ABSTRACT
Over the course of interviewing these 17 students, two competing narratives continued to appear. In the first narrative, the students described and defined themselves and subsequently their social world from a self-assertive perspective. In this instance, the emphasis was on how they defined their social locations. However, their self-definitions also operated, in part, based on perceptions of external interpretations of racial/ethnic identification. The focus of this chapter is on those external identifications which comprise the second narrative. This narrative involved the students being conscious of how they perceived external forces and/or individuals define them and subsequently frame their social world. In essence, this second narrative elucidated those factors that constrained how these students could identify and who they could be. Therefore, the central question of this chapter is, how do these students perceive others situating them racially and ethnically?
