ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how ordinary day-to-day school practices and classroom dynamics are racialized and gendered and in turn shape second-generation youth views about the role of education in their lives. While the election of Dominican representatives to local and state government has led to the creation of a handful of elementary and junior high schools to address the problems of overcrowding, the dire need for a new high school remains. Classrooms are not impervious to the social narratives and formal and informal institutional practices that “cast” youth who are racially stigmatized groups, particularly young men, as “problems.” Mexican students experienced schooling as a subtractive process, whereby their cultural and language backgrounds are defined as “problems” that needed to be stripped from them for them to succeed. Through the implementation of security measures, young men in particular were profiled and singled out as problematic students throughout the school.
