Notes

1.El Barrio is the community name given to the neighborhood also known as East Harlem. A 2011 report, Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, “Latino Population,” details the residential demographics of Latinos living throughout New York City between 1990 and 2010. In 1990, the year that I attended fifth grade in one of El Barrio’s public elementary schools, 49 percent of the city’s Latino population was Puerto Rican.

2. Growing up bilingual, and continuing to live in both Spanish and English, I often switch between the two languages in my speaking and writing. In this study, I draw on my knowledge of both, in what Ofelia García calls “translanguaging”: “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (“Education, Multilingualism,” 140). Throughout this book, I have sought to approximate this experience of translanguaging by representing both Spanish and English in similar ways without constantly marking one language as different from the other. Drawing inspiration from Mira Shimabukuro’s way of representing Japanese—where switches between languages appear as fluidly in the text as they do in talk—I have chosen to italicize non-English words or phrases the first time that they appear, but not again. This way, once they are introduced, words and phrases in Spanish cease to be “set off by any further marks of difference” (Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority, xiii).

3. The City University of New York’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies, also known as El Centro, was a place that I often visited throughout my adolescence and young adulthood as I learned more about my own Puerto Rican history. Pa’lante is the name of the bilingual newspaper published by the Young Lords Party between the years of 1970 and 1976. This became important reading for me when I was taking high school courses in U.S. history and the history of feminism and found works by Puerto Ricans and women of color to be largely missing from the curriculum.

4. One of the first books I was assigned as a master’s student pursuing my teacher certification in bilingual education at the Bank Street College of Education was Ana Celia Zentella, Growing Up Bilingual. It was the first time that I saw a place and group of people whom I loved so dearly—Puerto Rican families living in El Barrio—represented in a book that emphasized their social and cultural strengths. It was also the first published scholarship that I’d read examining the linguistic and cultural practices of living in both Spanish and English. Zentella—in both this book and her life’s work—has been an inspiration to me ever since and continues to serve as a model for my own writing and research.

5. For demographic changes to the Latino population in New York City, disaggregated by neighborhood changes over time, see Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, “Latino Population.”

6. The early lessons I gained from studying at El Centro were central to the work of starting NYCoRE. The founding members and I returned to the issues of Pa’lante that I’d studied in high school, learning from both the Young Lords Party and the Black Panther Party as we drafted our own version of a ten-point program for teacher activists. In 2010, NYCoRE was granted a Union Square Award by the organization’s director—and leading member of the Young Lords Party—Iris Morales. NYCoRE’s work for educational justice and Morales’s commitment to liberation continue to shape my work today.

7. New York City Department of City Planning, “NYC 2000 Results,” shows that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans were the majority Latinx residents in the neighborhoods where I first worked as an ESL teacher.

8. For a critique of the deficit perspectives encoded in the demographic labels that we use in education to identify students acquiring English, see García, “Emergent Bilinguals,” and Koyama and Menken, “Emergent Bilinguals.” For a related and more recent decolonial analysis of language labels and deficit ideologies, see García et al., “Rejecting Abyssal Thinking.”

9. In the early 2010s, when I began this study, immigration patterns changed as Mexican immigrants stopped frequently entering and leaving the United States, instead staying for long stretches of time. A 2019 Pew Research Center report chronicles this shift, noting that these “long-term residents” often stay to live in the United States for fifteen years or more (Passel and Cohn, “Mexicans Decline”). Several recent publications provide book-length treatments of the changes in immigration policy that have led to these demographic shifts. The introduction to Nancy Foner, One Quarter of the Nation, and the entirety of Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives, describe how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was a turning point in immigration policy. It created new ways of constructing illegality while coupling them with exclusionary policies focused on border protection. A. Naomi Paik, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, explains: “Border enforcement has also increased the undocumented population. The difficulty and expense of migrating across a militarized border has compelled many to stay once they make a successful crossing. Indeed a migrant must stay and work in the United States longer to recoup smuggling expenses and cannot afford the multiple crossings that once characterized long-standing patterns of seasonal labor migrations. Many newer migrants thus settled permanently and brought their families to join them, rather than endure unending family separation” (68).

10. Elsewhere I have written about the ways that I, in partnership with colleagues at the City University of New York, have created ongoing research opportunities that helped to sustain these relationships far beyond the scope of the original study. See Mangual Figueroa and Fox, “Refusing Closure.”

11. Turner and Mangual Figueroa, “Immigration Policy”; Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

12. Mangual Figueroa, “Fourteenth Amendment”; Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

13. A 2010 memo issued to district superintendents and school administrators explains, “While Plyler did not expressly address the issue of whether a school district may inquire about a student’s immigration status at the time of enrollment, the decision is generally viewed as prohibiting any district actions that might ‘chill’ or discourage undocumented students from receiving a free public education. Accordingly, at the time of registration, schools should avoid asking questions related to immigration status or that may reveal a child’s immigration status such as asking for a Social Security number” (New York State Education Department, “Student Registration Guidance,” 1–2). This memo issues a statewide mandate that is based on the federal ruling issued in Plyler. Two things are particularly notable. First, the recommended approach to protecting the rights of undocumented students is to avoid any discussion of their status. Second, the focus is on the process of school enrollment and data collection, with no attention paid to the possibility of disclosure at other moments throughout the students’ schooling experience.

14. School districts may violate the guidance issuing from Plyler by requesting documentation that—while not explicitly referencing immigration status—can implicitly reveal a family’s noncitizen status. One example of this might be asking a parent or guardian to furnish a driver’s license in a state where undocumented immigrants cannot obtain one. In most U.S. states, noncitizen residents cannot obtain a driver’s license, so this can be akin to asking someone to reveal their immigration status. For evidence of such chilling effects that can deter students and families from obtaining a K–12 public education, see American Civil Liberties Union, “1 in 5 New York State School Districts.” See also Pratt-Johnson, “Collision.”

15. López and López, Persistent Inequality.

16. Jeffries and Dabach, “Breaking the Silence,” 83.

17. 66.4 percent of children in New York State designated as limited English proficient between the years 2012 and 2016 were born in the United States. This mirrors the national average of 70.6 percent U.S.-born English learners enrolled in public schools. A higher percentage of U.S.-born students are enrolled in elementary school, whereas there were more students labeled limited English proficient and born outside of the United States in grades six through twelve; more details are available in the fact sheet by Sugarman and Geary, “English Learners in New York State.”

18. Jennifer Queenan, Paulette Andrade, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, and Ariana Mangual Figueroa, “Supporting Immigrants in School: Educators’ Personal and Professional Identities in Context,” unpublished paper.

19. Qualitative studies conducted at the secondary level have shown that teachers may conflate students’ language proficiency or ethnicity with their juridical citizenship status and negatively impact students’ self-perception and academic outcomes. Dafney B. Dabach, “You Can’t Vote, Right?” observes the ways one social studies teacher mistakenly equated a perceived lack of English fluency with undocumented status. In a discussion about voting in presidential elections, the teacher explicitly states that students with limited English proficiency could not vote and would therefore be less motivated to participate in the lesson. Dabach argues that this kind of linguistic profiling undermines English learners’ inclusion in school. In another example, Gonzales, Heredia, and Negrón-Gonzales, “Untangling Plyler’s Legacy,” note that secondary teachers in California—some of whom state that their Latin-American origin students enrolled in ESL classes are destined for jail over graduation—influence undocumented students’ exiting school before completing their degree.

20. Here I am thinking of pedagogical approaches like Funds of Knowledge, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. Each has a different emphasis, but all three approaches advocate for a “practice of asset pedagogies toward more explicitly pluralist outcomes” that pushes U.S. public schooling beyond its assimilationist goals (Paris and Alim, “What Are We Seeking,” 87). The fundamental argument is that students’ cultural and linguistic practices are inextricable from the structural exclusion that they and their communities experience and that school curricula and pedagogy should reflect these lived realities in order to support learning in historically marginalized communities (Vélez-Ibañez and Greenberg, “Formation and Transformation”). By taking a big-picture look at school inequality with a focus on structural failures instead of perceived student deficiencies, these approaches place the onus on educators and policymakers to change the practice of schooling to improve students’ learning (Ladson-Billings, “But That’s Just Good Teaching!”). See also Gallo and Link, “Diles la verdad,” and Alvarez, “Multilingualism Beyond Walls.”

