Forced Out: How Immigrant Mothers Navigate Displacement From a Sanctuary City and Its Schools

• In Event: Spatial Justice and Educational Geographies of (In)Opportunity

Abstract

Objective and Theoretical Frameworks
In cities across the country, gentrification in immigrant neighborhoods provides a formidable barrier to immigrant families’ abilities to remain in their neighborhoods and schools (Bruhn, 2023; Hwang, 2015) . These families encounter shifting power relationships, rising housing costs, and educational policy-making that favors economically privileged constituents (Ewing, 2018; Freidus, 2020; Quarles & Butler, 2018). Although theories of racial capitalism and gentrification have illuminated important dynamics related to white racial and economic power (Rucks-Ahidiana, 2021), the gendered impacts of gentrification are often overshadowed. To expand our understandings of place, family roles, and educational opportunity, I draw on frameworks of spatial justice to show how gentrification disrupts Latina immigrant mothers’ desires to stay in a city where they believe their children are well-served by the public schools.

Methods and Data Sources
This study draws from a larger ethnography (2018-2023) about how immigrant women use their caregiving to construct belonging and resist displacement. Based in a gentrifying sanctuary city in the Northeast, I conducted multiple interviews with 50 mothers from Latin America, coupled with participant-observation in schools, district programs, and across the city. I focus on the stories of mothers who left the city (N=9) and the impact on their families while using the larger data set to situate their experiences of educational striving and displacement.

Findings
While almost every mother in the study hoped to stay in the city and its public schools, by 2022, nearly 20% of the women in my study had left, forced out by gentrification’s relentless march. I find that housing costs are an equally powerful disrupter to educational opportunity as anti-immigrant policies, with particularly painful, gendered ramifications for the Latina immigrant mothers who rely on the city’s welcoming policies, densely populated geography, and material resources to sustain their families. When women can’t stay, they lose access to the symbolic welcome of the city, especially when they are pushed to towns and cities that are whiter and unaccustomed to recent immigrant families. Women who leave are also excluded from the dense, place-based networks of information and resources that support their sense of efficacy about their children’s education and their relationships with schools. My data reveal how mothers who are displaced bear the responsibility of additional gendered labor as they rebuild their families’ lives in schools and communities that often have fewer resources or fewer immigrant families than the city they had to leave.

Discussion and Significance
For immigrant women and their families who have been displaced, educational justice is not only centered in schools’ efforts to create welcoming spaces and enact high educational standards. It is about housing justice, about intentional policies that ensure that low-income, Latinx, immigrant families are not forced out by processes of gentrification that favor white wealth accumulation. To imagine a world rooted in racial justice, as the conference theme invites us to consider, this study points to policies and strategies that allow immigrant families to stay in the cities where they find welcome and resources.

Author

• Sarah Bruhn, University of Pennsylvania