In our recent interviews with 154 poor and working‐class young adults, male and female, across racial and ethnic groups, we hear whispers of hope amid the narratives of despair. In both jersey City and Buffalo, we have wandered through communities that have been ravaged by deindustrialization and a withering of the public sphere. Here we turn our attention to what Boyte and Evans call ‘free spaces’—those spaces in which hope is nourished in spite of impoverished material circumstances. Offering a wider theoretical frame for understanding the social psychology of these spaces than has been offered in previous work, we provide two examples from ethnographic investigations (of an arts community and a spiritual community) as emblems of pluralistic sites. Our goal here is to deepen the theoretical lenses through which we assess such spaces as community‐based educational sites, offering ethnographic data drawn from two sites situated in urban areas.

The debate on segregated and desegregated schools generally has been framed as an either-or matter, and in fact, legally, this has been the case. What we have not investigated to any great extent are programs within already desegregated schools that serve an identifiable population of students for the express purpose of cultural affirmation and advancement of the targeted group. In this article we provide data that attest to the potential power of such spaces, investigating a girls' group in an urban magnet school and a homeroom set aside for Vietnamese students in a neighborhood-based urban comprehensive school. Using ethnographic data, we articulate both the power of such spaces and the contradictory impulses within such arrangements.

This article explores the construction of masculinity among poor and working-class Puerto Rican men on the mainland, filling a distinct gap in both the literatures on Puerto Ricans' and men's studies. Based on extensive interviews with a group of Puerto Rican men, the authors focus on the ways in which these men are staking out their identity on the mainland, as well as the social context in which this identity construction is taking place. It is argued that an affirmation of cultural citizenship is wrapped around notions of patriarchal authority and that a screaming to be heard “as a man” on the mainland exists within a context in which these men are stripped of all the costumes and accoutrements that enable “men to be men.” The subject of domestic violence is also probed.

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