21. I admire the work of scholars who make visible their choices regarding the terms they use when writing about the immigrant populations that they work alongside, even when I elect to use other terminology. See, for example, particularly thoughtful accounts of the politics of naming in Luis F. B. Plascencia, Disenchanting Citizenship, and Leisy Abrego, “On Silences.”

22. Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yurdakul, “Citizenship and Immigration.”

23. For critical explorations of the ways in which the definitions and criteria for U.S. citizenship—who is eligible for it and who is denied access to it—have shifted over time, see the following: Paik, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, and Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants.” Both trace the colonial origins of the U.S. nation-state into contemporary immigration policies that seek to uphold white supremacy while erasing, confining, and excluding nonwhite immigrants. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, and Chomsky, Undocumented, provide detailed analyses of the construction of the concept of illegality as it relates to citizenship, along with the development of policies and technologies used to reinforce state borders and punish those assigned this dehumanizing status at different points in time. As an ethnographer of immigrant children, I attend to the macro and micro dimensions of citizenship in order to denaturalize citizenship as a category and to draw attention to the social construction of the term. I am indebted to scholars who make explicit the links between state policy and everyday life in immigrant communities in the United States. Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship,” warns that without attending to the power of the state, studies of citizenship may give “the erroneous impression that cultural citizenship can be unilaterally constructed and that immigrant or minority groups can escape the cultural inscription of state power and other forms of regulation that define the different modalities of belonging” (738). She calls for a view of citizenship as a “dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society” that may be “at once specific and diffused” (738). For an autoethnographic examination of the intersections between changing conceptions of race and literacy—and the role that schools have played in the construction of citizens—see Ladson-Billings, “Through a Glass Darkly.”

24. I thank Cynthia N. Carvajal, CUNY’s inaugural director of undocumented and immigrant student programs at CUNY, for advising me to avoid using the phrase “legal citizenship” in this book because it would run the risk of assigning a legal/illegal designation to individuals and families. Leigh Patel, Youth Held at the Border, explains her choice not to use this phrasing: the “reductive dichotomy of legal and illegal obscures the complexity of the political, economic, and cultural factors that permeate the push and pull of human capital across borders” (6). In 2013, when Patel’s book was published, mainstream news media outlets like the New York Times and the Associated Press still used the terms “legal” and “illegal” immigrant to refer to individuals who had entered the U.S. without authorization. After a public campaign called Drop the I-Word was organized that same year, the Associated Press revised its style book to use the term “illegal” to refer to actions instead of people. Activist anthropologists—including linguistic anthropologists Netta Avineri and Jonathan Rosa—played an important role in this campaign and helped make visible the cost of the linguistic and racial ideologies communicated in the term. For more on the Drop the I-Word campaign and the role of academics, see Race Forward, “Drop the I-Word,” https://www.raceforward.org/sites/default/files/DTIW_update_WhyDrop4.pdf, and Society for Linguistic Anthropology, “Public Outreach to Eliminate the I-Word,” https://www.linguisticanthropology.org/i-word/.

25. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, xix.

26. More information about the New York State Youth Leadership Council is available at their website (https://www.nysylc.org/). Another good resource is a 2015 Public Broadcasting Station documentary entitled Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie), which features one of the organization’s codirectors, Angy Rivera, and her experiences of being undocumented and becoming active in the immigrant justice movement in the United States (https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/donttellanyone/).

27. Fix and Zimmerman, “All under One Roof,” 397–98.

28. Rosaldo, “Social Justice,” 243.

29. Flores, “Citizens vs. Citizenry.”

30. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3.

31. Within the field of education, U.S. citizenship has tended to be viewed as a set of dispositions and actions that students can realize through political engagement (Westheimer and Kahne, “What Kind of Citizen?”). For an insightful view of the complexities of pledging allegiance, see vignettes in Rubin, Making Citizens. See also Westheimer, Pledging Allegiance. Each essay in Joel Westheimer’s edited volume addresses important distinctions between citizenship, nationalism, patriotism, and dissent in periods of political extremism and war. Thea Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging, details “the central role that everyday nationalism plays in drawing youth from im/migrant communities into the racialized social fabric of this country” (32). She examines how the discourses and curricula circulating in one public high school in Pennsylvania serve to reproduce a U.S. logic that treats American Muslim youth as outsiders and threats to the integrity of the nation-state. Going beyond the script provided within mainstream public schools, Abu El-Haj traces the ways high schoolers resist the dominant narrative that excludes them by developing transnational views of citizenship and belonging. Reva Jaffe-Walter, Coercive Concern, explores how educational policy and teachers’ practices in Denmark shape educators’ treatment of their Muslim immigrant students. Jaffe-Walter demonstrates the ways in which educational practices that are meant to celebrate diversity and promote inclusion are in fact based in exclusionary forms of nationalism.

32. For more ethnographic detail on the citizenship grade on the report card and how undocumented parents from Mexico interpreted the term citizenship grade to evoke their child’s immigration status as well as their educational progress, see Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.” For a firsthand account of the significance of the citizenship grade, see Chang, “Undocumented Intelligence.” The example of homework assignments evoking multiple meanings of citizenship that are visible on school bulletin boards is described more fully in chapter 2.

1.“U.S. Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement,” American Immigration Council, June 24, 2021, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/us-citizen-children-impacted-immigration-enforcement#:~:text=Millions%20of%20U.S.%2Dcitizen%20children,family%20member%20as%20of%202018.

2. Ibid.

3. Chaudry et al., Facing Our Future; Passell and Cohn, U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Total Dips to Lowest Level in a Decade.

4. The United States Citizen and Immigration Services website lists key terms in immigration policy, among them citizen and noncitizen. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “Glossary,” https://www.uscis.gov/tools/glossary.

5. Taylor et al., “Unauthorized Immigrants.”

6. Taylor et al., “Unauthorized Immigrants.”

7. Pew Research Center, “Demographic and Family Characteristics.”

8. New York City Department of City Planning, “Newest New Yorkers,” provides a portrait of Dominican families that relocated in the years just before my starting this project.

9. Teachers’ knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about undocumented students can affect their teaching, as Sophia Rodriguez and William McCorkle, “On the Educational Rights,” find: “The data from this correlational study reveal that teachers’ awareness of policies impacting undocumented students has a positive correlation with their attitudes toward educational rights for undocumented students. Similarly, teachers’ awareness has a strong positive correlation with teachers’ attitudes,” 4.

10. MPI, “Profile.”

11. MPI, “Profile.”

12. New York City Department of City Planning, “Newest New Yorkers.”

13. New York City Department of City Planning, “Newest New Yorkers.”

14. All school-level information comes from publicly available New York City Department of Education reports; however, I do not cite them here in order to maintain anonymity at the school level.

15. Burawoy introduction to Ethnography Unbound; Marcus, “Ethnography.”

16. Erica Meiners, For the Children?, offers a brief yet insightful discussion of coming out as the term relates to the “gay liberationists coming out and the outing tactics of the contemporary (youth) undocumented movement,” 71. For an example of a Korean immigrant student openly declaring his undocumented status to push for immigration reform during one of Obama’s presidential events, see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/one-year-later-obamas-immigration-heckler-feels-vindicated-n258951.

17. Suárez-Orozco and Yoshikawa, “Shadow of Undocumented Status,” 103.

18. The age range and developmental significance of the term “middle childhood” varies. According to the book Yardsticks, a text commonly cited in resources developed by school districts around the country, children at age ten are highly concerned with classification and schematizing their world at the same time as they are concerned with fairness and rules. The girls in this study were no exception. However, if we consider the guidelines of more recent definitions of middle childhood, then they would not be included within the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s age range, which goes from six to eight years old; see CDC, “Middle Childhood.” Mah and Ford-Jones, “Spotlight on Middle Childhood: Rejuvenating the ‘Forgotten Years,’” 81.

