Transborder Parent Engagement Con Respeto

• In Event: Truths and Consequences: Guadalupe Valdés's Contributions to Pursuing Equity for Multilingual Students, Families, and Communities

Abstract

Guadalupe Valdés’ (1996) groundbreaking ethnography, Con respeto, changed the field of family-school relationships through intimate portraits of how Mexican heritage families made sense of, contributed to, and supported their children’s educación. Today, Valdes’ legacy around equity and access to schooling for children from immigrant families is visible in transborder approaches, which seek to complexify families’ multidirectional journeys across borders and plan for schooling that is reflective of children’s potential educational futures across the countries they call home. Grounded in Valdes’ (1996) advocacy for critically centering families’ complex knowledges in school, I trace the experiences of a family who had recently relocated from the United States to the parents’ hometown in Mexico to illustrate how schools urgently need transborder approaches that are reflective of families’ histories, presents, and futures that extend beyond mononational expectations and possibilities.

I draw upon a transborder con respeto framework. Rather than measuring families’ ways of doing education against White-middle class metrics that erased or pathologized families’ educational resources, Valdés’ con respeto invited scholars and educators into radical new possibilities of family-school relationships that recognize and extend minoritized families’ educational supports rather than trying to replace them. Transborder approaches are about multiplicity, multidirectional movement and in-betweeness across geopolitical, institutional, cultural, and linguistic borders (Anzaldúa, 1987; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020; Mignolo, 2000). A transborder con respeto framework seeks to dislodge the school---and the mainstream, mononational norms it reifies--as the sole authority on education and instead opens up spaces to understand diverse caretakers’ ways of knowing and supporting children’s education across borders.

I draw from a yearlong critical ethnography conducted in Mexican schools with students who had recently arrived from the United States. Study methods entailed participant observation in schools, community gatherings, workshops, and families’ homes as well as interviews and artifacts that provided descriptive validity across timescales and sources. I open-coded (Saldaña 2015) the corpus of data, iteratively refining each code and its description. Here I focus on codes such as ‘family involvement, ‘‘transborder strategies,’ and ‘im/migration.’

A transborder lens provides a window into how Adelina, a mother of four US-born children now living in Mexico, drew upon her knowledges and networks within and across the disjunctures of Mexican and US institutions to broker her children’s access to schooling, take up US and Mexican engagement practices to advocate for educational supports, develop her children’s critical understandings of inequities across documentation statuses, and engage in educational planning that envisioned her children’s educational futures on both sides of the border.

Revisiting Valdés’ (1996) seminal work through a transborder lens reminds us of the continued need for critical, flexible, and multidirectional ways to engage in family school relationships that de-center rigid assimilationist ways of knowing to instead learn from and with diverse families. Rather than dismissing parents’ engagement practices, a transborder approach demonstrates that mononational metrics are harmful to families in the US or abroad and that ‘good parent involvement’ can include parenting across linguistic, institutional, and geopolitical borders.

Author

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author