Tienes que estudiar: Articulations of indigenous migration and formal education in Guatemala

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Tienes que estudiar: Articulations of indigenous migration and formal education in Guatemala

For many indigenous communities in the western highlands of Guatemala transnational migration is considered critical to community survival. This poster analyzes the articulations between educational decision making and migration within one of these communities. The institutions that structure efforts to prevent migration, including transnational development organizations, the Guatemalan and U.S. governments, as well as local NGOs, have identified lack of educational access as significant “push factor” in northern migration. Construed this way, increasing individual access to formal educational opportunities helps relieve migratory pressures. I argue that this conceptualization of the relationship between educational attainment and migration is flawed because it fails to consider the social, material and historical ties in which both migration and education are entangled for indigenous Guatemalans.

This work, based on ethnographic research in Guatemala and the United States between 2015 and 2019, illustrates how, for indigenous youth living in communities of extensive migration educational striving is conceived of communally, rather than individually, and is structured both materially and ideologically by familial experiences of migration. I show how while access to educational attainment alone did not impact migration decision making for my interlocutors and their peers, the migratory experiences of family members did. Building on literatures that trace the connection between migration and formal educational attainment (Brooks & Waters 2017; Crivello 2011; Dustmann & Glitz 2011; McKenzie & Rapoport 2006) this work illuminates how living in a community of extensive migration structures educational aspirations.

Author

• Briana Nichols, University of Pennsylvania