Sylvia Rodríguez
Biographic Data
| ID | 86039 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sylvia Rodríguez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sylvia |
| FAMILY NAME | Rodríguez |
| SIGNATURE | RODRÍGUEZ S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3261-1944 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 137 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Toward Race-Conscious Care-Based Healing to Support Latino Immigrant Youth
This longitudinal convergent mixed-methods study sheds light on how school-based personnel such as educators, counselors, and district leaders perceive the needs of immigrant youth. Additionally, we explore how immigrant youth experience belonging and well-being in school and community spaces to advance a conceptual framework for ecosystems of care. The research questions ask how school-personnel manage the welcome of immigrant youth and how yout…
A Call for New Frameworks to Capture Latinx Immigrant Young Adults’ Racialized Educational Experiences in the United States
This article assesses the literature on immigrant assimilation frequently used to explain the educational experiences and trajectories of immigrant young adults in the United States. These analyses often under-theorize the central roles that racialization, racism, and discrimination based on race and ethnicity play in shaping Latinx immigrant youth and young adults’ well-being, opportunities, aspirations, and impact on their access to resources. …
Parallel lives, re(imagined) futures, and the hidden injuries of undocumented Latinx youth across the lifespan
“Like They’re My Same People. They’ve Probably Been in My Shoes. . .”
This is a critical qualitative case study of foreign and native-born Latino students from immigrant households who participated in an immigrant-serving community-based organization (CBO). The authors draw from Mario Small’s concepts of network ties and organizational embeddedness to examine how Latino youth talk about the impact of a CBO on their belonging and identity, the formation of social and organizational ties in shaping their educational …
Different ways to broker
This study uses quantitative methods to explore the role of school social workers (SSWs) in promoting education equity for immigrant students. We focus on how SSWs act as resource brokers, connecting immigrant students to valuable resources both in schools and the wider community. Our analysis is based on data from a national survey of SSWs (N = 324). Through regression and multivariate analyses we find that a significant number of SSWs actively …
Struggling to Belong
This brief reports findings from a survey with middle and high school youth in a midsize district in the Mid-Atlantic. We find that belonging varies by race and ethnicity for young people. Overall, Black and Latino/x youth report lower belonging when compared to their White peers in a pro-diversity and inclusion district. Implications for policy and practice are addressed to improve sense of belonging for racially/ethnically and linguistically di…
Seeking care across the US-Mexico border
This study shows the importance of geography in health. Rural unincorporated colonias located in the borderlands are precariously located and lack basic critical infrastructure including healthcare access. Within such places, historically and socially marginalized populations become invisible, are subject to the health effects of environmental hazards, and are limited depending on their positionality and thus vulnerability to healthcare services
Activism and Resistance from the Trenches
This article explores critical ways that migrant groups engage in diverse forms of resistance. In this comparative case study, we draw on our longitudinal ethnographic research on migrant groups, particularly those that are characterized as undocumented, with a focus on the ways in which they engage in activism and resistance in China and the United States, respectively. We aim to expand the literature about comparison by asking: how is compariso…
Even Being a Citizen Is Not a Privilege Here
This three-year multi-site ethnographic study centers undocumented high school youth's ( N = 53) perspectives on citizenship. Challenging legal conceptions of citizenship, the article advances the notion of racialized citizenship, which is grounded in youth experiences and argues that deeper racial meanings and hierarchies undergird categories of citizenship. By highlighting a nuanced context of reception in the U.S. Southeast, the authors docume…
“Immigration Knocks on the Door . . . We Are Stuck . . .”
