Epilogue

It was nearly a year since I had seen Siete, and she was now twenty years old. She wore a long sleeveless black and blue striped dress made of polyester—Siete was always good at finding fashionable things at low prices. She wore black flip-flops and clutched a small purse. Her hair was held up in a tight bun and she was wearing shiny turquoise and black eye makeup and bright red lipstick. She was one of the most attractive women in the room....

Risky Love

This chapter provides a nuanced look at the romantic and sexual relationships of Port City youth. Popular culture, media, public policy, and academic scholarship alike have pathologized the romantic and sexual relationships of economically marginalized youth of color by constructing their sexualities as “risky,” teen pregnancy as an epidemic in their communities, and men in these communities as predatory. Their romantic and sexual ties are, however, more complex. This chapter highlights the many joys of first love, the heartbreaks of romance, the resources generated within romantic and sexual relationships, as well as the sacrifices people make out of love. It shows how gender ideologies impact the everyday lives of youth, and it highlights how young women manage the pregnancy panic by distancing themselves from risk narratives and from some of their pregnant and parenting peers. They distance themselves by drawing on feminist ideologies of self-development and, in the process, police their own bodies and bodies of their peers, often reproducing dominant race, class, and gender narratives. Drawing on women-of-color feminisms, this chapter argues that the ubiquitous problematization of teen parenthood and sexuality interferes with resources that could be used to support all young people’s educational and occupational goals.

Port City Rising from the Ashes

This chapter provides a brief economic and sociohistorical overview of Port City—where the author conducted her fieldwork. The chapter discusses the role of one large pharmaceutical company in the city’s recent “revitalization” efforts and its resulting consequences. It also provides a thick description of the various Port City neighborhoods that are still socioeconomically segregated and provides key details regarding the city’s structures and residents.

The Mobility Puzzle and Irreconcilable Choices

This chapter provides an overview of academic debates around the role of structure, culture, and agency in understanding the reproduction of poverty. It is argued that the recent “cultural turn” in poverty studies continues to construct drugs, gangs, violence, and early parenthood as central narratives in the lives of poor black and brown youth, while it privileges middle-class cultural norms. In doing so, scholars ignore the trajectories of youth who continuously struggle to become upwardly mobile. Families, romantic ties, and institutions of school and work function in paradoxical ways in the lives of marginalized youth—providing support while creating impediments as youth are forced to figure out a complex mobility puzzle while piecing together the scant resources available to them. This chapter also highlights how expansion of higher education and the service industry shapes educational and occupational trajectories of marginalized youth. It concludes with a discussion on issues of fieldwork and methodology.

Saved by College

This chapter highlights how marginalized youth attempt to mobilize resources they acquire from school, at work, and through nonprofits and churches in order to facilitate their transition from high school to college. It shows how these institutions generate resources, but they also impede young people’s opportunities for upward mobility. Having to balance the demands of school and work regularly overburden youth, making it difficult for them to succeed in school. Moreover, while organizations and institutions are occupied with educating marginalized youth, they also—and sometimes more importantly—discipline and police them. While the school and community construct the policing of youth as necessary to prepare them for a bright future, this chapter shows how and why the policing agenda often pose obstacles to their higher educational opportunities. In sum, while available resources collectively facilitate their college goals in some ways, such as admission and homework completion, they fall short of preparing them for the myriad daily struggles involved in succeeding in institutions of higher education. Meanwhile, open access to certain institutions of higher education—combined with the organization of labor in the service industry—allows youth to hold on to their aspirations of a college degree and white-collar jobs.

Dismantling the “At Risk” Discourse

This chapter briefly revisits the structure/agency dilemma before turning to a call to rethink the “at risk” framing of inner-city youth—as potential parents, drug users and dealers, gang members, and perpetrators of violence—that often shapes both public policies and the experiences of the youth. It then frames how to think about service jobs and also provides policy recommendations focusing on what can be done at the local level to facilitate young people’s transition to college and their retention once they are there, arguing for a need to provide sustained support in the face of persistent marginalization.

