The Effects of Gendered Immigration Policy Enforcement on Elementary Children’s Schooling

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

Abstract

Drawing from a 3-year ethnographic study on Mexican immigrant fathers and their children in a community of the New Latino Diaspora, this paper examines the implementation of current immigration policies, which have come to equate “illegal” with “Mexican immigrant” (Dick, 2011) and how the enforcement of these policies, which overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men, affect immigrant children and their elementary schooling. I focus on middle childhood in particular, an age group that has received little attention in the research literature (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011), in a receiving context in which dramatic increases in small-scale arrests under the Secure Communities program quietly shaped many immigrant children’s lives while going unnoticed by the non-immigrant community, including many of their teachers. Shifting immigration practices in this Pennsylvania town led to a context in which 71% (5/7) of the students from my study had firsthand experience with the deportation of close family members or served as an intermediary between their family and the police. In this paper I focus on the case of Princess and her father Federico to explore how his deportation for a minor infraction during the spring of her second-grade year affected her childhood and schooling.
Methods for the ethnographic study included regular participant observation and video recording in 7 Mexican immigrant families’ homes, students’ classrooms, and the local community. I draw upon fieldnotes, video logs, interviews, and transcripts to empirically illustrate how this gendered vigilance led to father-child separations and incredible stress for children, yet it also created opportunities for real-world biliteracy practices. For example, Princess went from a stable two-parent household with academic support to a single-parent household in which she took on many new responsibilities. Like many children who have been separated from parents due to deportations, she struggled with feelings of depression, abandonment, and fear, as well as increased economic hardship (Yoshikawa & Kholoptseva, 2013). Yet Federico’s deportation also created a context for her to develop real-world biliteracy practices, such as writing to her detained father and beginning Spanish literacy lessons to prepare for a potential repatriation to Mexican schools. I explore how this case can inform pedagogical approaches that tap into students’ experiences with immigration practices and build upon their real-world biliteracy skills. As Suárez-Orozco and colleagues emphasize, little is known about immigration policies and childhoods beyond the “brute numbers” (2011, p. 439) and this paper helps illustrate the complex familial realities of immigration policy enforcement today. I illustrate how targeting Mexican adult males, especially for minor infractions, is likely to create educational challenges for their children in middle childhood, a younger generation of DREAMers and U.S. Citizens.

Author

• Sarah Gallo, The Ohio State University