19. This view of children as innocent has a long history that did not begin with Plyler. Critical childhood scholars like Thorne, Gender Play, and Faulstich Orellana et al., “Transnational Childhoods,” have debunked the social construction of the child as an innocent, passive subject. Rather than ascribing to a view of children as innocent, immature, and dependent, they have shown that children are agentic and astute. See also Luttrell, Children Framing Childhoods; Meiners, For the Children?; Woodhead, “Child Development.”

20. López and López, Persistent Inequality; Mangual Figueroa, “Fourteenth Amendment”; Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

21.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/202/, Powell at 236. See also Olivas, No Undocumented Child Left Behind.

22.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

23. Olivas, No Undocumented Child Left Behind, 38.

24. Driver, Schoolhouse Gate. Pressure on state governments to issue this guidance has come in part from the important work that the ACLU has done to document the ways districts “chill” families by asking them to provide documents to prove residency that may inadvertently disclose legal status. One previously mentioned example is when school districts ask families to furnish a driver’s license in states where undocumented individuals cannot apply for one. At the time of the study, this was the case in several New Jersey school districts (ACLU of New Jersey, “ACLU-NJ Sues 5 School Districts that Discriminate against Immigrant Students,” press release, October 18, 2016, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-nj-sues-5-school-districts-discriminate-against-immigrant-students) and in New York State (ACLU of New York, “Following NYCLU Advocacy, DOJ/DOE Affirm Immigrant Children’s Right to Attend U.S. Public Schools,” May 7, 2011, https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/following-nyclu-advocacy-dojdoe-affirm-immigrant-childrens-right-attend-us-public).

25. Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence.” Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” found that the guidance to adhere to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding immigration status is commonplace in schools. However, the guidance on how to uphold this edict through everyday schooling practices is directed to school leaders; as a result, teachers learn of these guidelines only secondhand and do not have the opportunity to decipher the policy and consider its implications for practice.

26. Interestingly, the New York State Department of Education lists immigration-related considerations regarding students on the portion of their website focused on English language instruction, thereby contributing to the conflation of language ability and immigration status. Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” note that this is also directed to teachers.

27. Justin Driver, Schoolhouse Gate, discusses the case, concluding that it has had “broad applicability throughout the nation, and has served as a vital bulwark against widespread efforts to deprive unauthorized immigrants of access to education” (353–54). Yet threats to Plyler still exist. Isabela Dias describes recent attempts by Republican lawmakers and their advisers to revise the Plyler guidance by “giving states the option to deny undocumented students enrollment in K–12 schools” (Dias, “First Roe, Then Plyler? The GOP’s 40-Year Fight to Keep Undocumented Kids Out of School,” Mother Jones, June 15, 2002, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/first-roe-then-plyler-the-gops-40-year-fight-to-keep-undocumented-kids-out-of-public-school/). From the start, Plyler has raised the question of how educational policy can be leveraged to deter immigrants from residing in the United States or include them in those institutions most fundamental to this country’s well-being.

28. Olivas, No Undocumented Child Left Behind, 8.

29.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

30. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo, 11.

31. Dias, “First Roe, Then Plyler?”; Driver, Schoolhouse Gate; Olivas, No Undocumented Child Left Behind.

32. Driver, Schoolhouse Gate, 316.

33.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

34. Meiners, For the Children?

35. Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” New York Times, Sunday magazine, June 22, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html.

36. Chomsky, Undocumented, 163.

37. Chomsky, Undocumented, 163. Vargas, foreword to Gonzales, Lives in Limbo, refers to childhood as a time when he was “buoyed by the blissful ignorance Gonzales writes about, an ignorance that envelops undocumented children at younger ages when neither they nor their teachers understand their status” (xii).

38. Suárez-Orozco and Yoshikawa, “Shadow of Undocumented Status,” 104.

39. Suárez-Orozco et al., “Growing Up in the Shadows,” 452.

40. Suárez-Orozco et al., “Growing Up in the Shadows,” 453.

41. Suárez-Orozco and Yoshikawa, “Shadow of Undocumented Status,” 107. See also R. G. Gonzales and Leo R. Chavez, “Awakening to a Nightmare: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States,” Current Anthropology 53, no. 3 (2012): 255–81.

42. Gonzales et al., “(Un)authorized Transitions.”

43. This change in immigration policy accompanied the signing of the Patriot Act into law. This “sweeping law” resulted in expanded definitions of “terrorism,” new levels of governance, and an unprecedented amount of funding dedicated to “homeland security” (Paik, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, 36–37). To paraphrase Paik, those years marked a new approach to immigration enforcement that shifted from policing and militarizing a physical border between the United States and Mexico to instead surveilling and detaining immigrants that reside within the country, often far from the border.

44. Cornejo Villavicencio, Undocumented Americans, chronicles the stories of undocumented immigrants from Latin America living in New York City and throughout the country. In the chapters “Flint” and “Cleveland,” she focuses on the experiences of children born to undocumented parents in the years after 2001. Her account, like the ethnographic one provided in this book, is evidence of the many ways children hold and manage their knowledge of the threat of detention and deportation. Growing up in an era of ICE has fundamentally altered the everyday life of children in mixed-status homes.

45. Catalina, Jenni, Aurora, and Pita’s responses align with a proposal that Jocelyn Solis issued to educational researchers in 2008. “Illegality as an identity,” Solis suggests, should be “theorized as the integration of societal and individual histories, rather than as separate, hierarchical, or linear progressions” (Solis, “No Human Being Is Illegal,” 183). This view requires an understanding of child development as contingent on social factors, not just individual attributes. In mixed-status families, the disparities associated with an individual having or lacking U.S. citizenship shape the experiences of the entire family and can change over the course of a lifespan.

46. Thorne, Gender Play, 3. In this book, Barrie Thorne theorizes and models ethnographic approaches to the study of gender by asking not how gender makes boys and girls different but instead asking how children (or kids, to use the term preferred by the students in Thorne’s studies) come to understand, challenge, and create gendered meaning in their lives. See also Marjorie Orellana’s essay on Thorne’s influence in her own life and career in her contribution to Oeur and Pascoe, Gender Replay.

47. Faulstich Orellana, Immigrant Children, 135.

48. Stephanie Condon, “Second Grader to Michelle Obama: ‘My Mom Doesn’t Have Any Papers,’” CBS News, video, May 19, 2010, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/second-grader-to-michelle-obama-my-mom-doesnt-have-any-papers-video/.

49. Bhimji, “Language Socialization.”

50. Combs, González, and Moll, “U.S. Latinos.”

51. Solis, Fernández, and Alcalá, “Mexican Immigrant Children.”

52. Oliveira, Motherhood across Borders. For more on the strained relationships that negotiating differing immigration statuses can produce among siblings in a mixed-status family, see Dreby, Everyday Illegal; Beck and Stevenson, “Someday I’m Going to Have Papers!”; Zavella, I’m Neither Here nor There.

53. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

54. Solis, “No Human Being Is Illegal.” For a recent book-length exploration of children’s drawings related to detention and deportation in the United States, see Rodriguez Vega, Drawing Deportation.

55. Gallo, Mi Padre.

56. Arnold, “Language Socialization.”

57. Dreby et al., “Nací Allá.”

58. Mangual Figueroa, “I Have Papers.”

59. Mealtimes at home are one recurring family activity where socialization to speaking routines and norms for appropriate silences are explicitly taught. Ochs and Shohet, “Cultural Structuring.”

60. Muriel Saville-Troike, “Place of Silence” (in Tannen and Saville-Troike, Perspectives on Silence), notes that “the time-spaces occupied by silence constitute an active presence (not absence) in communication” (10). This notion of silence as presence is a helpful formulation, although it only accounts for silences that are perceptible to others during an interaction. Other authors with essays in this volume argue that silence signifies by making an impact interactionally on the listeners. Deborah Tannen, “Silence,” claims that silence “is always a joint production” (100), and Saville-Troike, “Place of Silence,” explains that “silence ‘means’ what it conveys” (10). In this book, I draw on these claims while also examining instances of silence that may not be noticeable to others—and therefore do not affect them—but that are still meaningful to the individual withholding expression.

