Latino/a Youth Subcultures in Elizabeth, New Jersey: Memory, Spacemaking, and Citizenship, 1980s-1990s.

Abstract

“Latino/a Youth Subcultures in Elizabeth, New Jersey: Memory, Spacemaking, and Citizenship, 1980s-1990s” is a case study that documents youth experiences of coming of age in the house, hip hop, club kid, goth, and skate subcultures in and near Elizabeth, a post-industrial New Jersey city often perceived (along with its residents) to be in decline and undesirable. This narrative reveals that Elizabeth was an important, vibrant subcultural center of progressive youth of color. Youth involvement in subcultures often resonated in subtle ways with support for social movements for racial equality and sexual and gender diversity in the 1980s-1990s. These subcultures represented more than the commodifiable fashions and immature and rebellious phase often associated with them. Ultimately, youth subcultures challenged right wing movements and their assimilationist, heteronormative, and multicultural values, offered youth spaces for their self-determination, and represented yourths’ active cultural citizenship. I conduct ethnographic interviews of 25 second-generation Latinos/as about their experiences with youth spacemaking within or outside dominant publics, such as in a minority Latino and African American gay house scene, the New York City nightlife club kid scene, an annual goth party at a cemetery, an afterhours goth hangout in a diner, and an unofficial skate park. This project contributes to subculture studies by centering Latino/a perspectives in subcultures that are usually reductively coded either white (goth, club-kid and skate) or black (house and hip hop). For Latino/a Studies, this project encourages scholars to employ a subculture lens instead of merely traditional static markers of race, ethnicity, and notions of success and failure to understand Latino/a youth subjectivity and claims to belonging and citizenship.