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Sequestered Inclusion: Social Service Discourses and New Latino Diaspora Youth in the Shenandoah Valley

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Sequestered Inclusion: Social Service Discourses and New Latino Diaspora Youth in the Shenandoah Valley SEQUESTERED INCLUSION: SOCIAL SERVICE DISCOURSES AND NEW LATINO DIASPORA YOUTH IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Elizabeth Esther Phelps May 2015 © 2015 Elizabeth Esther Phelps SEQUESTERED INCLUSION: SOCIAL SERVICE DISCOURSES AND NEW LATINO DIASPORA YOUTH IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY Elizabeth Esther Phelps, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 Abstract: This dissertation explores ethnographically the impact of discourses of belonging and exclusion in a New Latino Diaspora (NLD) city located in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Young NLD adults in Rocktown, Virginia, experience a form of sequestered inclusion shaped by racializing narratives based in nativist hostility as well as by implicit deficit narratives embedded in humanistic multiculturalism. Based on more than twelve months of ethnographic field work (and over six years of ordinary life in Rocktown), this dissertation explores how advocates, activists, and their allies in the social service and educational institutions in the Rocktown area have institutionalized processes of inclusion over a period of fifteen years both with and for NLD youth. These processes have been constrained by the paternalistic and reductive discourses that frame youth both as inherently needy and as a resource that benefits the receiving community. NLD youth themselves recognize their own specific needs and contributions, but resist the reductionism and racializing tendencies of these discourses. Within this context, a small group of young NLD activists formed to support and promote the DREAM Act (for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), both capitulating to and contesting dominant discourses and constructing a narrative frame for belonging on their own terms. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Elizabeth Esther Phelps was born in 1973 in Lima, Peru, to missionary parents. The family lived transnationally and inter-culturally, cycling through a jungle mission center to Quechua communities in Ayacucho and San Martín, and to the Phelps family farm in western New York. Her mother’s side of the family also has diasporic roots: Phelps’ maternal grandfather emigrated from Japan in 1912 to Cusco, Peru, where he married her grandmother. Phelps majored in English at Wheaton College (IL), with a minor in Philosophy and a certificate in the college’s Human Needs and Global Resources program. Following graduation, Phelps spent four years as a community development worker in Bolivia with the Mennonite Central Committee. This experience led her to Cornell University for a Master’s degree in Adult Education, completed in 2001 with a thesis titled Participation and Power in Community Development Program Planning: A Study of a Process in the Bolivian Lowlands. During the second year of the program Phelps moved with her husband to a small city in Virginia where she spent six years working with Latino and Latina children and youth in a social service capacity. This is where the specific questions guiding this research project were born. iv To my husband, Terry and to our children, Valerie and Gabriel the three who have given the most towards making this project possible. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Above all, I would like to thank Vilma Santiago-Irizarry for teaching, guiding, coaching, and mentoring me through this entire endeavor. Her incisive analyses and pragmatic interventions gave me the tools I needed to conceptualize this research project and to navigate the educational journey. Sofia Villenas introduced me to the sub-field of the Anthropology of Education, and facilitated my participation on a panel at the 2010 American Anthropological Association meetings on the New Latino Diaspora. These conversations greatly shaped the direction of my analysis. I thank Michael Jones-Correa for tolerating high doses of anthropological reflexivity, and for helping me situate this project within studies of transnationalism and new destinations for Latino transmigrants. I am deeply grateful to everyone in my field site who was willing to talk with me about their work, perspectives, and experiences as part of or with New Latino Diaspora communities in the Shenandoah Valley. I owe much to everyone who passed through the Migrant Education Program, where I first learned the phrase “No human being is illegal,” the humanist foundation for all our organizing work. I am especially thankful to those who took extra time to talk with me and tolerated hearing my half- formed ideas: Patrick Lincoln, Tonya Osinkosky, Isabel Castillo, Marcos Quintana, Sylvia Whitney, Yolanda Blake, Alejandro Olguin, Jason Good, Anneke Martin, Katy Pitcock, and Laura Zarrugh. Thanks to Kim Hartzler-Wheatley for her support as director of the Shenandoah Valley Migrant Education Program. Each of you has given