Encountering the Affective in Latino Immigrant Youth Narratives

• Published in: Reading research quarterly 2021-04, Vol.56 (2), p.273-292
• Main Authors: Lee, Crystal Chen, Falter, Michelle M., Schoonover, Nina R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Experience; Family Relationship; Hispanic Americans; Immigrants; Immigration; Literacy; Narratives; Noncitizens; Psychological Patterns; Qualitative research; Social Bias; Students; World Views; Youth
• ISSN: 0034-0553; 1936-2722
• DOI: 10.1002/rrq.316

The authors argue that attending to the affective dimensions of everyday life for Latino immigrant youth offers a disorientation away from the circulation of fear around immigration in the United States, and a new orientation that links together the intimate affective images and narratives of the everyday that are less oppressive and rooted in and branch out to hope and solidarity. To demonstrate the importance of the affective, the authors conducted a post‐qualitative research inquiry interested in animating lifeworlds of seven Latino immigrant youth living in the context of North Carolina. The authors used process and nonrepresentational affect theories to analyze the data, tracing the rogue intensities and surface tensions of ordinary affects across and through the different students and their writing to highlight the students’ fragments of experience as Latino youth in America today. Specifically, the authors drew on Ahmed’s affect theory of sticky objects and sweaty concepts as they analyzed students’ words against the discourse of fear and hate. In tracing the affects that circulate around three sticky objects—immigration, families, and America—the authors witnessed and experienced the moments of tension in students’ affective lives. Doing this work with narratives of first‐generation immigrants exposes the effect that embodied memories have on present‐day experiences. The authors maintain that attunement to the affective realm produces a humanizing practice of literacy research and provides counteraffects of hope, gratitude, and life that speak to the more‐than‐representational written narratives.