Marcelo Diversi

Ethnic Identity and Self-Esteem of Latino Adolescents: Distinctions among the Latino Populations.

This article reviews 21 empirical studies in which the relationship between self-esteem and ethnic identity among Latino adolescents was examined. This analysis indicates that for some conceptualizations of ethnic identity there has been a positive relationship between ethnic identity and self-esteem, whereas with other conceptualizations the relationships between ethnic identity and self-esteemhave been inconsistent. The methodological limitations of the existing work are also examined. Despite the differences in conceptualization and the methodological limitations, the existing research suggests a positive relationship between degree of ethnic identification and self-esteemfor Latinos who live in areas where their Latino group composes the majority of the Latino population.

Educational and Occupational Aspirations of Latino Youth and Their Parents

In-depth interviews of 10 rural Latino family triads (mother, father, and adolescent) investigated the educational and occupational aspirations of parents and youth, and factors affecting those aspirations. Using a content analysis of the interview scripts, several themes emerged that described these families’ experiences. In some instances, Latino parent aspirations were found to transfer to their youth. However, only one half of the parents were aware of their youth’s aspirations, and most had not discussed them with their youth. Youth and parents articulated several barriers to achieving higher educational or occupational aspirations. Implications for programmatic initiatives and research are delineated.

Aging out: Youths’ perspectives on foster care and the transition to independence

Foster youth in the United States face significant barriers in a transition to independence which is markedly abrupt compared to the ‘emerging adulthood’ that is expected of most young adults. While many of the difficulties that foster youth face in this transition are known at the larger demographic level, first-person narratives of the process of ‘aging out’ of foster care are largely missing from academic literature. To date, most qualitative studies rely on methods that are not grounded in trust-based relationships between researchers and youth (e.g. hit-and-run focus groups, interviews conducted by research assistants unknown to youth, indirect assessment of youths’ emotional states). In an attempt to advance youths’ own narratives, we used critical ethnography to engage youth in sharing their perspectives on the process of ‘aging out’ of foster care. Youths expressed anxiety about their subjective experiences of ‘aging out’, including economic challenges and housing instability, loss of social support, and pressure to be self-reliant. Youths’ narratives during the early stages of transition from foster care provide insights for professionals, policy makers, and future research.

Social Policy Supports for Adolescence in the Twenty‐First Century: Framing Questions

Worldwide changes are altering the conditions under which adolescents prepare for adulthood and are increasing the need for thoughtful, tailored, youth policies and programs. This article offers a set of “framing questions” aimed at helping countries and communities create policies that are adapted to the particulars of a given context. These questions are presented as a means for policy makers, advocates, practitioners, researchers, community members, parents, and adolescents to formulate services, supports, and opportunities that will help adolescents become adults who are problem free, fully prepared, and fully engaged in their communities.

Critical Homelessness: Expanding Narratives of Inclusive Democracy

The experience (as opposed to the concept) of homelessness is hardly part of the academic discourse in education, cultural studies, or human development. One of the central goals of our special issue is to create a bridge between homelessness as a personal experience and homelessness as a public issue. Along with the personal experience that breaks free from the deficit-model informing dominant notions of homelessness, we also want to bring attention to the politics in the construction of knowledge about homelessness. Starting from street folk’s textual representations of their visceral knowledge of homelessness, we offer a reading of current dominant narratives of homelessness: narratives of poverty as individual trouble (as opposed to systemic expression of ideologies of domination), narratives of personal choice (as in “choose the right” movements), and narratives of charity (as in “feel good about yourself for spending a week of your spring break vacation helping clean and build around Katrina”).

Street Kids in Nikes: In Search of Humanization Through the Culture of Consumption

Brazilian street kids have been represented, with few exceptions, as victims of oppressed cultural forces that weaken the family and dilute social capital. To be sure, concentrated poverty, loss of extended family ties, low levels of education, and lack of governmental involvement have all given shape to a terribly strenuous childhood for many in the country. These kids, however, are more than victims. They are also active agents in the coconstruction of their social realities, and they struggle in brave ways to become fuller human beings. Using reconstructions from my ethnographic fieldwork on the streets of Campinas, Brazil, in which kids encounter Nike artifacts and the culture of consumption, the author attempts to show this struggle for humanization. In addition, a central purpose of this article is to present a slice of social science research written in a self-reflective manner about authorship, interpretation, and the interweaving of theory and fieldwork.

