The Contradictions of Opportunity: Transfronterizx Education Across Asymmetrical Border Lines

• In Event: The hidden side of emancipation: Historicizing well-intentioned educational projects.

Abstract

1. Objective
This paper interrogates how the daily cross-border movements of transfronterizx students—U.S. citizens who live in Mexican border cities and attend public schools in the U.S. (de la Piedra & Araujo, 2012; Nuñez & Urrieta, 2021; Relaño-Pastor, 2007; Zentella, 2013)—both reflect and complicate dominant understandings of educational opportunity, often framed as a neutral or aspirational aim. These students are situated within the sociopolitical logics and asymmetries that shape the historical relationship between México and the United States, as well as the everyday realities of border life (Acuña González, 1988; Iglesias Prieto, 2011; Velasco Ortiz & Contreras, 2014). The paper posits how transfronterizx experiences are undergirded by the legacies of U.S. intervention in México and the ongoing restructuring of education and labor under neoliberal reforms (Aboites, 2012; Aguilar Barceló et al., 2022; Ojeda, 2009).

2. Theoretical Context
Drawing on the conceptual metaphor of Learning as Movement (Gutiérrez, 2020), this study posits that learning is shaped by—and responsive to—material, ideological, and historical conditions, and emerges as people move and participate across socio-spatial and sociopolitical dimensions of everyday life. Relatedly, the study draws on Espinoza and Vossoughi’s (2014) conception of educational rights and dignity as historically produced and enacted through activity, whereby the right to positive educational experiences is not solely guaranteed by policy or law, but emerges through the labor of those who seek dignity amidst structural degradation.

For transfronterizx students, whose lives span multiple institutions, geographies, and nation-state systems, these frameworks foreground how consequential learning unfolds through the navigation of constraint, contradiction, and possibility across the border region. At the same time, they invite us to understand students’ pursuit of educational opportunity not merely as a response to policy conditions, but as a historically situated form of activity—one that reveals the uneven terrain on which education is pursued, withheld, and reimagined, as well as the conditions under which students may simultaneously benefit from and be excluded by the very systems they traverse.

3. Methods
This paper draws on data from a larger qualitative study examining forms of consequential learning that emerge through the routines and ecologies of current and former transfronterizx students in the Tijuana–San Diego border region. Data sources include online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, ethnographic shadowing, daily routine logs, family educational histories, and policy analysis.

4. Findings
Despite the burdens of racialized surveillance, multi-hour commutes, and daily precarity, transfronterizx youth attend U.S. schools based on their families’ belief that a U.S. education offers a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. In doing so, they navigate the duality of racialized precarity in the U.S. and relative privilege in México—privilege made possible through access to U.S. educational and economic opportunities.

5. Findings
This paper contributes to the growing literature on transfronterizx students by foregrounding the contradictory dynamics of educational opportunity and learning within the border region. It argues that, in these contexts, opportunity is neither neutral nor emancipatory, but rather constituted by—and constitutive of—asymmetrical relations shaped by neoliberal logics of merit, mobility, and market reform.

Author

• Isaac Alejandro Felix, University of California - Berkeley