Unequal Choices: Latina Immigrant Mothers and School Enrollment in a Gentrified District

• In Event: Losing Place, Losing Opportunity: The Varied Experiences of Latinx Families With Neighborhood and School Gentrification

Abstract

The interplay between gentrification and school choice has increasingly captured scholars’ attention (Candipan, 2020; Mordechay & Ayscue, 2020). This research documents how powerful racial stereotypes and racist institutional policies frame white parents’ investments in urban schools (Cucchiara & Horvat, 2014; Kimelberg & Billingham, 2013; Posey-Maddox et al., 2014). Yet Latinx families are often left out of analyses entirely or treated as a monolithic group. In response, I investigate the perspectives and decisions of women who migrated from Latin America as they enroll their children in a gentrified school district. I examine how English learner programming shapes immigrant mothers’ options amidst rapid school and neighborhood gentrification. Because the school choice literature is strikingly gender neutral, with only a few exceptions acknowledging the role of gendered expectations on mothers (e.g., Cooper, 2007; DeSena, 2006; Kimelberg, 2014), I turn to theoretical frameworks that conceptualize immigrant women’s caregiving, highlighting how this gendered labor includes school enrollment decisions (Abrego & Menjívar, 2011; Abrego & Schmalzbauer, 2018; Oliveira, 2018). I demonstrate the tensions that emerge between equitable options for immigrant families, students’ right to access English language learning, and rising housing costs.

This research emerged from a broader ethnography in Somerville, Massachusetts examining the intersections of place, motherhood, migration, and schools between 2018 and 2021. I engaged in participant-observation, in-person and virtually, in schools, district programs, and across the city. For this paper, I draw on 87 in-depth interviews with 40 immigrant mothers from Latin America. I also interviewed 20 educators, family liaisons, and district leaders. Examining school placement and choice qualitatively reveals important nuances and perspectives that provide a critical counterpart to quantitative studies about gentrification, inequality, and choice.

Like white gentrifier families, the mothers in my study disrupted the link between neighborhood and schools. But rather than a proactive decision about school quality, their choices reflect the district’s practice of locating the Sheltered English Instruction (SEI) classrooms in two schools in gentrifying neighborhoods. Because immigrant families typically cannot afford to live near these schools, immigrant mothers bear the brunt of the additional, gendered labor required to manage bussing schedules and multiple schools. For newly arrived immigrants, school choices are made primarily in deference to educators who encourage enrollment in SEI programs, regardless of the school’s proximity to the family’s home. While instructionally effective – mothers generally felt pleased with their children’s academic and English language progress – this generates inequality in parents’ agency and decision-making. Privileged gentrifier parents consider a range of factors in selecting schools, while Latinx immigrant children are assigned to schools with little consideration of mothers’ actual needs and desires.

My research points to the unintended consequences of school enrollment plans on immigrant families who are particularly vulnerable in gentrified cities with high costs of living. Even when districts operate with good intentions, as Somerville’s schools do, the intersection of school choice and English learner programs can create a stratified system in which Latina immigrant mothers contend with constrained choices, while gentrifier families use their resources to select schools they identify as ideal.

Author

• Sarah Bruhn, Harvard University