Poverty Pimps in the Academy: A Dialogue About Subjectivity, Reflexivity, and Power in Decolonizing Production of Knowledge

The authors often talk about the moral and ethical predicaments they experience working with marginalized populations. But such conversations, confessions, and verbalized doubts happened in intimate settings, often with out office doors closed or when the hallways are quiet and empty. This is not a whisper of secrecy or conspiracy but one of self-reflexive contemplation about the privilege differential between the authors and the humans they encounter in the streets as they conduct action research or simple walk around as citizen observers. Through this dialogue, the authors attempt to capture some of the conversations they have had about the unspoken internal conflict faced by the scholars, including the authors, doing forms of action research with fellow humans who continue to suffer under the self-righteous ideologies of justified domination. The central force behind this dialogical article is not to offer solutions but to problematize the lack of narrative space and language for the colonialist reenactments every poverty scholar have to live with, even as they aim at decolonizing and empowering scholarship. The authors hope this dialogue is evocative enough to invite others to further explore similar dilemmas of decolonizing scholarship.

The Ever-Shifting Excuses for Demonizing Black People in America

Eric Garner is choked to death in Staten Island, New York. Michael Brown is executed in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Another year passes and many more unarmed Black men die at the hands of law enforcement. Brutality against people of African ancestry continues to be justified by the American establishment. As citizens, how do we make sense of the police killing of unarmed young Black men? How do we make sense of the ways in which these killings continue to be justified by the White establishment? How do we talk to a new generation of children in ways that will prevent the horrors of racial profiling against Black people from being replaced by White supremacist narratives of justification? This article examines the entrenched racism in a country that started with a Declaration of Independence written by slave-owners, and how so many White people of all ages, religions, classes, and regions can claim not being prejudiced against African Americans while, under the same breath, justifying the police killing of unarmed African American men. It criticizes the colorblind movement and proposes ways to move toward more powerful narratives of solidarity and redemption for the historical violence against Black people in America.

Decolonizing constructions of childhood and history: interrupting narratives of avoidance to children’s questions about social injustice

Together, we the authors, wonder, write, imagine, suffer, and criticize the support of the Belo Monte Monster Dam in the Rio Xingu, in the heart of the Amazon, by two of our personal heroes and fellow Brazilians: Lula, former president and iconic founder of the Workers’ Party, and, Dilma Rousseff, our presidenta guerilheira. Using our autoethnographic reflections, memories, street poetry, and decolonizing wanderings, we try to make sense of this persistent disconnect between the “discovery” of Brazil by the Portuguese in 1500 and the brutal social injustices of our everyday life. And we bring constructions of childhood and history right into the center of this critique. Throughout, we invite the reader to imagine new ways of seeing and teaching children, and thus ourselves as educators and parents, to interrupt the avoidance approach to questions of inequalities in favor of decolonizing versions of history.

Damming the Amazon The Postcolonial March of the Wicked West

The Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, at the heart of the Amazon tropical forest, is not the first in the area. But it is going to be the largest. The third largest hydroelectric plant on the planet. It will dry out miles and miles of a river that sustains more than a dozen surviving indigenous tribes. More than 20,000 people will be displaced from their ancient lands, many forcibly moved into the new slums of little towns servicing the new dam. The ecological damage of flooding a tropical forest as large as a small country is undisputed by natural scientists. And this is just the beginning of greater encroachment into the Amazon forest and its people. For the Belo Monte Dam to be operational all year around, it will need 4 or 5 smaller dams upstream. Indigenous people live there too. And the government has plans for 40 more dams all over the Amazon for the rest of this century. Indigenous and allies have put up a strong and organized resistance. But Belo Monte marches forward backed up by the new national economic pride. Energy over people. It is an old story happening again, in a massive ecological scale, in our times. Here I grapple with the competing narratives of justification and try to imagine a narrative that firmly puts people over energy.