The Succeeders

How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America

Andrea Flores

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520976306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

A powerful and challenging look at what "success" and belonging mean in America through the eyes of Latino high schoolers. This book challenges dominant representations of the so-called American Dream, those "patriotic" narratives that focus on personal achievement as the way to become an American. This narrative misaligns with the lived experience of many first- and second-generation Latino immigrant youth who thrive because of the nurture of their loved ones. A story of social reproduction and change, The Succeeders illustrates how ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valuable, and who is an American are worked out by young people through their ordinary acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family. In this eye-opening book, Andrea Flores examines how ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valued, and who is considered to be an American are worked out by young people through ordinary acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family. Through examining the experiences of everyday Latino high school students—some undocumented, some citizens, and some from families with mixed immigration status—Flores traces how these youth, in the college-access program Succeeders, leverage educational success toward national belonging for themselves and their families, friends, and communities. These young people come to redefine what it means to belong in the United States by both conforming to and contesting the myth of the American Dream rooted in individual betterment. Their efforts demonstrate that meaningful national belonging can be based in our actions of caring for others. Ultimately, The Succeeders emphasizes the vital role that immigrants play in strengthening the social fabric of society, helping communities everywhere to thrive.

PART I Contexts of Belonging

1 City of Success

LIVING AND LEARNING IN MUSIC CITY

What do you imagine when you think of Nashville, Tennessee? When you see it in your mind’s eye, do you picture crowded souvenir shops selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Getting Shitty in Music City?” Or do you see the cranes that hover menacingly over half-built mega-hotels and gleaming, high-rise condos? Maybe you stay closer to the ground, envisioning the neon kitsch music venues downtown teeming with pink-cowboy-hatted, out-of-towner bachelorette parties? These images are icons of what local journalist Steve Cavendish calls the “honky tonk industrial complex” associated with Nashville’s recent meteoric growth.¹

When you think about Nashville, you probably are not thinking about South Nashville. Home to much of the city’s immigrant population, South Nashville has an altogether different set of icons. It’s full of winding, beige apartment complexes rife with what my car’s shocks found to be unexpectedly tall speed bumps. There are simple, cozy ranch houses arranged on dead-end streets and tightly packed trailer parks. Along its main drags are mechanics selling llantas usadas (used tires), car title loan shops promising quick cash, and storefront nonprofits promoting English classes. Bakeries offering their wares in Kurdish, Spanish, and Arabic dot petite strip malls dwarfed by supersized Walmarts. At its neighborhoods’ quiet edges are its midcentury, low-slung high schools and more recently built concrete ones. Both types are overcrowded, underfunded, and overlooked in this era of roaring economic success.

At the time of my research, South Nashville contained the city’s fastest-growing and most diverse neighborhoods. It bore the brunt of jokes regarding urban blight and served as a cautionary tale regarding both past gang violence and present school failure. A visit inside one of these apartments, trailers, or high schools, however, revealed immigrant families and youth striving to belong in a city that needed them but seemed not to want them.

Since the late 1990s, Nashville has experienced unprecedented immigration from across the Global South, especially from Latin America. Despite their centrality to Nashville’s boom—as they cleaned its hotels, cooked food for hungry tourists, and built its ever-expanding skyline—Nashville’s new immigrants were “invisible to the rest of the city.”² For years they went unnoticed by locals due both to their residential segregation in South Nashville and to immigrants’ “institutional invisibility” in metro government.³ Ms. Millerton, a white, lifelong resident of South Nashville and the teacher who worked closely with the Succeeders club at Gilead High, remembered this period:

All I remember kinda seeing is going to a Walmart or going to a Kroger [a regional grocery store chain], literally, and seeing a group of Latino men in plaid and jeans, and, like, they had just gotten off work . . . manual labor, usually dirty hands. . . . And that’s what I remember from the beginning.

Despite this initial invisibility even to more attentive neighbors like Ms. Millerton, Nashville’s immigrants were increasingly visible in its schools starting in the early to mid-2000s.⁴ As geographer Jamie Winders argues, schools are “often the first institutions to experience the transition from Latino workers to Latino families” and are “frequently the institutions through which immigrant students and their parents first feel connected to the local community.”⁵ They are also the first sites where the local population encounters immigrants in more sustained ways than furtive glances exchanged at the supermarket.