61. The strong influences of an ethnography of speaking approach is evident here; see Hymes, “On Communicative Competence.” From this perspective, the study of an individual speaker’s language use “must take as context a community, investigating its communicative habits as a whole, so that any given use of channel and code takes its place as but part of the resources upon which the members of the community draw” (3). Language use and withholding language are important in specific ways to particular groups of people, so observing when and why someone talks or remains silent teaches us something about the local norms governing communication itself. We might consider silence to be an integral part of competence, as Saville-Troike, “Place of Silence,” explains: “an essential part of the acquisition of communicative competence, is how children learn when not to talk, and what silence means in their speech community” (11). Affirming the importance of silence in studies of communication, Keith Basso, “To Give Up on Words,” writes that “knowledge of when not to speak may be as basic to the production of culturally acceptable behavior as knowledge of what to say. It stands to reason, then, that an adequate ethnography of communication should not confine itself exclusively to the analysis of choice within verbal repertoires.” Basso suggests that ethnographers of language should specify those conditions under which the “members of the society regularly decide to refrain from verbal behavior altogether” (215). Audra Simpson considers decisions to speak or remain silent to be a twofold calculus: first, a “calculus of our predicaments” between ethnographer and “informant” regarding what topics to broach in the field, followed by a later calculation on the part of the researcher concerning what to share once data have been collected (77).

62. Ochs, “Transcription as Theory,” influentially argues for the need to pay close attention to children’s verbal and nonverbal communicative practices and to adapt our transcription methods to represent them. Knowing how to talk—and when not to talk—is an important part of children’s acquisition of competence in everyday conversations; see the early work of Susan Philips (Invisible Culture), Shirley Brice Heath (Ways with Words), and Norma Gonzalez (I Am My Language), and others. In this way, silence points to (or indexes) a set of concerns and beliefs that transcend any particular conversation. The decision to remain silent or speak up in any particular interaction is made against a broader sociopolitical backdrop that inflects and informs social life. In Ochs’s words, “sociocultural information is generally encoded in the organization of conversational discourse and that discourse with children is no exception” (“Introduction,” 3).

63. In order to understand the significance of speech or silence, we have to go beyond an outside-researcher perspective on what counts as expression—or lack of expression. Hymes, “Introduction,” calls this an “etic grid”—what we might think of as a set of insider understandings regarding what matters to speakers and how they have learned to address them (22). Knowing when to be silent involves a sophisticated “ability to recognize/interpret what social activity/event is taking place and to speak and act in ways sensitive to the context” (Ochs, “Introduction,” 3). By fine-tuning our attention to children’s speech and silence with close ethnographic evidence, insights are obtained into the etic grid of children growing up in mixed-status families throughout the United States today.

64. In her study of Japanese American writing on mass incarceration during World War II, Relocating Authority, Mira Shimabukuro traces the changing meanings of the term gaman: a specific kind of silence resulting from the suffering experienced in the internment camps. Shimabukuro examines the governmental narratives that portray gaman as a kind of suffering in silence that valorizes individual tolerance of injustice over collective outrage. She juxtaposes this with the words of survivors—in writing and through oral history—for whom gaman is a term that acknowledges a tangle of suppression and rage, silence and outcry, that cannot be easily reconciled. Shimabukuro is relevant to this study because of her insistence on a study of speech and silence that addresses both talk and writing; also important in this context is her instructive claim that “while gaman is often discussed in terms of individual survivance, it has, as its base, an ethical commitment to a collective good” (82). Silence in schools is also often construed as an individual action or personal trait that reveals a broader community deficit (Cazden, Classroom Discourse, is a foundational book in this area), when it is in fact often better understood as a social practice adhered to by individuals in order to maximize their collective safety.

65. Early ethnographic studies of classroom interaction in the United States focus on comparative analyses of interactional patterns among different cultural and linguistic groups; examples include Cazden, Classroom Discourse; Philips, “Participant Structures” (a study conducted on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon); and Kay M. Losey’s study of Mexican American women in a community college in California. These studies examine what was at the time considered a mismatch between norms for communicative competence between mainstream schooling practices and assessments and those of historically marginalized students. These anthropologists seek both cultural and structural explanations for students’ silences and discourse patterns in the classroom. These studies are rooted in questions about the power dynamics that become evident when educators negatively interpret speakers’ silences in classrooms. See also Ron Scollon’s analysis of the ways that institutions and outsiders—like schools and teachers—can pathologize the silences they perceive in students from nonwhite, racially minoritized discourse communities.

66. Pon, Goldstein, and Schecter, “Interrupted by Silences”; San Pedro, “Silence as Shields.”

67. Gilmore, “Silence and Sulking.”

68. San Pedro, “Silence as Weapons”; Schultz, “After the Blackbird Whistles.”

69. O’Connor, “Language Out of Place”; Rampton and Charalambous, “Breaking Classroom Silences.” Breaks in the normative flow of classroom interaction can produce opportunities for teachers and students to reexamine the underlying rules that guide school-based talk. Borrowing from Harold Garfinkel’s approach to the study of interaction, I believe we can learn from observing breaches because a person’s response reveals a set of tacit social norms that generally go unspoken. Breaches can be as revealing of children’s unspoken beliefs as they can be of teachers’ understandings of their students, as Baquedano-López, Solís, and Kattan, “Adaptation,” show in their study of elementary school science classrooms in California. In the case of children from mixed-status families, who rarely explicitly report on the norms they have learned for disclosing or disguising their immigration status, a breach becomes an opportunity to witness the tacit knowledge they draw on when the topic of immigration arises. In these moments, silence can serve as a resource to manage the risks that attend disclosure. For another examination of the relevance of breaches to undocumented communities, see Mangual Figueroa, “Embodying the Breach.” See also Burruel-Stone, “Centering Place,” which applies my framework to develop an anticolonial lens for analyzing schooling discourses regarding place and Latinx students in California. Garfinkel introduces the concept of breaches in Studies in Ethnomethodology.

70. Philips, “Interaction Structured,” rightly notes that “talk and silence have been viewed largely in the context of interaction structured through talk. There is a need, then, to pay more attention to interaction structured through silence in our efforts to describe both the discourse structure of speech and the larger organization of communication in interaction as a whole” (212).

71. These all rely on what Agyekum, “Communicative Role of Silence,” refers to as “eloquent silences” because they presume an audience that receives and assigns meaning to these signifying (and articulate) silences.

72. Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence.”

73. We can turn to an ethnographic study of language in a different historical and social context for a helpful heuristic of different kinds of silence. Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, distinguishes between two kinds of silence: literal silence, as in the “refraining from outward speaking” or the “curtailment of speaking”; and metaphorical silence, which involves “outward speaking” dictated by social norms governing divine speech that allows for some forms of speech while restraining others (21–22). Both kinds of silence involve restraint. In the literal sense, talk is completely withheld. In the metaphorical sense, specific forms of talk are permissible if they are considered appropriate for establishing a spiritual connection to God. This formulation provides a helpful schema for understanding the two kinds of verbal silences that appear in this study. There are moments in which children withhold speech, and there are other moments when children refrain from talking about immigration status in one way but replace it with another, more appropriate reference. In both cases, speakers are highly aware of the risks involved in talking, which include losing a connection to the divine or losing a sense of safety at school.

74. Take, as an example, Alberto Ledesma, “The Structure of My Undocumented Immigrant Writer’s Block,” which recounts his undocumented childhood in California. He chronicles the experience of withholding information at school as a protective stance his parents explicitly taught him. The vague or incomplete answers that he gives as a child on school assignments relating to family history, personal experiences, or ethnic identity lead to tensions that he feels throughout his education as he attempts to reconcile the inherent dilemma between completing assignments (“doing well in school”) and the responsibility to keep his family safe. Ledesma’s story points to the fact that teachers may perceive a student’s silence as a sign of deficiency when it can actually demonstrate maturity.

