Invisible Hierarchies: How Co-ethnic and Generational Dynamics Affect Latinx Students in the Classroom

By Allison Finn Yemez

In their book, Reunited, about youth migrating to the US to reunite with parents in the Washington, DC area, Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks find that “youth tend to do better when they are around students with whom they can identify” (2024, p.181). This is absolutely true, and it is important for classroom teachers to note that finding “relatable others” for some students is more nuanced than we think. Externally sharing an ethnicity or even nationality is not enough. Dynamics in classrooms can be subtle, especially for monolingual teachers who can’t access the conversations happening in other languages. Social hierarchies rooted in cultures we don’t understand can undermine even our best efforts to create a safe space for learning, and that can lead to adverse effects we can’t control. In middle and high school classrooms, for example, students who struggle to learn English feel less respected and more discriminated against, which leads to them struggling more in school (Castañeda and Jenks, 2024, p. 175). This includes rejection from students with roots in the same country or region, but who were born in the U.S. or have been living in the U.S. for a longer time and have a better command of the English language.

I see this play out in my own classroom, especially at the beginning of the year, when students are hesitant to engage in conversation with one another. One of my Latinx students reflected that over the course of the year, she developed the ability to speak more loudly and clearly. She noted that at the start of the year, she would speak in a low, quiet voice, so that no one could hear her. This student does not clarify what exactly made her feel that she couldn’t speak, but the idea that “some second-generation students could bully new migrants in school” (Castañeda and Jenks, 2024, p. 174) makes me wonder if that was what was going on.

I was first introduced to these invisible identities when I taught in a Turkish public high school in İstanbul, Türkiye. When I arrived, I couldn’t “see” any differences in students: to me, they were all Turkish. And that is exactly what the founder of modern Türkiye, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, intended when he made the law that “we are all Turks” and that there should be no language or culture other than Turkish. For a long time, it was actually illegal in Türkiye to be anything but a secular Turk: my husband, who is ethnically and linguistically Zaza, was forced to hide his background when in the public sphere. My Kurdish and Zaza students, among others, were compelled to hide themselves among their peers in class. But this “hiding” is also relative: the invisibility of their ethnicity only extends to people who cannot see it because they are cultural outsiders (people like me). The markers of ethnic difference in Türkiye —naming, language and dialect, accented Turkish, skin tone, and facial features— things I knew nothing about. My students and Turkish colleagues were aware, and some distinctions were prevalent around them. They had been developing biases about these types of differences throughout their lives. Kurd, Alevi, Zaza, Uighur —there are over fifty ethnic minority groups integrated into the Turkish education system, and these students do their best to “hide” their identity by staying silent.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in U.S. classrooms. Co-ethnic and intergenerational tensions are high, and because the majority of teachers are white Americans, they are not part of the culture that would allow them to see. This is where my reading of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, by Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales (2024), Reunited, by Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks (2024), The Latino Education Crisis, by Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras (2009), The Chicana/o/x Dream by Gilberto Conchas and Nancy Acevedo (2020) and “They called me chanchi and it made me feel bad” by Eric Macias et al. converge and provided a strong starting point to better understand of my own current classroom contexts and provide foundations to begin building opportunities to also learn from my students in the classroom. More learning is necessary regarding the hierarchical dynamics at play within groups of Latin American students, which will impact how we create collaborations, design our space as a safe one, and how we might intervene when bullying occurs in our classroom.

Indigenous groups in Latin America, for example, have “historically been categorized ‘as dangerous, lazy, childlike, or mulish.’ Once Indigenous immigrants are in the United States, this illicit and stigmatizing generalization affects everyday social interactions within the Latin American immigrant community” (Canizales, 2024, p. 19). A paper from Macias et al. reports that “racialized discourses and slurs (i.e. chanchi)” used by some Central American students against others were used enough among high school students to make some students leave school (2025, p. 5). This intentional stigmatizing of peers —who are Indigenous, whose English proficiency is not as high as others, who struggle to learn English quickly, and who come from certain countries— creates tensions in classrooms that are difficult to alleviate for a teacher who is unaware of them. This is also exacerbated when bullying happens in a language that a teacher is unable to understand.

