It is a disturbing fact of contemporary American society that the children of immigrant minorities perform better in secondary school than the children of nonimmigrant minorities. It seems as if children learn how to underperform through their experience in school. This research will study the secondary school culture of young Latino students in a comprehensive California high school serving European-American and Mexican-American students. The researchers, an anthropologist and her students, will document the role of high school peer relations in constructing student identities and orienting students away from, or towards academic performance. It will document how attitudes about race, gender and class are mediated through the interaction and conversations of peers in the school setting, study the role of peer affiliations in encounters between students and school personnel, looking at how power dynamics influence students' feelings about formal learning, and study how some student groups define themselves with or against other student categories in status, and how this affects the academic engagement of groups and individual students. The methodology will be ethnographic participant observation, focus groups, event interpretation analysis, and semi-structured interviews with a sample of Latino students in the class of 2002. This case study will contribute towards advancing our theoretical understanding of the reasons why students develop an adversarial position against learning and academic performance. The results will be useful to planners and academic administrators as well as to the community at large concerned about education.
