Empowerment and Civic Surrogacy: Community Workers' Perceptions of Their Own and Their Latino/a Students' Civic Potential

This article tracks how three, Nashville-area, female educational support professionals deploy empowerment and through this deployment enable or discourage certain forms of civic participation for both the Latino/a youth and families with whom they work and for themselves. I focus on these professionals' reflections on empowerment to explore how professionals' expectations can inform their and their students' civic lives. I make two related arguments.

First, I argue that the professionals' citizenship expectations for their students are inversely related to their understanding of their own roles as citizens, an interdependence I call civic surrogacy. In this way, students are proxies for the professionals' civic selves or professionals serve as proxies for their students. This surrogacy reveals complex relationships of civic connection between these professionals and the students with whom they work, ultimately illustrating how professionals' own citizenship is reframed in the process of empowering others. Clearly, students' civic development is in dialogue with teachers' expectations of their students' civic potential (youth's ability to act as citizens now and in the future), educators' normative expectations of who citizens are and are not, and educators' own civic identities (Sarroub 2005; Maira 2009; Abu El-Haj 2010). The women profiled here are part of a cadre of new, non-teacher professionals working at the margins of classrooms. Without understanding how these professionals see their own citizenship, it is difficult to parse how they teach others about the critical role it plays in their lives.

Thus, I also make a second, related argument that the kinds of schools students and education professionals find themselves in affect civic surrogacy. I focus on what I term educational support professionals, nonprofit employees working with schools and school support staff who are non-classroom based. Nonprofit partnerships with public schools and non-classroom–based support professionals like Raquel are reshaping public schooling and students' abilities to develop academically and civically, leading scholars to question these interventions' long-term impact (Bartlett et al. 2002; Wong 2010; Harris and Kiyama 2013). I contend one key impact is that the unique out-of-classroom character of these professionals' work allows them to re-create citizenship. As support professionals empower themselves and others into certain kinds of citizens, I argue it is critical to examine the specific constraints and affordances of these new educational spaces to see how these situational differences affect civic development.

I begin with an overview of the stakes of empowerment for immigrant learners and those who seek to empower them. I then discuss the research design of this project with particular attention on the women profiled. Next, I present/contrast each woman's work, ideas of empowerment, and the citizenship she constructs. I conclude with an analysis of what the contrasts reveal about the effects of empowerment on professionals' civic efficacy, the role of out-of-school spaces in mediating this efficacy, and the implications of civic surrogacy.

Perspectives on the Stakes of Empowerment and Citizenship

Empowerment is a ubiquitous catchphrase for Nashville's educational and service professionals and any number of social welfare and human development projects ranging from drug addiction to microcredit (Elyachar 2002; Carr 2011). Indeed, empowerment has found a particularly strong foothold in both the politicized reform of the social service and educational sectors (Bartlett and Garcia 2011:96) and as a circulating discourse appropriated by practitioners (Carr 2011:167). Scholars such as Paulo Freire (1970) have positioned empowerment as a laudable goal of education, arguing that participatory modes of educating others can mediate inequalities toward social transformation (see also Delgado Gaitin 1991).

However, empowerment is not a neutral category devoid of political significance or contestation among Nashville's professionals, in contemporary America, or among scholars. The social history of American empowerment discourse, from the Great Society to neoliberal tax breaks, reveals that the idea of empowerment carries with it normalized values regarding the shape of power, the role of the state, and the identity of the good citizen (Zippay 1995; Cruikshank 1999:65; Hyatt 2001; Durham 2007). Barbara Cruikshank argues that empowering others is a “strategy for constituting and regulating the political subjectivities of the ‘empowered' ” in that an end goal of empowerment is to reform disempowered subjects into citizens who act upon themselves to conserve existing hierarchies of power (1999:69; see also Hyatt 2001:206, 221).

Thus, empowerment is a relationship of unequal power—between those to be empowered and those who purport to empower them (Cruikshank 1999:22). Cruikshank and others point to the necessity of understanding empowerment through this relationship of power where the end goal is the remaking of the political subjectivity of the empowered; however, empowerment efforts also remake the empowerer. Here, I explore the citizenship outcomes to the empowerer, including the abrogation of the empowerer's citizenship. I argue that the effects of empowerment on empowerers are contingent, relying on: (1) empowerers' notions of empowerment's goals, (2) the relationships between empowerer and empowered, and (3) structural conditions—here, variable out-of-classroom contexts. My aim is not to define good and bad empowerment, to prescribe good empowerment efforts, nor to critique the concept itself. Rather, I explore how the empowerment imagined by these professionals, laden with meaning and hierarchies of power, circulates in their work and affects their constructions of civic potential.

