Through a longitudinal ethnographic study of two Los Angeles neighborhoods and their young adult Latino residents, María Rendón systematically collected and analyzed compelling evidence to render an important argument for reframing social science perspectives about the social mechanisms shaping life trajectories of second‐generation immigrants. Rendón's account revisits two arguments about the urban underclass and Mexican second‐generation immigrant incorporation with refreshing new evidence urban experiences between 2007 and 2012. Consequently, Rendón refutes earlier arguments that were grounded in tropes related to a culture of poverty or downward assimilation through cultural identification with the underclass. Rendón also refutes arguments about immigrant work ethics and upward assimilation of second‐generation children. Neither of these outcomes result among the young men in her study and in the context of Los Angeles neighborhoods during this time period.

Rendón sets the stage by arguing for the case selection as representing two puzzles and worthy of investigation. Namely, residents of two of the poorest, most segregated, violent, and least resourced and institutionally enriched neighborhoods in Los Angeles, should only produce underclass outcomes for young adults, according to many urban sociologists. Furthermore, many immigration scholars have consistently argued that Mexican immigrant children, the 1.5‐ or second‐generation immigrants, are more likely to downwardly assimilate and have among the poorest outcomes compared to other immigrant groups. Rendón suggests that contrary to these generalized patterns from earlier decades of research, the young men in her study do not end up in the urban underclass, on the whole. Instead, they mostly remain, much like their parents, in the working class. The first puzzle is, therefore, why do they not do as poorly as might be expected based on theory and earlier evidence? The second puzzle is, when they do go onto college and have substantial social support from family, why do they not do better? In both cases, most of the young men in her study experience neither downward assimilation nor upwardly assimilation. They are stuck where their parents landed upon their arrival to the United States.

Stagnant Dreamers is divided in two parts. The first part examines the two urban contexts of the fictitiously named and selected neighborhoods—Pueblo Viejo and Central City. The descriptions show how both neighborhoods represent places of overwhelming poverty and neglect, as well as hypersegregation. These two places are meant to be contexts described in most urban sociology texts as places of the truly disadvantaged. The two places are also meant to be placed in comparison. While both neighborhoods have high numbers of Latinx residents, Pueblo Viejo is overwhelming Latinx and mostly Mexican and Chicano. Central City is mostly black, although the neighborhood had also recently shifted to include more Latinx residents since the 2000 census. Pueblo Viejo's street life is described by Rendón with characterizations that include small shop owners, street vendors, services offered in Spanish, religious venues and churches, and foods and goods that evoke the image of an ethnic enclave. Central City is not described in these terms and even described as less institutionally varied and enriched. Pueblo Viejo and Central City, therefore, offer an opportunity to compare the influences of immigrant social capital and institutionalized poverty.

Also in the first part of the book is a description of the parents’ arrival to the United States. Here, Rendón elaborates two sets of structural and related arguments about the contexts of childhood and young adulthood for the young men in her study. The parents in her study, for the most part, arrived at the end of the 1980s or early 1990s. They arrived at a time of extremely high levels of gang violence in Los Angeles, and this violence shocked them. They had arrived with dreams of opportunities only to find themselves fearing for their lives. In addition, not all arrived with established social networks that could support them and be leveraged. Some of the parents stood up to the violence and sought to reclaim social spaces from gang members, while others recoiled and shrank their social spaces so as to avoid violence, increasing their social isolation. The shocking violence, variably helpful social networks, and parental approaches to managing the structural uncertainties of the social disorder in the two neighborhoods sets the stage for remainder of the book.

In the second part of the book, Rendón takes the reader along the life journeys of 42 young men, first interviewed in 2007 and then reinterviewed in 2012. This section of the book is organized in four parts to illustrate how the cases reveal alternative theoretical explanations than current sociological orthodoxy about urban poverty and immigrant incorporation. In Chapter 4, Rendón demonstrates how all of the young men are exposed to violence, including bodily harm to themselves, but that those with cohesive kin networks were buffered from exposure to high amounts and levels of violence. This buffering effect not only reduces exposure to violence but also prevents dropping out of high school. In other words, in both neighborhood contexts, further downward assimilation is prevented by cohesive community and kin networks. Very low exposure to violence, furthermore, was associated with continuing on to college after high school.