75. For a detailed analysis of two school documents that circulated between public schools and mixed-status homes in Pennsylvania—the report card with a “citizenship grade” and a letter to parents about student attendance that refers to “illegal absences”—see Mangual Figueroa, “Language Socialization Experiences,” and Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

76. Kate Vieira, American by Paper, a study of the literacy practices of documented and undocumented Portuguese-speaking immigrants from Portugal and Brazil, examines the significance of papers that circulate in the lives of undocumented immigrants. Vieira finds that “the meanings attached to immigration documents also infused other papers,” among them “diplomas, certificates, and time sheets” (3). Vieira learns that school documents issued in public elementary and secondary schools reproduce a hierarchy of access and belonging between students with U.S. citizenship and those without. As a result, “they often experience schools—public, authoritative, bureaucratic—as extensions of the very state that sought their expulsion” (119).

77. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 42.

78. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 100.

79. In their study of methodological considerations in the study of teen women’s sexual desire—a subject shrouded in taboo, stigma, and repression in public schooling—Sara McClelland and Michelle Fine explore “the possibility that [the silence from young women] is not an absence, but perhaps something else: an absence we know to be present.” They go on to explain that amid the “stammering and the silence from young women”—sounds similar to those I heard throughout this study—one lesson we must continually remember is that the “presence or absence in young women’s narratives” (in their case explicit mentions of desire, and in mine, talk about citizenship) “does not determine its existence” (McClelland and Fine, “Writing on Cellophane,” 233, 245).

80. Ellen Basso, “Ordeals of Language,” refers to the moments of dissonance that take place during social situations characterized by unequal power relations that can have high-stakes consequences. In these moments, Basso explains, a person may fall silent, suppressing the voice in a way that allows “the anxiety-producing event to be experienced as somewhat more manageable” (122). Basso’s use of the word “suppressing” reminds me of Don Kulick’s discussion of language, desire, and identity. Kulick, “Importance,” calls on us to think beyond what is spoken in interaction and to consider the unspoken—perhaps unspeakable—dimensions of our social identities as well. As he puts it, “To the extent that our goal in thinking about language, interaction and culture is to make claims about how and why speakers use linguistic resources, and how and why those linguistic resources both constrain and enable subjectivity and action, then it seems crucial to recognize that subjectivity and action ought not to be reduced to literal performance—the ‘there’ in an interaction. Subjectivity and action should also be understood in relation to what is barred from performance, what is not or cannot be performed—the not-there, the unsaid traces, the absent presences, that structure the said and the done” (616). For Kulick, social identity is not merely something that one consciously wills into being and actively performs or asserts, because in order to portray one particular self, there may be other aspects of the self that must be suppressed. In my study, students may feel that they need to suppress—hide or deny—what they know about their undocumented status in order to outwardly project an image of being a good or successful student to their teachers and peers. To take another example: in a study of indigenous activism, Sherina Feliciano-Santos and Barbra Meek, “Interactional Surveillance,” argue that suppression can be a political strategy to advance a collective goal. In their analysis of the assertions and silences of Taíno activists in southeastern Puerto Rico, they “highlight self-suppression as an active technique involved in many linguistic interactions, the interactional outcomes of which then depend on the local contexts, histories, and social relationships presupposed and desired” (375). They study communication between members of the Taíno grassroots community and the colonial Puerto Rican government, finding that “self-suppression and silence became, within the limitations of this particular context, strategic techniques of empowerment” (388). Silence here is a politically savvy choice when communicating with state officials, who could not be trusted to act on behalf of the community’s expressed desires.

81. My hope is to integrate the many dimensions of children’s communicative practices here—to render visible what William Hanks, “Joint Commitment,” calls “the various dimensions of context” needed to “arrive at a joint understanding” (300, 301). For Hanks, “integration is produced through a combination of linguistic, semiotic, and perceptual resources” that include “intersubjective relevance (perceived or inferred), the history of interactions between the parties, the nonverbal setting and other features of context that appear nowhere in a transcript, no matter how exacting or comprehensive it is” (300, 302). This challenge—to represent the anxiety and fear, strength and resolve of children—is part of what I am taking on by presenting a transcript that integrates the aural and physical resources that they use to communicate with one another, with me, and with their teachers.

82. Katherine Schultz, “Interrogating Students’ Silences,” calls on teachers “to listen deeply to both talk and silence. Above all, inquiring into silence might lead to classrooms where engaged and equitable participation are defined as broadly as possible” (221).

83. Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, Silenced Voices, note: “Silence is not simply the absence of exported marginalized voices; it is the simultaneous and parasitic invitation to voices that dominate and ‘other’” (7). That is to say, beliefs and ideologies circulate even—or especially—in the status quo silences of schools, and they communicate who is believed to be smart, moral, or worthy. Classroom practices reinforce these beliefs as students are given opportunities to speak and their contributions are accepted, refuted, or silenced. Rick Ayers and William Ayers, Teaching the Taboo, invite us to explore the “taken-for-granted in teaching” and to “open our eyes to a deeper reality through a pedagogy of questioning” (1). They explore the detrimental consequences for democratic learning when so many school topics are labeled as untouchable. They describe a situation that resonates with this study: “Schools routinely suppress or deny the experiences of young people—they know terrible things, but they mustn’t let the adults know that they know, and the adults are living in deep denial. Student voices are silenced, their insights ignored, their feelings patronized, their integrity undone, and sometimes, especially in high schools, enormous energy and resources are expended in a project of enforced ignorance” (72). Indeed, teacher education programs that prepare candidates to teach in public schools often sanction professional silences by not raising pressing social issues and making explicit connections to education. For example, few, if any, teacher education programs offer courses or even opportunities to discuss the intersections between immigration and education. In their exploration of models of teacher activism that explicitly discuss the intersections between racism and schooling, Valdez et al., “We Are Victorious,” find that teachers and teacher candidates often look outside of schools (that is, their own institutions of higher education and the schools where they teach) to engage in a pedagogy of questioning and to challenge systemic silence. These teachers discover that teacher-sanctioned talk in schools is complicit in the silencing and erasure of the complexities of their own and their students’ lives. As one future teacher, Nelly, puts it—referencing Audre Lorde’s phrase “your silence will not protect you”—it is important that we have shared professional experiences that “expose our quietness on topics we thought we had raised our voice for” (253).

84. In their interview study of eighteen teachers serving undocumented students in Virginia public schools, Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” report that “teachers’ capacity for supporting their undocumented students was greatly constrained by unclear policy contexts, chilling school climates, and concerns about restrictions on political speech” (534). As a result, their respondents are caught in a paradox: “they had an ethical obligation to support students’ specific needs, but they could not inquire about those needs if they pertained to immigration status. Whereas Plyler established a system in which status is withheld from schools, the reality is that concealment is not always possible or even desirable, as knowledge of status often helps teachers better support their students” (535). Sarah Gallo and Holly Link, “Exploring the Borderlands,” examine the ways teachers respond to their immigrant-origin students from mixed-status families when they learn about their lived experiences. Gallo and Link place teachers on a continuum from acknowledgment to avoidance and call on educational researchers and teacher educators to go beyond a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and to support teachers in their development as advocates by raising the topic of immigration status and educational experiences throughout their training.

85. Mangual Figueroa and García-Sánchez, “New Horizons.” See also Menjívar, “Liminal Legality.”

86. I draw inspiration for the idea of writing collaboratively from Saavedra et al., Eclipse of Dreams, written and edited by a mixed-status “collective of documented and undocumented activists” that includes both university professors and their students.

1. Abu El-Haj, Unsettled Belonging; Oliveira, Motherhood across Borders; Ong, “Cultural Citizenship”; Ramanathan, “Language Policies.”

2. Gonzales and Chavez, “Awakening to a Nightmare”; Sassen, “Repositioning.”

3. Marks, Ejesi, and García Coll, “Understanding the U.S. Immigrant Paradox”; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova, Learning a New Land.

4. Smith, Mexican New York.

5. Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, and Todorova, Learning a New Land, 8.

