Teaching the Transmigrant Generation: Teachers’ view of decasségui Japanese-Brazilian youth in São Paulo

• In Event: Analyzing cultural production: immigration status, transmigrant youth, and education response

Proposal

My study explores the expeiences of teachers in São Paulo who work with a new generation of "transmigrant" Japanese-Brazilian students that challenges immigrant-native boundaries that are rather taken for granted in the case of their parents, the decasségui Japanese-Brazilian children. Migratory flows between Brazil and Japan dates back to 1908. In the more recent history of immigration across these two countries, a new ethnic community of Japanese-Brazilians became established in Japan since 1990 when special visas for Brazilian nationals of Japanese descent up to the third generation became legalized. Subsequently, the Japanese term dekasegi, meaning people who is temporarily away from home to earn money, became commonly used in Brazil—spelled decasségui in Brazilian Portuguese—to refer to Japanese-Brazilians who work and live in Japan for short or long-terms but eventually repatriate to Brazil. Since the economic crisis hit Japan in 2008, many families decided to repatriate. Since then, the presence of decasségui children, unfamiliar with Brazilian schools and coming from households of unstable financial situations, became a challenge for schools in São Paulo, the metropolitan area with the largest concentration Japanese-Brazilians in Brazil.

This paper focuses on two key question: how teachers perceive the Japanese or Brazilian distinction as influential for the schooling prospects of decasségui students and; how teachers understand their educational and societal responsibilities toward these students. I have used a case study research design, recruited participants via snowball sampling and collected semi-structured interview data with 25 teachers of elementary and middle schools in São Paulo in June of 2016 and June of 2018. I borrow concepts from the sociological literature on ethnicity and immigration, specifically assimilation theories and ethnic boundary making theories, to analyze teachers’ perceptions of the influence of the unique immigrant experience and background of decasségui children on educational attainment and social mobility. In the highly decentralized and privatized educational context of São Paulo, where there is an absence of an explicit public policy for the integration of ethnic immigrant students, teachers shape de facto policy through their voices and everyday implementation.

I find that teachers perceive decasségui children as Brazilian natives for whom moderate proficiency in Portuguese, an education level of at least high school completion, and maintaining Japanese language and cultural heritage can lead to successful social mobility opportunities either in Brazil or Japan. I discuss how teachers use markers of group affiliation to negotiate between different models of immigrant youth integration in their education of decasségui children, who are Brazilian in nationality but Japanese in ethnicity, pure or mixed in race, and with diverse levels of acculturation and language proficiency in Brazilian and Japanese ways of schooling. Conventionally, we tend to assume that the immigrant assimilation process flows in the direction of the minority becoming more like the majority group. I argue for a reconsideration of essentialized categorizations of immigrant-native or minority-majority advantages and disadvantages that are used to explain teachers’ perceptions, expectations, and attitudes towards students in classrooms increasingly marked by diversity. I conclude that much like Japanese-Brazilian international migrants, teachers also consider changing socioeconomic structures and historical scenes across Brazil and Japan, the two countries that are both homelands as well as host-countries for decasségui children to explain their approach to education. Thus, I contribute with an empirical case that shows how the long held conventional view of assimilation is challenged and replaced by other ways of understanding integration.

My study contributes to the Cultural Contexts of Education and Human Potential SIG focus on “voice” by highlighting the often shadowed experiences of teachers. Scale and heterogeneity of immigrant destination and origin communities distinguish today’s international migration from previous eras. Such reality has made immigrant education a global issue, which is increasingly impossible to frame as a matter specific to immigrant minority populations in typical gateway cities. Policymakers worldwide have sought to address the economic, societal and cultural imperatives of investing in sustainable educational policies and practices that protect the right to education, promote quality and equity in educational opportunities for children who themselves, or whose family, move across borders (Alba and Holdaway 2013; Banks 2009). Beyond test scores, immigrant students and families have also sought educational opportunities that welcome and value minority groups as equal members of the community (El-Haj 2007; Keaton 2005; Rosaldo 1997).

I highlight that before policymakers, students and families could articulate a stance about immigration and education, teachers have been in the front line when a new immigrant student or family arrive at the school door. Local educators have been the ones confronting the challenges of making sense of the ‘cultural mismatch’ between an increasingly diverse student population and the territorialized and nationalized school systems that have long functioned as state institutions to unify (conform) the population under mainstream values. While thousands of teachers around the globe share their daily lives with immigrant students, not much attention has been given to the reality of how they understand their work with such students and what shapes notions of student inclusion and exclusion among teachers. Scholars have acknowledged teachers as significant actors shaping students’ notions of belonging in school and society. Usually, such studies describe and analyze the ways teachers daily actions, habits and rule enforcement fail to accommodate students’ needs and, instead, alienate minority students further away from the center of school communities (Carter 2012; Valenzuela 1999). Such studies have moved the literature from deficits theories that blamed minority students for their incompatibility with school culture. However, I bring attention to the danger of essentialist and deterministic perspectives that view teachers as faithful reproducers of the norms and values of the dominant group. Another danger is the generalizing narrative that the teaching force, largely composed of members of the dominant group, have deep rooted dispositions to discriminate against minority students. Thus, more broadly my study contributes to the comparative and international education literature and conference theme of “sustainability” by illuminating the pitfalls of unquestioned assumptions that we make when trying to make sense of the complex social phenomena of migration and education.

Author

• Anna Sera, Indiana University