Young People and the Latinx Diaspora

  • by Kevin R. Johnson
Book

This week, the Aoki Center on Critical Race and Nation Studies and the UC Davis Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion presented the UC Davis Hispanic Serving Institution Speaker Series with Professor Enrique Sepúlveda.

He talked about "Chicanx Education Activists: A Story of Mexican Farmworker Children Ascending to Institutional Liberal Power in a Northern California City."  The talk was based on his 2020 book titled Border Thinking: Latinx Youth Decolonizing Citizenship.

The book provides rich accounts of how Latinx migrant youth experience belonging across borders. As anti-immigrant nationalist discourses escalate globally, Border Thinking offers critical insights into how young people in the Latinx diaspora experience belonging, make sense of racism, and long for change. Enrique Sepúlveda asks not how to help the diaspora youth assimilate but what the United States and Europe can learn about citizenship from these diasporic youth.
 
Border Thinking offers critical insights into how Latinx youth speak back to racializing, colonial discourses that frame them as outsiders. It is theoretically sophisticated, engaging, and methodologically innovative, offering new insights into participatory methodologies—but its true contribution lies in how it reveals young people’s creative imaginings of transnational forms of citizenship and belonging that are too often silenced by integration initiatives focused on national assimilation.
 

Enrique Sepúlveda is an Assistant Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado-Boulder. He is an anthropologist of education who has centered his research in Latinx communities and schools heavily impacted by global migration in northern California, San Salvador, El Salvador and Madrid, Spain. He is the son of Mexican migrant workers from the Texas/Mexican border and in his early career worked as a bilingual teacher and school principal in Woodland, California.

Professor Sepúlveda offered wonderful insights and stories about the experience of Latina/os in California. It was an important talk for the King Hall community to hear.