Just as empowerment has come to describe any number of interventions popularly, scholarly frameworks of the other key term with which I engage—citizenship—are varied covering legal entitlements, the responsibilities attendant to citizenship, and its affective registers (Reed-Danahay and Brettell 2008; see also Glenn 2000). I focus on participatory and cultural citizenship, the most common ways the women profiled described citizenship. I take their perspectives as critical: their focused views reveal how everyday professionals practically value and experience citizenship. In my discussion of the kinds of citizenship claims made, I draw on what Sunaina Marr Maira (2009:5) calls the “micropolitics of citizenship practices” not to recognize the global in the local but to argue for the micropractices of citizenship. I argue for the political nature of quotidian acts of citizenship—such as demanding recognition of a student's name or filling out paperwork for educational enrichment programming—and examine how citizenship is experienced in the everyday, supportive, depoliticized work of these individuals.

The first notion of citizenship these professionals highlighted is what Caroline Brettell and Deborah Reed-Danahay discuss as participatory citizenship, for example voting and civic engagement (2012:2). While aspects of participatory citizenship are limited by age and legal status, civic engagement is potentially more inclusive. Yet, minority youth, such as those with whom these professionals work, face a dearth of substantive civic opportunities (Kahne and Sporte 2008). Moreover, those opportunities they do encounter often track them into certain roles and not others, for example public cleaning projects and not peer tutoring, which may have negative effects on their conception of their citizenship potential (Kahne and Sporte 2008). In this article, I present professionals' calls on youth to (or not to) protest, make rights claims, and volunteer as how these professionals both mold their students' and their own citizenships and transform participatory citizenship toward more inclusive/exclusive ends.

The second citizenship frame these professionals point to is what Renato Rosaldo calls cultural citizenship—the “right to be different and to belong”—that is, asserting cultural heritage while claiming membership in the broader nation (1994:202, see also Flores and Benmayor 1997; Maira 2009). This construction of citizenship has overlap with notions of “flexible citizenship,” a conceptual framework initially aimed at how understanding economically privileged immigrants elect into modes of cultural belonging between states (Ong 1999; see Maira 2009 for how the concept has been applied to economically disadvantaged migrants). Scholars of cultural citizenship in particular have focused on how minorities leverage heritage toward political action (see Lukose 2009 for formulations around consumer-based identities). Alyshia Gálvez (2010) has argued that cultural citizenship does not have to be connected to rights claims but can be an attempt to create belonging and new meanings for citizenship in small acts seemingly isolated from grander questions of democracy. Building on this critique, I contend that acts like demanding Jesús' name are claims of cultural citizenship that reveal an American politics of difference that demands sociopolitical recognition.

Research Setting and Design

According to U.S. census data, Tennessee's enumerated Latino population increased from 32,742 Latino residents in 1990 to 187,747 in 2006, a 437.4 percent increase (Odem and Lacy 2009:xii). Scholars have argued that the draw of the South for immigrants has been the availability of work, a low cost of living, and, until recently, low levels of nativist sentiment (Odem and Lacy 2009:xvi). These factors have historically been strong in Nashville with its perceived high quality of life and work opportunities in health care, hospitality, and service industries (Doyle 1985).

However, these numbers say little about this migration's social impact, in particular on educational spaces. As recent scholarship suggests, the influx of Latino students into Southern schools that understand difference in terms of a native-born black–white racial binary has raised unique challenges ranging from misaligned services to the construction of newcomer learners as deficient (Wortham et al. 2002). In the case of Nashville, a district where diversity was long understood in term of the black–white binary, the system was transformed demographically (Winders 2013). The district went from having few English language learners to 22 percent of the student population identified as such, including 10,692 Spanish speakers (Hubbard 2010). With respect to the outcomes of Latino learners, the results were poor. In the 2002–2003 school year, only 43 percent of Nashville's Latino high schoolers graduated (MNPS 2013). This has improved slightly with 2012's rate at 72 percent (MNPS 2013).

When I asked educators to reflect on Nashville-area schools' performance in teaching Latino and newcomer populations, they responded that schools struggled but improved significantly toward becoming better, not perfect, institutions. Aiding that improvement is schools' reliance on recently founded nonprofits that target immigrants—consonant with scholarship on the creation of unique arrangements in Southern schools aimed at better engagement with Latino students (Hamann 2003). According to Alignment Nashville (2011), a nonprofit organizing collaboration with the school district, at one time 175 nonprofits worked in the Nashville's public schools. Nashville's immigrant-serving nonprofits often provide professional development on cultural literacy for teachers; immigrant parental programming; and tutoring, guidance, socio-emotional learning opportunities, emotional support, and outreach for students and parents.