6. Garrett and Baquedano-López, “Language Socialization.”

7. Mangual Figueroa, “I Have Papers So I Can Go Anywhere!”

8. See Slobin et al., Field Manual, published by the University of California, Berkeley. This manual was meant to guide fieldwork on language use among young children and is significant because it constituted “the first systematic initiative to bridge academic divisions” between psychology, anthropology, and sociology in order to develop a research program for the study of children’s language acquisition and socialization (3). Like the authors of the original field manual, I believe it is important to provide details regarding the recording tools and approaches that I used throughout this study. However, in a departure, I will also detail the significant ways that the children themselves shaped this methodology. Ochs and Schieffelin, “Language Socialization.”

9. The number of foreign-born and Spanish-language-dominant Latinos who acquired cellphones and smartphones increased dramatically between 2009 and 2012; see Lopez, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Patten, Closing the Digital Divide.

10. Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence.”

11. I explore this question in a series of publications issuing from an ethnographic study of mixed-status families living in Pennsylvania: Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship, Beneficence”; Mangual Figueroa, “La carta de responsabilidad.”

12. Tuck and Guishard, “Uncollapsing Ethics,” 7.

13. Over the length of the project, the girls began to describe wearing the iPods and having their words recorded as a kind of benefit. As they went on to middle school and high school, they reflected on the way their study participation made them believe that they had something valuable to say. There is no question that being in the study involved moments of discomfort, but there were also many moments in which Jenni, Tere, Hazel, Pita, Catalina, and Aurora developed a sense of confidence. This is expressed in this book’s afterword, collectively authored by four of the six original participants.

14. Like the children described in Dreby, Everyday Illegal, and those in Mangual Figueroa, “I Have Papers,” the children in my study expressed their belief that juridical citizenship—having or lacking papers—is linked to questions of self-worth and fairness.

15. Hill, “Mock Spanish.”

16. See Thorne, Gender Play, for an insightful discussion of “the underground economy of food and objects” (20)—much like the economy made visible to us when Tere secretly asked Aurora to bring her a pencil that she was forbidden to carry in the lunchroom and schoolyard.

17. The 2016 special issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly provides a longer treatment of the intersections between qualitative research and surveillance. Its articles offer critical ethnographic accounts of students’ perceptions of researchers’ recording techniques.

18. Rethinking accountability as a central part of our research involves relinquishing the expert role traditionally associated with being a researcher, instituting what Fox and Fine, “Accountable to Whom?,” refer to as systems of “collective accountability” issuing from redistributing power among those involved.

1. Mangual Figueroa, “I Have Papers”; Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

2. Vieira, American by Paper, 3.

3. Vieira, American by Paper, 3.

4. Chang, Struggles of Identity, 3.

5. Chang, Struggles of Identity, 14.

6. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

7. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education.”

8. Another case of a school form producing fear in an undocumented parent was a “Notice of Illegal Absence,” issued by a Pennsylvania public school district. This mother received the notice in the mail after her son was absent several times without being excused. Her husband had just been detained and deported to Mexico, and amid this crisis, the mother had to suddenly change residences and jobs. As a result of this sudden instability, her three children missed a lot of school. Instead of opening a line of communication between her and her children’s teachers, the notice scared her, and she refused to visit the school. She called on me to help restore a clean attendance record without revealing the reason behind the absences. Mangual Figueroa, “Language Socialization Experiences.” Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” note a similar phenomenon recounted by a teacher describing something she had heard from the parent of a student in her classroom: “an undocumented mother afraid to sign forms or come to school to sign those [forms] needed to get her son free eyeglasses” (537).

9. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Language.” In eighteen qualitative interviews with public school teachers conducted in a “new Latino destination” in Virginia, Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” report that teachers expressed concerns about how school documents could reveal family members’ immigration status to educators (527). One teacher reported “instances in which she could infer students’ status, such as by noticing missing Social Security numbers on forms” (535).

10. Jerome Bruner, Process of Education, theorizes that students learn best when given the opportunity to learn the guiding principles relevant to a particular subject matter and then apply them to increasingly complex problems within that discipline. Referring to the sciences and humanities, he argues that educators should teach students ideas fundamental to each content area, noting, “A curriculum as it develops should revisit these basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them. Fourth-grade children can play absorbing games governed by the principles of topology and set theory, even discovering new ‘moves’ or theorems. They can grasp the idea of tragedy and the basic human plights represented in myth. But they cannot put these ideas into formal language or manipulate them as grown-ups can. There is much still to be learned about the ‘spiral curriculum,’ that turns back on itself at higher levels” (13). Bruner theorizes that with practice, those principles become heuristics that learners refer back to and build on as they apply them over time. The idea that these ideas are forming even if children cannot express them directly is important to our adapting the notion of the spiraling curriculum to children’s understanding of citizenship.

11. Pew Hispanic Center, “Mexican-American Boom.”

12. For an example of how show-and-tell is connected to state learning standards and student developmental outcomes in schools today, see the following guide developed for early childhood educators, guardians, and parents: New York State Education Department, “New York State Prekindergarten Foundation for the Common Core,” Early Childhood Advisory Council, 2006, https://www.ccf.ny.gov/files/5813/9145/7002/PreK_Common_Core_2013-10-28.pdf.

13. Joanna Dreby, Everyday Illegal, describes a sibling “pecking order” (129) that is based on immigration status. In her book chronicling the impact of restrictive immigration policies on mixed-status families, Dreby finds a pattern in which undocumented siblings are expected to shoulder a greater share of the household chores than their U.S.-born counterparts. Scott Beck and Alma Stevenson, “Someday I’m Going to Have Papers!,” found that U.S.-born siblings in mixed-status families displayed signs of the “immigrant paradox” (127): the children and youth in their study felt a kind of apathy and disregard for schooling that ran counter to their parents’ insistence that they do well in school. This contrasted with the life experiences of undocumented siblings who worked hard to achieve mainstream success in schooling because they were acutely aware that they could not rely on birthright citizenship to grant them access to higher education or social services.

14. Dell Hymes, “On Communicative Competence,” notes that a “confrontation between different systems of competency” (68) permits the ethnographer to observe the ways in which people learn, resist, and even redefine the agreed-on social norms of a particular community. During points of contact between private systems (domestic) and public systems (schooling, travel, or health care), mixed-status family members confronted varying norms about competence related to their experiences as U.S.-born or undocumented individuals. In these moments, parents and children demonstrated their understandings of the specific behaviors expected of citizens, the forms of participation available to those who have citizenship, and the appropriate ways to talk about citizenship status.

15. Alulema and Pavilon, “Immigrants’ Use.”

16. Cory Turner, “Food Fight: How 2 Trump Proposals Could Bite into School Lunch,” NPR News, February 19, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/806155521/food-fight-how-2-trump-proposals-could-bite-into-school-lunch.

17. Mary Romero, “Foreword,” writes that “the current anti-immigrant sentiment and high deportation numbers have created a ‘chilling effect’ in accessing social services and exercising citizenship rights that might place noncitizen family members at risk. Parents are hesitant to use benefits their children are eligible for, like school lunch programs, for fear of jeopardizing future chances for citizenship because they might be perceived as a ‘public charge.’” (xvi).

18. Kate Vieira, American by Paper, describes moments in which school forms sent home evoked fear in undocumented students and their parents (119). For undocumented high school students from Brazil, submitting forms in order to access internship opportunities or employment, or to prepare to graduate and seek admission to college, produced anxiety about disclosing their undocumented status. She bore witness as students and their parents worried whether the information they were asked to provide on these routine forms could upend their lives in the United States if they ended up in the hands of the wrong person. Vieira explains: “Perhaps educational institutions were the only sites in which to pursue social mobility, but they were also closely enough aligned with the state that they could plausibly demand papers” (123).

19. Meredith Byrnes, “Learning,” demonstrates how school-based assessments that label Spanish-speaking children attending U.S. public schools as in need of remediation affect Mexican-born parents’ perceptions of their children’s progress. She details the moments in which parents call on their children to “echarle ganas,” or put in effort, where effort is equated with achieving good grades and showing progress by the school’s monolingual English standard.

20. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” notes that discourses that universalize the immigrant experience in the United States operate on two simultaneous ideological levels. On the one hand, this discourse serves to galvanize and unify a national identity integral to maintaining an exploitative capitalist system that depends on the belief in a meritocracy where hard work and sacrifice can result in social mobility, as in the American dream. On the other hand, this view of a universal immigrant experience erases the history of Native American genocide and the enslavement of African people on which this country is founded, leaving no room for understanding the shifting racial and legal classifications that have shaped immigration policy over the last four hundred years into the present. In both cases, the “we are all immigrants” narrative ignores the structural inequalities that facilitate or prohibit assimilation into a U.S. mainstream.

21. The “sample writing” provided by the teacher reads: “Barack Obama, Kenya, U.S.A.,” followed by a sentence starter: “My family came to the U.S.A. because . . .” The assignment’s evocation of Barack Obama’s family connection to Kenya is particularly fraught in this context. It both links questions of immigration to legality (the president represents state power) and summons the birther discourse in which Obama’s own birthright citizenship—and thus his right to hold office—was disputed.

22. As David Howard, Coloring the Nation, explains: “The concept of residency is an important issue in Dominican society. La residencia is a term frequently used in the context of Dominicans attaining residential rights and citizenship in the United States. As such, it is a much sought-after status and a significant sign of prestige” (35). Here we see how a term denoting immigration status shaped a child’s view of educational documents she encountered at school.

23. The 2011 special issue of the Harvard Educational Review includes a “collection of autobiographical stories” authored by student members of the nonprofit organization Educators for Fair Consideration. One of the stories recounted by Fermín Mendoza echoes Aurora’s response to this social studies assignment. The parallels are so significant I will reproduce the narrative here. Fermín Mendoza recalls a classroom activity on the first day of geography class during freshman year of high school: “One at a time, everyone will reveal their birthplaces. I stare off into the whiteboard, scared. No one in the room knows I was born in Mexico. People start giving simple answers I wish I could use: Houston, San Antonio. Someone says Matamoros, a Mexican City, but I can tell he has papers—he is confident, popular, and I think his parents speak English. I think about the name of my birthplace: Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Tamaulipas, ‘Where-the-roads-were-made-of-dirt-and-family-hens-made-family-meals,’ Mexico. I am sure this humble name will give me away. I look at the world map. I don’t even know where my hometown is. It’s my turn to share now. Diaz Ordaz, Tamaulipas, I tell Mr. Giordano. Is that a big city? He asks. Yes, I lie. I’ve never heard of it, he replies. The next student speaks. I wonder if the class knows I’m illegal” (502). This account provides a rare glimpse—along the lines of the ethnographic accounts that I provide throughout this book—of the moments in which routine schooling exercises that teachers imagine will instill pride in their students and foster connection in fact motivate fear in their undocumented students. Like Aurora, Fermín wished for a simple answer to the question “where are you from?,” and like Fermín, Aurora experienced the anxiety associated with wondering whether sharing the real name of the country, region, or town where she was born could put her or her family at risk.

24. Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence”; Mangual Figueroa, “I Have Papers.”

1. Ochs and Capps, Living Narrative, 2.

2. Two book-length studies address this color-blind ideology and how it shapes contemporary public schooling: Turner, Suddenly Diverse, and Castagno, Educated in Whiteness. The first focuses on district-level policymaking by educational leaders and how they use a style of “color-blind managerialism” that acknowledges diversity while evading questions about structural inequality and power differences among stakeholders. The second takes a close look at teacher–student interactions in two high schools in a single school district. Castagno traces what she calls an ideology of “powerblind sameness” to show how school conversations about diversity reify a belief that the status quo is acceptable by acknowledging student differences (such as race, ethnicity, language, and immigration) in a celebratory way without engaging in potentially challenging conversations about the structural inequality that often attends such differences.

3. Ochs and Capps, Living Narrative, 102.

4. Pita’s father, who had been living in Brooklyn for many years before Pita and her mother migrated, was granted amnesty following the 1986 passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. As a naturalized U.S. citizen, he was able to petition for a status change for Pita and her mother in 2013. When I met them, they were already several years into the application process.

1. Wides-Muñoz, The Making of a Dream, a chronicles the genesis of the federal Dream Act legislation, the political debates that resulted, and the nationwide activism that ensued.

2. See Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales, introduction to We Are Not Dreamers, for a discussion of the critique of the term Dreamers. They explain that for the volume’s authors, “there is deep resistance to the DREAMer narrative and a call for a nuanced understanding of how this critique aims to shift conceptions of deservingness but also of how undocumented subjectivities are negotiated and crafted” (16).

3. Davidson, “New York State Just Passed the Dream Act”; Fernández, “Unfinished Business.”

4. Christina Goldbaum, “Dream Act Is Approved in N.Y. to Aid Undocumented Students, in Rebuke to Trump,” New York Times, January 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/nyregion/dream-act-bill-passed.html.

5. See the New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC) definition of a Dream Team at https://www.nysylc.org/dtn. Guadalupe Ambrosio, former Executive Director of the NYSYLC, has been a leader in developing a Dream Team Network throughout New York City high schools and college campuses. For more on the history of Dream Teams in New York City, see Initiative on Immigration and Education, “Comprehensive Educator Modules,” https://www.cuny-iie.org/comprehensive-educator-modules.

6. Linguistic anthropologists are especially attuned to the significance of the interview as a highly metalinguistic act in which the social conventions and power hierarchies are on display, including the dynamics of posing questions, negotiating turn taking, and reckoning with the roles of expert or novice. See, for example, Briggs, “Learning How to Ask,” which has been influential in my thinking about the metapragmatic significance of the interview.

7. Mangual Figueroa, “Speech or Silence.”

8. Chang, Struggles of Identity.

9. Brett McDonald, “Pushing the Dream,” New York Times, November 30, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000001929737/pushing-the-dream.html.

10. For an examination of cultural-deficit framing, see Baquedano-López, Alexander, and Hernández, “Equity Issues.” Dabach et al., “Future Perfect?,” is a more recent empirical study of how these deficit beliefs take hold in teachers’ perceptions of their students.

11.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

12.Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202.

13. Negrón-Gonzales, “Undocumented,” 271–72.

14. See the film Don’t Tell Anyone (No le digas a nadie), PBS, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/donttellanyone/.

15. For more information on traffic checkpoints and immigrants’ rights, see ACLU, “Know Your Rights: 100 Mile Border Zone,” https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone.

16. For a history of school safety agents (SSAs) in New York City, see the police-free tool kit, “Sustaining Police-Free Schools through Practice,” published by the New York City–based nonprofit organization Girls and Gender Equity in 2020 (https://ggenyc.org/police-free-schools-toolkit/), which details the long history of police presence in public schools—both in New York City and around the country—and which notes that SSAs have been under the jurisdiction of the New York City Police Department since 1998. SSAs “are certified New York City Special Patrolmen, and granted New York State peace officer authority—meaning, among other authorities, the power to use physical force and deadly physical force.”

17. I have assigned these two Dream Team members pseudonyms for confidentiality.

18. Here Ms. Janet also added more detail about the Dream Team’s work with the YLC and explained the YLC’s role in shaping immigration policy at the state and school levels: “So the high school . . . after school class has done a lot of work with the group called the New York State Youth Leadership Council, which is a group of undocumented mostly college students and in the protests we saw. . . . Most of the people there were high school students but it was planned by this organization. And they do a lot of really cool work in New York trying to get more rights for undocumented people; especially undocumented students. So like they actually wrote the New York Dream Act. They wrote it and they met with their senators and they talked to them and they said, ‘We want to pass this.’ And even though it didn’t pass, that law was basically written by college students.”

1. According to a 2017 report from the Center for American Progress, 16.7 million people “in the country have at least one unauthorized family member living with them in the same household.” Mathema, “Keeping Families Together.”

