TY - JOUR T1 - Making Americans: Schooling, Diversity, and Assimilation in the Twenty-First Century JF - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences SP - 99 LP - 117 DO - 10.7758/RSF.2018.4.5.05 VL - 4 IS - 5 AU - Cristina L. Lash Y1 - 2018/08/01 UR - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/4/5/99.abstract N2 - How do schools teach American identity in light of immigration-driven diversity? This ethnographic study focuses on everyday nation-making at Castro Middle School, located in a city transformed by immigration. Building on theories of bidirectional assimilation, I show how assimilation can produce new definitions of Americanness more recognizable to immigrant communities, facilitating their national identification. At Castro, bidirectional assimilation supported African American students’ descriptions of Americans in multicultural terms and their own identification as American. Assimilation between the school and the larger Latino and Asian student populations, however, was limited because of a binary racial paradigm that excluded them from the national community. This study thus nuances the role of race as a barrier in the assimilation process, particularly as it unfolds in schools. ER -