Immigrant Children: Resilience and Coping With HeART

• In Event: Adapted Interview Approaches With Students of Color in Urban Schools and Settings

Abstract

The national impasse to resolve the undocumented status of 11 million people has placed 4.5 million children of immigrants at risk for family separation (Suarez-Orozco, 2015; Yoshikawa, 2014). The combined stressors of migratory status and poverty can have long-term detrimental consequences for youth (Yoshikawa, 2011). Already, children in urban areas exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of soldiers returning from war (Tucker, 2007). My aim is to understand the experiences of children in immigrant families growing up in harsh conditions through artistic pedagogies that provide tools to cope with their daily stressors. This project highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through an innovative theater class at a local elementary school in Los Angeles, California. Recently arrived immigrant children ages 11 to 13 from Mexico and Central America participated in a Theater of the Oppressed class founded on the principles of Pedagogy of The Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Through an artistically engaged methodology using Freirean epistemologies like problem posing, dialogue, and praxis, this study highlights children’s experiences with “illegality” and deportability (De Genova, 2002). These classes are specifically coordinated around art workshops like “Image or Newspaper Theater” where children create drawings and skits by discussing issues impacting their lives. This project fills the gap in the literature on the experiences of preadolescent immigrant children and contributes to the fields of Interdisciplinary Education, Ethnic Studies, and Immigration Studies by helping scholars, policy makers, and educators understand the current demographic shift occurring in the country. Particularly, this project brings to light the cultural, emotional, academic, and creative experiences of Mexican and Central American immigrant children and families in the U.S.

Author

• Silvia Rodriguez Vega, University of California - Los Angeles