When I began the study that forms the basis for this book, I was thrilled at the idea of going back to school. This would be the first time since I’d left classroom teaching to pursue a doctorate degree that I would spend most of my work week inside a public elementary school. I was returning to a familiar school system (I’d been a student and a teacher in New York City public schools), but I now had a different role as a professor entering the classroom to conduct ethnographic research.

In the eight years since I’d left public school teaching, I had been studying the relationship between citizenship and childhood in a wide variety of contexts. I had worked with immigrant families in California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, spending time in their homes and learning from the ways in which they sought opportunities within and beyond school settings. I had spent years preparing teachers to meet the needs of English language learners and students from immigrant families against the backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment. All of my experiences as a teacher, graduate student, and scholar were united by a desire to better understand the relationship between citizenship status and public schooling. I was hopeful that this new project would deepen my knowledge and allow me to help others in the field grasp how immigration status shapes the educational experiences of children and families living in the United States.

I’m drawn to this work for a variety of reasons, but certain aspects of my own childhood are relevant to how I enter the field. I grew up in a bilingual Puerto Rican household in upper Manhattan. My father, like all of my grandparents, was born on the island, and my mother was the first in her family to be born on the mainland. Unlike the families at the center of this study, everyone in my family was a U.S. citizen; however, this fact was not uncomplicated. My parents taught me that Puerto Ricans had been granted birthright citizenship shortly after the United States established colonial rule over the island. I also learned that Puerto Rican citizenship was two tiered: those of us born on the mainland had full birthright citizenship, while our Puerto Rican family members born and residing on the island had a form of statutory citizenship. They were granted many of the privileges of U.S. citizens but were barred from full participation in the nation’s democracy. For example, they were limited to voting in primaries (not general elections) and were unable to vote for their congressional representatives. From a young age, then, I learned that citizenship was uneven and unstable—as well as inextricable from larger questions of politics and place.

I attended elementary school in El Barrio at a time when nearly 50 percent of the Latin American population in New York City was Puerto Rican.1 Before every school assembly, we sang three anthems (“The Star Spangled Banner,” “La Borinqueña,” and “Lift Every Voice and Sing”) that shaped my burgeoning sense of the historical complexity and racial plurality of this nation-state.2 After graduating elementary school with a scholarship to attend a private middle and high school, I made weekend trips to El Centro to read issues of Pa’lante and study Puerto Rican history missing from my course textbooks.3 I left New York for college and returned to work as an English as a Second Language (ESL) and Spanish teacher, first in a South Bronx high school, then in an elementary and middle school in East New York, Brooklyn.4 While the Puerto Rican population citywide had declined by more than 15 percent during this ten-year period, the neighborhoods where I taught remained majority Puerto Rican.5 In the months after September 11, 2001—my first year of teaching—a group of public school teachers and I founded the New York Collective of Radical Educators in an effort to stop a broad set of policies from hurting our students.6 Our early campaigns included working to end military recruitment in schools and calling for an end to high-stakes testing.

When I returned in 2013 to launch this ethnographic project in one New York City classroom, I was no stranger to the school system or issues facing immigrant families. These experiences helped me build important relationships with administrators, teachers, and community organizers at the school I’ll call P.S. 432. One of the first challenges in establishing this study was figuring out how to connect with immigrant families that included undocumented students when public schools do not (for reasons that I will discuss below) collect or report demographic information on students’ and families’ citizenship status. After months of talking with P.S. 432’s teachers and learning about their students in the most general terms, I finally obtained the specific information I needed by meeting with the school’s ESL teacher.

P.S. 432’s ESL teacher barely spoke during my visit to her office. Instead, she handed me a document titled “Report by Place of Birth” (RPOB) and left me to read it on my own. The RPOB is a schoolwide roster of all registered students labeled by language ability. The roster also includes additional demographic information for each student: birthplace and date, year the student entered the public school system, and current grade. This ESL teacher had been charged—like many ESL teachers in New York City—with helping families who live and learn in languages other than English to enroll in school. In order to complete a family’s registration, she was required to administer a Home Language Survey (HLS) that included questions about which language or languages the family spoke at home. She used these data to decide whether to recommend that the child take a grade-specific language assessment called the New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test (NYSESLAT). These two procedures—administering the HLS and NYSESLAT—are used to determine students’ eligibility for ESL and bilingual programs. As ESL teachers enroll, assess, and assign classes to their newest students, they also contribute to the administrative work of creating and updating their school’s RPOB.

