Encountering the Affective in Latino Immigrant Youth Narratives

Abstract

The authors argue that attending to the affective dimensions of everyday life for Latino immigrant youth offers a disorientation away from the circulation of fear around immigration in the United States, and a new orientation that links together the intimate affective images and narratives of the everyday that are less oppressive and rooted in and branch out to hope and solidarity. To demonstrate the importance of the affective, the authors conducted a post-qualitative research inquiry interested in animating lifeworlds of seven Latino immigrant youth living in the context of North Carolina. The authors used process and nonrepresentational affect theories to analyze the data, tracing the rogue intensities and surface tensions of ordinary affects across and through the different students and their writing to highlight the students' fragments of experience as Latino youth in America today. Specifically, the authors drew on Ahmed's affect theory of sticky objects and sweaty concepts as they analyzed students' words against the discourse of fear and hate. In tracing the affects that circulate around three sticky objects-immigration, families, and America-the authors witnessed and experienced the moments of tension in students' affective lives. Doing this work with narratives of first-generation immigrants exposes the effect that embodied memories have on present-day experiences. The authors maintain that attunement to the affective realm produces a humanizing practice of literacy research and provides counteraffects of hope, gratitude, and life that speak to the more-thanrepresentational written narratives. Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they're also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. (Stewart, 2007, p. 2) S ince the 2016 U.S. presidential election, hatred and fear have circulated and moved through the United States, treating immigration as an object of ordinary affect (Stewart, 2007) in that it has become ingrained in the everyday lives of U.S. citizens. In a quick internet search of immigration, borders, politics, and fear, hundreds of multimodal messages on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and news websites demonstrate a perceived threat and a residue of fear through terms such as invasion, safety, danger, and illegal aliens. This threat is echoed in messages of how immigrants might "hurt, " "burden, " "undermine, " and "strain" a nation. Often, the immigrants targeted by these public statements are silenced and hidden from view. The rhetoric makes their existence feel unwanted; thus, they are continually searching for a place in which they can belong. This rhetoric was echoed by

The Politics of Affect in Literacy Research

“…Perry’s (2020) pluriversal examples of literacy and her analysis, in fact, flood us with both what is being felt in the literacy engagements that Lee et al (2020) describe and the too shallow of a container that literacy has provided for the overflow of emotions and affect. Perry delicately addresses her role as researcher without centering herself.…”

“…Similarly, in Lee et al’s (2020) article, we are asked to bear witness to the sticky places in which anti‐immigrant rhetoric from the person in the highest office in the United States are felt, annotated, and rejected through immigrant students’ writings and oral histories. The authors invite us into the complicated collectivity of love.…”

“…Affect is inextricably bound up with other beings, living and seemingly still objects. The three articles that I discuss here by Jocson and Dixon‐Román (2020), Lee, Falter, and Schoonover (2020), and Perry (2020) all, differently, address the intra‐action of humans with space/time bundles, textual praxes, and sociopolitical forces that have palimpsests into the moments they describe and the potential of reading across moments. It is particularly this potential, of reading emotions, of paying attention to affect, across instances that I would like to gather attention—not draw attention but gather.…”

“They Are Doers”: Writing to Advocate With Immigrant Youth in Community‐Based Organizations

“…This study, the Juntos NC Writing Project, is a part of the Literacy and Community Initiative, an interdisciplinary university–community partnership that investigates and promotes the power of voice among youth community organizations that serve currently marginalized populations (Lee, Falter, & Schoonover, 2020; Lee & Schoonover, 2019). The project was designed to promote the power of youth advocacy for Latinx immigrant students in North Carolina and to address the increased need for communities to hear the voices of immigrant adolescents in the United States’ rapidly changing landscape.…”

Refusals,Re-Turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale

“…Recently, the renewed attention to affect within the field of literacy (Leander & Ehret, 2019) has brought with it similar concerns, namely that literacy studies drawing upon posthuman and new materialist theories, which include theories of affect, have not adequately attended to issues of power and, as such, tend to undertheorize or overlook race and racism (Beucher et al, 2019; Dernikos et al, 2020; Nichols & Campano, 2017). Within this article, we acknowledge these critiques at the same time that we draw upon contemporary literacy scholarship on affect that has been vital to our conceptualization of affective literacies as emergent (Dutro, 2019; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Rowsell et al, 2018), material-discursive (Burnett & Merchant, 2016; Kuby et al, 2019; Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016; Lenters, 2016; Niccolini, 2019), vibrational (Dernikos, 2020; Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Wargo, 2019), and historical—that is, where the past unexpectedly emerges within present moments to trouble the humanist conception of time as discrete and linear (Dernikos & Thiel, 2020; Grinage, 2019; Jones & Spector, 2017; Lee et al, 2020; for timescales, see Compton-Lilly, 2011; for racial hauntings, see Johnson, 2017).…”