Background/Context: Undocumented youth navigate unwelcoming federal, state, and local contexts in the United States. Although previous research shows the significant impact of immigration policy and enforcement on educational outcomes and social-emotional well-being, this study sheds light on the multiple, intersecting policy, and school contexts that hinder social and educational mobility. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to elicit Latinx un…
We can be leaders”
This article problematizes traditional and critical conceptions of civic knowledge and centers minoritized youth voices. We utilize case studies from two critical qualitative studies in two urban contexts to suggest that minoritized youths’ subjugated knowledges are a type of civic knowledge and necessary for youth to imagine agentic social futures. These case studies indicated that youths’ community-based curricular experiences illuminated and t…
Crossing Borders
Anti-immigrant rhetoric increasingly depicts immigrants as undeserving, but schools are social institutions where these perceptions can be challenged and, ideally, where inequities confronting immigrant students can be ameliorated. Existing research suggests that teachers and administrators are central to this task, but it also raises questions about the role of other personnel in immigrant-serving schools. Drawing on the concept of nepantlera, t…
Discourses of Belonging
This article problematizes methodological practices, specifically the use of surveys as tools of measurement in evaluation with migrant youth. Drawing from Foucault’s Genealogy of Ethics, we investigate the knowledge created about particular minoritized groups through the author’s current evaluation, the power relations involved, and the ethical dimensions of evaluation. We argue that ethical questions for evaluators are entangled in an era of ne…
Avowing as healing in qualitative inquiry
This article problematizes the role of the interview as a methodological strategy that loses its easy replication when employed in studies with undocumented youth. We raise questions about the contingencies of conducting qualitative interviews with undocumented youth – what does it mean leverage the interview-event as a space of healing for them? What does it mean to recognize, or potentially mis-recognize one’s identity in the context of a resea…
I’ve never cried with a stranger before”
Issues of immigration and documentation permeate institutional policies, implicate academic, employment, and transportation spaces, structure access to and use of informational resources, as well a
They Let You Back in the Country?”
Educating Hope, Radicalizing Imagination, and Politicizing Possibility in Hard Times
This manuscript introduces a dialogue on educating hope, radicalizing imagination, and politicizing possibility. It provides both conceptual and empirical, challenge traditional ways of engaging in and interpreting research, and affirm the significance of educational inquiry as a form of liberatory or radical democratic practice. It illuminates creative strategies for us to research and write to resist and fight for human dignity and social justi…
When Nationalism Supersedes Belief in Religious Freedom
This study is based on an analysis of survey data from a national sample of K-12 public schools teachers (N = 5,237). The purpose of this article is to examine teachers’ beliefs about nationalism and how it correlates to teachers’ beliefs about religious liberty, and to what extent beliefs about nationalism are stronger than beliefs about religious liberty. To this end, we use regression analysis of survey data. This research is significant becau…
Decolonizing Care at Diagnosis
The decolonization framework in medical anthropology is slowly reframing tropes of cultural competency toward decolonizing health care. For decolonization of health care to occur, both colonial histories and continuing postcolonial inequities must be recognized from the first diagnostic moment. We report on qualitative research into the role of culture, history, and family experience in person-specific reactions to receipt of a diagnosis. A colla…
On the Educational Rights of Undocumented Students
Background/Context Undocumented and DACAmented students face substantial restrictions in higher education as well as in U.S. society. Though there has been significant research on the effects of these policies on the lives and educational outcomes of immigrant students, including how undocumented students are accessing higher education, there is less understanding of K–12 teachers’ awareness of these policies and their attitudes toward these poli…
“You’re a Sociologist, I Am Too . . . ”
The article is about a set of methodological disruptions that occur in ethnographic fieldwork and what these disruptions mean for ethnographic studies, including analysis, representation of data, and experiences of the ethnographic self. This article documents the process of a minoritized high school youth, Queen, entering the research space and the emergent relations among Queen and Latinx undocumented youth. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s analyti…
Biopolitical power and paradoxes in evaluation research with transnational migrant youth