The Making of a Teenage Service Class

This chapter describes the complex and vacillating trajectory between higher education and low-wage work that defines the coming-of-age experiences of marginalized youth. Open access to certain institutions of higher education allow youth to postpone degrees indefinitely while claiming to be invested in college through isolated community college classes. This also reinforces the belief that social mobility through higher education is feasible. At the same time, emotional labor involved in the performance of low-wage service work opens up opportunities for autonomy and creativity as it generates more nuanced understandings of expertise and skills. Youth are able to creatively link the wide array of skills they deploy to satisfy their customers to a larger skillset they imagine they are developing through their isolated college classes. The big companies youth work for also convey the idea that workers at the bottom are part of the industry and can climb up the ladder to white-collar jobs through hard work and training. In the end, marginalized youth are channeled into the disposable labor force as they continue to work multiple part-time jobs at low wages while participating in higher education through isolated community college classes.

Sibling Ties

This chapter focuses on the complexities of sibling ties of the urban poor and highlights the relationship between exchange and intimacy under the constraints of poverty. It argues that located at the nexus of family and peer group, siblings play a unique role compared to peers, parents, extended family, teachers, or romantic partners. Sibling relations are a particularly important family arrangement within socioeconomically marginalized families: in such families, brothers and sisters regularly take on adult responsibilities and make contributions to the household. Older siblings help younger ones navigate school, work, neighborhood, and interactions with the police. Regular and obligatory exchange between siblings, however, often makes families unstable. The close analysis of kinship ties among Port City youth provided in this chapter challenges the simplistic preoccupation with exchange of resources (or absence thereof) within kinship systems by recognizing the costs of exchange on intimate relations, as well as accompanying emotional work. The exchange of resources within kinship networks often strain kinship ties, making them simultaneously resourceful and hostile. The family, thus, acts in paradoxical ways in the lives of the poor, providing support for upward mobility and acting as a place of hostility and conflict.

Uncertain Success

This chapter explores how Port City youth invest in displaying their socially mobile markers not only through school, work, and bourgeois heteronormative life but also through their everyday styles and consumptions. Youth performed class in their daily lives by producing mobility symbols in their leisure practices, clothing, music, vernacular, and food preferences. To manage their haphazard educational and occupational trajectories, the youth redefined mobility into goals that were achievable. While the majority of our understanding of youth regarding race/ethnicity, gender, and class is based on school ethnographies, a context in which students often perform class through memberships in groups that are part of a hierarchical order, this chapter frames meanings of class and youth cultural production by considering how youth perform social mobility in everyday life as they transition to adulthood. When highlighting how youth managed uncertain trajectories by redefining mobility, this chapter emphasizes the points of contact between the marginalized Port City youth and middle-class people who facilitated their access to middle-class cultural capital while also causing “hidden injuries” of class and race. Youth consumed certain foods, visited certain restaurants, watched shows, and even left Port City to claim membership in the middle class—and sometimes this further constrained opportunities.

Internalizing Uncertainty

This chapter describes the ways in which marginalized young Americans manage hunger, the threat of eviction, untreated illnesses, and the untimely death of loved ones, and how this shapes their chances of upward mobility. Growing up under the constraints of poverty requires that children learn to live in highly uncertain and precarious conditions and to readily deal with various types of crises and disruptions, often unforeseen, that occur on a regular basis. This chapter shows that marginalized youth internalize a valuable lesson: life is uncertain. They “normalize” these uncertainties by drawing on highly individualistic and often uncontrollable and otherworldly accounts, such as “bad genes,” “fate,” and “unknown conspiracies”—accounts that help them deal with the unpredictability of life. For example, in Port City, youth developed and enacted a guarded perception of what home means—often imagining home through a symbolic connection to the place where they were born or the country from which their parents or even grandparents immigrated to America—which left them always prepared and eager to move. Strategies like these enable meaning making among youth amid their struggles and uncertainties, but they also create additional obstacles for upward mobility.