Description

Transnational and Transgenerational Latina/o Cultural Citizenship Among Kindergarteners, Their Parents, and University Students in Utah

Delgado Bernal and colleagues discuss data from a school/university/community educational partnership, which provides spaces for the mainly Latina/o student population and community to initiate a discourse of university attendance beginning in kindergarten. The ongoing anti-immigrant movement in Utah and around the nation provides a backdrop from which to explore the tensions and complexities surrounding cultural and legal citizenship across different generations of these Utah Latinas/os. Presenting participant narratives and drawing upon cultural citizenship studies and Chicana feminist theory, the authors discuss the meanings of citizenship and identity among transnational and transgenerational Latina/o kindergarteners, their parents, and their university mentors. This study analyzes and discusses the participants’ negotiation of anti-immigrant discourses and policies, affirmation of pedagogies of cultural citizenship, and contestation of bilingual/bicultural identities. Finally, the authors reframe the traditional definitions of “citizen” and call for employing a Latina/o cultural citizenship concept when working with constituents who struggle for rights in an increasingly anti-immigrant political context.

cultural citizenship, legal citizenship, transgenerational, transnational, Latina/o college students, Latino parents, Utah

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 35, No. 1 (2008): 28-49