I open with a research anecdote: while explaining his school’s daily operations and the “work” of engaging youth in their education and school life, a public high school principal quietly lamented the fact that his school was acquiring a local reputation as “a dumping ground” for the immigrant and refugee children spilling into the city.¹ He rattled off a list of global hot spots, places rife with civil war, civic unrest, and from which vast swaths of the populations desperately sought escape, noting with a shrug of resignation that teenagers from these countries would eventually end up at the door...

More than twenty years ago while walking through a Mexican American neighborhood somewhere in San Antonio, Texas, a good friend and I passed by a house whose front yard had become a cluttered gallery of homemade concrete folk art. Scattered within this fantastic scene were real mesquite trees, shrubs, vines, a dwarf tree or two, and potted plants and flowers. Narrow paths tried to make their way through the clutter but were soon defeated. The lot was small, but oh so intense. The clutter wrapped around both sides of the house to create an even bigger heap of the back...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, more and more U.S. residents are becoming versed in the twentieth-century anthropological deconstruction of biological race groups as human-made “myth.”¹ Popular magazines occasionally tackle the very concept of “race,” reminding readers that the nation’s “racial groups” are more genetically diverse within than between themselves (see Newsweek 2000). The American Anthropological Association has launched a new public education program contesting biological notions of “so-called racial” difference (AAA 1998) and it has now become almost routine in U.S. academic discourse to call racial difference a “social construction.” Indeed, contesting the very existence of “racial” difference...

In ethnic studies as well as in American studies (and the two fields increasingly intersect), an interest in globalization has stimulated a more transnational or comparative perspective that forces attention to the ways in which forms of culture, community, and subjectivity spill over national borders. Young people are often held up as compelling examples of how individuals increasingly shape forms of culture, community, and subjectivity in relation to two or more nation-states, or beyond nation or state altogether. Yet there is still a cautious acknowledgment that nationalist identities and territorialized nation-states play a powerful role in the lives of presumably...

The examination of women and work in Southeast Asia has a long history in the field of cultural anthropology.¹ In Thailand, much of this literature has focused on farmers and factory workers, and also on work and beauty as it relates to the prostitution industry.² Studies of Thai women and beauty have thus tended to present the relationship between women, beauty, and money as merging in only one venue: sex work. While this model is accurate in some respects, it ignores the experiences of the majority of Thai women, creating a scenario in which the only relationship between money and...

In El Salvador, gangs resembling L.A. gangs, in their use of names, clothing, and other cultural symbols, began to make front-page news during the mid-1990s. The country’s two main newspapers published sensationalistic accounts filled with rumor and speculation that did not help the situation on the street and only fed the violence between rival gangs. This type of reporting also fostered the public perception that “U.S. deportees and marginal youth are the principal perpetrators of violent crime” (DeCesare, 1998, 24). Sensationalistic reports regarding gang-involved youth in El Salvador are not only recorded in written form but also emerge in visual...

The war that raged in Sierra Leone throughout the 1990s is often understood as a crisis of youth.¹ Although inequitable access to mineral resources and years of corrupt government must play an important part in any explanation, it was legions of youth with no hopes for education or employment who carried the guns and committed the atrocities that have become the hallmark of this particularly brutal civil war. The stories are similar: children are abducted, forced to commit atrocities, caught between the innocence of youth and the horror of war. A typical characterization of the war in Sierra Leone in...

Upon leaving school at age sixteen, Mani (a pseudonym), the Tamil foster child of my neighbors in Zurich, Switzerland, was asked to write a twenty-five-page graduation paper. The topic of his choice was Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong movie star. I remember well how some years earlier, Mani, who was then still living in a foster home three hours away by car from his foster parents, first began to tell us about Jackie Chan. Previously, his idol had been Jean-Claude van Damme, and we—Mani’s foster parents and their friends—were secretly relieved by this switch of allegiance. Compared with...

We were at the center—the hub—of the digital revolution, but, at times, our presence alone acknowledged our marginalization from the digital economy that had taken over the San Francisco Bay Area. Our small group of youth and adult educators, organized by the Media Education Center (MEC), a community-based media production organization located in the San Francisco Bay Area, was embarking on an intensive project that would result in a short narrative video about youth life in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mission District, a historically working-class Latino neighborhood, has been reshaped in recent years by an influx of...

The first thing you might notice in Aaron’s mom’s basement is an impressive collection of sports trophies displaying shiny figures frozen in athletic gestures. The poses on those pedestals are somehow both manly and delicate. On a Thursday night in the summer of 1998, Aaron and four buddies gathered amid the trophies while waiting for some pizza to arrive. World Wrestling Federation blared from the TV, and occasionally the guys interrupted what they were doing to comment on the match. “Hey, Mom, how was work?” Aaron asked, greeting his mom warmly when she showed up around eight o’clock. Mrs. Davis...

As in common homophobic discourse, the object of devaluation and intolerance in discourses of disability is seemingly erased in the phobic utterance. Phrases like “That’s so gay” and “That’s retarded” are used colloquially to indicate that an object or event is senseless or silly. These speech acts become so routinely abstracted that those who perform and witness them lose sight of the real gay and disabled people whose very lives are overcoded with negative social and individual value by such idiomatic usage. There is, then, a metaphorics to the discourses and social processes of both “erotophobia” and “stigmaphobia” in which...