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Narratives of 27 Puerto Rican and Mexican students, written first in eighth grade then again as juniors in high school, address the important question of "Who am I?" and illustrate school-sponsored silencing, with students' critiques of their educational experience ignored by both the elementary and the high school. The narratives also provide a window into the high dropout rates of Latino children, the reasons behind students" academic decisions, and interventions needed to change negative schooling processes and outcomes. By giving witness to these voices, we as readers help ensure that through their writing, these Latino adolescents do not just speak but that they are heard. In sixth grade my teacher was Mr. S. Mr. S. had a stick. If you were talking or something he would hit you with it. His stick's name was "George." He had wrapped it in tape so that when he hit you it would hurt more. In seventh grade my teacher had red hair and when she spoke to someone she always spit at that person. Since she retired we got a substitute until the principal could find another capable teacher. So our teacher for a long period of time was Mrs. R. We used to call her "chocolate chip" because she had a big mole on her upper lip. After Mrs. R. we had another teacher who we thought was going to be our permanent seventh grade teacher. She lasted about two days I think. Then she left for an eighth grade class... and the teachers kept changing. That seventh grade was so confusing I didn't learn a thing but I tried. My worst experience was in 5th grade. I got stupid in Math. I had a very low I.O,W.A. score. I didn't know how to divide. When my teacher used to call on me to do a division problem, which I couldn't do, I started to cry. He used to yell at me. So I sometimes just didn't go. I didn't understand anything until 4th grade. Then I got a regular [nonbilingual] teacher and it was awful. He was so mean. He would act like we were in the army and make me stand for punishment in the closet. I hated regular class. These statements are excerpts taken from eighth grade "autobiographies" and offer a profile of poor and working-class Puerto Rican and Mexican students at their point of entry into Lares High, a predominantly Latino high school in Chicago. 1 The autobiographies are part of the students' school files made available to me while engaging in an ethnographic study of Lares from the end of the 1990-91 school year

The discursive practices of adoptive parents in two online transnational adoption forums (2006-2008) and observations of five international adoption workshops suggest that what Heather Jacobson described as culture keeping, the cultural socialization of children that retains a sense of native group identity, is more aptly characterized as cultural tourism, the selective appropriation and consumption of renovated cultural symbols, artifacts, and events that serve as the source of identity construction for adopted children. A feature of consumer capitalism, cultural tourism in transnational adoption helps shape the contours of cultural and racial identity. It also provides a partial understanding of how adopted children often fail to develop hybrid identities and how adult adoptees exist on the margins of two cultures.

Changes in US society have found their way into the adoption arena, resulting in new policies and participants in the adoption process and altering the discourse of adoption. Although the discourse of modern adoption has shifted, the legacy of race in adoption remains. Drawing on popular adoption literature, information in the public domain, and discussions in an adoption forum, this paper argues that despite efforts at reconstruction, racial inequalities are often reified in current adoption discourse, implemented through the very practices designed to help children. Interpreted both as a device for categorization and as discursive formation, the language of adoption continues to empower some groups and disempower others. The Internet presents a zone of possibility for reconstructing relations of power in adoption via symbolic and linguistic resources as asymmetries between adoption participants are contested and reconstructed.

As an assistant professor I became interested in studying personal ads, in part because I perceived a lack of attention to this phenomenon by sociologists. In my view, we ceded explanation for the growth and outcome of this activity to psychologists, communications, and media scholars. More importantly, we failed to address the phenomenology of those who participated in placing personal ads. With some exceptions, I believe that this remains true. 1 However, in a relatively brief period of time, what I call personal advertising, the impersonal public marketing of the self in a circumscribed medium, space, or place, has become a normative way of meeting people and establishing relationships. We know that modern personal advertising is linked to geographic mobility, demographic and cultural changes, occupational constraints, the limited success of more traditional dating methods, and innovations linked to twenty-first-century technology. Aside from the reality that people increasingly engage in alternative lifestyles and live longer, demographic trends indicate that the number of unmarried people has increased significantly, and this population