Intersectionality in Interaction: Immigrant Youth Doing American from an Outsider-Within Position

Current sociological studies on children of immigrants largely focus on how well children integrate into U.S society. Working against this outcome-oriented framework, which undermines the importance of children's social location and situated doings, this study employs an interactional, intersectional approach to examine how bilingual youth navigate multiple inequalities when they translate for their immigrant parents. Based on 72 interviews with Mexican American and Korean American youth, my findings demonstrate that these "language brokers" confront racialized nativism and develop different interactional strategies to negotiate power imbalances pertaining to age, race, and class in different institutional contexts. Paying particular attention to structural barriers that limit the effectiveness of these strategies while highlighting their considerable agency, I argue that children of immigrants do not simply become American. Rather, they strategically use their "outsiderwithin" position and perform "American" behaviors in an attempt to gain social citizenship rights. This study, therefore, calls attention to how the margin, as a social location, can create moments of resistance and empowerment.