In this article, the authors theorize the practice of evaluation as linked to truth-telling and organizing future societies. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of biopolitical governmentality, the authors examine the origins of the field of evaluation, theorize it as a truth-telling practice that aims to control populations and futures, and consider the implications of this for a current evaluation project with transnational newcomer migrant youth in…
Community-School Partnerships as Racial Projects
The article conceptualizes community-school partnerships (CSP) as racial projects. Drawing on data from a mixed-methods study of how CSPs increase belonging for migrant youth, the article reveals existing tensions in CSPs from migrant youth ( N = 63) and stakeholder perspectives. Viewing CSPs through a racial project lens allows researchers and practitioners to identify, in both design and implementation, spaces of tension where attempts to disru…
School Social Workers as Nepantleras in Equity Work for Immigrant Students
This article investigates the critical role school social workers play in promoting equity and advocating for immigrant students in K–12 settings. We explore and conceptualize the notion of nepantlera from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and draw from qualitative data to show how school social workers function as nepantleras in service and advocacy roles for immigrant students. We further argue that the school settings in which these services take pl…
I Was Born at the Border, Like the ‘Wrong’ Side of It
This article provides ethnographic evidence of how Latinx undocumented youth navigate racialization processes. The research occurs in a focal state in the New Latino South, a highly restrictive and hostile context toward immigrants broadly and undocumented ones specifically. The author situates this research in Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas' call for the racialization of immigration studies, considering notions of race and racism in the study o…
Paying to belong
Societies and social scientists have long held the belief that exclusion induces ingratiation and conformity, an idea in contradiction to robust empirical evidence linking rejection with hostility and aggression. The classic literatures on ingratiation and conformity help resolve this contradiction by identifying circumstances under which rejection may trigger efforts to ingratiate. Jointly, findings from these literatures suggest that when peopl…
I Was Born at the Border, Like the ‘Wrong’ Side of It
This article provides ethnographic evidence of how Latinx undocumented youth navigate racialization processes. The research occurs in a focal state in the New Latino South, a highly restrictive and hostile context toward immigrants broadly and undocumented ones specifically. The author situates this research in Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas' call for the racialization of immigration studies, considering notions of race and racism in the study o…
People Hide, But I'm Here. I Count
This article sheds light on the educational trajectories of undocumented youth who engage in forms of organizing through a community-school partnership in an urban public school in Chicago. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study in an urban public high school, readers learn that undocumented youth gain a positive sense of identity and belonging to their school and community by participating in a community-based after-school program called The…
It’s about hearing and understanding their stories”
In this article the co-authors draw from three separate ethnographic studies in the U.S. South to expand the literature about how teachers understand and apply multiculturalism specifically when working with newcomer undocumented immigrant youth. The co-authors identify an implementation gap between what is known about critical multicultural education and how it is put into practice by educators, specifically in regions that can be characterized …
Everyday magical powers
These studies examined whether having thoughts related to an event before it occurs leads people to infer that they caused the event--even when such causation might otherwise seem magical. In Study 1, people perceived that they had harmed another person via a voodoo hex. These perceptions were more likely among those who had first been induced to harbor evil thoughts about their victim. In Study 2, spectators of a peer's basketball-shooting perfo…
School Social Workers as Nepantleras in Equity Work for Immigrant Students
This article investigates the critical role school social workers play in promoting equity and advocating for immigrant students in K–12 settings. We explore and conceptualize the notion of nepantlera from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and draw from qualitative data to show how school social workers function as nepantleras in service and advocacy roles for immigrant students. We further argue that the school settings in which these services take pl…
Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos
They Let You Back in the Country?”
We're building the community; it's a hub for democracy.”