Looking over the roster, I remembered that I’d been handed a similar document during my first year of teaching. Back in 2001, when the principal of a small South Bronx high school gave me our school’s RPOB, most of our students hailed from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. They were Puerto Rican students with U.S. citizenship, or they were students from the Dominican Republic who had, by and large, obtained family-sponsored visas before entering the United States.7 I remembered that the NYSESLAT—like so many other standardized tests that I was responsible for administering—made it harder, rather than easier, for me to ascertain who my students were and what they knew. In some cases, bilingual students scored poorly because the test measured their fluency in middle-class cultural norms more than their proficiency in English. In other cases, students were made to take the test because the previous ESL teacher had assumed their Spanish surnames meant they did not speak English. In both instances, children were miscategorized as low performing or in need of remediation.8 In those early years of teaching, I directed my energy toward advocating for language learners and working against deficit views of them; I wasn’t yet thinking much about the connections between language proficiency and immigration status.

Twelve years later, when I returned to New York City as an ethnographer, I had learned to read between the lines. I had come to understand that basic demographic information used to assemble a portrait of a student’s schooling trajectory and primary language—their birthplace, year of enrollment, and age—could also tell a story about their immigration experiences. The student data remained the same but had taken on new meaning for me. After a decade of living and working alongside Latin American families with different immigration statuses, I had learned to attend to what is explicitly stated, but also to what is implied, by the demographic labels we use in schools. P.S. 432’s RPOB included five students—all ten- and eleven-year-old girls assigned to one fifth-grade classroom—who were born outside the United States. These five girls were Catalina and Aurora, who were born in Mexico and came to the United States as toddlers; Pita, who was born in El Salvador and migrated to New York City in early childhood; and Jenni and Tere, from the Dominican Republic, who had just moved to New York City that summer. I got to know these five students, along with a sixth, Hazel, who was born in the United States to parents from El Salvador. Soon after these initial conversations, all six students and their families agreed to participate in this study.

The RPOB contained specific demographic information about Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, Tere, Pita, and Hazel that also mirrored larger trends in U.S. immigration. At that time, the border between the United States and Mexico had become so highly militarized that families migrating north were staying in the United States on arrival rather than coming and going as they once had.9 The RPOB bore this out: there were only a handful of children in the upper elementary grades born in Mexico or Central America, they had enrolled in school before 2010, and they were now in fifth grade. In other words, nearly all the students at P.S. 432—a public school in one of Brooklyn’s primary immigrant neighborhoods—were born in the United States. This was because fewer and fewer families were crossing into the United States at the southern border with small children in tow; instead, younger children were born in the United States to immigrant parents who were doing their best to stay put. It was a coincidence that all of P.S. 432’s fifth graders born in Latin America were girls. While in this book I foreground immigration status over gender, a particular kind of closeness developed among us that has helped to sustain this project over many years.10

Reading between the lines helped me to see an argument that I’ve been making for some time: that immigration and educational policies are interrelated and shape the experiences of students attending public schools.11 In 1982, the Supreme Court held in Plyler v. Doe that Texas had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment when it restricted free public schooling to citizens of the United States or “legally admitted aliens.” Although the Court affirmed prior case law holding that public education is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, the majority in Plyler did emphasize the unique nature of public schooling. “Both the importance of education in maintaining our basic institutions and the lasting impact of its deprivation on the life of the child” distinguish it from other social welfare “benefits,” Justice Brennan wrote for the majority.12 In guaranteeing equal protection of the law, the Fourteenth Amendment precluded Texas from denying children access to free public education based on their or their guardian’s citizenship status.

In the decades since Plyler, federal and state education departments have worked to ensure that the law in action accords with the law on the books. In an effort to prevent inquiries that might have chilling effects on parents and children who are legally entitled to public education, various levels of government have mandated staff and teachers not ask for proof of immigration status when determining residency in the school district for purposes of enrollment.13 The implementation of these mandates has been far from uniform. On a local level, educators have—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully—violated these mandates by asking for forms of documentation that require parents and guardians to reveal their undocumented status.14 These unlawful violations can instill fear in immigrant families and result in the exclusionary practices that the Plyler ruling meant to guard against.

