Immigrant Youths’ Repertoires of Practice in the Transcultural Mainstream

• In Event: Unraveling the Positioning, Problematizing, and Pathologizing of Emergent Bilingual Youth in Schools

Abstract

This presentation reports on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a four-year period across two high schools in New York and Los Angeles with large populations of recently-arrived immigrant youth.

Traditionally, schools have placed importance on recent-arrivals becoming American, marked through aspects of social life like learning English or participating in democratic processes here. Such approaches can treat immigrant youth as if they were U.S. minorities, ignoring the transnational character of their lives. Scholarship pushes back on this normative framing by conceptualizing the cosmopolitan and transnational skills immigrant youth bring into schools (Campano & Ghiso, 2011; Orellana, 2009). In myriad research, "trans-" has come to indicate metaphors of movement and spatial frames that contain both the global and local (Pennycook, 2007). Pennycook has defined "transcultural flows" as 1) the ways in which cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts, and 2) the "effects of the many encounters and hybrid co-productions of languages and cultures" (p. 6). Transcultural flows include not only "supercultural commonalities," or cultural forms that transcend locality, but also processes of borrowing, blending, remaking and returning to processes of alternative cultural production (p. 6). Campano & Ghiso argue that immigrant children, by virtue of their "diverse vantage points and transnational negotiations," are uniquely positioned to educate their peers and teachers about the world (2011, p. 166). Similarly, Guerra (2004) refers to a "rhetorical practice of transcultural repositioning" as an emerging habit of mind.

My fieldwork takes place in global cities that are top immigrant-receiving sites in the nation, and have lengthy histories of struggle over the incorporation of immigrant populations. Both the NYC and Los Angeles schools served large populations of recently-arrived immigrant high school students; one school reported their student body speaking over 20 different languages, and the schooling network to which the second school belongs reports that their students come from 120 different countries. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation in seven classrooms, forty interviews with teachers and students, two focus group interviews, and longitudinal interviewing with key informants both while they were attending high school and after graduation.

Results demonstrate that highly-diverse immigrant classrooms represent a transcultural mainstream. In the transcultural mainstream youth draw on multilingual, multinational, and multicultural frameworks. Immigrant youths' cultural, social, and academic development was primarily influenced by their participation in a transnational and transcultural community of practice. Here, immigrant and transnational youth engaged in repertoires of practice that included a) taking interest in multiethnic and multilingual social life and community, b) exchanging cultural, linguistic and global knowledge, and c) expressing and living values stemming from their migration experiences and home cultures. I argue that youths' practices demonstrate how a distinct immigrant epistemology emerges from transcultural contexts and the experience of migration. I use scholarship on indigenous epistemologies (Gegeo &Watson-Gegeo, 2001; Meyers, 2001) to demonstrate the possibilities for a theory of immigrant epistemology.

Author

• Christine Brigid Malsbary, Vassar College