This chapter describes the complex and vacillating trajectory between higher education and low-wage work that defines the coming-of-age experiences of marginalized youth. Open access to certain institutions of higher education allow youth to postpone degrees indefinitely while claiming to be invested in college through isolated community college classes. This also reinforces the belief that social mobility through higher education is feasible. At the same time, emotional labor involved in the performance of low-wage service work opens up opportunities for autonomy and creativity as it generates more nuanced understandings of expertise and skills. Youth are able to creatively link the wide array of skills they deploy to satisfy their customers to a larger skillset they imagine they are developing through their isolated college classes. The big companies youth work for also convey the idea that workers at the bottom are part of the industry and can climb up the ladder to white-collar jobs through hard work and training. In the end, marginalized youth are channeled into the disposable labor force as they continue to work multiple part-time jobs at low wages while participating in higher education through isolated community college classes.

Racialized and classed “risk” narratives of sexuality in the United States construct economically marginalized young women of color as sexually precocious, potential teen mothers who are likely to end up as burdens on the state. Some scholars underline the utility of recognizing reproductive inequalities involved in constructing teen motherhood as an unequivocal social problem, and they stress the importance of exploring teen mothers’ agency in navigating dominant risk narratives. Fewer studies analyze how young women who are not pregnant or parenting produce, reproduce, and challenge dominant risk narratives about their sexuality. Drawing on three years of intensive fieldwork among 13 young economically marginalized black and Latina women, I demonstrate how feminist ideologies of empowerment interact with pervasive risk narratives in the everyday lives of marginalized women coming of age in the “shadow of the women’s movement.” My observations show that the young women strategically navigate circulating risk narratives about their sexuality by constructing an identity of distance characterized by feminist ideals of independence, self-respect, and self-development to distance themselves from these narratives. However, as they construct this identity of distance, they also stigmatize young mothers and police their own bodies and the bodies of their friends and sisters. I draw on women-of-color feminism to reflect on the uncomfortable relationship—evident in the process of a group of young women’s identity construction—between feminist ideologies of empowerment and bourgeois heteronormativity that marginalizes young women’s sexualities by constructing teen motherhood as inherently problematic.

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The paradox of girls’ academic gains over boys, across race and class, has perplexed scholars for the last few decades. Through a 3-year longitudinal ethnography of two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools, I contend that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Focusing on the case of Black girls and recent immigrant girls of color, I identify three specific ways in which school functions as hostile institution for them: (1) gendered racial harassment from teachers, (2) erasure of intellect, and (3) estrangement within their communities. Furthermore, the denigration of immigrant girls becomes the conduit for misogynoir. I find that the gains of some racially marginalized girls in school often justify hostility against all of them. Bringing into conversation a feminist analysis of schooling that rejects girls’ educational gains as ubiquitous evidence of a gender revolution with a Black-colonial education framework that emphasizes schooling as a technology of oppression, I explore the current role of school as a hostile institution for Black girls and immigrant girls of color.

Drawing on three years of fieldwork among a group of young men and women from a poor urban community in Northeastern United States, I explore the salience of sibling ties in the lives of poor urban youth. Observations reveal that siblings provide crucial support in navigating institutions such as school, work, and criminal justice system. Proximity in age combined with familial piety and exposure to almost identical family, school, and neighborhood often means that sibling ties have unique implications for survival against poverty. However, I also point out several negative effects of influence through intimacy. While scholars have long grappled with the issue of survival through kinship ties, as well as its role in limiting upward mobility for the poor, I illustrate the cost of exchange on intimate ties. Obligatory exchange under the constraints of poverty often blur the line between exchange and unconditional love. Those who provide resources desire obedience or make decisions for those they provide for, and dependency makes relationships fraught with hostility.