These arrangements are not unique to either Nashville or immigrant populations as school-community partnerships are part of a broader educational trend in the United States (Bartlett et al. 2002). Locally, some teachers argued that the increased reliance on nonprofits helped schools become more culturally sensitive and responsive, whereas others argued that this reliance created a difficult-to-navigate web of educational services that hinders immigrant families more than helps them. What is certain is that this development created a flexible space where support professionals have a degree of autonomy to remake citizenship. The flexibility of these arrangements varies and thus so do the kinds of citizenship interventions possible. Regardless, immigrant nonprofits increasingly serve as powerful allies and intermediaries in the making of local practice and policy, including educational policy (Bloemraad 2006:161–189; de Graauw 2007:2, 18–20; Harris and Kiyama 2013). Those who work in immigrant nonprofits often become the standard bearers of immigrants' needs and causes, potentially imbuing their work with solidarity but perhaps also an increased sense of their own civic identities as they act as civic surrogates for others. Two of the women I discuss below work in the nonprofit educational sector, something central to their views about their students'/their own citizenship.

These data come from a larger ethnographic project I conducted over 16 months in 2010–2013 on Latino/a learners and college access in Nashville, Tennessee. This article is based on a part of that research which focused on the social and educational services available to immigrant families and the gatekeepers who form this service net. For this phase of research, I used ethnographic methods including participant observation at local professional development seminars, school registrations, local community events, civic associations, scholarship fundraisers, and programming with students. In addition, I collected lesson plans and marketing materials from the set of organizations studied.

Finally, I conducted semistructured interviews with 32 participants who work in or with colleges, K–12 public schools, and educational and social service nonprofits/community organizations. The interviews (between one and four hours, conducted in English) focused on professionals' life, work, and education histories; classroom experiences; and perspectives on educating and working with Latino/a youth/families. All but three interviews were recorded and transcribed; for those I could not record, I wrote extensive interview notes during and immediately following the interview.

My research subjects saw me as a PhD student and as a Latina because of the various forms of information I provided them about the project and myself. These aspects of my identity shaped my interactions with all involved in the research in complex ways that I cannot elaborate upon due to space constraints.

I analyzed interview transcripts, field notes, interview notes, and other media using inductive methods; thus, my findings stem not only from scholarly paradigms but also from information gathered with participants. Materials were hand coded and no reliability testing was conducted. In this article, I center on professionals' conceptual frameworks for understanding their work, their students, and themselves. The limits of my data mean that I cannot here explore the academic, social, or civic outcomes of these professionals' interventions on students specifically, as this would veer into excessive speculation. Fully explicating the long-term effects of the professionals' ideologies necessitates further longitudinal study. I focus on support workers' conceptual frameworks as a first step in developing an understanding of how students' civic outcomes are in part produced by the work of those tasked with caring for youth.

The three women described have experiences and approaches representative of the broader participant pool. The people I met who were involved as participants in these women's organizations valued the professionals and their work. These families and youth were not asked to reflect on the women's civic identities; thus, I cannot speak verifiably to their perspectives on this topic based on extant data. The professionals—Marta Perez, Raquel Sandoval, and Liz Koch—are three female workers with distinctive personal, social, and work lives who are employed in equally unique settings. I next outline their backgrounds and workspaces to provide a glimpse of who they are and how their perspectives came to be. I am reluctant to chalk up their pedagogy to one aspect of their subjectivity—gender, age, or ethnicity. However, gender, ethnicity, migration status, and class are key to how these workers see themselves and their work as well as to how others see them as women engaged in gendered work with minority populations (see Biklen 1995, Henry 1995, Leinaweaver 2009).

In her mid-sixties, Marta Perez works as a facilitator of what she terms “educational support groups” for Latinas called Latinas Up. The program is based in a small community mental health and wellness nonprofit with long-standing, local presence. She developed and runs groups for adult women and for teens that are based in local high schools. While ostensibly centered on mental wellness, Marta focuses on developing educational goals as crucial to her practice and the programming she created. Marta previously worked in the corporate sector; however, when volunteering with refugees throughout the 1990s, she decided that her bilingualism could help her help the nascent Latino community. She began volunteering with many local organizations, settling in her current role after securing private foundation funding. Her umbrella organization is large but diffuse, with individual programs like Latinas Up operating independently. Likewise, while often based in schools, her partnership with schools has also been loose with few if any curricular demands. Marta's brisk efficiency and infectious smile led many to seek her counsel.

Marta migrated from Cuba to Tennessee as a teen and struggled with her educational trajectory and transition to the United States. While discouraged by the quality of Tennessee schools, she recognized that her pathway in the United States was dependent on educational success, stating “I survived and made it here because I went to school.” She drew parallels between her experience and those of the Latinas with whom she works: “I remember when I came how difficult it was for me … I had to kind of assimilate and I became so American that I didn't need my Latino thing. But then, as I got older, I started realizing I should be happy that I have the two cultures and I know, I can live amongst these two cultures, so I wanted to help.” However, Marta's immigration position (refugee), nation of origin (Cuba), and social class (professional) are distinct from the largely Mexican, working-class economic immigrants she works with in Latinas Up and enabled her differently in her life. Marta would sometimes explicitly recognize this structural advantage; however, she believed in the power of education for all toward upward mobility, seeing her life as proof.

