Liminality and Learning Among Mixed-Status Latina Peers

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

This paper draws on a two-year longitudinal ethnographic study of a group of six mixed-status peers attending a Spanish-English dual-language elementary school in Brooklyn, New York City between 2013 and 2014. The six ten-year old girls who participated in this project have a range of immigration statuses including two undocumented immigrants who arrived from Mexico as toddlers; two newcomer students with visas from the Dominican Republic; and two students from El Salvador with U.S.-citizenship and legal permanent resident status. The purpose of the study is to examine the ways in which these girls––along with the peers and adults in their lives––talk about legal and cultural citizenship in their everyday interactions at home and school.

I have found that children make deliberate choices about when, why, and how to talk about citizenship; and these choices are significant because they both reflect and in turn affect student participation across settings (Author, 2017). This paper explores a new dimension of the linguistic and ethnographic data I gathered: what are the moments in the school day when the focal children spoke about and made visible their immigrant heritage? What can educators and educational researchers concerned with this year’s annual theme of power and possibility learn from young children as they collaborate to make sense of complex concepts like legality and citizenship that directly impact them on a daily basis?

This paper simultaneously employs and critically examines the concept of liminality as relevant for understanding immigrant youth’s experiences. Previous educational ethnographers consider “hallways, cafeterias, and playgrounds, or whenever teachers could not overhear” to be liminal spaces (Echeverria, 2003, p. 358). Others characterize moments in which students exhibit agency to be “liminal spaces in which identities are created are imbued with some degree of creative possibility” (Caraballo, 2019, p. 4). Still others working in the area of immigration and education argue that undocumented students “inhabit a liminal space where the boundary between their everyday lives in the nation and their lives as part of the nation is maintained as a way of ensuring their control and social regulation” (Gonzales and Chavez, 2012, p. 256). Each of these formulations foreground a different aspect of liminality: physical space, agentic student-led interactions, and the relationship between the individual and the nation-state.

Drawing on audio recordings of children’s talk throughout the school day, this paper provides a window into the focal girls and peers’ talk during recess by focusing on what the girls’ talk and play reveal about their and their families’ immigrant experiences. In these moments, the focal girls made visible what they considered central or peripheral, static or dynamic, aspects to their immigrant-heritage. In doing so, this paper highlights the how and when immigrant girls in a diverse Diasporic setting established common ground regarding what they believe it means to grow up Latina in this century. These insights matter for educational stakeholders working to build alliances and work toward change within and beyond schools.

Author

• Ariana Mangual Figueroa, Graduate Center, City University of New York