This past year, my co-teacher and I perceived a very supportive climate in one of our co-taught classes. In fact, we had several observers come in to see the students engaged in a Socratic discussion, and when they left, they both commented on how supportive the students were of each other. They even cited a few different interactions that they perceived to be caring ones. However, at the end of the year, the students were tasked with writing arguments that they would present to the class. One student was agonizing over whether he would share a few details of his migration story. In a conversation with him, I shared how powerful his story was and that using it or not was entirely his decision. I shared with him my perception of support in the class, and he just looked me in the eye and shook his head back and forth. I asked him if he didn’t feel supported by his peers, and he shook his head again. It was a surprise to me because of my own perceptions and because I was unaware of the hierarchical dynamics that existed between him and the Latinx students who had been in the US for longer, or who were second- or third-generation Americans.

In addition to all of this, it is imperative that teachers stop imposing their common assumption that all students should be motivated to excel in school and base their worth on individual achievements and accolades. Canizales’s book Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, which focuses on unaccompanied Central American migrant youth, many of whom came to the United States with dreams of going to school (or of completing school they were unable to complete in their home countries) allowed me to see that the forces at play in their lives, and the focus of their priorities, does not align with the Western capitalist narrative of individual success that pervades our classrooms and drives much of the motivation work we do in U.S. schools. For many of the youth in her study, “remembering one’s family and making sacrifices for them serve as currency in a moral economy” (Canizales, 2025, p. 227) and it is important for teachers to understand that the “moral economy” in which many of their Latinx students are living is as important —if not more— than the capitalist economy that we were indoctrinated into.

Teachers need to educate themselves about the changing classroom dynamics so that they can effectively create safe spaces for students to speak, write, and engage with one another. Teachers need to educate themselves also about the metas (goals) of students who exist outside our cultural norms, as for students who live outside the norms, “it is not enough to set goals and work hard to achieve them. Systems of power and opportunity structures must be aligned in one’s favor” (Canizales, 2025, p. 235). If we are to motivate all students to achieve their goals, we must first understand what those goals are, how the education we provide helps achieve those goals, and how we might align the structures of our classrooms to favor all students instead of just some.

Some exhortations for teachers:

1. Get informed about the social dynamics at play in your classrooms and communities. A great place to start is with the books Reunited; and Sin Padres, Ni Papeles. The book The Latino Education Crisis is an older study, but it is great for building foundational knowledge.
2. Get vulnerable with your students; share your awareness of your positionality through your own experience.
3. Make learning symbiotic: commit to learning from your students as you hope they will learn from you. Also, teach them how they can learn from one another and how their differences contribute to deeper learning for the whole class.
4. Examine your own motivations and the assumptions on which they rest; get curious and open up to accepting new knowledge lacunae; learn about other cultural frameworks, points of view, and social positions that might be driving your students’ motivations, behaviors, goals, and present priorities.

I truly believe that accepting these four invitations will make classroom relationship-building easier, and that subsequently it will make teaching more enjoyable and effective. That doesn’t mean it will be easy, though, especially for white teachers like me. We will first need to learn to see through other people’s eyes while simultaneously acknowledging our own presence in classroom spaces (and society) as a racial one.

My journey to seeing the need for this kind of learning has taken multiple years and multiple country contexts, and I hope that by sharing my learning with other teachers and administrators, it will come easier for them. As I continue to learn and build relationships with my students, I will share some more readings, strategies, and reflections about how it is going for me and my students as we move through this school year. I also invite any comments my colleagues might have as we embark on this journey together.

Allison Finn Yemez is a National Board Certified teacher currently serving as Head of the English department in a local public Middle School. While her background and past 25 years of experience have been teaching and leading in high schools in three different countries, she is enjoying the new challenge and the joy of bringing academic rigor to and working with middle-grade students. Allison is currently an Ed.D. student in the School of Education at American University.

Works Cited

Canizales, S. L. (2024). Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States. University of California Press.

Castaneda, E., & Jenks, D. (2024). Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration. Russell Sage Foundation.

Conchas, Gilberto Q. & Acevedo, Nancy. (2020). The Chicana/o/x Dream: Hope, Resistance, and Educational Success. Harvard University Press.

Gandara, P., & Contreras, F. (2009). The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies. Harvard University Press.

Macias, E., Barrera Trivino, M., Dreyfus, R., & Pasion, D. (n.d.). “They called me chanchi and it made me feel bad”: Undocumented Youths’ Perception of Relational Racial Projects in School Settings.