As a researcher and as a professor, it can be hard to speak openly with teachers about the connections between immigration status and schooling. Because educational policymakers at the federal, state, and school district levels typically require school staff to uphold Plyler by not inquiring about students’ status, educators have had little opportunity to talk openly about the relationship between students’ citizenship status and their educational experiences. The policies instituted since the Plyler ruling have been taken up as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mandate where talk about students’ immigration status in school is discouraged. This silence is reinforced by federal regulations detailed in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which, among other things, protects students’ privacy by prohibiting educators from sharing identifiable information about their students without parental consent. Where the mandates issuing from Plyler establish the “don’t ask” principle, FERPA strengthens the “don’t tell” part of the equation.15 The result is that educators protect educational access by establishing an institutional culture of “status quo silences” surrounding undocumented students.16

In the absence of professional conversations about students’ immigration status, educators rely on an existing lexicon of educational labels that can misconstrue students’ lived experiences. I often hear teachers refer to their immigrant students as English learners when in fact the vast majority of students designated as language learners are U.S.-born citizens.17 Educators and school leaders often assume that they should consult their school’s ESL teacher with questions about how to best serve their immigrant students, even when there is rarely anything in their training that prepares ESL teachers to take on the role of advocate.18 In this context, children’s privacy may be protected, but misnomers and false assumptions can make it hard for educators to serve them well.19

The labels that we educators use to refer to our students shape how we perceive them. At the same time, our inability to talk openly about the connections between immigration and education can render important dimensions of our students’ experiences invisible to us. This can lead to professional ignorance regarding citizenship’s significance—an ignorance we can project onto our young students if we assume that they are unaware of the realities associated with their immigration status. Working alongside immigrant families, I have wondered how we can teach our students well when we know so little about their lives. This question has only grown more urgent in light of research indicating the need for educators to develop pedagogy that draws on students’ experiences and knowledge to support new learning.20 My goal in this book is to broaden our shared understanding of just how much children know about citizenship so that we can also imagine new possibilities for supporting them through teaching, research, and advocacy.

In light of the preceding discussion regarding the ways in which demographic labels used in education illuminate or obscure important aspects of students’ lives, I’ll take a moment to define some of the key terms used throughout this book.21 Birthright U.S. citizenship is obtained on the principle known as jus soli—from the Latin word for soil—which confers citizenship to those born on U.S. territory.22 The ways in which this principle has been applied or denied to groups of people on the bases of race, gender, and other criteria have changed over time as politicians and lawmakers determine whom to welcome in, whom to keep out, and on what terms.23 A noncitizen person can become a U.S. citizen through a process called naturalization that leads first to obtaining lawful permanent resident (or green card) status and then to full citizenship. I use the terms “birthright citizenship” and “juridical citizenship” interchangeably. Both underscore that the rules regarding citizenship today are bound by laws that were first spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, I avoid using the term “legal citizenship” except when quoting other sources so as not to reify the legal/illegal binary prevalent in mainstream discourse that has shaped the national conversation on immigration in harmful and dehumanizing ways.24

The children and families at the center of this study often refer to being a U.S. citizen as “having papers” (papeles in Spanish), and I will frequently join them in using this expression. This suggests a binary formulation that is not entirely accurate because there is in fact a broader range of immigration statuses, but the emphasis on papers—on material documents—will be important as the book develops. I won’t define all of the possible U.S. immigration statuses here, and these categories change over time, but I will use the following terms to refer to four status types represented in this project: undocumented, lawful permanent resident, family-sponsored visa, and U.S. born.

The first of these terms—“undocumented”—merits elaboration. Mae Ngai explains that to be undocumented is “a historically specific condition that is possible only when documents (most commonly a visa) are required for lawful admission, a requirement that was born under the modern regime of immigration restriction.”25 Although there are many different ways to refer to this group, I follow the example set by organizations like the New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC, YLC for short), the first undocumented youth–led nonprofit in New York, who refuse the language of illegality and, along with other immigrants living without papers, proclaim that they are “undocumented, unapologetic, and unafraid.”26

Beyond references to an individual’s immigration status, I will consistently use the term “mixed status” to refer to the families at the heart of this book. A mixed-status family is one kind of immigrant family that “may be made up of any combination of legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and naturalized citizens. Their composition also changes frequently, as undocumented family members legalize their status and legal immigrants naturalize.”27 At many points in this book, we will encounter mixed-status families, classrooms, and peer groups; we will track both the differing levels of vulnerability and possibilities for solidarity that arise within these contexts.