Raquel Sandoval, in her mid-fifties, has worked in various capacities in her Nashville suburban school district for about 15 years. The school where she works, Jackson Hills, serves largely working-class families from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. She has extended school connections to the Spanish-speaking community, including working with a health group that provided vaccinations for children and other services. As she translated during school events, she would let families know about these additional opportunities. Raquel is part of a small group of educational professionals I met who—in poorly defined and underpaid roles—made connections with nonprofit partners to deepen their practices and stretch their outreach budgets.

She migrated as a teenager from Mexico, and as an adult, she and her middle-class family settled in Tennessee from the West coast. Raquel's own children attended local schools; indeed, Raquel recalled that one of her children's experiences with passive racism energized her professionally. She also reflected on her own past experiences as a newly arrived, non-native English speaker in what she found to be racist, demoralizing public schools, experiences which she saw as professionally motivating. During research, I assisted Raquel with translation services at a variety of school events and was constantly attempting to keep up with her frenetic pace as she went about her work. Indeed, one mother at a kindergarten registration laughingly warned me that I shouldn't try to keep up. Raquel was well known, liked, and sought after by Latino families and nonprofit partners.

Liz Koch, 25, is at the start of her career as the coordinator of a college readiness program called Succeeders. Like Latinas Up, Succeeders is based in a larger nonprofit that focuses on wellness—with educational attainment seen as the central component of the larger organizational mission by not only Liz but also by the central administration. Unlike Latinas Up, Liz's organization has much more managerial oversight, especially around the expression of political ideologies. Additionally, Succeeders is much more tightly connected to the schools—with individual teachers serving as sponsors and the program sometimes having dedicated office space in the schools themselves. The program functions as a kind of alternative guidance department, aiding students through course selection, graduation requirements, and college admissions.

Originally from the D.C. area, Liz began working with Succeeders as an intern in her final year of college where she studied Human and Organizational Behavior. Unlike Raquel and Marta, Liz attended a prestigious private girls' secondary school. While her work is not motivated by her experience of public schooling, Liz's studies of inequality and her Christian faith motivate her work. Her cell phone buzzes nearly constantly with students' messages asking her for advice, support, or just a friendly hello. Her goofy enthusiasm for the work is boundless and her youth aids her in building friendly relationships with students, making her seem more like, as one student put it, “a sister” than an authority figure. Her grandparents migrated from Germany, and like Marta's narration of the role of education in her own and immigrants' social lives more broadly, Liz reflected with students about the role of education in her family's upward mobility.

In the next sections, I discuss Marta, Raquel, and Liz's views of empowerment and their civic expectations for themselves and their students. I demonstrate how these civic expectations are inversely related, developed through their relations with students, and shaped by the affordances of each out-of-school space.

Marta: A Super-Citizen Whose Students “Stay Low”

Marta described her program for teens and adults as a blend of self-esteem exercises, goal setting, and GED or vocational classes. In regard to goal setting she stated: “I would say, ‘what are your talents?’ And, instead of saying, oh you are good at studying—I would say talents could be you like to cook, you like to keep children [look after children], you like to sew, I would give them simple things.” In doing so, Marta suggested goals that reproduce low status occupations commonly associated with Latinas (childcare, domestic and food service; see Chavez et al. 1997). However, she also voiced her frustration with how undocumented women were barred from pursuing certain licensed career paths. Nonetheless, Marta proudly recounted how “my women” have gone on to start small businesses, get their GEDs, and, as she particularly emphasized, become naturalized citizens—her proof of empowerment. When I asked Marta to reflect on the social value of education, she emphasized education as the way individual women become “responsible”—earning income, showing up on time to work and school, and trusting the government. This form of empowerment carries with it not only social reproduction along class and ethnic lines but also a certain moral order of personal and civic responsibility that aligns with a view of citizenship as a self-improvement project (Cruikshank 1999).

Marta's mode of empowerment education is marked by individual accomplishment operating at the periphery, reflecting circumscribed cultural belonging and participatory citizenship for immigrants and their children. However, this critique is not intended to underplay the educational and professional accomplishments the teens and women have made or Marta's role in aiding her students. For example, Marta's client Orbelina Rodas has been taking cake-decorating classes at a local culinary center and now has a successful cake design business that resulted from both Marta's encouragement to enroll and Marta's referrals of Orbelina to her friends. Isabel Martinez, a teen student in both Marta and Liz's programs, cited Marta as a central support as she talked through college going with her family.

