COMPUGIRLS: How Girls of Color Find and Define Themselves in the Digital Age

Abstract

organizing, it took years of participating in organizing within education-based and violence prevention spaces for me to unlearn individualized pathological narratives while learning how unequal intersecting social structures produce specific life opportunities, or lack thereof, for us. Any sociological research and story of Chicagoans thus must include the resistance and strategic maneuvering of the conditions that racially minoritized and marginalized people experience in the neighborhood spaces where they come to live. Vargas referenced various forms of “strategic intelligence” (p. 11) that the navigation of hostile barriers toward health care coverage produces for uninsured Latinx people. Gonzales referred to “strategic collective mistrust” (p. 28) as an organizing tool. In this sense, any study and re-narration of Chicago must include how the two powerful tools of strategy and ingenuity explored in both books are deployed by individual actors within a historical timeframe. This showcases how racialized communities in the struggle become or are sustained sites of ongoing strategic mobilization, despite the intersecting social structures that hinder the possibility for life-affirming conditions and neighborhood areas in a city-space like Chicago.