This article delves deep into the story of "illegal" immigration, while humanizing the issue of those who experience it and its enduring consequences. In so doing, this study seeks to look beyond the broadly articulated claims about undocumented immigrants and shed light on what it really means to be unauthorized in America. This body of…

This article examines how new forms of learning and expertise are made to become consequential in changing communities of practice. We build on notions of scale making to understand how particular relations between practices, technologies, and people become meaningful across spatial and temporal trajectories of social action. A key assumption of…

This qualitative research study, applying aspects of van Manen's framework for hermeneutic phenomenological research, was conducted to investigate the narratives of relationally aggressive girls of color. The study focused on nine adolescent girls of color who were ages 14-17 years old and exhibited aggressive/bullying behaviors representing the…

A popular social discourse in the United States is that play is important for children's learning and that parental involvement maximizes play's learning potential. Past research has concluded that parents who hold this view of play are more likely to play with their children than those who do not. This study investigated the prevalence…

Youth involved in illegal street activities such as drug trafficking and violence are at high risk for school failure and other negative outcomes. Research often seeks to identify what is "wrong" with them, what makes them different from "normal" youth, but relatively few studies focus on variations in how youth engage in and…

With the marked increase of the Latino population in the United States during the past 20 years, there has been growing interest in the social, cultural, and structural factors that may impede breast cancer screening among Latino women, especially among those subgroups that have been understudied. Acculturation and fatalism are central cultural…

Culturally relevant pedagogy is a framework that conceptualizes the process of student learning as contingent upon educators' deep understanding of students' cultural backgrounds to co-construct knowledge and develop academic skills. Concurrently, there are a growing number of studies that explore hip-hop as a culturally relevant curriculum for…

Objective: To assess colorectal cancer screening (CRCS) prevalence and psychosocial correlates of CRCS among Latinos in South Texas. Method: Using multivariable analyses, we examined the association of perceived susceptibility, self-efficacy, pros and cons, subjective norms, knowledge and fatalism on CRCS among 544 Latinos (50 years and older).…

Reports indicate that the criminal victimization of Latino immigrants in the United States has been increasing yet is often underreported. This may be especially true in new immigrant settlement cities that lack an established Latino community to provide support and feelings of security. New Orleans is an important context to investigate criminal…

The purpose of this narrative inquiry qualitative study was to explore the formal (school-based) and informal (home-based) school involvement experiences of Hispanic immigrant parents with dominant Spanish language proficiency and to understand the personal, environmental, and social factors that influence the school involvement process of these…

Thinking of identity as a multi-dimensional process through which individuals actively experience and create the self-definition of themselves, this dissertation examines the multiple dimensions of identity that undergraduate college students consider when making meaning of their lives inside and outside of the classroom. Only recently have…

Student mobility can both positively and negatively affect students' academic and social behavior. Grades can drop, behaviors can change, and in some cases students can even drop out of school. My research found that a fluid education is important to students. Talking to the children about the move is also important. Making sure that the move…

This study examined 32 Hispanic parents' perceptions of education, especially, (a) parent's motivation for their children's career choice, (b) their perceptions of education, and (c) informal means of education at home. The data were collected using openended questions and were analyzed using content analysis. Findings in this study provide…

Using data from Waves I and III of Add Health, this study examines early family formation among 6,144 White, Black, and Mexican American women. Drawing on cultural and structural perspectives, models of the first and second family transitions (cohabitation, marriage, or childbearing) are estimated using discrete-time multinomial logistic…

This article uses a feminist framework to explore embodied aging by analyzing indepth formal interviews with 57 men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Emphasizing intersectionality, I focus on the interpretations and strategies these men and women use to make sense of their aging bodies. Their aging corporeal experiences allow me to examine…