2. Dias, “First Roe, Then Plyler?”; Olivas, No Undocumented Child Left Behind.

3. This approach to protecting undocumented students’ rights to schooling by shrouding them in invisibility seems to run counter to the spirit of the Plyler decision. The justices writing for the majority believed that their decision to grant undocumented students protection under the Fourteenth Amendment would avoid creating what they call a “shadow population” of immigrant children by integrating undocumented students into primary and secondary schooling. However, federal and state guidance on how to interpret the ruling has de facto pushed students who are undocumented or from mixed-status families into those very shadows, placing the onus on the most vulnerable to disclose their undocumented status to educators when they are seeking out educational opportunities.

4. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship, Beneficence”; Mangual Figueroa, “La carta de responsabilidad.”

5. Belmont Report, 5.

6. Dyrness and Sepúlveda III, Border Thinking, 28; Dyrness and Sepúlveda III, “How Not to Think Like a State.”

7. Alfonso Serrano, “Obama Faces Immigration Protests in 40 U.S. Cities,” Aljazeera America, April 4, 2014, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/4/immigration-advocatespressureobamaondeportations.html; Chishti, Pierce, and Bolter, “Obama Record.”

8. For a helpful analysis of the changes and legal battles surrounding DACA—as well as a detailed discussion of the efforts that students, community organizers, and higher education staff and leadership have made to support undocumented students directly affected by these changes—see Wides-Muñoz, The Making of a Dream.

9. Chishti and Gelatt, “At Its 10th Anniversary.”

10. Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Rules for Dreamers, against Trump,” National Public Radio, June 18, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/18/829858289/supreme-court-upholds-daca-in-blow-to-trump-administration.

11. Chishti and Gelatt, “At Its 10th Anniversary.” DACA’s ongoing “legal limbo” has continued through the program’s eleventh anniversary (https://www.fwd.us/news/daca-court-case/#posts).

12. For more on the impact of Trump-era enforcement policies and political discourse on teachers, students, and schools, see the two-part City University of New York TV episode entitled “I Am a Dreamer Special: Beyond DACA,” facilitated by Cynthia N. Carvajal, CUNY’s inaugural director of undocumented and immigrant student programs, available at https://tv.cuny.edu/show/iamadreamer/PR2010779. Ee and Gándara, “Impact of Immigration Enforcement”; Rogers et al., Teaching and Learning.

13. Costello, “Trump Effect.”

14. KBI, CMS, and OJE. “Communities in Crisis.”

15. In 1982, one of the dissenting Supreme Court justices called undocumented immigrants “wetbacks” during the deliberations over the Plyler ruling (Driver, Schoolhouse Gate, 354). Trump, who in 2019 called Central American immigrants by the same derogatory name, attempted to revise the Plyler guidance by “giving states the option to deny undocumented students enrollment in K–12 schools” (Dias, “First Roe, Then Plyler?”). From the start, Plyler has raised the question of how educational policy can be leveraged to deter immigrants from residing in the United States or include them in those institutions most fundamental to this country’s well-being.

16. Clark et al., “Disproportionate Impact”; Gomez and Meraz, “Immigrant Families.”

17. This sense of “feeling illegal” is not surprising, given the dramatic increase in ICE’s presence throughout Brooklyn in the early days of the pandemic. One of the undocumented mothers in this study recounted to me the daunting presence of local police and federal immigration officers during lockdown, raising community fears of detention and deportation even as they were counted on to fill the role of essential service workers throughout the city. She also told me about citizens’ watches being organized at the grassroots level, so community members could warn one another about neighborhood checkpoints. For more on how this played out throughout New York City and in Brooklyn, see IDF and CCR, “ICE Policing.” For additional book-length treatments on the everyday experiences of undocumented immigrants living with surveillance and policing, see Asad, Engage and Evade; García, Legal Passing.

18. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Republicans Blaming Covid on Immigrants Threatens Public Health and Our Democracy,” MSNBC, October 2, 2021, https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/republicans-blaming-covid-immigrants-threatens-public-health-our-democracy-n1280599; Camilo Montoya-Galvez, “How Trump Officials Used Covid-19 to Shut U.S. Borders to Migrant Children,” CBS News, November 2, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-closed-borders-migrant-children-covid-19/.

19. Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Education”; Mangual Figueroa, “Citizenship and Language.”

20. Public schooling is a site where broader national debates over immigration policy, race, and patriotism are played out. As one example at the federal level, Republican state leaders have threatened to take Plyler back to court in hopes of repealing the ruling and discouraging immigrants from coming to the United States. More recently, in 2022, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund issued a statement condemning Texas governor Greg Abbott for threatening to revisit Plyler in the hopes of repealing it; this is the same governor who fueled anti-immigrant sentiment by referring to an invasion at the border between the United States and Mexico. Heidi Pérez-Moreno and James Barragán, “Critics Denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick’s ‘Invasion’ Rhetoric on Immigration, Saying It Will Incite Violence,” Texas Tribune, June 17, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/17/greg-abbott-dan-patrick-el-paso-invasion-immigration/amp/. The increasing political polarization in this country has made it harder than ever for teachers to broach topics considered controversial—specifically those related to race and immigration—because they fear retribution from their colleagues. At the school district level, Turner, “Districts’ Responses,” reports that school board members must contend with local residents who express anti-immigrant and anti-Spanish sentiment, calling for school policymakers to exclude noncitizen students and eliminate bilingual programming. In her study of district leaders’ responses to demographic change in two Wisconsin school districts, Turner finds that “these district leaders said the opposition did not impede their efforts to meet the educational needs” of English learners (23). We can see here evidence of conflation of student designation as language learners and their immigration status, perhaps as a precautionary measure to return local anti-immigrant discourse to matters of school language policy that are more easily discussed and managed. This is an indication of how hard it is for school leaders to respond to explicit threats to Plyler that take place among their constituents.

21. Through our collaborative research across six U.S. school districts, we found that teachers were scared to broach subjects considered political (Lowenhaupt, Dabach, and Mangual Figueroa, “Safety and Belonging”). Given the national polarization over immigration policy and border enforcement, the subject of immigration has become harder to teach and harder to discuss in school, reinforcing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” dynamic already in place.

22. Kleyn, Living, Learning, calls for “integrating immigration issues into teacher certification” (155); Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” advocate for teachers to develop “status consciousness” in order to become more informed advocates who “can counter school climates and societal discourses that can marginalize and dehumanize” (545).

23. Jeffries and Dabach, “Breaking the Silence.” As Parkhouse et al., “Teachers’ Efforts,” surmise from the interviews with public school teachers in the state of Virginia, “because political contexts were always in flux and ambiguous, their [teachers’] actions were often spontaneous and improvised responses to particular incidents. And while they found creative ways to support students, they lacked an understanding of what the law required of them” (538). A lack of clear guidance or professional conversation involving practicing educators has resulted in an ad hoc approach to advocating for undocumented students.

1. Most of us added new drawings to our original lifemaps; one of us shifted from sketching to creating a timeline. Creating a timeline was one way of representing continuity while also representing new ways of thinking about my own life that I was grappling with at this time.

2. Faulstich Orellana, “Work Kids Do,” 373.

3. Faulstich Orellana, “Work Kids Do,” 373; García-Sánchez, Language, 10.

4. Metaphors can help us to understand our own thinking about lifemaps and what they represent thematically and relationally for us as researchers. Faulstich Orellana, “Work Kids Do,” writes of the lifemaps she cocreated: “I find the metaphor of a camera helpful here. By moving back and forth between a wide-angle lens and a zoom lens, we may see things that we might not see with a more fixed gaze.” We used Faulstich Orellana’s work as a model when drafting our own metaphors about the process. Given our long-standing connections to this inquiry and to one another, we believe that these longitudinal lifemaps go beyond a snapshot of immigrant-origin children’s lives to provide a panoramic view of how, when, and which kinds of papers become prominent for us throughout a lifetime of growing up in mixed-status families.

5. As of March 13, 2023, nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws that allow undocumented immigrants to apply for a driver’s license; National Conference of State Legislators, “States Offering Driver’s Licenses to Immigrants,” https://www.ncsl.org/immigration/states-offering-drivers-licenses-to-immigrants.