An Interview with the Dream Team

Injustices That We Want to Change

I want to begin by describing the classwork that laid the foundation for the fifth graders’ interview with the Dream Team. Over the course of the school year, the fifth graders had studied U.S. history from 1860 to 1970, with an emphasis on the history of race and racism; they focused on topics such as slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century. This integrated humanities curriculum was called “Resistencia,” and the teachers wanted to end the year with a unit they named “Causas de Quinto,” which they would base on students’ ideas about pressing contemporary social and political issues. The teachers polled the fifth graders to find out which social issues they felt most connected to by asking students to complete a form entitled “Injusticias Que Queremos Cambiar” (Injustices that we want to change). The instructions read: “Hagan una lista de las 10 injusticias más importantes que quieren cambiar en el mundo” (Make a list of the 10 most important injustices that you want to change in the world). Students completed the sheet by writing down the social issues that they cared most about and numbering them in order of importance from 1 to 10.

On the day her students completed the form, Ms. Daniela talked with the class about the activity and how it represented the culmination of their curriculum. The conversation began as Ms. Daniela posed the guiding question:

So, la pregunta es qué injusticias existen en el mundo hoy en día. La reunión de hoy es seria, porque todo lo que nosotros hagamos desde ahora hasta fin del año va a ser basada en la actividad que hacemos hoy. Vamos a decidir qué causas queremos defender. ¿Qué es lo que realmente nos pone como bien apasionados que queremos luchar por esa causa? So, es en serio. Okay. So la primera pregunta es- y queremos solamente tres o cuatro lluvia de ideas. ¿Qué injusticias existen en el mundo hoy en día?

So the question is what injustices exist in the world today. Today’s meeting is serious, because everything that we do from now until the end of the year is based on the activity that we do today. We are going to decide which causes we want to defend. What is it that really gets us very passionate so that we want to fight for that cause? So, this is serious. Okay? So, the first question is- and we want only three or four brainstorms- what injustices exist in the world today?

I wasn’t present for this morning meeting, but by this point in the school year, Ms. Daniela helped me with data collection by recording classroom conversations that she knew I’d be particularly interested in. We had agreed to audio record all of the lessons in the Causas de Quinto unit, and I had left her an extra recording device to use on days I wasn’t visiting the school. That day, Ms. Daniela sent me the following note about the conversation:

There are many classrooms in the United States where teachers would fear raising the subject of immigration in school, but Ms. Daniela’s was one where children felt comfortable talking about the injustices of family separation across national borders and their experiences of racial and linguistic discrimination. As I read her email, I was reminded of the personal memoir unit from earlier in the year. Ms. Daniela’s mention of the students’ responses to her “open-ended question” recalled how the focal girls took up general questions about childhood memories as opportunities to express the realities of growing up undocumented in mixed-status families (see chapter 3). The next day, I visited Ms. Daniela’s classroom to pick up the recorder and audio files. Let’s listen together as Aurora shared two injustices:

Okay. Las injusticias que somos. . . . Es que si ya eres como un poco mayor- pero en verdad no eres tan, tan y si no eres tan como viejita y por eso no te dan tu visa. Y cuando, y cuando eres maestra, porque mi abuela es maestra y mi abuelo también. Ni uno de sus hijos fueron nada importante, so eso salió mal, y entonces sí mi abuela como maestra y ella quiso agarrar a su visa para venir a visitarnos a mí y mi mamá y mi papá. Se lo negaron siete veces. So, trató siete veces, y mi mama quiere que ella intenta de nuevo, pero ella dice—para qué si me lo van a negar otra vez—porque ya se la bajaron sus ánimos de que es un injusticia que no dejen pasar.

Okay the injustice that we are. . . . Is that if you are a little older but not that, that, that- and if you’re not so old and because of that they don’t give you your visa. And when, and when you are a teacher, because my grandmother is a teacher and my grandfather too. None of their children became anything important, so that came out badly, and then yes my grandmother as a teacher wanted to access a visa to come visit me, my mother, and my father. They denied it seven times. So, she tried seven times and my mom wants her to try again but she says “why if they’re going to deny it to me again” because her spirits are down from this injustice that they don’t let pass.