When Ms. Millerton began to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) at a local community college, she began to “see” the immigrant population: “That [teaching] was my first real ‘okay, wow, there are lots of immigrants here now.’ ” When she became a teacher in Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS), she saw the change even more closely as her emergent bilingual students picked up academic English. By the 2014–15 academic year, Latino learners would account for 20 percent of the district’s students, and emergent bilinguals comprised 14 percent of the school population.⁶ Through her teaching, Ms. Millerton also saw how these growing populations were excluded in their schools and city as some colleagues failed to show what she called “willingness” to help emergent bilinguals and Latinos in or outside the classroom.

This chapter situates Succeeders’ striving for belonging in the wider success-focused cultural politics of Nashville and its educational institutions. I briefly sketch the city’s recent past, including the latest wave of economic growth, Global South immigration, and local immigration-related policies. I show how the city’s political elite included immigrants through highlighting the latter’s role in producing local economic growth. While urban economic growth is different from academic accomplishment, they both prize a common value: achievement. Thus, this more macroanalysis at the level of city politics reveals widely circulating ideals of success-based membership.

I then narrow my focus to the role local educational institutions play in brokering belonging. Schools are often ignored when it comes to belonging, but they matter as much as—if not more than—what happens at city hall. Schools are belonging’s front lines. As Ms. Millerton’s experiences attest, schools hold a unique social position as a point of first, sustained contact between newcomers and the local community. They thus can be the foundation of meaningful inclusion or perpetual exclusion. The transformation of Nashville’s schools into immigrant-serving ones is, at its core, about membership.

There were persistent inequalities within Succeeders’ schools. Moreover, the dominant success-based terms of membership in schools produced deep and enduring marginalization, as students’ academic failure was used to exclude them institutionally and from a sense of belonging there. However, there were also glimmers of hope in the inclusion that students and teachers alike felt and fought for daily in their schools and in the Succeeders program. As the repositories of students’ hopes and dreams and the location of their sense of community, educational institutions played a critical role in forging belonging in Nashville. Throughout this chapter I include the voices of the Succeeders, teachers like Ms. Millerton, and others to show how local histories are lived. The ways students and locals make sense of their city’s cultural politics, immigration history, and schools show how notions of belonging are worked out not only by politicians but by us all.

THE “IT” CITY: TRACKING ECONOMIC GROWTH AND IMMIGRATION IN A NEW CENTURY

Midway through my fieldwork in 2013, it seemed everyone from my dad to my dissertation adviser sent me the now locally infamous New York Times profile of Nashville. Nashville, author Kim Severson argued, was the latest “it city” having its moment in the spotlight due to its expanding economy, rising tourism downtown, and even the glamorous (now long canceled) primetime musical soap Nashville.⁷ Although the national press may just then have been bestowing “it” status on the city, Nashville’s previous century was dominated by economic success.

Nashville’s success made it largely exceptional as a southern city.⁸ Like the other big economic winners of the Sunbelt, Nashville experienced its most significant growth after the 1970s. During that period, local government introduced “business-friendly” incentives like corporate tax exemptions to lure industries southward.⁹ By the end of the 1990s, Nashville had cemented its status as a national hub for the insurance, healthcare management, music, and corporate services sectors.¹⁰ For example, Hospital Corporation of America, one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers, was founded in and is currently headquartered in Nashville. State Farm, Dell computers, Caterpillar Financial, and LifePoint Health also have corporate operations or headquarters in the metro area.¹¹ The city’s rise to economic prominence has only increased since the 1970s, according to its well-advertised, double-digit job and economic market growth figures.¹² Its success has been vital to how city leaders and boosters have seen and sold Nashville to would-be tourists and relocating Fortune 500 companies—even if locals, including my in-laws and friends, complain about the increased traffic this success has wrought.¹³

