Description:

Yamil Avivi García

PhD 2016, University of Michigan

Adjunct Lecturer, Northwestern University

Avivi García’s dissertation project is a case study on Latino/a second-generation youth as they came of age in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area’s subculture and alternative music scenes of the 1980s-1990s. Largely raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, these youth represent a working class immigrant Latino/a population who navigated publics such as the schools and crafted counterpublics in house music, gay ball, club kid, gothic and skateboard scenes. Avivi García argues that subculture crucially formed a part of his participants’ Latino/a identities, subjectivities, and nurtured a sense of belonging with others in the context of Elizabeth and New York City. Through 25 semi-structured ethnographic interviews, spatial and discursive analysis (of films, magazines, and English and Spanish language newspapers), his work disrupts simplistic narratives and textual (mis)representations of the local Elizabeth Latino 1.5 and second generation. Ultimately, Avivi García shows how Latino youth embodied and expressed a form of cultural citizenship that challenged the dismal perception of “failed” and “apathetic” working class Latino youth found in mainstream media and policy. His work reveals that these local youth scenes were queer spaces of agency that allowed his participants to articulate non-heteronormative racial, ethnic, and sexual and gender variant subjectivities and challenge social hierarchies and dominant mainstream and subcultural ideologies among them.