Theorizing classrooms as contexts of reception shaped by ideological, relational, and pedagogical dimensions, and drawing on ethnographic data from a yearlong study of recent-arrival immigrant youths' educational experiences in an urban U.S. high school, this paper describes how a group of recent-arrival youth acted upon the discourses, pedagogical practices, and identity categories in their content-area and ESL classes. It challenges traditional depictions of school engagement that focus on youths' personal traits and individual attributes.