Nevertheless, in Chapter 5, Rendón shows how educational attainment and cohesive social and community networks had no effect on class mobility. All of the young men in her study landed squarely among the working poor. Rendón argues that the major challenge in truly disadvantaged neighborhoods is that hypersegregation, even in the presence of strong social networks, does not contain enough social capital that can empower and leverage young men out of the working poor. Missing are support agents and empowering social capital. Furthermore, immigrant work ethic narratives that reinforce meritocracy continue to resonate within the community, rather than the need to cultivate strategic network ties with institutional agents that can help a child get a foot in the door. And, when children make it to college, they do not have nearby cohesive social networks that support their navigation of higher education environs. Many of the young men reported feeling lost at how best to use their time in college.

As the young men mature, we learn in Chapter 6 about how they understand better their pathways for navigating life. Rendón illustrates how many of the more successful young men understood key moments when a strategic agent or mentor helped them make it. In some cases, it was a combination of steady familial support and the help of a high school counselor, a coethnic who gave them a chance at a job, or parish priest. A particularly profound observation of the study is that at least one third of the young men are socially isolated with no one to turn to for help. These young men truly flounder and experience great hardship.

Nevertheless, in the final empirical chapter, Rendón illustrates how these young men, on the whole, remain remarkably determined. None have adopted an oppositional perspective on their situation, the context, or society, despite their hardships. In making sense of their lives, Rendón renders their voices into three types in the context of the American opportunity structure—resolute optimists (the modal category), the determined, and the self‐blamers. Resolute optimists see structural conditions of their lives as an open system with lots of opportunities. The determined see the structural conditions as closed or constrained. The self‐blamers see the structural conditions as open, but their standpoint about themselves is pessimistic. However, notably, the numbers following into each ideal type shifts from the first wave of interviews to the last. Little is made of this shift, even though over half are no longer resolute optimists by 2012.

Rendón's methodological appendix is a well‐wrought description of the study design, providing a valuable and replicable model for future qualitative research and ethnographic investigations. The clear and thoughtful reflections on positionality, ethics, theory‐driven neighborhood selection, purposeful sampling of respondents and their parents, and prospective study design illustrate how qualitative methods can illuminate social mechanisms and generate new hypotheses and models. For example, Chapters 4, 5, and 7 provide great examples of how ethnographic evidence can be used to build a proposed model of social relations and outcomes. My quibble about the methodological account is that there is no description about how qualitative material was coded, interrogated, compared, and contrasted in order to draw inferences and insights. In particular and especially challenging, in longitudinal ethnographic studies, are how respondent accounts can change, memories change, or perspectives evolve. This evolution of perspectives or the contingent nature of meaningfulness can sometimes offer contradictory interpretations, even for the same person at different points of time. From a methodological standpoint, Rendón does not describe whether there were contradictions and evolution of meanings and how they might have been resolved. Furthermore, this notion about how meaning is social constructed, contingent and dynamic is not apparent in the main body of the text. Nevertheless, the overwhelmingly strong argument for structural explanations rather than cultural ones in this powerful account, the missing social construction component of shifting meaning, does not undermine the case for the profound findings and conclusions to be drawn from Stagnant Dreamers. In sum, Rendón makes a strong case for investments in schools, community centers, and social support institutions that empower and leverage socioeconomic mobility, as well as the economies of neighborhoods. Furthermore, Rendón argues for better and more robust social support systems for those who make it out and into college. This is a story of human resiliency and promise, as well as one of profoundly lacking policy imagination and political will to investment in places of need.

