Parental racial-ethnic socialization as a moderator of Latinx youth's cultural orientation and family dynamics.

As ethnoracial diversity continues to reshape the sociocultural landscape of the United States, adolescents from immigrant-origin families increasingly navigate multiple cultural reference points-often extending beyond the traditional heritage-host (i.e., heritage culture and White host culture) cultural paradigm. Most research on cultural orientations remains grounded in this binary framework, overlooking youth's potential engagement with other minoritized cultural streams, such as Black American culture. At the same time, less is known about how youth's multidimensional cultural orientations shape family dynamics and how youth's cultural orientations interact with family-based cultural processes, such as racial-ethnic socialization. Drawing on survey data from 175 Latinx adolescents, this study examined the following: (a) how youth's orientations toward Latinx, White, and Black American cultures were associated with youth-reported maternal support and mother-youth conflict and (b) whether these associations were moderated by youth's reports of parental cultural socialization and cultural mistrust. Results revealed that engagement with each cultural stream was positively associated with maternal support and that cultural socialization shaped the relation between Latinx and Black American cultural orientation and maternal support. This study expands existing models of cultural orientation and highlights the relational value of maintaining at least one meaningful cultural anchor within Latinx family relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).