When Participants Anticipate Violence Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Carlos Martínez-Cano February 12, 2018 The strengths of anthropology as a discipline are its ability to amplify disenfranchised voices and capture the fine-grained, daily, lived experiences of its participants. The gap between policy actions and their human costs is widening in our current political climate. The rescinding of DACA and local law enforcement cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, force migrants into spaces of risk that can sometimes have fatal consequences. It is imperative that we consider how Latinx community members alter their daily lives, movements, and behaviors in anticipation of being targeted. These young Latinx learners are facing a particular kind of systemic violence that often ﾓies under the radar. It does not raise a riﾓe or a voice. It inscribes a sense of despondency and wields it like a weapon. Much has been written about the challenges young Latinx learners face, including language brokering, the school to prison pipeline, and obstacles to completion of higher education. Insidious, and more difficult to document, is how the anticipation of impending malicious policies affects the informal learning practices of Latinx students. My research with Mexican-origin families in southeastern Pennsylvania took place from 2008–2014. For most of that time, I lived in the New Latino Diaspora town and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a group of Mexican-origin middle school boys as they engaged in self-directed digital literacy practices in a community center. Five years ago, the boys were eager to learn computer programming languages on their own time and spoke enthusiastically about higher education trajectories and of imagined futures as programmers, architects, and business owners.