In distinction to her students, Marta carves out a more visible citizen role for herself vis-à-vis her work. She, like other service providers with whom I spoke, is skeptical of political “advocates” as she terms them and the potential impact they can have for Latinos: “And they have appointed themselves [political community] leaders and leaders for what—who appointed you? They never have direct contact with the people I worked with.” Relationships between service providers, like Marta, and activist community organizers are often fraught as each attempt to prove their value to the community and prove their understanding of the community and its needs (Aparicio 2006:96). Marta positions her work shepherding participants through educational interventions and social services as the best path to social acceptance. Advocates are not good citizen models for students; nonprofit workers are.

In statements such as these, Marta reproduced unequal power relations between empowerer and empowered while also pointing to her complex role where commonalities in the immigrant experience are shot through with class bias, ethnic difference, and professional status. In her discussions with students Marta often reflected on her own personal struggles as a Latina immigrant as key to her own empowerment. Potentially, her sense of her own personal accomplishment and empowerment, paired with her professional and personal role as “matron,” strengthen Marta's sense of herself as a model citizen whose strategy of education, cultural assimilation, and political accommodation are to be emulated. Thus, she has further opportunity to reproduce her narrative about herself as a survivor, reformer, responsible matron, and ideal citizen. The implication of this to her work is that her view of empowerment allows her to flatten or expand differences between Latina identities strategically and in so doing make sense of her disruptive migration and professional path into the nonprofit sector. In distinction to, and potentially as a result of, the circumscribed role Marta envisions for her educationally empowered but socially disempowered students, she stakes out for herself a more visible role as matron-citizen, the citizen surrogate, for her students.

Additionally, Marta is someone who has been called upon by immigrants and other service providers to represent immigrant families' interests in formal ways, including giving testimony at social service hearings, translating for students, and putting pressure on local government for service and educational provisions. As I sat in her office one day, Marta pulled out various news clippings about her activities and proudly showed me a few awards she had won regarding this work. When I first interviewed Marta, Lourdes Garza, a middle-aged participant in one of the adult educational groups who had recently been beaten by her husband, had been waiting patiently. I apologized for making her wait, but Lourdes claimed it wasn't a problem and did not meet my or Marta's eyes as she spoke. Marta explained that she would fill out Lourdes' assault paperwork and would likely go to the police station in Lourdes' stead. As Lourdes made her way into Marta's office, Marta patted her back softly, soothingly telling her not to worry and that she would take care of it. Central to Marta having this role is her nonprofit's extremely flexible institutional arrangements. Marta's nonprofit does not limit her political involvement, delineate what she can/cannot do for Lourdes and others, or demand her curriculum follow certain goals or align with school curriculum. This allows Marta the most freedom to act politically (and otherwise) compared with the other women profiled. This lack of barriers to her engagement has allowed her civic work to become part of her professional work and illustrates how the specific conditions of the nonprofit itself shape work's civic dimensions.

I argue this kind of standard-bearing role has imbued Marta's work with a sense of super citizenship, or a heightened estimation of her role as citizen, as she acts as the surrogate for immigrants' civic and social interests through the flexible nonprofit where she works (de Graauw 2007). Taking on Lourdes' case is surely welcomed by Lourdes, and the others for whom Marta acts in courts, in schools, and elsewhere. It is likely that ceding power to Marta—a light-skinned, upper-class woman fluent in English—will lead to better outcomes with the state for women like Lourdes. However, Lourdes and others' ceding of power to Marta reveals how the propagation of uneven power dynamics is itself powered by agreed upon relationships between the powerful and supposedly powerless. While it would be unkind and unfair to demand Lourdes behave powerfully in the face of assault, this is but one—albeit dramatic—example of how Marta acts as a surrogate.

However, I also want to draw attention to how some of Marta's participants opt out of her prescription for circumscribed participatory and cultural citizenship in order to demonstrate how Marta's own citizenship is contingent upon those she empowers. Isabel Martinez, the undocumented high school student in both Marta and Liz's programs, was among the most vocal youth migration activists I met. Isabel's feistiness rejects Marta's advice of “staying low,” and she refuses to see her position as powerless and in need of a civic surrogate as she acts for herself civically in her community. While this aspect of her self-presentation was not in opposition to Marta, it worked in contrast to Marta's form of empowerment as Isabel saw her political work as central to her development and not as something she would do later. Isabel enjoyed her time with Marta's group, citing it as “supporting” to her; however, she cited Liz's organization and her activism as more central to the development of her goals and sense of self. While Isabel and Lourdes' situations are not comparable, they illustrate the centrality of the empowering relationship to the empowerer's citizenship.