通过对两个洛杉矶社区及其年轻的拉丁裔居民的人种学纵向研究，玛丽亚·伦登（MaríaRendón）系统地收集和分析了令人信服的证据，为重新构想社会科学观点对塑造第二代移民生活轨迹的社会机制观点提供了重要依据。Rendón的叙述重新审视了关于城市下层阶级和墨西哥第二代移民的两个论点，并在2007年至2012年间提供了新的新证据，证明了城市经验。因此，Rendón驳斥了早先的论点，这些论点基于与贫困文化或通过文化认同而向下融合的比喻。与下层阶级。Rendón还驳斥了有关移民职业道德和第二代儿童的向上同化的论点。

Rendón通过争辩案件的选择来代表两个难题，值得调查。也就是说，根据许多城市社会学家的说法，洛杉矶两个最贫穷，最隔离，最暴力，资源最贫乏，机构最富裕的社区的居民只能为年轻人带来卑鄙的后果。此外，许多移民学者一直认为，与其他移民群体相比，墨西哥移民儿童（1.5或第二代移民）更容易向下同化并成为最贫穷的结果。Rendón建议，与早期几十年研究中的这些普遍模式相反，她的研究中的年轻人总体上并没有进入城市下层阶级。相反，他们大多像父母一样留在工人阶级中。不会像理论和早期证据所预期的那样糟糕吗？第二个难题是，当他们上大学并获得家人的大量社会支持时，为什么他们做得不好？在这两种情况下，她研究中的大多数年轻人都没有经历过向下同化或向上同化的情况。他们被困在父母到达美国后登陆的地方。

停滞的梦想家分为两个部分。第一部分研究了虚拟命名和选择的社区的两个城市环境-普韦布洛维耶霍（Pueblo Viejo）和中心城市。描述说明了这两个街区是如何代表压倒性的贫困和忽视以及过度种族隔离的地方。这两个地方是在大多数城市社会学文献中被描述为真正处境不利者的地方。这两个地方也有待比较。虽然这两个街区都有大量拉丁裔居民，但普韦布洛·维耶荷（Pueblo Viejo）压倒了拉丁裔，主要是墨西哥人和奇卡诺人。尽管自2000年人口普查以来，该社区最近也已转移到包括更多拉丁裔居民的位置，但市中心几乎都是黑人。Rendón对Pueblo Viejo的街头生活进行了描述，其特征包括小商店老板，街头小贩，在西班牙提供的服务，宗教场所和教堂，以及唤起民族飞地形象的食品和商品。没有用这些术语来描述中心城市，甚至说它在制度上没有那么多的变化和丰富。因此，普韦布洛维耶荷（Pueblo Viejo）和中心城市提供了一个机会，可以比较移民的社会资本和制度化贫困的影响。

本书的第一部分还描述了父母到达美国的情况。在这里，Rendón详细阐述了关于她研究中的年轻人的童年和成年时期的背景的两组结构性和相关性论证。在她的研究中，父母大多是在1980年代末或1990年代初到达的。他们抵达洛杉矶的帮派暴力事件极为猖time之时，这种暴力震惊了他们。他们带着机会的梦想来到了这里，却发现自己为自己的生命感到恐惧。此外，并非所有人都已经建立了可以支持他们并得到利用的社交网络。一些父母顶住暴力，试图从帮派成员那里夺回社会空间，而另一些父母反冲并收缩了他们的社会空间，以避免暴力行为，增加他们的社会孤立感。令人震惊的暴力行为，各种有用的社交网络以及父母为应对两个社区的社会混乱的结构性不确定性而采取的方法，为本书的其余部分奠定了基础。

在本书的第二部分中，Rendón带领读者了解了42位年轻人的人生历程，他们在2007年首次接受采访，然后在2012年进行了重新采访。本书的这一部分分为四个部分，以说明案例如何揭示替代性的理论解释。比当前关于城市贫困和移民并入的社会学正统观念要强。在第4章中，Rendón展示了所有年轻人如何遭受暴力，包括对自身的身体伤害，但是具有紧密联系的亲密网络的年轻人受到了避免遭受高强度和高水平暴力的伤害。这种缓冲作用不仅减少了遭受暴力的机会，而且还防止了高中辍学。换句话说，在两个邻域中，凝聚的社区和亲属网络阻止了进一步的向下同化。

