"Una lucha de fronteras" in Higher Education

• In Event: 52.066 - A Call for Critical Education Policy: Examining Injustice and Advancing Justice in Education

Abstract

Navigating higher education involves traversing sometimes unseen, yet somehow tactile, borders demarcating race/ethnicity, language, socioeconomic and immigration statuses. These terrains were the focus of ROLE (Researchers of Latin@ Education), a participatory action research collective comprised of undergraduate students, recent graduates, and college professors who identify as Latin@ in a small liberal arts university. The objective of this ongoing collective initially was to explore the roles that gender, sexuality and documentation status play on Latin@s’ experiences in higher education.
We engaged in mostly qualitative research, in the form of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, and joined other campus groups in national comprehensive immigration reform advocacy and local tuition equity efforts. In this presentation, we examine the experiences of undocumented students and the often “underground” networks that support their efforts in college. In the study results, we identified themes of socially-just risk-taking, meaning-making, uncertainty and underground networks, in higher education and beyond. Students moved between feelings of uncertainty about the future amidst persistent hope and moments of temporary triumph, often through their organizing work - a particular risk for youth sin papeles. Anzaldua’s (1987;1999) writing on mestiza consciousness - built on multiplicity, complexity, “tolerance for ambiguity,” and choques - the clashes of cultural contexts within one individual’s body - offers a theoretical framework for situating these experiences. The present paper will discuss these issues, and the implications of this work; that pathways of possibility can be forged by, in part, by bringing to the surface the supports previously only offered underground.

Author

• Jennifer Ayala, Saint Peter's College