Raquel: An Apolitical Family Coordinator with Citizen-Students

Raquel voiced further frustration with the limited awareness of Mexican and Latino cultures among teachers. She stated: “We are not all Mexicans. And Mexico has arte, historia, cultura. Not just margaritas and burritos.” In reducing Latino culture to a ten-minute presentation, as discussed in the introduction, Raquel sensed a degradation of the diversity of Latino cultures and by extension the cultural citizenship of the learners and herself. In her hijacking of the presentation, Raquel refused to affirm diminished expectations of the learners and her cultural citizenship. A passive multiculturalism that reduces Latino heritages to universalizing stereotypes is marginalizing for both meaningful multicultural educational practice and for the cultural citizenship of Latino/a youth (see Hall 2002:61–62 for further critique).

Beyond her critiques of passive multiculturalism and reflection on the value of cultural difference, Raquel envisions a more visible, empowered role for students and parents in the school community, modeling a way to civically engage more broadly. During school events, I watched as she quietly urged parents to apply for extended daycare, changes to the bus schedule, and reduced fees for afterschool programs. She pulled a myriad of forms and pens, Mary Poppins-like, from her bag and set parents, and me, to work filling them out. As I helped Amalia Villas, a young Honduran mother of three, fill out a form for reduced tuition at the school's after-school enrichment program for her fifth grader, I considered the implications of this paperwork.

Stuart Hall and David Held define citizenship as the ability both to access and practice rights equally regardless of class, gender, and culture (1989:185–187). Without equal practice, citizenship and rights become merely “paper claims” that are empty of substance (Hall and Held 1989:175). While filling out forms for enrichment programming seems insignificant, Raquel urges parents and the students enrolled in these programs to practice their right to participate in public education regardless of authorized status. These claims are no longer “paper claims” but real claims of citizenship made on paper by documented and undocumented immigrant families (Hall and Held 1989:175). Schools are often among the first representations of the state that immigrants encounter; thus, interactions with the school come to define how immigrants come to approach the state, using their experiences with the schools as a template for how to work with those in power. By urging paperwork as a kind of micropractice of citizenship, Raquel envisions learners and their parents as rights-bearing, and rights-practicing, participatory citizens.

In contrast to Marta, Raquel's view of empowerment minimized her roles as both citizen and education support professional while envisioning greater visibility for her students starting in the school. I first met Raquel by chance at a civic organization focused on the Latino community. She was vocal and sat among the few families in attendance during the otherwise staid meeting of a few interested academics and the friends they dragged along. Raquel volunteered to take notes, run community events, and lead other programs that the group haltingly began to plan. Raquel brought local teachers and administrators to the table, easing their worries about the politics of the group with characteristic chatter. Bridging the gap between educators and activists, she volunteered to spearhead a professional development program for local educators. Raquel seemed a natural organizer—allaying fear while pushing the unsmiling principal she brought to the meeting to get further involved, almost nonbegrudgingly. I was surprised the following year when Raquel told me that she had stopped going to the meetings and that the professional development plan failed. She explained that she didn't “have the time to be calling about the DREAM Act all the time.” “My work, my role” she told me, “is helping the community. I'm not political.”

Raquel frames her professional work as “helping the community,” which in practice looks akin to something “political.” Working with families to assert a right to educational access is a political act: if equal access is political, by extension, so is Raquel. In her practice, Raquel positions education as a citizenship right that needs to be exercised, and exercised fully, not by Raquel but by students and their parents. However, unlike Marta, Raquel is tightly linked to the school and must face unsmiling principals who are (like Marta) skeptical of advocates. Her workplace partly limits her, demonstrating how institutional arrangements shape civic activity. However, when professionals see their work as “helping the community” and practice it like community activism despite such institutional pressures, educational work can become a form of citizenship for practitioners caught in ironically depoliticized, but political, schools. Calling one's work “community” based suggests not just an investment in learners' scholastic achievement but a broader sense of the collective social good of one's work. Her actions, while not framed as political, point to my argument regarding the need to reconsider the political stakes of her work and her attempts to liberalize access to state education. Yet, Raquel—an enabler of citizenship—cedes citizenship to her proxies. The implications of this are not clear: her role as a participatory citizen in this equity campaign perhaps makes her students her proxy but her role also imbues her work with a robust citizenship that is overlooked as it reads as support and “not political.”

Liz: A Surreptitious Citizen with Civically Engaged Students

I watched Liz pack boxes at the local food pantry with students in between laughing and taking cell phone photos. Liz asked students how it felt community and told them how it made her feel good about their collective role in the community. By doing community service with her students, and demonstrating her value of the students' service, Liz practices her citizenship with the students while also modeling what she holds dear in her conception of the good citizen. By doing the same work as the students, she also positions herself as their civic peer as she seeks to empower them to civically engage. These kinds of acts, small in nature and within the realm of work, are nonetheless acts of citizenship and acts of citizenship education that remake civic engagement as inclusive. They also serve to model a particular kind of citizen and citizen proxy—here, one who is actively engaged in the community. Liz is successful in her aims. Many program participants engaged in service (50 percent of surveyed participants) and some in more overtly political aspects of community service—such as protesting for in-state tuition for undocumented youth. Imagining students as “young leaders” marks them, for Liz, as participatory citizens.

