Entrance and voice: Immigrant pain, agency and anxiety

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Mapping pedagogies of hope and resistance in a borderless future

Proposal

While there is a great deal of research focused on strategies for facilitating English language learning, there is far less work on the forms of trauma and pain associated with experiences of language learning for racialized migrant students. In the United States, a country with high levels of immigration as well as prominent ethnic and racial diversity, debates about the erasure of heritage languages and the alleged promise of opportunity that “English proficiency” supposes for communities of color remain (Sexton, 2008). Building on a history of colonization and assimilation projects, the question arises, are American policymakers (at all levels) really interested in the full educational participation of students of color and/or students with immigrant backgrounds in the school system and, eventually, broader civic life? The concrete application of English language acquisition often results in erasure of heritage and intracommunal separation, as well as individual and collective students’ pain. Through the framework of anthropology of pain and anthropology of silence (Le Breton, 1999; Das, 2007; Castagno, 2008), and by the discourse analysis of recent immigrant students trajectories, this paper seeks to reflect on immigrant students’ public speaking anxiety as a part of the pain inflicted by language acquisition policies, shedding light on ways to make shared pain a path to healing, and to accessing a restored identity and agency (Dussel, 2007; Patel, 2016). Focusing specifically on the experiences of two migrant students from Mexico attending a South Bay Area high school, this paper shows how language acquisition policies and practices can be a source of trauma and pain that manifest on public speaking anxiety, silence, and drop in educational participation. By reflecting upon this pain, this paper argues that in order to achieve their full educational, political, and social participation educators need to acknowledge the voice and agency of immigrant students inside the classroom.

Author

• Sharoon Iliana Negrete González, Stanford University