The Volunteer State: Latinx youth and the making of membership in Nashville, Tennessee

Volunteering has long held a vaunted position in the United States, which has only increased in the wake of welfare reform and the state's retraction from the provision of public goods. This article explores how immigrant-origin Latinx youth in Nashville, Tennessee, who are active community volunteers, linked volunteering to moral personhood and their claims to national membership. This linkage is based on an internalized deficit perception of the Latinx immigrant person as an immoral national interloper and a concurrent stigmatization and racialization of economic need. However, youth also reframed membership and volunteering's meanings rooted in their relational commitments to each other and their undocumented peers' blocked paths to citizenship. These socially reproductive and more transformative understandings of volunteering, and their links to self-as-citizen, reveal the contingent value of civic engagement for immigrant-origin Latinx youth. It also reveals their central roles in defining the parameters of membership in an era of increased nativist racism and decreased state social service provision in the United States.