Integrating Hispanic immigrant youth: perspectives from white and black Americans in emerging Hispanic communities and schools

Acculturation is bidirectional and includes not only the process of Hispanics adaptation to US culture(s) but also the process of US cultural adaptations to Hispanics. However, few studies of Hispanic adolescent adaptation have examined the ways in which US society accommodates or fails to accommodate its Hispanic immigrant populations. Our study addresses this gap by examining the ways in which non-Hispanic students, parents, and teachers in an emerging Hispanic community have acculturated to the Hispanic adolescents in their community. This study utilizes focus-group data from the Southern Immigrant Academic Adaptation (SIAA) study -- a multi-site, high school-based study conducted in North Carolina between 2006 and 2010. We held 34 focus groups with 139 participants from two rural and two urban high schools. In each community, at least seven focus groups were conducted to include non-Hispanics: (1) black female and male students, (2) black parents, (3) white female and male students, (4) white parents, and (5) high school teachers. In each school, we identified different modes of incorporation linked with receiving-community acculturation strategies that included varying degrees of accommodation of heritage cultures and languages as well as cultural exchanges ranging from inclusionary to exclusionary.