mark the bodies of undocumented youth in negative, punitive ways in school and societal contexts in a restrictive policy context like South Carolina. Drawing on data from a three‐year, multisite ethnography in two Title I public high schools in South Carolina, the study shows how youth are racialized in their schools and communities. Their narratives provide moments when undocumented youth elaborate their experiences in schools, which the author argues is an act of resistance where they broker, dismantle, and overcome their position of marginality. This cultural elaboration by undocumented youth positions them as active agents and re‐centers and humanizes their experience of racism and racialization in order to make visible the systemic oppression they encounter. It is through their cultural elaboration of their undocumentedness that they can powerfully critique immigration policy and schools’ roles in perpetuating deficit discourses about the “problems” the undocumented subjectivity presents.