ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine how one school community in a New Latino Diaspora town characterized Latina middle school students as inappropriately aggressive and dangerously submissive. Using intersectionality as a theoretical framework, I explore how these damaging characterizations circulated throughout the school community, focusing on Latina girls’ responses to those characterizations. First, I explore how and why those characterizations were created and the narratives or events that perpetuated them. Second, I analyze Latina girls’ responses to these characterizations and argue that they often responded with fierce strategies of regulation and resistance: they aggressively regulated narratives about Latina girls’ sexual practices through social punishment and physical violence and resisted discriminatory disciplinary moments and social identification, using a variety of strategies. As I trace girls’ experiences of being sexualized and identified as aggressive, I emphasize that these damaging characterizations often produced distress for the girls, many of whom used an afterschool girls’ group as a homeplace where they could process these emotional injuries and nurture one another’s resistance. I conclude by discussing how the girls developed and deployed a critical consciousness to create meaningful social change within their school and community.