Community-School Partnerships as Racial Projects
The article conceptualizes community-school partnerships (CSP) as racial projects. Drawing on data from a mixed-methods study of how CSPs increase belonging for migrant youth, the article reveals existing tensions in CSPs from migrant youth ( N = 63) and stakeholder perspectives. Viewing CSPs through a racial project lens allows researchers and practitioners to identify, in both design and implementation, spaces of tension where attempts to disru…
After all I have done for you
We can be leaders”
This article problematizes traditional and critical conceptions of civic knowledge and centers minoritized youth voices. We utilize case studies from two critical qualitative studies in two urban contexts to suggest that minoritized youths’ subjugated knowledges are a type of civic knowledge and necessary for youth to imagine agentic social futures. These case studies indicated that youths’ community-based curricular experiences illuminated and t…
Educating Hope, Radicalizing Imagination, and Politicizing Possibility in Hard Times
This manuscript introduces a dialogue on educating hope, radicalizing imagination, and politicizing possibility. It provides both conceptual and empirical, challenge traditional ways of engaging in and interpreting research, and affirm the significance of educational inquiry as a form of liberatory or radical democratic practice. It illuminates creative strategies for us to research and write to resist and fight for human dignity and social justi…
Impact of the ski industry on the Rio Hondo watershed
Decolonizing Care at Diagnosis
The decolonization framework in medical anthropology is slowly reframing tropes of cultural competency toward decolonizing health care. For decolonization of health care to occur, both colonial histories and continuing postcolonial inequities must be recognized from the first diagnostic moment. We report on qualitative research into the role of culture, history, and family experience in person-specific reactions to receipt of a diagnosis. A colla…
Subaltern historiography on the Rio Grande
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ
Biopolitical power and paradoxes in evaluation research with transnational migrant youth
In this article, the authors theorize the practice of evaluation as linked to truth-telling and organizing future societies. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of biopolitical governmentality, the authors examine the origins of the field of evaluation, theorize it as a truth-telling practice that aims to control populations and futures, and consider the implications of this for a current evaluation project with transnational newcomer migrant youth in…
Philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, adolescence and youth
Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions and constructs. These constructs are tainted with ontological and epistemological histories and ideas about ‘real children’ and childhoods. In this Special Issue, we argue that the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence need to be rethought as concepts, and that philosophy, sociology and anthropology are some of the disciplines that can allow us to do so. There are a number of concern…
Avowing as healing in qualitative inquiry
This article problematizes the role of the interview as a methodological strategy that loses its easy replication when employed in studies with undocumented youth. We raise questions about the contingencies of conducting qualitative interviews with undocumented youth – what does it mean leverage the interview-event as a space of healing for them? What does it mean to recognize, or potentially mis-recognize one’s identity in the context of a resea…
I’ve never cried with a stranger before”
Issues of immigration and documentation permeate institutional policies, implicate academic, employment, and transportation spaces, structure access to and use of informational resources, as well a
Risky” Subjects
This article theorizes migration as risk, drawing on Biesta’s notion of risk. The author explores how productive risk connects with emancipation, seeing the risky migrant subjects in societies in new ways, rather than positioning them as marginalized threats. Finally, the author connects the theory of migration as risk to current qualitative data from empirical research on newcomer migrant youth in the United States. Implications of the theorizin…
My Eyes Were Opened to the Lack of Diversity in Our Best Schools”
Productive encounters
Fiesta Time and Plaza Space
This article describes the Taos, New Mexico, summer fiesta of Santiago and Santa Ana as a living ritual event and considers the voices of participants and opponents of the festival. My analysis shows how the fiesta enacts collective and individual identities while staging a moment of communitas. This invented tradition expresses resistance as well as accommodation to the conditions and structures of power within which the celebration takes place …
The Taos Pueblo Matachines
This article analyzes the Matachines dance at Taos Pueblo as a ritual-symbolic expression of the history and character of Indian-Mexicano relations in the Taos Valley. Details of the dance are examined with reference to the history and ecology of Taos, including the overall pattern of interethnic village relations established around the Pueblo. The analysis focuses on the Abuelos, or clowns, and the burlesques they perform during the three-day Ch…
Impact of the ski industry on the Rio Hondo watershed
Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos
The Taos Pueblo Matachines
