Me Da Cuenta: Sources of Resiliency Identified by Mexican-American Young Men in Kings Beach, CA

Abstract

Latino youth are often categorized as an at-risk population, particularly in regards to the juvenile justice system. Overrepresented within the juvenile justice system and misunderstood as a group collectively, Mexican-American male adolescents are a group without a voice in much of the literature describing how minority youth identify, access, and navigate internal and community-based sources of resiliency. Using a constructionist framework of resiliency, this exploratory, qualitative study examines how Mexican male adolescents who have had access with the juvenile justice system describe their experiences as "at-risk" and how they negotiate competing identities generated by a discourse of "illegality" and processes of marginalization. Despite structural constraints generating a very real sense of risk, the participants indicated relatedness/connectedness, when grounded in Mexican cultural values of family, respect, and collectivism, as a pathway to resiliency.