Despite Severson’s passing reference to the city as being “alive with immigrants,” the immigrants of South Nashville were mostly ignored in media clips that documented the city’s rise to prominence.¹⁴ Immigration, however, has been central to Nashville’s economic growth in both this century and the previous one. Until the end of the twentieth century, the city’s steady population growth was due to the arrival of internal migrants, or US residents moving from one state, region, or city to another.¹⁵ As “high-skill” labor came to Nashville for work in the 1990s, there were increasing demands on the service, hospitality, and construction industries.¹⁶ Instead of rural white and black populations filling these niches, as they had done a century before, it was international immigrants who did so.¹⁷ Between the years 2000 and 2012, international immigration accounted for 60 percent of total metropolitan population growth, and foreign-born residents increased from 2 to 12 percent of the city’s population.¹⁸ Almost half of these new Nashvillians hailed from Latin America.¹⁹

This new local pattern of immigration reflected a broader one of Latin Americans settling in the new destinations of the Southeast at the turn of the twenty-first century.²⁰ Immigration scholars assert that the Southeast had many draws for working-class immigrants from Latin America and original sites of settlement in other US regions. Chief among these was the economic success I have just outlined in the alluring forms of plentiful jobs, a low cost of living, and high wages relative to those available in more saturated labor markets like California.²¹

In the wake of 9/11 and amid increasingly stringent immigration enforcement, Latin American immigration changed in new destinations like Nashville. It went from being the unnoticed, impermanent labor pool at Kroger that Ms. Millerton remembered seeing to a population of families with small children in South Nashville.²² By 2010, when the oldest Succeeders I worked with finished their first year of high school, Latinos comprised 10 percent of Nashville’s population.²³ To give a further sense of the scale and speed of this population change, Nashville’s Latino population (native and foreign born) increased thirteenfold in a twenty-year span—from 4,775 people in 1990 to 62,527 in 2010—an approximately 1,200 percent increase.²⁴

Yet these economic push-pulls and impressive percentage increases tell only part of the story. Immigrants came to Nashville and the South for other reasons, including perceived lower levels of immigration enforcement targeting undocumented family members.²⁵ Students whose parents came from rural areas of Central America and Mexico also told me that their parents had moved to Nashville after they heard from early immigrant movers there about the availability of land, the pleasant climate, and the slower pace of southern living.²⁶ Some students also mentioned their families’ desire to leave high-crime urban areas, particularly New York and Los Angeles. Soccer-playing senior Jane-Marie’s family left Los Angeles for precisely this reason: “Another reason they [the family] left was because there was a lot of gangs going on there in Cali. . . . But the ironic thing, when we came over here years later, there was gangs coming up in Nashville.”²⁷ From Succeeders I also heard stories of the much-derided chain migration, or what we might call family migration: an uncle or aunt who moved to Nashville first and then encouraged family reunification. Clusters of aunts, uncles, and cousins already in Nashville made the city—with its ample work opportunities—seem all the more attractive.²⁸ Nashville presented an opportunity to belong, with economic success, reunited families, a house of one’s own, and a calmer way of life. It could grant the American Dream.

Latin Americans were the largest group of immigrants in the city, but they weren’t the only ones. Another significant migration stream has been the steady flow of refugees almost entirely not from Latin America. In 2001 Nashville was designated part of the “Building the New American Community” initiative which looked to place refugees in cities that, while not traditional sites of entry, could absorb refugee labor locally.²⁹ In 2012 the state resettled 1,032 refugees from throughout the Global South in Nashville.³⁰ Today, Nashville is home to refugees from Iraq (most notably Kurds), Bhutan, Sudan, South Sudan, and Somalia, among other nations.³¹

Despite their shared “foreignness,” there was a difference in reception for refugee versus economic immigrants in Nashville. In 2010 Sharon, an immigration counselor with over twenty years of professional experience, succinctly expressed this difference to me:

I think the reception for refugees is more compassionate than for just immigrants. . . . Most people know they’re refugees and they’ve come from hard times, but they don’t know the hard times that people from Mexico have gone through to cross the border. . . . I’ve seen where people have died trying to cross the border and it’s just as sad a story [as that of the refugees] or could be, but reception of refugees is more compassionate.

Despite this compassion differential, both groups of immigrants—the small number of refugees and the large number of Latin Americans—shared common experiences. They both strove to succeed in Music City, worked in the industries fueling its urban growth, lived in the same segregated parts of Nashville, and had children in the same struggling schools. As I describe next, they also faced the same exclusionary terms of local membership predi...