This article analyzes the Matachines dance at Taos Pueblo as a ritual-symbolic expression of the history and character of Indian-Mexicano relations in the Taos Valley. Details of the dance are examined with reference to the history and ecology of Taos, including the overall pattern of interethnic village relations established around the Pueblo. The analysis focuses on the Abuelos, or clowns, and the burlesques they perform during the three-day Ch…
Pueblo Mountain, Village, Dance. Second edition. Vincent SCULLY
The Shrine . 1990. A film by Bob Paris and Christiane Badgley
Subaltern historiography on the Rio Grande
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ
Defended Boundaries, Precarious Elites
Etude du renouveau de la danse Matachines dans le village d'Arroyo Seco au Nouveau-Mexique en 1985-1986 et interpretation de la performance a la lumiere de l'histoire de la communaute, des differenciations internes et des circonstances ecologiques vis-a-vis des populations voisines et plus particulierement de celle de Taos Pueblo. Cette danse masquee, organisee par un directeur d'ecole issu d'une famille aisee, a a la fois une signification regio…
Cancellation of the Anthropological Promise
La Fiesta de los Tastoanes
Fiesta Time and Plaza Space
This article describes the Taos, New Mexico, summer fiesta of Santiago and Santa Ana as a living ritual event and considers the voices of participants and opponents of the festival. My analysis shows how the fiesta enacts collective and individual identities while staging a moment of communitas. This invented tradition expresses resistance as well as accommodation to the conditions and structures of power within which the celebration takes place …
Dancing with the Virgin
Hermanitos Comanchitos
Everyday magical powers
These studies examined whether having thoughts related to an event before it occurs leads people to infer that they caused the event--even when such causation might otherwise seem magical. In Study 1, people perceived that they had harmed another person via a voodoo hex. These perceptions were more likely among those who had first been induced to harbor evil thoughts about their victim. In Study 2, spectators of a peer's basketball-shooting perfo…
Pilgrimage and Healing. Jill Dubisch , Michael Winkelman
Paying to belong
Societies and social scientists have long held the belief that exclusion induces ingratiation and conformity, an idea in contradiction to robust empirical evidence linking rejection with hostility and aggression. The classic literatures on ingratiation and conformity help resolve this contradiction by identifying circumstances under which rejection may trigger efforts to ingratiate. Jointly, findings from these literatures suggest that when peopl…
After all I have done for you
Productive encounters
Forever young
Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated t…
Philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, adolescence and youth
Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions and constructs. These constructs are tainted with ontological and epistemological histories and ideas about ‘real children’ and childhoods. In this Special Issue, we argue that the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence need to be rethought as concepts, and that philosophy, sociology and anthropology are some of the disciplines that can allow us to do so. There are a number of concern…
History, Memory, and Querencia
Archaeologists, historians, and geographers link Hispano or vecino ethnogenesis in the late eighteenth century to the occupation of a land base, while at the heart of modern Nuevomexicano identity formation is the paradoxical condition of being simultaneously dispossessed and place-based. The modern Hispano ethnoscape combines themes of land loss, displacement, and a deep longing to remain on the land, captured by the term querencia, which refers…
My Eyes Were Opened to the Lack of Diversity in Our Best Schools”
People Hide, But I'm Here. I Count
This article sheds light on the educational trajectories of undocumented youth who engage in forms of organizing through a community-school partnership in an urban public school in Chicago. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study in an urban public high school, readers learn that undocumented youth gain a positive sense of identity and belonging to their school and community by participating in a community-based after-school program called The…
It’s about hearing and understanding their stories”
In this article the co-authors draw from three separate ethnographic studies in the U.S. South to expand the literature about how teachers understand and apply multiculturalism specifically when working with newcomer undocumented immigrant youth. The co-authors identify an implementation gap between what is known about critical multicultural education and how it is put into practice by educators, specifically in regions that can be characterized …
Risky” Subjects
This article theorizes migration as risk, drawing on Biesta’s notion of risk. The author explores how productive risk connects with emancipation, seeing the risky migrant subjects in societies in new ways, rather than positioning them as marginalized threats. Finally, the author connects the theory of migration as risk to current qualitative data from empirical research on newcomer migrant youth in the United States. Implications of the theorizin…
Feeling our way to machine minds
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (26 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (16 works) · Immigration (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Education and experiences of immigrants and refugees (13 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (13 works)