This article examines Ecuadorian students' attempts to contest immigrant stereotypes and redefine their social identities in Madrid, Spain. I argue that academic tracking plays a pivotal role in the trajectory of students' emergent ethnic identity. To illustrate this process, I focus on students who abandon their academic and professional ambitions as they are tracked into low‐achieving classrooms, and in the process participate in social and cultural practices that reify dominant stereotypes of Latino immigrants. [academic tracking, identity, immigration, ethnicity, Spain]

This article examines the participatory impact of a storytelling project on a small group of Latinx English learners in a sixth grade classroom. The storytelling project unexpectedly emerged as a positive ripple effect from a Participatory Action Research (PAR) initiative to foster civic empowerment among middle school students in an English Language Development classroom in Northern California during the 2014-2015 academic year. As the university researcher and classroom teacher worked together on the PAR project, they came to understand the importance of storytelling for this group of students and agreed to create a safe classroom space with appropriate instructional support for the students to develop and write their stories in English. Although the PAR project failed to produce an Action Plan based on students' research findings, the storytelling ripple effect from the PAR initiative had a transformative impact on the students as they constructed counter-stories to dominant discourses that marginalize and dehumanize Latinx immigrant students and their families. Through the process of writing and reading their stories aloud in English, the Latinx English learners successfully positioned themselves as resilient, hard working students who are fully capable of participating in civic programs, projects or debates with their native English speaking peers.

This article follows a group of Latino/a English language learners conducting Participatory Action Research in a segregated school. I examine how students' perspectives on civic engagement shifted after they joined an after-school initiative that brought them together with students from a private Jewish day school located directly across the street. Even as students formed new perspectives on civic engagement throughout the year, internalized racism framed how they understood their capacity for civic action.

This study analyzes the relationship between a discourse of integration in the European Union and the ways in which the ethnic boundaries of segregated social groups of immigrant children are conceptualized in one working-class and immigrant neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. I use qualitative data gathered during sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among Ecuadorian immigrant teenagers to explore the unintended consequences of European efforts to promote the integration of immigrants in member states. My argument is that the pervasive discourse of integration in the European Union is central to a racialized process of subject formation occurring in Madrid through which the children of immigrants come to be recognized as ethnic outsiders in Spanish society. By analyzing in ethnographic detail how discursive forces intertwine with material constraints to shape the subjectivity of immigrant children in Madrid, this study helps to explain how racialized colonial and postcolonial socioeconomic hierarchies are reproduced in current immigration scenarios.

This issue1 provides striking examples of how current educational policies and practices play a fundamental role in processes that constitute immigrant and ethnic minority children as 'others'. This collective compendium not only interweaves theory and practice but also initiates a trans-Atlantic conversation about intercultural education embracing ethnographic cases from North America (Texas), South America (Bolivia) and Europe (Spain). These conversations lead towards an interesting exercise of similarities and differences in how interculturality is used and understood in the classroom, based on the local fluid composition of ideological, ethnic, political and economic factors. The exercise in comparison of these intercontinental ethnographic exercises points out crucial common themes that authors use as prisms to show the articulation of education policies and epistemological contradictions. It is with particular attention that these contributions examine educational policies and practices in intercultural contexts and their effects in essentializing the concept of culture as if it were a fixed attribute believed to determine students' behaviours, attitudes, school expectations and social relationships. Most of the ethnographic cases presented clearly document how cultural differences, rather than being seen as an asset in intercultural education contexts, are more often understood in terms of 'deficits'. In sum, the core anthropological contribution of these articles is centred on the analysis of the processes that lead to cultural reifications, how these transform into stereotypes that weigh down students' trajectories in schools, and how this culminates in the very opposite of the original intention of educational policies.These ethnographic examples draw from distinct regions of the world -Spain, Bolivia, and the United States -to illustrate how historically and geographically specific processes in schools work to differentiate children according to their ethnic and racial backgrounds. In Spain, we highlight a process by which high-achieving, self-disciplined immigrant students come to see themselves as not belonging and out of place, and ultimately leads many students to abandon their academic ambitions and even drop out of school (del Olmo, this issue). Indeed, we find that very few immigrant children in Spain are able to move successfully from the transitional one-year programmes for newcomer students (aulas de enlace) to pursue their educational dreams.In Bolivia, the educational system works to reify stereotypical differences between indigenous and non-indigenous children. By specifying in the law that the intracultural component of schooling is necessary to 'promote the recovery, strengthening, development and cohesion within the indigenous people's cultures', the resulting educational policies and practices assume that indigenous students are not only fundamentally different from other children at their schools, but also possessing a static identity (Osuna, this issue). Likewise, Spanish bilingual ...