'In Between Oprah and Cristina": Urban Latina Youth Producing a Countertext with Participatory Action Research

BETWEEN 2000 AND 2004, THREE LATINA YOUTH AND I SPENT CLOSE TO POUR YEARS collecting data and using our findings to coauthor a children's picture book about a transnational Latino immigrant family. Our participatory action research (PAR) project, self-titled "TNL" (TransNational Latinas), had taken us to the neighborhoods of Oakland, San Pablo, and Berkeley, California, as well as to communities in Chihuahua and Jalisco, Mexico. In one of our last tape-recorded sessions in which we co-evaluated the merits of our project, Genobeba Duarte (one of the teens involved in our collaborative) commented upon what it means to be a second-generation transnational Mexicana: But if you look at it, historically, we are like in between two things.... You know, you have your American and Mexican culture, and then you have dealing with lots of different issues on both sides.... We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more Americans than the Americans.... Like that movie [Selena], we're in between Oprah and Cristina, Frank Sinatra and Pedro Infante.... And I've noticed that we've been able to handle that really well. And it just makes me even more proud to be transnational .... Genobeba and the other two youth (Carlota Duarte and Maria Topete) shared the same pride about their binational, border-crossing experiences. (1) Thus, after completing the PAR project and publishing a coauthored children's book with Scholastic, Inc., they were disappointed when the press releases we sent to the "Oprah Show," the "Cristina Show," Latina magazine, and local media outlets to solicit a story about our book did not yield any media interviews. In response, Carlota said something to the effect that the news did not want to hear about a Latina from the hood doing something good; only if she were in trouble, pregnant, or breaking the law would we get any interviews. This astute comment aligns with the media's general portrayal of Latina youth as newsworthy only if behavior is attached to a negative event (Dorfman and Schiraldi, 2001; Mastro and Greenberg, 2000; Rodriguez, 1996; Yosso, 2002). It is not unlike the portrayal of Latina/o immigrants in this country, whose behavior and mere presence in the United States is also criminalized (Bacon, 2008; Garcia, 1995; Hing, 1998; Santa Ana, 2002; Welch, 2003). By researching, creating, and producing a bilingual children's book on the positive aspects about return trips to one's country of origin, Genobeba, Carlota, and Mafia produced not one, but two countertexts: their research-based story on transnational Latino families and their own story of how they as Latina immigrant youth embarked on a journey of research and reflection through a PAR project. In this article, I will cover in more depth the project the youth and I developed. I begin with a discussion on how schools view the transnational experiences of Latina/o immigrant students and how the TNL project was initiated with Genobeba, Carlota, and Maria in Northern California. Next, the three youth speak reflectively about their lives as second-generation immigrant youth of color, including what this PAR project has meant to them. The findings--based on their verbal and tape-recorded evaluation of our project--include: how this TNL project was not like school, their critique of U.S. schooling, and the transformative aspect of PAR. Ultimately, PAR was a useful vehicle for the youth to act upon this critique of schooling, which the three teens had developed long before we began research together. U.S. Schools and Transnational Latino Students Latino students are the fastest growing group of children in U.S. public schools (Suarez-Orozco and Paez, 2002); almost 65% of these Latina/o children are of immigrant stock, meaning that either they or one (or both) of their parents were born in another country (Fry and Gonzales, 2008; Rumbaut, 2002). In other words, nearly half (48%) of all Latina/o students in this country are U. …