Citizen, Student, Soldier Latinao Youth,

Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC, and the American Dream Gina Perez

70-71: “The only good one.” JROTC provides youth with positive identity, within a context that suppresses other possible positive identities.      88: Demonstrate worthiness in the face of stigmatization for taking government resources

74: 2013 as turning point when JROTC became about citizenship, not military pipeline. Strangely reminiscent of argument in 13th, that ALEC rebranded itself as about deconstructing the prison-industrial complex, while now focusing on more indirect forms of surveillance and social control. 

77: JROTC focuses on only certain aspects of military experience, not destruction & death 80: “Have fun” repeatedly uses this term to encourage non-critical stance toward JROTC activities. 

88 set up as oppositional to Rios: “Studying the experiences of Latina/o and working-class youth provides additional insight in the ways the state operates in their daily lives that many regard to be positive and well-deserved”          Seems to offer positive associations with the military as the benefit conferred by the state…

105: Another example of aborted structural critique

106: JROTC as social capital. Interrogate this claim. 

    Also interrogate discipline

    College access

    Leadership (and followership) How much of each… what roles are people being prepared for? Unquestioning obedience (Ch,. 2?)

        140: link between leadership and followership would be stronger with analysis of behavior, not just speech      

114: earning money now, (earlier) financial independence.      —> This is compelling in a way the social capital argument is not particularly. 

    115: The system constructs needs: paying for college is like having to justify worthiness of government services or citizenship. 

115-117: Personal, intense encounter with military recruiter.      What is happening in the ethnography here? The ethnographic perspective is disrupted by the recruiter, who discounts some of the experiential findings offered so far: leadership, discipline are cliche answers. They do it as part of a clique, to fit in. 

    Military as the answer to dreams not panning out. 

    Is this about education, “they care about you” or is it about getting people into the military? *** The core issue of the book. 

131: Intersectionality, recharacterizing racial and gender stereotypes. Puerto Rican girls in JROTC.      132: Gendered JROTC: Girls’ “handling your business” and boys’ presumed criminality

Does JROTC prepare students for military service? Does it implicitly suggest being in the military is like being in JROTC? 120: JROTC travel draws on students’ desire to travel internationally 202: Claim of JROTC as example of government playing a positive role in lives of poor

204: Emptiness of American dream (again, not pursued)

“Citizenship takes practice”     156: Conflicting definitions of citizenship. As power, belonging, subordination. 

    157: Ease of talking about citizenship in JROTC. How shall we not understand this as an ideology? The aspects they focus on are the participation and service. (Claim that this extends beyond JROTC; but we see, for example, that girls’ status does not seem to do so)

I think there is something funny going on with ‘citizenship.’ For some, it is conferred by birth, inalienable and automatic. For others, even those who have citizenship by birth, it is a status always in jeopardy; a category always needing to be legitimized and justified. And for others, it is something to aspire to, the prospect of no longer being in a tenuous and vulnerable status. Citizenship is also a set of behaviors that can be performed. Performing citizenship will mean different things depending on the tenuousness of having it as an inherent category.      161: Citizens are made, not born. WHA?  —> Compare to “native speaker” 

    164: Class, racial segregation in JROTC funding. How can this be used as an exemplar of positive government role in peoples’ lives?

    165: That’s just garbage. (Subversive?) // This ethnography is focused on the winners…

    169: What could nonmilitary models of positive youth programs positively look like? 

        —> How can you take this and also support the idea that JROTC is well-intentioned? 

    175: “Personal responsibility for an at-risk status”

    176: Teachers “in failing schools” under pressure to teach to the test, don’t have time for relationships with students. Same pattern reproduced at another scale. 

In contrast to Rios’s ethnography, this one seems reluctant to engage in sociology, frequently poi

Like racism, (Morrison) JROTC encourages people to chase a distraction, constantly trying to justify themselves in a quest that will never be enough. Performance citizenship will never add up to “natural born citizenship.”

Review…

In the introduction, the author describes the tension between a sociological and an ethnographic approach in the face of potentially manipulative ideologies. The parents asked her whether she was there to destroy their program. Perez consistently chooses the ethnographic approach, emphasizing the participants’ positive experiences with JROTC, while acknowledging but not pursuing possible negative aspects of the program.This is fine. But the analysis becomes more problematic when she credits JROTC with providing its participants with resources such as social capital, without considering the sociological validity of these claims. Similarly, the analysis is temporally-bounded, focusing on students’ experiences in JROTC, with only allusions to experiences in ROTC, college, the military, and other futures. However, claims for the value of the program are based on future prospects which are not analyzed. 

For whom are the book’s conclusions? For people who have some power to engage with systemic inequality? Are we trying to change the system, or to describe and humanize the reactions of people within the system? 

Who is fundamentally deserving, and who must (endlessly) justify worthiness?

JROTC fills a need which is strategically created. 

Is this a text which strategically collapses or undercuts itself? This could make sense if it were understood as a performance designed for 

What is the theory of change? Perez is telling the story of people who participate in a system which they know is unfair, offers a raw deal, is a trap, because they think they can repurpose it here, for now, to meet their needs. And yet, she puts this book in contrast to Rios, showing the good 

It feels like the students she is most interested in are those who think they know what they are signing up for in JROTC, for whom it who do not plan to join the military. 

The way these schools are structured profoundly parallels the restructuring of the postindustrial society. If that’s not neoliberalism…

Who’s doing the new worlding? Is that productive? A pedagogical stance—creating the conditions of possibility for others to