Liz also emphasized the importance of “cultural identity development” programming, linking identity and cultural citizenship to her view of empowerment. This is largely accomplished through community-based arts projects (see Abu El-Haj 2010). Some of these efforts are explicitly tied to questions of Latino/a identity, such as a photo and essay prompt: “What does it mean to be Latino/a?” The essays students produced described the challenges they face, including a lack of documentation. The photos and essays were then displayed in the Frist Art Museum, claiming an important cultural place for Latino/a youth in public spaces (see Flores and Benmayor 1997). For Liz, Latino/a students are to be visible in the classroom and community but also should be cultural citizens in the sense Rosaldo describes—exercising “the right to be different and belong”—be it through art projects or in the variety of these youth's civic engagements (1994:402).

Smaller acts, like the piñatas built over fall break in 2012, seem like the empty multiculturalism Raquel critiqued rather than engaged cultural citizenship that demands the right of recognition. However, for Liz and her co-organizer, art projects are imagined as low-stakes safe spaces to explore one's identity. Building on work by Thea Renda Abu El-Haj (2010), I contend these kinds of art projects can be meaningful ways to explore cultural citizenship even if, as in the case of piñatas, they are not framed as such.

Consider the following piñata. Fernando Ortiz, a Guatemalan-American teen, decorated his in white and blue tissue—the colors of the Guatemalan flag. As he fit his oversized hands into the child's sized scissors to fray his tissue paper, Fernando explained that he wanted to make his piñata Guatemalan “since, you know, everybody thinks we're Mexican.” Given our shared identity as Guatemalan-Americans, Fernando often talked with me about how he felt that his Guatemalan identity was subsumed by both popular assumptions that all Latinos are Mexican and the Mexican-specific cultural expectations of his Mexican-American peers in Succeeders. In making his piñata a Guatemalan one, Fernando makes a micro cultural citizenship claim to his peers that Liz and her coworker in part enabled in this low-stakes environment. Fernando lodges an important critique of Latino cultural citizenship—he and his piñata are Guatemalan and notions of pan-Latino citizenship must account for his Guatemalan identity.

Liz and I would often discuss the political and cultural inclusion issues facing and engaged by the youth in the program. Liz clearly spoke with pride about a recent cohort of students who had become vocal activists, including Isabel (recall, also a participant in Marta's group) who often announced in Succeeders tuition equality and immigrant rights campaigns. While Liz was proud of these students, she seemed ambivalent about her limited role: “I, Liz Koch, can have my opinions. But I, Liz Koch, program coordinator, can't wear my nametag and fight for the DREAM Act,” due to the regulations of the nonprofit for which she works. Indeed, while visiting Liz in the office one afternoon, she and Javier Morales, a volunteer college student and aspiring high school teacher, described sneaking into a local rally for the DREAM Act. They left their nametags in Liz's car and “hung out” in the back “awkwardly,” as Javier put it, because they could not be seen as “advocating” for political action per the nonprofit's rules. Here, Liz's position in the nonprofit educational space actively precluded her from expressing her civic identity. Whereas Marta may derive her feelings of citizen efficacy from her role in a largely flexible nonprofit, Liz is discouraged from doing so given her organization's more active surveillance of workers. The organization sought to position itself nationally as nonpolitical, Liz told me, in order to position itself locally as a trustworthy, nonpartisan entity and to maintain its ability to form diverse partnerships. These differences speak to my argument regarding the need to more carefully account for the specifics of nonprofit educational spaces and how, despite a shared tax status, the citizenship scripts they offer differ entirely for students and professionals.

Potentially, as Liz's visible political action is circumscribed by her work, her role as educational support worker and empowerer of others' citizenship identities gains salience. Liz's students are a proxy for her own citizenship—empowering and “investing in leaders” who conform to her ideal of the participatory citizen justifies the negation of her citizenship at work. One might wonder, were she able to express her political leanings more openly, how Liz might be able to deepen her civic educational practice given her largely egalitarian relationships with students. While Raquel voluntarily forfeits visible political activism, Liz seemed more conflicted about the tension between her role as nonprofit worker and her role as politically engaged citizen. There were some commonalities between Raquel and Liz's experiences: both women carve out a bigger role for their students in school and public life while their roles are diminished, by choice or by regulation. In contrast to Marta, who is the civic surrogate for her students, for Raquel and Liz, their students become their civic surrogates.

