The Contours of Concealment and Disclosure: Undocumented Youth's Accounts From South Carolina High Schools

• In Event: Undocumented Youth and Education Across Contexts

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nuances of undocumented students’ decisions about disclosure and concealment of legal status in South Carolina high schools. Despite current federal law that protects youth in U.S. public schools, undocumented youth are routinely confronted with decisions around disclosing their status in school settings. This can be a defining dimension of their school experience. Yet, the costs and benefits of disclosure vary according to context. Drawing on interviews with DACA beneficiaries, we specifically ask: How do undocumented youth describe experiences of disclosure or concealment in South Carolina high schools?

Theoretical Perspective
This work is situated within a Context of Reception (COR) framework, which typically focuses on government policies, the nature of receiving communities, and perceptions of members of the host society (Marrow, 2011; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006). Here, we elevate school-based contexts of reception (Dabach, 2015). Framing our analysis through COR is particularly salient for South Carolina, which has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants and one of the most exclusionary sets of immigration policies in the country.

Methods and Data Sources
We analyzed 41 interviews with DACA beneficiaries in South Carolina conducted in 2015, specifically focusing on their experiences of disclosure and concealment in schools. We refer to these experiences as “episodes,” which became our unit of analysis. The analytic move to separate episodes from participants is consistent with our theoretical framework that allows us to analyze instances of disclosure without making assumptions about the kinds of people who reveal or disclose status. Subsequently, we thematically coded types of disclosure or concealment, subsequently coding for interlocutors in each episode (e.g., teachers, school counselors, peers), tracking whether these episodes were occurring among groups or individuals.

Findings & Significance
Interview participants shared how they navigated school with both a sense of palpable fear along with a desire to share their status with trusted individuals. Of 135 coded episodes, slightly less than half involved a discussion of active concealment of their status in school. Over half (85) of the episodes included a description of disclosure of status. Approximately 75% of disclosure episodes were cases of “selective disclosure,” such that participants shared information about their status with a select, trusted school adult (e.g. teacher or school counselor) or a group of close friends. The most frequent motivations for selective disclosure were a sense of trust with an individual adult or a pragmatic decision to learn about college options. Concealment was often driven by fear, first instilled by parental messaging, and then reinforced by by peers’ negative comments about undocumented immigrants.

These findings furthers evidence about undocumented students’ decision-making around disclosing legal status and their need for more support and information from educators (Figueroa, 2017; Lauby, 2017). It complicates common binary perceptions of undocumented people as either openly revealing their status in highly publicized settings or hiding status at all costs--even in a highly restrictive state context of reception, allowing for more nuance in representations of undocumented people.

Authors

• Dafney Blanca Dabach, University of Washington - Seattle

• Deepa Sriya Vasudevan, Wellesley College

• Roberto G. Gonzales, Harvard University