Allard, Elaine
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Publication Helping Immigrants Identify as "University-Bound Students": Unexpected Difficulties in Teaching the Hidden Curriculum(2010-09-01) Mortimer, Katherine; Wortham, Stanton; Allard, ElaineGlobalization has brought rapid migration to many regions previously unfamiliar with immigration. In these changing landscapes long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors, and immigrants must adjust to hosts’ ideas about them and develop their own accounts of a new social context. How immigrants are viewed and how they view themselves have important implications for their future prospects-especially in schools, where students are measured against normative models of success. Yet as members of cultural and linguistic minority groups, and often as people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrant students may not be aware of these models that are typically part of the implicit or hidden curriculum. Realizing this, secondary school educators in one American town tried to help immigrant students adopt a normative model of identity, the «university-bound student,» by teaching them explicitly how such a person should behave. Their well-intentioned efforts at teaching the hidden curriculum did not work, however. Immigrant students recognized and valued the identity, but neither they nor their teachers believed that the students could adopt it themselves. Using ethnographic data and discourse analyses of curricular materials and classroom interaction, we describe how this program failed to work. We argue that this occurred in part because the intervention was based upon a conception of culture and identity as static and homogenous. We show how a more complex account of culture and identity –as circulatory, multiple, and heterogeneously evaluated– explains this failure and suggests how such an intervention could be more successful.Publication Homies in the New Latino Diaspora(2011-01-01) Wortham, Stanton; Mortimer, Katherine; Allard, Elaine“Homies” are a series of over two hundred 1¾ inch figurines created by a California artist, with the images also available on clothing, in comics, in videogames, on stickers and on the internet. The artist claims that his creations represent the whole range of people one finds in “the barrio.” As the images circulate, however, different audiences interpret them differently - some decrying their glorification of gangsters, for instance, with others lauding the portrayal of less commonly represented social types. This paper traces the uptake of Homies images in one suburban American town, a town with no previous history of Mexican settlement that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past 15 years. In this location, Homies images are taken up in various identity projects as Anglos use them to make sense of the rapidly growing immigrant community and as Mexican youth use them to identify themselves. The role that Homies play in social identification cannot be understood by examining discrete events of media “reception,” however. Analysts must also take into account ongoing local struggles over identity through which the mass mediated images come to have meaning and in which these images sometimes play central roles. The recontextualization of these mass mediated images among different groups in town sometimes results in the homogenization of identities - with the signs used to construe Mexican youth in unflattering ways drawn from nationally circulating stereotypes - while at other times the images are taken up in less familiar identity projects.Publication Mexicans as Model Minorities in the New Latino Diaspora(2009-12-01) Wortham, Stanton; Mortimer, Katherin; Allard, ElaineRapid Mexican immigration has challenged host communities to make sense of immigrants' place in New Latino Diaspora towns. We describe one town in which residents often characterize Mexican immigrants as model minorities with respect to work and civic life but not with respect to education. We trace how this stereotype is deployed, accepted, and rejected both by long-standing residents and by Mexican newcomers themselves.Publication Interviews as Interactional Data(2011-02-01) Wortham, Stanton; Mortimer, Katherine; Lee, Kathleen; Allard, ElaineInterviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes them or their groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town.Publication Racialization in Payday Mugging Narratives(2011-01-01) Wortham, Stanton; Allard, Elaine; Lee, Kathleen; Mortimer, KatherineAs Mexican immigrants move to areas of the United States that have not been home to Latinos, both longstanding residents and newcomers must make sense of their new neighbors. In one East Coast suburb relevant models of identity are sometimes communicated through “payday mugging” stories about African American criminals mugging undocumented Mexican victims. These narratives racialize African Americans and Mexicans in different ways. As payday mugging stories move across narrators from different communities, the racialized characterizations shift.