U.S.-Mexican youth narratives of immigration, survival, and resilience

• In Event: Panel Cluster on Social Movements, Unions, and Youth Resistance: "Crossing Borders between the Academy and the Community: Comparative Perspectives on Engaged Scholarship"

Proposal

All too often the negative schooling experiences and low achievement of Latinx immigrant youth are decontextualized from social contexts of xenophobia and anti-immigration (Suarez Orozco et al, 2010; Garcia et al, 2016), and from the restrictive ways in which they are taught; these include technocratic second language acquisition models, revitalized assimilationist projects, and scripted curricula (Gandara et al, 2003; Garcia. & Weiss, 2002; Gutierrez, 2008). A significant pedagogical shift is required to effectively engage Latina/o immigrant youth in a more liberatory education. Critical and sociocultural pedagogies call for more rigorous and relevant curricula, which draw from the intellectual and cultural heritages of students (Duncan Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Delgado Bernal, 2001; Gay & Howard, 2000; Ladson Billings, 1995; Lee 1995, 2007) their funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2005), Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2006), and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Paris, 2012). Yet, more empirical research is needed to explore the applications of critical pedagogies in varied contexts.
Towards this aim, this study examines a case study of one English teacher and her high school Chicanx/Latinx Literature class of predominantly immigrant youth in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. The larger study traced the planning stages of the curriculum development between the teacher, researcher (author), and a mentor that the teacher worked with. Collectively, we developed the curricula the summer prior to the academic year and the teacher implemented the curricula in fall and spring. I conducted participant observations 1-3 times a week during the academic year. For this paper presentation, I focus on how students’ from varied immigrant experiences engaged with the curriculum during class. The research questions are: 1) How do Latina/o immigrant students engage with critical culturally relevant curricula? 2) In what ways did they demonstrate new understandings of their cultural/racial identity and immigration? I define engagement for the purposes of this study as the ways that students spoke, wrote, and demonstrated understandings through class participation, dialogue, presentations, written assignments, and and via other texts (i.e., emails, interviews).
Findings demonstrated that as students listened to their teacher’s life stories, read about immigration experiences in novels like Drown, Enrique’s Journey and Gloria Anzaldúa’s essays, students were able to make deep connections, examine the disjunctures, and wrestle with the tensions between the curricula and their own varied immigrant Latina/o diasporas. In one assignment, a recently immigrated student, Miguel, wrote about how his middle class parents’ divorce and the financial toll it caused, forced his mother to immigrate to the U.S. Miguel shares, “For the first time in my life I had to wear a mask, a mask to cover my fears and sadness, leaving an exterior image of a strong stable kid.” Another student, Mariana wrote about feelings of sorrow that she immigrated to the U.S. while her younger siblings had to remain in the care of her grandmother; “I took the time to look carefully around the house and collect all the memories possible, I took a mental picture of every room and every corner of the dusty house where I grew up, and where my dad grew up with his brothers. I made sure to pack all the memories, sounds, tastes, and smells that in any way would help me stay connected to my place and my people.” Miguel gives us another picture of the immigrant youth—one who didn’t face abject poverty in Mexico and who came from an urban metropolis (Mexico City), but for whom divorce meant developing a strong façade of manhood, while immigrating to working poor neighborhoods in California’s Bay Area. Mariana also shares another perspective of family separation—one that originates on the other side of the border rather than in the U.S. These two examples, illuminate the complex ways immigration impacts Latinx youth lives and, and how powerfully students were able to make meaning from from their own immigrant narratives, while developing academic literacies.
This study addresses an urgent social problem that affects youth in the US- Mexico borderlands—the education of Latinx immigrant youth. We must recognize the strengths, abilities and knowledge they bring and utilize these perspectives in teaching them about the politics of immigration, cultural/racial literacies and academic literacies.

Author

• Rosa Maria Jimenez, University of San Francisco