Spanish research has investigated the disadvantaged experiences of children of immigrant families, but we have almost no information about black African children and youth in key issues such as their academic trajectories and transitions to adulthood, and even less about their identity construction as individual citizens in their families’ transnational spaces. On the one hand, they recurrently become overexposed through distorted representations of alleged cultural harms but, on the other, they remain doubly invisible in their discrimination and exclusion. This paradox often blurs not only the actual extent of their subaltern positions but also how schools’ neglect their opportunities and their families’ concerns. Drawing on a project focusing on the process from immigration to emancipation, the paper intends to present the exploration and analysis of narratives emerging from different voices in black African communities: from high-achieving girls to early school leaving among boys, through parents’ associations struggles to keep the dream of a better education for their children in the host country or, as part of coping strategies with the extremely severe conditions of the economic recession in Spain, the experiences of children and youth sent back to the home countries in Western Africa, including the disempowering media approaches.