The Experience of Mexican-Heritage Im/migrant Students in Rural Idaho

• In Event: Building Otherwise Multilingual Educational Research: Examples From the Field

Abstract

This paper explores how students who are Mexican-heritage and im/migrant experience high school in rural Idaho and participate and negotiate academic success. Through critical reflexivity (Chávez & Pérez, 2022) while enacting decolonial research, I draw from Chicana feminist epistemologies (Delgado Bernal 1998), community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), and repertoire’s of practice (Gutierrez and Rogoff, 2003) to inform my analysis of student’s testimonios to center their lived experiences, testimonios, and voices with a focus on assets possessed by students, families, and communities- a significant shift from mainstream interpretations of student’s and family’s experiences.

The four testimonios documented in this study serve as testaments of the varied ways Mexican im/migrant families and communities experience education in areas of shifting demographics. Participant testimonios highlight the complex barriers im/migrant students and families confront as they participate and negotiate access to school success including limited institutional recognition of the varied cultural repertoire’s students bring to schooling spaces, limited recognition of their community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), and instances of racialized aggressions. Participant testimonios implicate local, state, and national policies and inform discussions on familial engagement, im/migration, and transnational curriculum.

The testimonios collected in this study illuminate how parents and families support children in navigating schools in ways recognized by school and ways unrecognized by schools, including with the contribution of intellectual knowledge, advice and wisdom, and time. This study adds to the literature that highlights how modes of traditional parental and familial engagement in US public schools restrict parents' roles in participating in their children’s K-12 schooling by failing to adequately address race, class, and immigration as key equity issues. This paper also underscores how families drew from networks of parientes (Urrieta, 2013) across borders to help their children access K-12 schools. The testimonialistas’ experiences with schooling interruption due to the Covid-19 Pandemic and the family’s response sheds light on the ways the Covid-19 pandemic influenced students on a global scale while shining light on the impact of rural communities in Mexico and the US. The testimonios in this study exemplify a shift to familial participation in K-12 schools, where student support extends beyond parents, immediate kin, and those in close physical proximity as the testimonialistas and their families relied on transnational networks of support to access the US school system and access school success.

Further exploration would help inform ways parents participation was supported or limited by the school system through a more in-depth analysis would shed light on how the school supported parents’ intellectual contribution. Moreover, given the transnational networks and movement of im/migrant communities, more research is needed to prepare educators to access community-based knowledge in K-12 schools in the US (Urrieta, 2013) given that the testimonialistas relied on a network of extended relatives to attend schools in the US, a sacrifice the children’s immediate and extended family made.

Author

• Eulalia Gallegos Buitron, Oregon Department of Education