"Transfronterizo" Youth in Central American Schools: Implications of Research from Mexico

• In Event: Estudiantes transnacionales en América Central

Abstract

For nearly 20 years a binational team of researchers has considered how US and Mexican-born children with experience in US schools fare in Mexico and how the Mexican education system has responded and could respond (e.g., Hamann, 2001; Hamann, Zúñiga, & Sánchez García, 2006; 2017; Zúñiga & Hamann, 2009; 2015; Zúñiga, Hamann, & Sánchez García, 2008). This work has noted that almost 700,000 such youth are currently in educación básica (grades 1-9) in Mexico. Now a new team is drawing from this work to consider how this work transnational youth in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—i.e., Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. This paper explores how the multiple research strategies used in the Mexican work might be used in Central America, but more substantially uses the Mexican work to ask questions that should be considered in Central America where long-time patterns of circular migration to and from the US have recently become more substantial and staccato, as push and pull factors (like natural disasters and the extension then termination of temporary protective status in the US) mean tens of thousands of school-eligible youth with prior experience in the US are now in these countries, but it is unlikely that they are evenly distributed geographically, that they have broad and easy access to schools, or that schools are ready for the language profiles and academic backgrounds of these students. This paper proposes to introduce a new education and transnationalism research agenda that will be developed over the next decade.

Author

• Edmund Ted Hamann, University of Nebraska/Lincoln