Hope Against Hope

Abstract

Inspired by the writings of adolescents in a community-based organization, we utilize a critical poetic inquiry methodology to examine how they express the spatial, temporal, and relational boundaries of the pathways among adolescence, adultification, and adulthood through poetic expression. Through Anzaldúa’s (1999) framework of nepantla, an in-between space that serves to interlace the past, present, reality, and imagination for adolescents, we find that students (a) navigate and identify family dynamics, (b) negotiate tensions of adultification, and (c) recognize and push against social inequities. This article illuminates how youth in under-resourced communities negotiate, imagine, and realize possibilities for their futures.