Transcending Civic Disjunctures: transnational youth organizing in a community-based educational space

Abstract

Recent national migration policies - separations of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, increased arrests and removals by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Muslim travel ban - raise questions of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and religion. This article examines how, during times of racial tension and conflict, Latinx immigrant and Muslim refugee members of an immigrant youth organization have challenged deficit-based narratives through collective action in a community-based educational space. I argue that a community-based educational space (CBES) in a large Midwestern city offers a unique space for transnational immigrant youth to build transformative panethnic coalitions in ways that attend to civic disjuncture - the conflict between youths’ daily realities and the democratic civic ideals espoused by school curricula and staff - and competing messages from students’ schools, communities, and national and global conflicts.