Nilda Flores-González

Popularity versus respect: school structure, peer groups and Latino academic achievement

This article begins with a discussion of recent critiques of Fordham and Ogbu’s argument on the ‘burden of acting white’. These critiques point to the stereotypical and homogeneous characterization of the black peer group by Fordham and Ogbu, as well as their inattention to the ways in which schools relegate into the lower tracks those students who behave too ethnically and who do not demonstrate proficiency with dominant cultural attributes. The second half of the article presents data showing that academic achievement is related to peer‐group membership and that schools are largely responsible for which peer group students join. Based on an ethnographic study at a predominantly Latino urban high school, I argue that Latino high achievers do not necessarily experience the ‘burden of acting white’ as Fordham and Ogbu suggest. This was due to the institutional practices at Hernandez High School, which ensured that high achievers and low achievers occupied different academic and social spaces, resulting in little interaction between the groups, and to the very different culture that prescribed the ways in which members of each group could achieve status.

“Doing Race”: Latino Youth’s Identities and the Politics of Racial Exclusion

For most Latino youth, Latinos constitute a separate, while diverse, racial group. Our study demonstrates that, when asked about their identities, Latino youth do not follow conventional U.S. racial categories. Although they prefer to identify by national origin or panethnicity, they consider themselves to be part of a racial group rather than an ethnic group, as the U.S. Census designates them. Using findings from in-depth semistructured interviews with two samples of young adults in Chicago and Central Florida, this research joins the long-standing debate on the conceptual division between race and ethnicity arguing that there is a mismatch between existing sociological understandings of race and ethnicity and the current racial ideas and racial practices among Latino youth. There is also a mismatch between institutional measures of “race,” such as those found in the U.S. Census, and Latinos’ self-understandings of where they belong in the U.S. racial hierarchy. We suggest that not being officially designated as a racial group leads to the erosion of perceptions of belonging among Latinos to a nation in which being a member of a racial group allows for visibility and claims-making in a multiracial society.