The authors argue that attending to the affective dimensions of everyday life for Latino immigrant youth offers a disorientation away from the circulation of fear around immigration in the United States, and a new orientation that links together the intimate affective images and narratives of the everyday that are less oppressive and rooted in and branch out to hope and solidarity. To demonstrate the importance of the affective, the authors conducted a post-qualitative research inquiry interested in animating lifeworlds of seven Latino immigrant youth living in the context of North Carolina. The authors used process and nonrepresentational affect theories to analyze the data, tracing the rogue intensities and surface tensions of ordinary affects across and through the different students and their writing to highlight the students' fragments of experience as Latino youth in America today. Specifically, the authors drew on Ahmed's affect theory of sticky objects and sweaty concepts as they analyzed students' words against the discourse of fear and hate. In tracing the affects that circulate around three sticky objects-immigration, families, and America-the authors witnessed and experienced the moments of tension in students' affective lives. Doing this work with narratives of first-generation immigrants exposes the effect that embodied memories have on present-day experiences. The authors maintain that attunement to the affective realm produces a humanizing practice of literacy research and provides counteraffects of hope, gratitude, and life that speak to the more-thanrepresentational written narratives. Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they're also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. (Stewart, 2007, p. 2) S ince the 2016 U.S. presidential election, hatred and fear have circulated and moved through the United States, treating immigration as an object of ordinary affect (Stewart, 2007) in that it has become ingrained in the everyday lives of U.S. citizens. In a quick internet search of immigration, borders, politics, and fear, hundreds of multimodal messages on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and news websites demonstrate a perceived threat and a residue of fear through terms such as invasion, safety, danger, and illegal aliens. This threat is echoed in messages of how immigrants might "hurt, " "burden, " "undermine, " and "strain" a nation. Often, the immigrants targeted by these public statements are silenced and hidden from view. The rhetoric makes their existence feel unwanted; thus, they are continually searching for a place in which they can belong. This rhetoric was echoed by

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Over the course of a year, student authors in the Juntos NC Writing Project participated in the Literary and Community Initiative to write, publish, and share their lived experiences and identities as Latinx immigrants and first‐generation high school students in North Carolina. Throughout the publication process of their collaborative bilingual book titled The Voices of Our People: Nuestras Verdades, student authors actively engaged in pursuing advocacy and activism in three ways: (1) community space as an intentional space for advocacy, (2) writing as a vehicle for collective advocacy, and (3) publishing and sharing as an opportunity for youth activism. The participants’ words and actions demonstrated how youth in community organizations can use literacy practices to collectively advocate for their community and become activists who write about and vocalize immigrant youth’s strengths and needs.

Purpose This paper aims to explore how currently underserved young adults engaged in a community-based organization (CBO), Bull City YouthBuild, wrote and published a book together, and how this work impacted them and their communities. Through a critical literacy framework, the research asked: How do students in a community-based writing project demonstrate self-empowerment and agency through narrative writing? Design/methodology/approach This qualitative case study examined the students’ published narratives. The researchers used ethnographic methods in data collection, and the qualitative data analysis approaches were developed through a critical conceptual framework. Findings The students’ narratives expressed self-empowerment and agency in the ways the young adults wrote against a dominant discourse; they wrote about repositioning their lives and redesigning their futures to reveal how they wanted to be externally perceived and to be leaders in their communities. The students expressed how the CBO offered them freedom to write their stories as they found new ways of using their historical and cultural backgrounds to collectively pursue success. Social implications This work offers implications of how CBOs can meet the needs of currently underserved young adults through centering their voices. The authors see the writing process as crucial for student engagement in finding agency and self-empowerment with their words. Originality/value Critical literacy foregrounds the voices of young adults as they push back against dominant narratives and stereotypes. This research hopes to reveal the intersections between CBOs and the communities they serve to develop literacies that are relevant and meaningful to young adults’ lives.

This article describes a three-year qualitative study on how youth of color in one community-based organization, Durham Community Youth, used the mentor text, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “What’s your life’s blueprint?” speech, as a reflective tool to transform themselves and their community. Using a critical literacy framework, the authors situate the study within the rich history of the Black community in Durham, North Carolina and examine how students’ writing advocated for their communities by speaking out against oppressive forces. The article offers implications on how educators can reimagine the implementation and intentionality of mentor texts for youth.