Teachers as Border Brokers: Undocumented Students in Search of Community, Learning, and Acompañamiento

• In Event: Undocumented but Undaunted: The Political and Social Landscape of Latina/o DREAMers

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural production of an alternative third space for transnational Mexican youth by institutional agents whom I call “border brokers” at a northern California high school. Particular attention will be paid to how a small, select group of bilingual Chicana/o-Mexicana/o educators, each with migrant backgrounds themselves, deliberated and moved to create a different place on campus, a different way to engage undocumented migrant youth, and deploy a different pedagogy based on the idea of acompañamiento. This paper examines the contours of unequal social and educational circumstances for undocumented Mexican students and the significance of micro-level actions on the part of certain educators within marginal spaces on campus to (re)fashion their own sense of place and community through interpersonal relationships (Ruiz, 2006).

Using ethnographic data from a year long study at a northern California high school and town—which included analysis of observations, detailed field notes, conversations, structured and unstructured interviews, within classrooms, cafeteria, soccer fields, hallways, staff meetings, and community settings, this paper examines the different ways that educators came together to “claim space to create place” (Pérez, 2002, p. 182) for displaced transmigrants in what I call acts of acompañamiento. I argue that acompañamiento is a fluid cultural practice of solidarity, advocacy, relationships, and community building deployed mainly by individuals on the margins of society in the “greater Mexican community” (Nájera-Ramírez, 2002, p. 167). Goizueta (2001) posits that “to be abandoned is to be nobody; to be accompanied is to be honored, a person. The people’s accompaniment symbolizes a new honored status as a full human being” (p.75).

Complicating and challenging the dominant yet simplistic narrative of the learning process as an individual task based on the notion of achievement as test scores and the technical acquisition of academic and language skills, educators in this study illustrate through a pedagogy of acompañamiento how learning is predicated on the pillars of deep empathy, authentic relationships, transnational identity formation, and community building. By claiming public space, these educators attempt to bridge the fault lines of inequality through a different educational vision and narrative based on communal notions of learning where processes of identity formation and examination are critical to the intellectual and cultural growth of students. This paper argues against an over-reliance on scientific, rational educational exercises based on individual merit and divorced from everyday life, and for a relational, experiential, and cultural brokering of the learning process that represents a lived commitment by educators. It calls on educators to co-create their own pedagogies of acompañamiento, where undocumented transmigrant students on the margins can engage and speak with passion and authority.

Author

• Enrique Sepulveda, University of Saint Joseph