Familial Negotiations of Return: Return Migration Between Mexico and the United States

• In Event: Cyclical Migration and Education: Transborder Students and Families Between Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives: Drawing from a year-long ethnography with transborder students, their teachers, and their families in Puebla, Mexico I focus on what I call families’ transborder pedagogies of the home to examine how parents and children navigated decisions regarding place, U.S. papers, and schooling. I argue it is important to understand parents as transborder thinkers who draw upon transnational knowledge that push against mononational expectations to educate their children and make challenging schooling decisions.

Framework: I understand parents are transborder thinkers who draw upon their own experiences living, working, and educating their children within and across varying national systems in ways that embody an in-betweeness of both countries, that pushes against rigid mononational expectations (Anzaldúa 1987; Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2000; Mignolo 2000). Their home-based teachings build from experiences of multiplicity--- of how to do things here, allá, and often in search for an additional possibility for their children—across both nation-states (Anzaldúa 1987).

Methods: The data presented here draws from a yearlong ethnographic study conducted in 2016-2017 in 5 Mexican schools in central Mexico with 10 students who had recently arrived from the United States. It 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.

Data:. Using a qualitative data software program I open-coded (Saldaña 2015) the corpus of data, iteratively refining each code and its description. Here I focus on codes such as ‘papeles’ [papers], ‘Mexico vs. US,’ ‘politicized funds of knowledge,’ and ‘return migration.’

Results: I focus on the case of Jayson, a transborder father living in Mexico, who drew upon his own experiences as an undocumented im/migrant and caregiver for his younger brother while in the US to engage in transborder pedagogies of the home to prepare his US-born children for learning on either side of the border. These pedagogies included lessons on US and Mexican papers and their associated privileges and responsibilities, fostering his children’s critical consciousness about these inequities, and engaging his elementary school-aged children in transborder literacy practices of acquiring their US passports to prepare for their return from Mexico to the US for schooling. Although Jayson’s transborder pedagogies of the home prepared his children for potential lives and learning on either side of the geopolitical border, his children did not fully endorse their parents’ intentions, illustrating the complexities of family-based migration decisions, especially when they entail new arrangements of family separation due to the lack of authorized pathways for their parents’ return.

Significance: Transborder pedagogies of the home lay the groundwork for children to build a critical awareness of inequality across borders, engage in understandings and actions that support the challenges their family members face across geopolitical contexts, and help foster critical perspectives of mononational systems (Dyrness and Sepúlveda 2020). Although our education and im/migration policies are mononationally oriented, families like Jayson’s provide important insights into the transborder realities that should also be considered at the intersections of im/migration and education reform.

Author

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University