然而，在第5章中，Rendón显示了受教育程度以及凝聚力的社会和社区网络如何对班级流动性没有影响。在她的研究中，所有的年轻人都正好落在工作的穷人中间。Rendón辩称，真正处于弱势社区的主要挑战是，即使在强大的社交网络存在的情况下，种族隔离也无法容纳足够的社会资本，无法使年轻男子从工作中的穷人中获得权力和发挥杠杆作用。缺少支持者和赋权社会资本。此外，强化精英能力的移民工作道德叙事继续在社区内引起共鸣，而不是需要与机构代理人建立战略网络联系，以帮助孩子站稳脚跟。而且，当孩子们上大学时，他们没有附近的凝聚力社交网络来支持他们在高等教育环境中的导航。许多年轻人报告说，他们对如何充分利用自己的大学时光感到迷失。

随着年轻人的成长，我们将在第6章了解他们如何更好地理解自己的人生道路。伦登（Rendón）说明了有多少成功的年轻人了解战略代理或指导者帮助他们实现关键时刻的关键时刻。在某些情况下，这是稳定的家庭支持与高中辅导员（一位为他们提供工作机会的牧师）或教区牧师的帮助相结合的结果。对这项研究的特别深刻的观察是，至少有三分之一的年轻人在社会上与世隔绝，无人寻求帮助。这些年轻人真正挣扎，经历了艰辛。

然而，在最后的实证章节中，Rendón说明了这些年轻人总体上如何保持卓越的决心。尽管有困难，但没有人对他们的处境，背景或社会采取相反的观点。在理解自己的生活时，Rendón在美国机会结构的背景下将他们的声音分为三种类型：绝对乐观主义者（模态类别），坚定者和自责者。坚决的乐观主义者将他们的生活结构条件视为具有很多机会的开放系统。确定者认为结构条件是封闭的或受约束的。自责者认为结构性条件是开放的，但他们对自己的观点却持悲观态度。但是，值得注意的是，进入每种理想类型的人数从第一轮采访到最后一轮采访发生了转变。

Rendón的方法附录对研究设计进行了精心设计，为将来的定性研究和人种学研究提供了有价值且可复制的模型。对位置，道德，理论驱动的邻里选择，对受访者及其父母的有目的抽样以及前瞻性研究设计的清晰而周到的思考，说明了定性方法如何阐明社会机制并产生新的假设和模型。例如，第4、5和7章提供了很好的例子，说明了如何使用人种学证据来建立拟议的社会关系和成果模型。我对方法论的解释是，没有关于定性材料如何编码，审问，比较和对比以得出推论和见解的描述。在纵向民族志研究中，尤其是特别具有挑战性的是，受访者的叙述如何改变，记忆改变或观点发展。观点的这种演变或意义的偶然性有时会提供矛盾的解释，即使对于同一个人在不同的时间点也是如此。从方法论的角度来看，Rendón并未描述含义是否存在矛盾和演变，以及如何解决这些矛盾。此外，关于意义如何被社会建构，偶然性和动态性的观念在文本的主体中并不明显。但是，在这种强有力的解释中，对于结构性解释而不是文化性解释的压倒性的压倒性的论点是，意义的转移缺少了社会建构的组成部分，停滞的梦想家。总之，Rendón大力投资于学校，社区中心和社会支持机构，这些机构可以增强和利用社会经济流动性以及邻里经济。此外，Rendón主张为那些成功进入大学的人们提供更好，更强大的社会支持系统。这是一个关于人类的韧性和承诺的故事，也是一个极度缺乏政策想象力和对在需要的地方进行投资的政治意愿的故事。