me also the gift of friendship, which I treasure. vi Finally, I thank those who provided wrap-around support for me in this project in innumerable ways: my parents, Conrad and Irma Phelps, for their constant support and encouragement, especially around the births of my children; my parents-in-law, Vernon and Dorothy Jantzi, for food and child care beyond the call of duty; my cohort and writing buddies, Catherine Koehler and Beth Ryan, for generous feedback and friendship. Philip Fountain gave me invaluable feedback and encouragement on an early draft. Shpresa Koci in Tirana, Albania, and Luz Rondón in Bogotá, Colombia, cared for my children and gave me hours of peace of mind for transcribing, reading, and writing. Suzanne Wapner generously housed and fed me on numerous trips to Ithaca, and Rosanne Jantzi helped me find the mental, emotional, and spiritual strength I needed to finish this project. Most of all I thank my husband, Terrence Jantzi, who urged me from the beginning to pursue this degree and took on the extra work at home and in the office that made it possible for me to write this dissertation. I thank the DREAMers for being so steadfast in their dreams. All errors and omissions are my own. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VI LIST OF FIGURES X LIST OF TABLES XI LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XII CHAPTER 1: SEQUESTERED INCLUSION OF NEW LATINO DIASPORA YOUTH 1 CHAPTER 2: RACIALIZATIONS, TURKEYS, UNIVERSITIES, AND MENNONITES – THE NEW LATINO DIASPORA ENCOUNTERS “THE FRIENDLY CITY” 51 CHAPTER 3: ADVOCATES, ACTIVISTS, AND ALLIES - THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HISPANIC SERVICES COUNCIL 79 CHAPTER 4: LATINA SUICIDES, LATINO GANGS, AND DISCOURSES OF NEED 110 CHAPTER 5: NLD YOUTH FRAME THEMSELVES: CONTESTING DISCOURSES OF RESOURCE AND NEED 153 CHAPTER 6: DREAM ACTIVISM IN ROCKTOWN 180 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION - RACIALIZATIONS AND SEQUESTERED INCLUSION IN ROCKTOWN, VIRGINIA 208 viii REFERENCES CITED 215 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Racial Dot Map of Rocktown, VA 56 x LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Demographic Change In Rocktown, VA 1990-2010 8 Table 2: Pseudonyms and Characteristics of Interview Participants 43 Table 3: Programs and Interventions for Latina Women and Girls 149 xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ANCIR American Council for Immigration Reform BSU Big State University (a pseudonym) CRT Critical Race Theory DREAM Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ELL English Language Learner(s) ESL English as a Second Language ESOL English for Speakers of Other Languages FAIR Federation for Immigration Reform HSC Hispanic Services Council ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement IIHHS Institution for Innovation in Health and Human Services INS Immigration and Naturalization Service IRCA Immigration Reform and Control Act MEP Migrant Education Program NLD New Latino Diaspora OCY Office on Children and Youth SAU Small Anabaptist University (a pseudonym) VAWA Violence Against Women Act xii CHAPTER 1: Sequestered Inclusion of New Latino Diaspora Youth “We call it Operation Motor Oil because it’s supposed to reduce friction. What can we do to get the immigrants to understand what’s going on here?” (Reba, outreach officer for the Rocktown police department) “It was hard, you had that feeling that they didn’t want you. And it wasn’t like it was everybody, but there was a group of kids who obviously hated you for some reason, who would bully you, and try to do everything in their hands to make you leave; and there was the other group of kids who didn’t care who you were, but didn’t bother you either. And then there were those that maybe felt sorry for you, and wanted to be your friends, whatever the case might have been… So the integration issue for me was truly difficult. It was very difficult. And it took a little while… but then like I said it was a process… and after a while it just became natural, you know?” (Raul, young adult in the new Latino Diaspora) Introduction Raquel and Raul Sandoval1 are young adults in the New Latino Diaspora (NLD; Murillo & Villenas 1997, Villenas 2007). The two oldest siblings in their family, Raquel was 11 and Raul was 13 when their father brought the family to Rocktown, Virginia, in 1991 to join him after earning a green card through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) after years of hard migrant labor in the United States. Mr. Sandoval settled his family into a mobile home between the city and the poultry plant where he was eventually to become a line supervisor, and the children were enrolled in county schools. Raul recalls: For me it was just like, I’m gonna make the best out of it, but it was not easy. Again because I came at an older age, and 5 years of schooling [in the US], considering my first couple of years were not very productive because I spent most of the time alone in a classroom, or in classrooms where I was a little lost… 1 The names of all people, local places, and institutions are pseudonyms, except for public figures.
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