Work shows that involvement in state surveilling systems, like immigration enforcement, child protective services, and the criminal legal system, can impact parents’ ability to engage in their child’s education. Given the continued importance of parent involvement in schooling for child educational success and the importance of teacher perceptions in shaping children’s schooling experiences, this study aims to explore how school personnel perceive and attempt to work with system-involved families. Drawing on interviews with 28 elementary school personnel from a moderate-sized public school district, we (1) explore school actors’ expectations of parental involvement, (2) identify three perceived family–school relationship dynamics that lead to differing pathways of engagement and support, and (3) describe strategies school personnel use to repair ruptured relationships. We find that school personnel hold multifaceted views of system-involved parents and perceive factors like school-based reporting, normative expectations around “partnership,” and structural barriers as influencing the family–school relationship.
This article shifts our sociological attention to narratives by and from 19 Latine-identifying formerly incarcerated youth who were part of a community-based nonprofit reentry program in the San Francisco Bay Area. Insights within are focused on formerly incarcerated youth’s perspectives regarding the shaping contours of their life due to experiencing state custody, inclusive of their retrospective articulations related to their educational and reentry experiences post-incarceration. Throughout, I argue that formerly incarcerated youth develop and deploy “unruly outlawed envisioning,” which entails an accumulated set of practices, knowledges, and perspectives that involve informed sets of ideological, institutional, and structural arrangements post-custody that we must understand as strategic refusals to varying iterations of anticipated prolonged captivity via the youth carceral state. Ultimately, I showcase how Latine-identifying youths’ unruly outlawed envisioning refuses longstanding narratives of ethnoracialized passive state capture, gesturing instead toward relentlessly instructive abolitionist dispositions that we must take notice of.
In marginalized neighborhoods, Latinx and Black Americans disproportionately experience negative policing practices and legal estrangement, a process of detachment and alienation from law enforcement that is pervasive in communities of color. Despite sociological advances, there remains an empirical gap in understanding how legal estrangement is experienced across Latinx and Black communities. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with Latinx and Black men and women from marginalized communities in Riverside and San Bernardino, California, this study examines the relationship between policing and legal estrangement. Findings indicate that estrangement varies across intersecting identities, social networks, neighborhoods, and institutional contexts, particularly through enduring abuse of police power and unreliable protection. I conceptualize these patterns as differential estrangement, a framework for understanding the contextual and intersectional dynamics of legal estrangement. Participants’ accounts offer an unruly sociological perspective for rethinking safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods and barrios by reducing reliance on criminalization while investing in communities.
The present study draws from interviews with 54 U.S.-born gender-expansive people of Latin American descent to examine how they understand, identify with, and use ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ relative to ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino/a’. We find many not only identified with ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ among labels like ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino/a’, they also described ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ to feel the most authentic. Participants also reported the political and policy climate in the U.S. around gender-expansive individuals contributed to deepened investment in ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ identity. Moreover, rather than seeing ‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’ as fully interchangeable with ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino/a’, participants explained the ability of the former to communicate unique social information about their users. This information ranged from political stances and cultural values to queer identity. Last, we report a discrepancy found between the labels many identified most with (‘Latinx’ and ‘Latine’) and the labels participants cited using most often across social interactions (‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino/a’). We analyze this discrepancy as strategic decisions mediated by various contextual concerns across family, friends, work, and online settings. These concerns included discrimination, stigmatization, and preservation from emotional and mental labor.
Urban studies highlight the importance of public parks in fostering community, rest, and civic engagement. Yet for low-income and Latinx/e populations, public spaces that support leisure and community are often scarce or stigmatized as unsafe. To better understand the relationship between public space and social belonging, this paper analyzes the significance of public parks in the lives of Dominican and Puerto Rican men in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected over nearly four years, we argue that parks in Lawrence serve as temporal sites for Latinx pla(y)making. This process increases feelings of belonging, transforms the local environment in culturally relevant ways, and, through collective play, affirms cultural heritage while generating loving community and belonging rooted in Caribbean and Latinx/e saberes. These embodied practices—which are too often viewed as unruly by dominant culture—work in opposition to negative “controlling images” and dominant narratives of degradation.
