Transnational University Returnee Students in Mexico: Responses to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—Had Things Been Different?

• In Event: Transnationalism, Immigrants, and Schooling: Perspectives on College Pathways

Abstract

An increasing number of Mexican migrants are returning to Mexico as a consequence of anti-immigration laws in the United States. Many of these returnees are 1.5 generation children and young adults, who upon their first arrival to the U.S, were enrolled in public schools and attended English immersion programs. Such educational experiences forged competent English speakers, but often to the demise of their native language, as well as to their academic skills in both languages.

Now that they return to Mexico, such experiences place young student returnees at an academic disadvantage because of the truncated development of Spanish for academic purposes; and at a social disadvantage because in practice, bilingualism and biculturalism are not integrated as resources in Mexican educational institutions - alongside subtle discriminatory views held towards them by the mainstream monolingual Mexican population. The returnees, however, make the most use of the resources they bring with them, maintaining their agentive edge, with linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1994) they invest when returning.

This study looks at a group of returnees enrolled as university students in Mexico, whose opportunities for higher education in the United States were truncated when legislation outlawed federal scholarships and in-state tuitions for undocumented immigrants- obliging them to return to Mexico to continue their education. It also looks at how these students respond to the fact that the Differed Action for Childhood Arrivals memorandum was signed in 2012 - had the majority of these students remained in the United States, they would have been eligible for receiving its benefits.

The research project takes place at the main campus of the largest public university on the Mexican side of the Sonora-Arizona border. Findings are from year two of a three year longitudinal project that explores 15 returnees’ bilingual and bicultural identities and their biliterate practices in the periods of attendance to the University majoring in English Language Teaching.

Through the theoretical constructs of Transnationalism from Below (Smith & Guarnizo, 1998) and Imagined Communities (Anderson, 1983; Kanno & Norton, 2003), this presentation looks at how they claim and negotiate their languages and identities in their cultures, and how they are able to conceptualize new challenges, opportunities, and social dynamics that arise in the Mexican university academic setting.

Results show how the returnees are in the process of forging new identities as future professionals in Mexico or are preparing themselves to return to the U.S. as college educated (un)documented citizens. In this regard, the academic practices they are developing in English and Spanish represent not only different challenges for the students, but also pose varying purposes and values for each one of them.

This study provides initial data in order to rethink new ways to ease the transition of these students into a traditional schooling system and be able to account for the benefits of being bilingual, bicultural and bi-literate

Author

• Nolvia Ana Cortez Roman, Universidad de Sonora