Aurora had not seen her grandmother since she left Mexico with her mother at the age of two, and both she and her mother longed for her grandmother to visit Brooklyn. Aurora and her parents could not visit Mexico because the risks of crossing the border into the United States a second time were too high; instead, her family tried to obtain a tourist visa for her grandparents to visit them in New York City.

As Aurora shared her story, she was also thinking out loud about the relationship between different kinds of status and belonging. She associated a right to immigration status (being granted a visa) with social, professional, and educational status (it was unfair that her grandmother, a teacher, was unable to obtain a visa). Just as Ms. Daniela had noted in her email, Aurora strongly associated professionalization with authorization—hence the injustice of a teacher’s not being granted a visa. This strong symbolic connection between educational achievement and the right to be in the United States is also central to Aurora’s second injustice. She continued:

Otra es- sorry- otra es que, um, aquí nosotros y los que pue- los que tienen oportunidad de venir de allá y aquí- aquí no les dan oportunidad a veces. Es que yo. Es que yo- yo en el primer año yo sufrí porque un injusticia que algunos americanos o cosas así que no les gustan los latinos y son maestros como muchas. Yo me- mi mamá se dio cuenta y yo también que una vez había esta maestra que, uhm, no, no quería que yo pasara solamente porque yo era la única latina de la clase. Y, entonces eso- después todo- cuando mi mami di- cuando mi mamá le habló con ella y con la principal para decirle—¿cómo es posible?—porque mi mamá notó que- porque la maestra dijo que- yo pienso que ella no va a pasar y so- y mi mamá se dio cuenta que yo era la única latina y por esa razón sí era. Y ella decía porque no sabía nada. Y me hicieron un examen y mi mamá pidió que fuera con una maestra de otra escuela para que- porque tú ves que la maestra puede hablar con otras maestras y así. So, mi mamá decidió que hacer con otra y saqué noventa y nueve punto nueve. So, es- y después el siguiente dí- al siguiente año yo me fui para New Jersey y fui- um- saqué mi diploma de estudiante del mes. Y se lo fuimos a enseñar al, la, la principal para decirle cómo es posible que mi maestra no me iba a pasar de año y saqué examen cien y diploma del mes el otro año. Y ella se llevó el diploma y se lo enseñó a la maestra. Cómo es posible que no me iba a dejar pasar.

Another is- sorry- another is that, um, here we and those who ca- those who have the opportunity to come from there and here- here they don’t give them opportunities sometimes. It’s that I. It’s that I- I was in first grade and I suffered because an injustice that some Americans or something like that they don’t like Latinos and they’re teachers like many. I- my mom realized and I did too that once this teacher didn’t want to pass me because I was the only Latina in the class. And then after everything- when my mom said- when my mom talked to her and the principal to say “how is it possible”- because my mom- because the teacher said that, “I think, she’s not going to pass” and my mom realized I was the only Latina and that was why. And she said it was because I didn’t know anything. And they gave me a test and my mom requested that it be with a teacher from another school because you see this teacher could talk to other teachers. So, my mom decided to try it with someone else and I got a ninety-nine point nine. So, then- and then the next day- the next year I went to New Jersey and I got- um- a student-of-the-month diploma. And we went to show it- to the- the- principal from the previous year to say how was it possible that she wouldn’t let me pass when I got one hundred and diploma-of-the month in the following year. And she took the diploma to the teacher and showed her. How was it possible that she was not going to let me pass.

Aurora recounted this story often during fifth grade because it allowed her to describe the adversity she experienced in the United States without disclosing her undocumented status.7 There’s an interesting change in pronouns that shows her real-time negotiation of belonging and disclosure. She started with a “we” that she quickly corrected to a “those” and then spoke, albeit hesitatingly, in the first person. This testimonio—in which Aurora linked her personal experience up to a broader struggle faced by “those who have the opportunity to come from there to here”—underscores her view of the redemptive power of papers (her “student-of-the-month diploma”) as a way to prove that she (“the only Latina in the class”) could successfully achieve a sense of belonging in school.

