Sheila Bock (Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies) published a chapter, "#LatinxGradCaps, Cultural Citizenship, and the 'American Dream," in the edited volume Folklore and Social Media. Looking at the hashtag #LatinxGradCaps, it addresses how the aesthetic and narrative framings of immigrant identities in these online displays individually and collectively work to disrupt and reframe both prevalent cultural narratives about immigrants in the United States and how discourses of citizenship converge with popular interpretations of the “American Dream.” It shows how in a hostile political climate, the collective presentation of personalized mortarboards linked by this hashtag has worked explicitly to value the individual, family, and community stories and experiences so often rendered invisible or problematic. It also considers how people who engage with the hashtag are simultaneously imagining and creating emergent publics that question, resist, and re-envision the dynamics of belonging and exclusion embedded in the “American Dream.”
