European integration policy and Ecuadorian teenagers in Madrid. This study analyzes the relationship between a discourse of integration in the European Union and the ways in which the ethnic boundaries of segregated social groups of immigrant children are conceptualized in one working-class and immigrant neighborhood in Madrid, Spain. I use qualitative data gathered during 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork among Ecuadorian immigrant teenagers and their secondary school teachers to explore the unintended consequences of European efforts to promote the integration of immigrants in member states. My argument is that the pervasive discourse of integration in the European Union is central to a racialized process of subject formation occurring in Madrid through which the children of immigrants come to be recognized as ethnic outsiders in Spanish society. By analyzing in ethnographic detail how discursive forces intertwine with material constraints to shape the

subjectivity of immigrant children in Madrid, this study helps to explain how racialized colonial and post-colonial socio-economic hierarchies are reproduced in current immigration scenarios. I aim to contribute to a line of research analyzing the construction of social categories in processes of inclusion, exclusion, distinction, discrimination, oppression or resistance in educational settings.

I conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the working class and immigrant neighborhoods of Ciudad Lineal district in Madrid between July 2004 and June 2006. During three separate visits to Madrid, I conducted participant-observation and interviews with Ecuadorian teenagers, their friends, families, teachers and neighbors in homes, schools, churches, neighborhood parks, plazas, nightclubs, restaurants, after-school programs, and

community centers. I befriended individual families through my attendance at an immigrant support group, participation in schools, volunteer work at an after-school center, or through snowball sampling as my network of relationships expanded.