It is significant that the verb pasar (to pass) is central to both stories. The first injustice described attempts at passing through borders, while the second recounted passing from one grade to the next. In both cases, Aurora and her family were denied an opportunity because of their country of origin. Moreover, in the absence of immigration documentation, Aurora’s stories focused on the importance of obtaining other papers, like teaching degrees and student-of-the-month diplomas. As mentioned in chapter 2, this emphasis on what Chang calls “hyperdocumentation”8 is typical of mixed-status families’ attempts to pursue educational achievement as a kind of substitute for papeles and as a pathway to acceptance and belonging. Although the fifth graders had become accustomed to hearing a number of refrains about their own education as they approached graduation—“you can do anything you put your mind to!”—Aurora knew that in addition to her own individual choices, she would confront a number of institutional barriers linked to immigration status that would affect her future. As a result, she associated education with a pathway to belonging while also knowing the differences between papeles and diplomas. Let’s see how her thinking developed as the class turned to preparing interview questions for the Dream Team.

Preparing for the Interview

Once the fifth-grade students completed the worksheet to rank the social causes that mattered most to them, the teachers set about planning. The student-generated topics ranged from bullying and racism to animal abuse and climate change, but the majority of students across the four fifth-grade classes listed immigration—or a related phrase like derechos de inmigrantes (immigrants’ rights)—as their top choice. For the students in Ms. Daniela’s classroom, immigration was a defining aspect of their families’ everyday lives even though the majority were born in the United States. They all lived in a distinctly immigrant neighborhood; they were tuned in to national debates over immigration reform. Just that year they had welcomed newcomer students Tere and Jenni, who had immigrated to Brooklyn in September. Ms. Daniela thought of this unit as an opportunity for her students to meet older immigrant youth who could inspire them to take civic action as they entered middle and high school, and so she hoped to find student activists working within the national movement for immigrant justice that her students could learn from directly. When she told me about this idea, I introduced her to Ms. Janet, an ESL teacher at the neighborhood public high school who was also the faculty advisor to the school’s Dream Team. Together, Ms. Daniela and Ms. Janet arranged for the fifth graders to visit the high school and interview members of the Dream Team.

Ms. Daniela prepared the class for their visit at the high school in two ways: first, teaching about youth leadership in advocating for inclusive immigration policy reform; and second, co-constructing a set of questions and norms to guide the interview. To develop shared knowledge of the movement, Ms. Daniela drew on news coverage and digital footage of interviews with the group of students they called Dreamers. Drawing on the language used in these clips, Ms. Daniela and her students employed the vocabulary of the Dreamers and the Dreamers’ movement to refer to the youth activists that they were studying. The day before the interview, the class watched a video depicting key moments in the political campaign to pass the federal Dream Act. Ms. Daniela gave students a two-column chart to organize their thoughts into categories—what they knew about activists in the Dreamer movement and what they wanted to know—and she instructed her students to take specific notes on the policy goals, political strategies, and outcomes that they heard mentioned.

Ms. Daniela paused occasionally to ask questions: “So, what strategy have you guys heard so far in this video?” “Can you guys see what they’re doing here?” To these questions, the children replied, “Marches, planning, graduates, leaders.” Ms. Daniela made explicit connections to other social movements that they had studied: “Yeah, the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a sit-in. So they’re going to a government office and they say: ‘We’re gonna sit here until you listen to us.’ So make sure you have it in your list of strategies.” When one child asked why the students in the New York Times–produced video “Pushing the Dream” were wearing graduation regalia, Ms. Daniela paused to invite student ideas, and Aurora jumped in to answer.9

Aurora was excited about sharing just how much she knew with the class; she sounded assertive and animated as she explained that the graduation gown iconography represented a call for educational access, U.S. citizenship (papers), and an end to deportation. Graduation ceremonies, like birthdays (as we saw in chapter 3), evoked questions of belonging linked to citizenship, nationality, and the threat of being forcibly removed from the United States. In turn 3, Aurora switched to Spanish when saying diplomas and graduados, using language that reminded me of conversations I’d had with her mother, Marta, earlier that year.

Marta often raised concerns about what opportunities Aurora would have as an undocumented student if the family remained in the United States:

Aurora tiene su meta de que ella va ser abogada. Y que no le importa que si ella es inmigrante o no. Que ella tiene fe en Dios que algún día le van a dar una oportunidad en los Estados Unidos y que ella va ser alguien que le pasen en la televisión y digan—Aurora Sánchez es un orgullo hispano—Que es lo que ella quiere escuchar. Ajá, entonces es, ese es su propósito de ella. Y, bueno, gracias a Dios, mira hoy estamos con el cuarto diploma de que ella está en honores este año. Cuatro veces. Entonces, ¿tú cómo le vas a decir a tu hija que te trae esos honores de la escuela que no? ¿Algo que ella quiera?

