Resisting White Nationalism Through a Cultural Mentoring Program

The children of Latin American immigrants in the United States face a political context of rising white nationalist violence, racialized immigration enforcement, and public hostility toward immigrants. Based in a western US university, this research explores how a cultural mentoring program supports both Latine mentors and mentees to navigate a hostile racial climate. The cultural mentoring program brings together underrepresented university students with predominantly Latine fifth graders from a local public school to explore cultural identity and lived experiences of migration. This article examines how mentors and mentees form transnational identities in ways that challenge dominant discourses about immigrants in the United States. Drawing on three years of ethnographic data, we examine how conversations about parents’ home countries in the context of the mentoring program nurture resistance to symbolic violence in predominantly white educational institutions and contribute to critical consciousness about the conditions of immigrants’ lives. The cultural mentoring program becomes a way of ethnographically documenting young people’s transnational cultural knowledge that serves the purposes of community-building and critical consciousness-raising between Latinx mentors and mentees.