Fitting In: Hispanic Adolescent Challenges in the School Environment

As Hispanic adolescents navigate American public schools, a cascade of labels continues to define and shape their lives, their educational opportunities. With adolescents in this country, these labels can easily serve as factors that impact their success in the educational pipeline. Adolescence is a time characterized by change—hormonally, physically, and mentally (Blakemore & Frith, 2005). The idea of adolescence being a period of ‘storm and stress’ is a perspective introduced by Hall (1904), supported by the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud (1958) and congruent with Erikson’s (1968) definition of adolescence as a time of identity crisis. (Op de Beeck, 2009). Such characterizations of adolescence reflect the negative consequences that youth experience, from changes in their interpersonal relationships and when they are confronted with social expectations about their roles in the world. For young Hispanics, adolescence is a particularly difficult period of ‘storm and stress,’ as the