Aurora has the goal of being a lawyer. And it doesn’t matter if she’s an immigrant or not. She has faith in God that one day she’ll be given the opportunity in the United States and that she is going to be someone that will appear on TV and they’re going to say “Aurora Sánchez is the pride of all Hispanics.” That is what she wants to hear. Uh huh, yes then, that is her goal. And, well, thank God, look today we’re here on her fourth honors diploma this year. Four times. So how are you going to say no to your daughter who brings honors home from school? Something that she wants?

Taken together, Aurora and Marta’s comments remind us of the spiraling curriculum of citizenship described in chapter 2. In Aurora’s shifts between English and Spanish, she demonstrated that issues of education and juridical status were discussed both at home and at school. Marta and I had had many conversations like the one transcribed above, often when Aurora was present—conversations in which Marta expressed a hope that educational documentation (diplomas) could in fact substitute for immigration documents. The goal of being a lawyer—a person assumed to have U.S. citizenship who also has expert knowledge of the legal system and advocates for immigrant rights—and the fantasy of publicity (“will appear on TV”) show the powerful association between educational achievement and citizenship. It is important to note here that Marta’s belief in the importance of educational achievement and educational success—referenced above in Aurora’s second injustice—runs counter to enduring deficit views of immigrant Spanish-speaking families as uninterested in their children’s education.10

The prospect of visiting the Dream Team, a group of high school students explicitly linking education and a pathway to U.S. citizenship, activated for Aurora long-standing concerns about papeles both juridical and academic. The myth of educational achievement in which honors diplomas can solve inequality—a discourse reinforced in the family but also everywhere in schooling—is evident in both Aurora’s and her mother’s words. What we see in Aurora’s and Marta’s comments is a hope, however tenuous, that educational achievement will ultimately lead to U.S. citizenship. The idea that education will result in belonging and that public education will equalize students is present in the Plyler ruling. Justice Brennan summarized the court’s view that education “is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.”11 The prevailing justices argued that denying undocumented children access to a K–12 public school education amounted to “penalizing these children for their presence within the United States.”12 To an extent, what Aurora was navigating was the persistence of this rhetoric of equalization and access without a mechanism for full citizenship. She had both internalized the emphasis on education as a pathway to belonging and already encountered the reality of institutional barriers to her advancement that no diploma can remedy. These are the ambitions and anxieties about her own future that Aurora carried into her visit with the Vista High School Dream Team.

The next steps for Ms. Daniela’s class were to draft their interview questions and to develop a set of guidelines for conducting the interview. Drawing on what they had learned about the Dreamer movement, the fifth graders wrote their questions on index cards, and Ms. Daniela prominently displayed them in the classroom. The questions ranged from topics focused on goals (“Did they get in a university?” and “How will there lifes [sic] be with no deportation?”), community organizing (“What was your strategies?” and “Do you use words or violence to fix your problem?”), and emotions (“How do the Dreamers feel?” and “Are you happy the way you work?”). After compiling these and other questions, Ms. Daniela initiated a discussion of which types of questions would be appropriate to ask during the interview. She introduced the idea that there were “two kinds of kids” on the Dream Team, referring to the fact that some of the students were documented and some were undocumented. For Ms. Daniela, this was important for the fifth graders to consider when deciding what to ask and how to ask it. She explained to the class:

So I put the questions that are here because you guys did a really nice job of phrasing them in a way that kids who are in the Dreamer Club at the High School I think will feel comfortable answering. So one thing to know about this Club is that it has two kinds of kids. It has kids who would be considered Dreamers; meaning they themselves are immigrants who came over and they’re trying to get the Dream Act law passed to like personally benefit them. This Club also has kids who are what’s called allies, which means they’re like supporters of the Dreamer Movement. Now, to be sensitive to the allies and to the Dreamers, we’re not gonna ask them questions about whether or not they are a Dreamer or an ally. If they choose to tell us their personal story. Like, for instance, if one of them chooses to tell us, you know, “I came over the border when I was five years old and I don’t have documents.” That’s their personal choice to tell us that, but we’re not gonna ask because that’s something that’s very personal and um private and they might not feel comfortable sharing that information with a group of strangers.

