Learning to Lead

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 surveys, semi-structured interviews, and other data, Terriquez shows that nonprofit youth organizing groups strengthen adolescents’ capacity to address the systemic challenges facing their communities through political engagement. These groups 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. They 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, neighbor-hood violence, and other hardships. In response, youth organizing groups create spaces that support emotional well-being while also encouraging academic success and job readiness. They help young people develop a critical understanding of social inequality, power, and public policy. This education often motivates immigrant and refugee youth to work 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. Organizing groups also provide these youth with sustained, hands-on training in how to collectively exercise their voice in policy debates and government elections, effectively offering civic apprenticeships. Staff and experienced members mentor newer participants in basic civic skills such as public speaking, event planning, and community out-reach, while also coaching them on strategies for mobilizing peers and adult allies to contribute to nonpartisan campaigns.

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 how young people acquire the capacities to become a meaningful political force.