Experiences of Undocumented Status and Schooling Among Newcomer Teens

• In Event: Status and Schooling in New Latino Communities: Ethnographic Perspectives on Immigration Status in K-12 Contexts

Abstract

The discussion about undocumented students, both among advocates and academics, has focused on DREAMers, 1.5 generation adolescents whose parents brought them to the U.S. at a young age and who are U.S. - educated (e.g., Abrego, 2006, 2008; Gonzalez, 2010, 2011; Perez et al. 2009). However, these are not the only undocumented students in U.S. schools. An estimated 2.4 million undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 arrived after the age of 15 (Passel & Lopez, 2012), and some subset of these attends or has attended U.S. high schools. Migrants who arrive as teenagers experience markedly different outcomes than those who arrive at younger ages (Rumbaut, 1997, 2004; Oropresa & Landale, 1994). Their experiences of undocumentedness and schooling may also diverge, yet newcomers are seldom included in discussions of undocumented teens. This paper shares findings from a school-based ethnography of newly-arrived Mexican teenagers to explore how undocumented status influences newcomers’ school experiences.
Drawing on fieldnotes and interviews from a study in a New Latino Diaspora community of a beginner English-as-a-second- language class populated entirely by “sojourner students”—undocumented, transnational, labor migrants, prone to school mobility (Hamann, 2001), I show that although their status did not directly affect their opportunities in high-school, it was relevant there in other ways. First, it factored in students’ late enrollment in the school year. Due to the conditions of their border crossing and their initial plans to work rather than study, students seldom had the documents they needed for school, which delayed their matriculation by weeks or months. Second, everyday experiences living and working without “papers” carried into their school days. They were often absent or exhausted and unable to engage in class from long hours working. Furthermore, they eagerly shared their border crossing stories and openly joked about the dangers of arrest and deportation. Despite the high salience of their status to these students, their teachers seldom took up the topic, a lack that contributed to student disengagement and to shallow teacher- student relationships.
These findings suggest that the experiences of some undocumented newcomers diverge significantly from those of their 1.5 generation peers. Unlike DREAMers, who experience a period of “suspended illegality” (Gonzalez, 2011), during which their status is either irrelevant or unknown to them, sojourner teens are keenly aware of their legal status from their moment of entry. Furthermore, unlike DREAMers who often hide their status at school (ibid), sojourners were able to talk openly about their status because of the composition of their classes. I argue that teachers in such situations should use students’ status as a curricular resource to help them process stressful and often traumatic experiences as well as to build language and literacy skills (Campano, 2007) and bolster teacher- student relationships, which can support undocumented students’ school permanence (Gonzalez, 2010; Perez et al., 2009). This paper contributes to broadening the scope of the emerging scholarship on undocumented students by attending to the experiences of newcomer teens and initiates a conversation about policy implications for this group.

Author

• Elaine Cristina Allard, Swarthmore College