SEQUESTERED INCLUSION: SOCIAL SERVICE DISCOURSES AND NEW LATINO DIASPORA ...

238 Pages·2015·1.21 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Phelps

SEQUESTERED INCLUSION: SOCIAL SERVICE DISCOURSES AND NEW
LATINO DIASPORA YOUTH IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

by
Elizabeth Esther Phelps
May 2015
© 2015 Elizabeth Esther Phelps
SEQUESTERED INCLUSION: SOCIAL SERVICE DISCOURSES AND NEW
LATINO DIASPORA YOUTH IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

Elizabeth Esther Phelps, Ph. D.
Cornell University 2015

Abstract: This dissertation explores ethnographically the impact of discourses of
belonging and exclusion in a New Latino Diaspora (NLD) city located in the heart of
the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Young NLD adults in Rocktown, Virginia,
experience a form of sequestered inclusion shaped by racializing narratives based in
nativist hostility as well as by implicit deficit narratives embedded in humanistic
multiculturalism. Based on more than twelve months of ethnographic field work (and
over six years of ordinary life in Rocktown), this dissertation explores how advocates,
activists, and their allies in the social service and educational institutions in the
Rocktown area have institutionalized processes of inclusion over a period of fifteen
years both with and for NLD youth. These processes have been constrained by the
paternalistic and reductive discourses that frame youth both as inherently needy and as
a resource that benefits the receiving community. NLD youth themselves recognize
their own specific needs and contributions, but resist the reductionism and racializing
tendencies of these discourses. Within this context, a small group of young NLD
activists formed to support and promote the DREAM Act (for Development, Relief,
and Education for Alien Minors), both capitulating to and contesting dominant
discourses and constructing a narrative frame for belonging on their own terms.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Elizabeth Esther Phelps was born in 1973 in Lima, Peru, to missionary parents.
The family lived transnationally and inter-culturally, cycling through a jungle mission
center to Quechua communities in Ayacucho and San Martín, and to the Phelps family
farm in western New York. Her mother’s side of the family also has diasporic roots:
Phelps’ maternal grandfather emigrated from Japan in 1912 to Cusco, Peru, where he
married her grandmother.
Phelps majored in English at Wheaton College (IL), with a minor in
Philosophy and a certificate in the college’s Human Needs and Global Resources
program. Following graduation, Phelps spent four years as a community development
worker in Bolivia with the Mennonite Central Committee. This experience led her to
Cornell University for a Master’s degree in Adult Education, completed in 2001 with a
thesis titled Participation and Power in Community Development Program Planning:
A Study of a Process in the Bolivian Lowlands. During the second year of the program
Phelps moved with her husband to a small city in Virginia where she spent six years
working with Latino and Latina children and youth in a social service capacity. This is
where the specific questions guiding this research project were born.

iv
To my husband, Terry

and to our children, Valerie and Gabriel
the three who have given the most towards making this project possible.
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Above all, I would like to thank Vilma Santiago-Irizarry for teaching, guiding,
coaching, and mentoring me through this entire endeavor. Her incisive analyses and
pragmatic interventions gave me the tools I needed to conceptualize this research
project and to navigate the educational journey. Sofia Villenas introduced me to the
sub-field of the Anthropology of Education, and facilitated my participation on a panel
at the 2010 American Anthropological Association meetings on the New Latino
Diaspora. These conversations greatly shaped the direction of my analysis. I thank
Michael Jones-Correa for tolerating high doses of anthropological reflexivity, and for
helping me situate this project within studies of transnationalism and new destinations
for Latino transmigrants.
I am deeply grateful to everyone in my field site who was willing to talk with
me about their work, perspectives, and experiences as part of or with New Latino
Diaspora communities in the Shenandoah Valley. I owe much to everyone who passed
through the Migrant Education Program, where I first learned the phrase “No human
being is illegal,” the humanist foundation for all our organizing work. I am especially
thankful to those who took extra time to talk with me and tolerated hearing my half-
formed ideas: Patrick Lincoln, Tonya Osinkosky, Isabel Castillo, Marcos Quintana,
Sylvia Whitney, Yolanda Blake, Alejandro Olguin, Jason Good, Anneke Martin, Katy
Pitcock, and Laura Zarrugh. Thanks to Kim Hartzler-Wheatley for her support as
director of the Shenandoah Valley Migrant Education Program. Each of you has given
me also the gift of friendship, which I treasure.
vi
Finally, I thank those who provided wrap-around support for me in this project
in innumerable ways: my parents, Conrad and Irma Phelps, for their constant support
and encouragement, especially around the births of my children; my parents-in-law,
Vernon and Dorothy Jantzi, for food and child care beyond the call of duty; my cohort
and writing buddies, Catherine Koehler and Beth Ryan, for generous feedback and
friendship. Philip Fountain gave me invaluable feedback and encouragement on an
early draft. Shpresa Koci in Tirana, Albania, and Luz Rondón in Bogotá, Colombia,
cared for my children and gave me hours of peace of mind for transcribing, reading,
and writing. Suzanne Wapner generously housed and fed me on numerous trips to
Ithaca, and Rosanne Jantzi helped me find the mental, emotional, and spiritual strength
I needed to finish this project.
Most of all I thank my husband, Terrence Jantzi, who urged me from the
beginning to pursue this degree and took on the extra work at home and in the office
that made it possible for me to write this dissertation.
I thank the DREAMers for being so steadfast in their dreams.
All errors and omissions are my own.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH IV
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VI
LIST OF FIGURES X
LIST OF TABLES XI
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XII
CHAPTER 1: SEQUESTERED INCLUSION OF NEW LATINO DIASPORA
YOUTH 1
CHAPTER 2: RACIALIZATIONS, TURKEYS, UNIVERSITIES, AND
MENNONITES – THE NEW LATINO DIASPORA ENCOUNTERS “THE
FRIENDLY CITY” 51
CHAPTER 3: ADVOCATES, ACTIVISTS, AND ALLIES - THE RISE AND FALL
OF THE HISPANIC SERVICES COUNCIL 79
CHAPTER 4: LATINA SUICIDES, LATINO GANGS, AND DISCOURSES OF
NEED 110
CHAPTER 5: NLD YOUTH FRAME THEMSELVES: CONTESTING
DISCOURSES OF RESOURCE AND NEED 153
CHAPTER 6: DREAM ACTIVISM IN ROCKTOWN 180
CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION - RACIALIZATIONS AND SEQUESTERED
INCLUSION IN ROCKTOWN, VIRGINIA 208
viii
REFERENCES CITED 215

ix
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Racial Dot Map of Rocktown, VA 56

x