Learning to Lead - Grassroots Organizing in Immigrant Communities

Children of immigrants make up more than one in four people in the United States under the age of thirty. Amid today’s multipronged attacks on immigrant communities and growing threats to democratic participation, these young people often encounter significant barriers to political participation. Despite these challenges, some children of immigrants and refugees engage in nonpartisan grassroots campaigns, addressing issues such as education, health, environmental justice, immigrant rights, housing, and voting rights. In Learning to Lead, sociologist Veronica Terriquez examines how youth organizing groups facilitate the civic and political engagement of low-income, second-generation immigrant adolescents, enabling them to collectively exercise power alongside their non-immigrant peers and adult allies.

Drawing on extensive survey, semi-structured interview, and other data, Terriquez shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. Although these groups vary in the quality of their programming, they generally share a commitment to supporting young people’s healthy development, offer a critical form of civics education, and provide extensive guidance on how to participate in civic life. These groups adapt their programming in response to local demographic and political dynamics.

Many adolescents who join grassroots organizing groups face overlapping stresses related to poverty, immigration status, neighborhood violence, and other hardships. In response, youth organizing groups create spaces that support emotional well-being while also encouraging academic success and job-readiness. At the same time, they help young people develop a critical understanding of social inequality, power, and public policy. Through ethnic studies workshops and other activities, youth explore their own identities and learn about the histories and struggles of diverse communities.

This education often motivates second-generation immigrant and refugee youth to work in solidarity with their non-immigrant Black and Indigenous peers and deepens their understanding of the historical, economic, and political roots of community problems, as well as potential policy solutions. Unlike many youth-focused interventions, organizing groups also provide sustained, hands-on training in how to collectively exercise their voice in policy debates and government elections, effectively functioning as civic apprenticeships. Staff and experienced members mentor newer participants in basic civic skills such as public speaking, event planning, and community outreach, while also coaching them on strategies for mobilize peers and adult allies to contribute to nonpartisan campaigns.

Because of these intensive and formative experiences, adolescents who participate in youth organizing during high school tend to remain highly active in civic life into early adulthood. Terriquez concludes that these groups offer important lessons for schools and other youth-serving institutions seeking to strengthen engagement in a multiracial democracy.

Learning to Lead offers a thorough examination of the role of how young people acquire the capacities to become a meaningful political force.

VERONICA TERRIQUEZ is a professor of urban planning and Chicana/o and Central American Studies and director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles.