What Will You Stand Up For? Elementary-Aged Undocumented Students Speak Out on Immigration Reform

• In Event: 32.063 - Undertaking and Remaking Identity Politics in Educational Institutional Practice

Abstract

This paper presents ethnographic evidence of the ways in which immigrant girls from Latin America attending a bilingual elementary school in New York City refer to and situate themselves within recent immigration reform social movements. Conceptually, the paper builds on an argument leveled by Bourdieu and Passerson in 1977 that is relevant to contemporary schooling in the United States: “A situation of nascent crisis is an opportunity to discern the hidden assumptions of a traditional system and the mechanisms capable of perpetuating it when the prerequisites of its functioning are no longer completely fulfilled” (p. 99). I argue that schools are currently in a crisis of citizenship. On the one hand, educators are charged with socializing students to exert their rights as active participants in the democratic life of the nation (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) while, on the other hand, they encounter the everyday realities of a growing number of students living in homes where they or their parents lack legal U.S. citizenship and cannot assert such rights.

Empirically, I will show how undocumented students work to reconcile this tension by sharing testimonio in their classrooms––making connections between their migratory experiences, the school curriculum, and ongoing social movements. Testimonio “is a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian form of narrative in the sense that it implies that any life so narrated can have a kind of representational value” (Beverley, 2004, p. 34). I focus on three discursive features of testimonio—direct participant account, metonymy, and I-shifters (Beverley, 2004)—to demonstrate the ways in which individual speakers project multiple roles and index their relationships to a broader community which they define through talk. By focusing on the experiences of two undocumented immigrant girls in fifth grade, this paper highlights the perspectives of students who have the most at stake in this critical moment in education and immigration. The findings show that they challenged mainstream anti-immigrant ideologies and recycle pro-immigrant arguments in explicit and implicit ways during the school day.

These testimonios suggest ways in which undocumented girls envision their roles in society, the discourses that they appropriate when indexing their current and imagined future roles, and the ways in which schools and educators may facilitate or hinder their opportunities for civic engagement. The paper contributes to our understanding of an understudied population––elementary-aged undocumented students––and makes conceptual interventions in discussions about the role of civic and citizenship education in an era of globalization.

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Rutgers University