“Juridical citizenship” is not the only category of belonging within a nation-state. Studies of “cultural citizenship” examine bids for inclusion made by negotiating access to the everyday social, economic, and democratic life of a community through active expressions of belonging despite lacking legal rights.28 This may include, for example, adults speaking out publicly about health care rights, delivering performances representing community-wide concerns, and organizing protests decrying deportation.29 This kind of civic participation is not dependent on juridical citizenship; in fact, these examples call attention to the many ways in which undocumented and noncitizen community members actively work to access rights and resources while also being denied access to birthright citizenship and naturalization procedures. Moreover, this “nonjuridical concept of membership suggests the production of collectivities that are not national but transnational, sited in borderlands or in diaspora.”30 We will attend closely to the specific impact of juridical status on childhood and schooling while also becoming attuned to the wide variety of meanings activated by the term “citizenship.”

Public schools play an important role in socializing students to ideas about citizenship by teaching certain forms of participation in the country’s political system; these can range from pledging allegiance to the U.S. flag to voting in local and national elections.31 Educators often use the term “citizenship” metaphorically to mean good behavior or belonging: some districts issue report cards that provide a citizenship grade for attendance and homework completion, while others display bulletin boards that read “citizens of the world” in their school hallways.32 This book explores examples like these in much greater detail, but from the perspective of students and their families. I use the broad term “educator” to refer to school leaders and classroom teachers as well as other adults working in schools, such as guidance counselors, parent coordinators, and office staff.

This book focuses on what citizenship means to children and how they communicate their understanding in the course of their everyday lives. In the coming pages, I share what I have learned from and about Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, Tere, Pita, and Hazel throughout the past decade. Each has taught me valuable lessons about the ways citizenship matters; each has shown me that she is not limited by the labels assigned to her. Across the length of this project, they have reiterated through their words and their actions that they want the adults in their lives to hear their voices and understand their stories. I hope that this book helps to amplify their perspectives so that educators can recognize just how much children know and bring to school each day.

Le doy gracias al grupo de niñas y a sus queridas familias, quienes confiaron en mí a lo largo de estos años. A Spencer Foundation/ National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellowship offered crucial support for data collection from 2013–14. I’m grateful to the real Ms. Daniela for welcoming me into her classroom as an ethnographer and for remaining my friend once I’d left. Teachers Janet and Claudia helped to deepen the intergenerational dimension of this project. My editor, Pieter Martin, was committed to this book at every stage. My thanks also to Rachel Moeller and Terence Smyre for their expert guidance in seeing the book through to its print and Manifold versions. Thank you to my students (many of them also teachers) who worked closely with me on data analysis: Daiana, Gabriella, Julianne, Meredith, Rosa, Sindy, and Viviana at Rutgers and Carmín, Julissa, Lucy, Rachel, Rocío, and Wendy at CUNY. I finished writing this book at The Graduate Center and counted on the support of many colleagues, in particular Wendy Luttrell in the PhD program in Urban Education and José del Valle in the PhD program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures. My work with Tatyana Kleyn at CUNY-IIE and Rebecca Lowenhaupt on PIECE—along with our project collaborators—has deepened my thinking about education and immigration. Thank you to Kate Vieira for reading and rereading drafts and to Marjorie Faulstich Orellana for her brilliant feedback. Dear friends and colleagues commented on sections along the way: Cristina Mendez, Cynthia Carvajal, Daniela Alulema, Dave Stovall, Edwin Mayorga, Erica Turner, Fabienne Doucet, Jenna Queenan, and Maddy Fox. A special thanks goes to Liliana Garces and Lisa Kelly for their helpful guidance on the sections regarding Plyler’s significance. My family—near and far, pasado y presente—have supported me and my work at every turn. Mami, Papi, Eli: los quiero. Time and again, the women I call my sisters have given me ánimo. Ben, my closest and most caring reader, believed in this book before I ever started writing it and has read every word I’ve put down since. This book, this life, are better for the love he’s brought to it.