Ecologies of Adaptation for Mexican Indigenous Im/migrant Students and Families in the United States

• In Event: 72.024 - The Multiple Contexts of Indigenous Mexican Students and Their Families: Knowledge, Praxis, and Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Across Mexican and Latina/o immigration literature and American Indian studies, the Mexican Indigenous im/migrant student experience is invisible. Much of the existing literature on Mexican Indigenous im/migrants focuses on the migration of male adults, including their adaptation to and reception from the receiving society (Cornelius et al., 2007; Fox & Rivera-Salgado, 2004) and adult transnational networks and identities (Kearney 2000; Stephen 2001). More recent work has documented Mexican Indigenous migrant farmworkers’ health and experiences of discrimination (Holmes 2013; Murphy et al., 2014) as well as health disparities and cultural competency (Hester 2015; Zúñiga et al. 2014). Relatively little research has focused on the migration experiences of children and families of Mexican Indigenous origin in the US (Cornejo-Portugal & Fortuny Loret de Mola, 2012; Pérez-Rendón 2011), and even less has focused on their cultural adaptation (Sanchez & Machado-Casas, 2009) and language socialization in and outside of school (AUTHOR, 2011; Velasco, 2010). In this paper, we argue that Mexican Indigenous im/migrant families and children, who come from a multitude of Indigenous communities and speak over 85 different languages, complicate the study of Mexican im/migrant students’ cultural and linguistic adaptation.

Thus we engage in an understanding of “ecologies of adaptation,” which we define as various socio-historical and cultural contexts that Indigenous families and communities navigate before, during, and after migration to the US. Socio-ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1989) offers a useful starting point for understanding these ecologies of adaptation, in its view of human development as a function of reciprocal interactions between individuals and various social and systematic factors with different degrees of scope (i.e., from “macro” to “micro”). However, our analysis also points to some of the insufficiencies of socio-ecological systems theory where Mexican Indigenous im/migrant families are concerned. Specifically, we contend that approaching adaptation as primarily a question of individual development is inappropriate for understanding the transformations of collective or community identity that shape the experiences of Indigenous people in diasporic contexts (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). In addition, to conceptualize development as taking place within a nested series of systems from “micro” to “macro” does not adequately capture the complex interplay of material and ideological contexts that guides social action in transnational Indigenous im/migrant families.

After critically examining the existing literature on the adaptation of Mexican Indigenous im/migrants in the US from the perspective of socio-ecological systems theory, we propose integrating language-ecological approaches to provide a more complete picture of Indigenous students’ ecologies of adaptation in the US. A language-ecological perspective, unlike a socio-ecological one, places the community and language practices at the center of its analysis, rather than focusing on individual developmental pathways (Haugen, 2006). We argue that integrating both of these perspectives (i.e., socio-ecological systems theory and language ecologies) holds promise for achieving a fuller understanding of Mexican Indigenous im/migrant students’ experiences. We conclude that it is critical to expand research on Mexican Indigenous im/migrant student adaptation within the field of education and identify possible directions for future research.

Authors

• Saskias Casanova, Arizona State University - Tempe

• Brendan Harold O'Connor, The University of Arizona

• Vanessa Anthony-Stevens, University of Idaho