Implications and Conclusion

Schools are main sites where the civic consciousness and educational aspirations of immigrant and immigrant descendent youth and families are formed (Ramos-Zayas 2007; McGinnis 2009). Scholarship has pointed, in the Latino case, to the key role that educators and educational professionals play in Latino/as' schooling and civic outcomes (Valdes 1996; Valenzuela 1999; Foley 2010; Bartlett and Garcia 2011). Schools, and education more broadly, are changing with increased reliance on nonprofit partners, the proliferation of out-of-school spaces, and the rise of in-school support professionals. As the spaces and professionals change, so too do the lessons on what it means to be a citizen. One implication is that educational spaces do not just teach one way to belong. Rather, educational spaces are variable and as such so are the kinds of citizenship and empowerment prescribed. In the case of the distinctive settings here, Marta's educational support groups suggest limited membership, whereas Raquel's in-school/community liaison work carves out a hearty school citizenship for learners and families, and Liz's Succeeders claims civically engaged citizenship.

Tracing these professionals' perspectives considers the contingencies of empowering others and how these contingent efforts shape those who claim to empower. The directionality of civic surrogacy is determined, in part, by the roles the person purporting to empower imagines for those she seeks to empower. Regardless of whether an educational support worker sees herself as “matron” or like a knowledgeable “sister,” professionals' civic roles are dependent on those of their students. However, this relationality is uneven—dependent not only on student–worker ties but also on the institutional contexts where these relationships are formed. Thus, I also contend that where they teach matters.

Raquel is located in a formal elementary school. As she encourages Latinos to be active school citizens, it is possible to see that formal educational settings continue to matter for citizenship. The growing role of family coordinators, NCLB coordinators, and other school personnel like Raquel speaks to a need to consider how these individuals, tasked with increasing responsibilities, are themselves changing the face of the formal classroom as they work outside it. While one could see Raquel's ceding of her citizenship to her students as a lack of leadership and a relinquishment of the powerful role public schools could play in immigrant rights, Raquel's work demonstrates the narrow confines of political constructions of citizenship. Civic engagement is often positioned outside of personal or work commitments: Raquel's work, as she practices it, asks for a reconsideration of the compartmentalization of work and civic life. It also invites a questioning of what counts as citizenship: her demands for proper names and service access are small scale but represent the everyday ways citizenship is experienced and exercised. Were she able, or willing, to be overtly political on a grander scale, Raquel's ability to mend fences between state agents (principals and school boards) and families might be compromised and not result in the more equitable school citizenship she currently works to create.

By contrast, Liz and Marta are located in the kinds of third-sector outsourcing sites that are increasing in prominence. Further inquiry into nonprofit educational spaces can show, as Bradley Levinson argues, how “citizen identities” (2011:280) are formed in a complex of educational settings. As Nga-Wing Anjela Wong (2010) illustrates, students can position school and the community center (nonprofit providers) as oppositional spaces, potentially mapping onto notions of the location of civic identity outside of home and school and onto nonprofits. Attending to the relative level of flexibility—in lesson planning, oversight, and prohibitions against political action—is essential to further explicating the various kinds of citizenship imagined for students in these spaces by nonprofit workers.

This finding regarding the impact of institutional flexibility on student citizen identity is also true for the professionals' citizenship formation. Marta has free reign both pedagogically and personally. Her nonprofit creates an opportunity for her, and others, to see themselves as political actors—as matron of and civic surrogate for the Latino community. This may be at the expense of seeing programming participants as full civic participants. The nonprofit educational space that Liz enters removes her ability to practice citizenship and teaching together, though the program's focus has citizenship education enter the nonprofit classroom in cultural and participatory ways for immigrant youth. In some ways, Succeeders' limited flexibility places an emphasis on developing students rather than support worker allies.

Civic surrogacy is a complex, institutionally contingent, and relational mode of civic participation that illustrates the closeness of civic ties between educational professionals and those with whom they work. As support professionals politically act for others and have others act politically for them, the parameters of empowerment and citizenship are remade in ways that can either shift the balance of power toward students and families or conserve the existing hierarchies between students and professionals. The implication of this finding is that these flexible educational arrangements can be transformative to civic life as students, families, and those working with them generate productive relationships of civic connection in classrooms and the broader community. Furthermore, civic surrogacy illustrates that the informal civic education Marta, Raquel, and Liz practice is not a top-down process but an entirely dependent one. In the process of empowerment, modes of citizenship are created, not only for immigrant students, but also for those who work with them. Considering civic potential in terms of civic surrogacy born from notions of empowerment allows for not only a reconsideration of the stakes of the educational practices operating at the periphery of schools but for a reconsideration of what civic participation, for students and those caring for them, is in and out of classrooms.