Phelps, Elizabeth2015-08-202015-08-202015-05-24bibid: 9255376https://hdl.handle.net/1813/40626: This dissertation explores ethnographically the impact of discourses of belonging and exclusion in a New Latino Diaspora (NLD) city located in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. Young NLD adults in Rocktown, Virginia, experience a form of sequestered inclusion shaped by racializing narratives based in nativist hostility as well as by implicit deficit narratives embedded in humanistic multiculturalism. Based on more than twelve months of ethnographic field work (and over six years of ordinary life in Rocktown), this dissertation explores how advocates, activists, and their allies in the social service and educational institutions in the Rocktown area have institutionalized processes of inclusion over a period of fifteen years both with and for NLD youth. These processes have been constrained by the paternalistic and reductive discourses that frame youth both as inherently needy and as a resource that benefits the receiving community. NLD youth themselves recognize their own specific needs and contributions, but resist the reductionism and racializing tendencies of these discourses. Within this context, a small group of young NLD activists formed to support and promote the DREAM Act (for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), both capitulating to and contesting dominant discourses and constructing a narrative frame for belonging on their own terms.en-USLatinoimmigrationUnited Statesdissertation or thesis