"Little Sisters": An Exploration of Agency, Cultural Borderlands, and Institutional Constraints in the Lives Of Two Teenage Girls

Introduction FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I HAVE BEEN MENTORING TWO GIRLS, VERONICA AND OLIVIA, who live in poverty and who are crisscrossed by crises and hardship almost daily. I began in 2000 with Veronica, whom I was matched with through the mentoring organization, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, in Oakland, California. She was nine years old when we began our relationship. Several years later, in 2003, I met her new neighbor, Olivia, who was 14 at the time. The two girls quickly become friends, and so I began to invite Olivia regularly with Veronica on our weekend visits. (1) Since then, I have continued to see both of them regularly. My involvement in their lives has brought me face to face with the crushing realities of social injustice. Just when they have swallowed one injustice or trauma, another one hits, and they keep coming, and coming. Yet the girls move from crisis to crisis as if this were "normal." For them, it is. For me, it is education in the deepest sense, outrage, and a grasping for signs of hope. In this article, I attempt to find some lessons that can be shared by exploring the development of agency in this intercultural, interracial, and economically diverse space that lies along the borders of three female lives--the girls' and mine. The scenery and events of the drama in their lives change so often that I had to rewrite this article one month after it was originally submitted. So much had changed that the original interpretation had become a fiction; my desire to attach meaning to the ongoing current, which embodied a past, present, and future, therefore could not be neatly captured. The first version gave trajectories to the two girls' lives. Veronica's was increasingly a story of failure in school, and Olivia's was the inverse. The two trajectories begged two questions: why and how? Given that both girls are profoundly "at risk" for school failure, what explanation could I offer for the amazing upsurge in Olivia's academic performance, as measured by her grades, attendance, and teachers' comments in 2005? What was the reason for the worsening in Veronica's academic performance during that period? A month later, I was no longer comfortable with this story, much less its interpretation. And yet, was there some remaining undercurrent of truth? Central to the original article was my exploration of two concepts--agency and borderlands--that I thought helped to explain the divergent school performances of these two girls. The revised version also probes these concepts for their utility in the pursuit of social justice for young women like Veronica and Olivia. However, the theme of dynamic change is always in the background, pushing the reader to imagine the story continuing beyond words that so easily capture, frame, and fix the girls' identities and struggles. Rather than seeing the text as an enclosure, I prefer to think of it as a portal through which the girls are passing. Agency and Borderlands Theorizing about agency is fraught with controversy and differing definitions. The concept of agency traditionally implies individual choice and action--"the intentional capacity to identify and implement alternatives" (Miron and Lauria, 1998: 189). This article asks instead whether agency can be promoted together with a focus on helping youth navigate complex cultural borderlands, and if so, what the implications are for schools, social service providers, and families as socializing institutions. In contemporary gender theory, for example, there is controversy over "the extent to which emancipatory politics requires the conception of an individual agent capable of self-reflection, self-determination, and autonomy," or whether agency is "merely the result of the cultural (including gender) constitution of the subject" (Peter, 2003: 26). Fraser (1989) rejects this dichotomy as false: "the situatedness of agents need not imply robbing people of their autonomy" (as cited in Peter, 2003: 26). …