From “Gangbangers and Hoes” to “Young Latino Professionals”

Chapter 1 focuses on the school administration’s overarching goal of transforming students. It analyzes the contradictions teachers and administrators face as they simultaneously work to validate and transform students’ modes of self-making. The chapter begins by describing the intersectional anxieties surrounding violence, pregnancy, and poverty that are associated with Latinx youth socialization in the Chicago context. It goes on to show how these anxieties are heightened within the context of an open-enrollment neighborhood high school. The chapter argues that the transformation of students into “Young Latino Professionals,” which is formulated as an intersectional mobility project, becomes an ambivalent negotiation that alternately locates the “problem” within the students themselves and outsiders’ perceptions of them.