Recreation and Rejection: Stories of Borders and Boundaries in Newcomers’ Schools

• In Event: Migrants and Migrations Across the Americas: An Educational Perspective Against Borders

Proposal

For many immigrant youth who enroll in American public schools, their educational experience is lacking - in resources, in understanding, or in safety. Their language and culture is rejected rather than seen as a resource (Bartlett & Garcia, 2011) and assimilation becomes the preeminent goal of adolescent immigration (Rodriguez, 2018). But an alternative space exists that operates as a counterpublic, according to Fraser’s (1990) conception: newcomers’ schools. These separated settings offer a sanctuary space of affirmation and safety for students who are racially, culturally, and linguistically marginalized (Jaffe-Walter & Miranda, 2020) as they explore their complex identity and place within multiple communities. However, critics of newcomers’ spaces argue they form segregated borders, further distancing these students from community resources, (Feinberg, 2000) and may pose additional difficulties to migrant students (Rodriguez, 2018) when the dominant, expected narrative is still one of assimilation. The following paper takes up aspects of border abolition (e.g. Bradley & de Noronha, 2023) as a theoretical framework to investigate the boundaries and borders present in one newcomers’ high school in New York City, asking the following research question: How are cultural, linguistic, and social borders recreated, rejected, and manipulated in the context of a newcomers’ school? The school under study exclusively serves Spanish-speaking students who are themselves immigrants to the United States or from immigrant families, and thus the community is deeply affected by borders and laws surrounding immigration. Some students recall border crossing as a recent memory or an older family tale, while others are engaged in the back-and-forth motion of transnational migration.

Though the project is in its early stages, methods will include ethnographic observation, document analysis of student writing, and interviews with community members such as students, faculty, families, and alumni. As a teacher at the school in question, I have a complex participant-observer position, as I have a personal relationship with the community being researched, one that impacts both the data I am able to collect and the interpretation that follows (Strich, 2012). Early results suggest that within the context of a newcomers’ school, borders operate as a deeply embedded educational force. They are sometimes recreated through administrative decisions and social norms, demonstrating on a much smaller scale the complexities of allowing useful boundaries to be maintained while eliminating harmful or discriminatory borders (Gill, 2019). However, students are able to simultaneously make use of their own border crossing stories and transnational identities in empowering ways, illuminating the possibilities of newcomers’ schools as counterpublics in our current bordered world. Students’ and families’ ownership over these stories (Solorzano & Yosso, 2010) and the community created in newcomers’ schools, depicts an alternative to the singular assimilationist narrative of immigration.

Author

• Isabella Devin Bartels, Columbia University Teachers College