Ms. Daniela was not the only teacher to describe the composition of the Dream Team in this way. The following day, during our visit with the high schoolers, Ms. Janet—their teacher and faculty advisor—also told the fifth graders, “The Dream Team is not just Dreamers, though. So we’re a group and we are Dreamers or undocumented students but we’re also allies. This means like friends and supporters. So not everyone in our group is undocumented.” Ms. Janet’s self-correction, from “Dreamers” to “undocumented students,” can be attributed to the many conversations she’d been part of in which members of the YLC and students at Vista High decided to adopt the term undocumented over Dreamers. She and her students followed the YLC’s lead in choosing “undocumented,” a term that was both more inclusive of students who were not as academically high achieving and of undocumented loved ones that were not students at all. Emphasizing the mixed-status nature of the Dream Team meant that the audience couldn’t presume the immigration status of any particular member, thus allowing participants to make their own decisions about disclosing or withholding immigration status. It was also a broader political strategy that invited us all to get involved by modeling ways in which directly affected students and their peers might work together in solidarity.

Here, both teachers drew the fifth graders’ attention to the strategic silences that student members of the Dreamer’s movement used to avoid revealing their or their peers’ status in public settings. This is not the top-down silence mandated by the guidance issuing from Plyler in order to protect undocumented students by not inquiring about students’ immigration status in schools. It is instead a grassroots strategy in which individuals choose to disclose or not disclose their undocumented status as part of a collective effort to bring about visibility and change. The decision on the part of activists to break that silence, to speak out, is central to the Dreamer movement. As Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales explains:

As the potential consequences of discovery are so severe, silence is a fundamental part of the undocumented experience in this country. Undocumented children learn, generally following the lead of their parents or older siblings, the importance of guarding information about their status. Yet more and more, a generation of these young people is coming out of the shadows, demanding to be seen, proudly donning the label “undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic.”13

To study the Dreamers is to study a movement for immigrant rights explicitly predicated on the idea of taking risks to disclose one’s undocumented status in order to push for change.14 As we have seen in chapters 2 and 3, the fifth graders in Ms. Daniela’s classroom had ample experience negotiating the risks of disclosure when it came to the question of juridical status at home and school.

Here we see the children developing their own research methodology for the study of citizenship and schooling, reckoning with how to both solicit speech and protect a right to silence. The focal students had always been active participants—not just passive subjects—in our study. They asked to review what their iPod devices had recorded, and they helped me collect and analyze data. But here the children themselves became the interviewers, thinking through in their own terms many of the questions I had faced as they developed interview protocols and considered the ethics of elicitation for their own research on the Dreamers. Not unlike the questions of informed consent and confidentiality that concerned the students at the start of this project (chapter 1), the students were especially interested in the idea that the Dreamers’ decisions to share their immigration stories and statuses were personal choices. The following conversation about disclosure and trust took place as they puzzled through what was at stake in talk about citizenship and status.

This interaction began with Maysi echoing Ms. Daniela’s own words—“it’s their choice”—and adding “it’s their lives.” Maysi’s use of the deictic pronoun “their” made clear that the reality she described was not her own. Manuel countered Maysi’s idea that “they”—the Dream Team members—would not share their immigration status by appealing to the idea of a collective identity among the students in the class. Manuel was the U.S.-born son of immigrant parents, and his bid for an inclusive “we,” with an emphasis on the word “community,” appealed to a sense of camaraderie and solidarity (turn 3).

Ms. Daniela worked to acknowledge her students’ sense of connection to one another (“we are a community”) while also reiterating that disclosing status involves risk (“there’s real reasons why they might not wanna share”). In turn 5, Aurora jumped in to elaborate on why an undocumented student would choose to guard that information closely. The level of detail she furnished in this brief story indicates just how familiar she was with the hypothetical situation that she recounted. In turn 7, Aurora slowly worked up to depicting a scene that escalated quickly from a student being asked for a name, to being asked for ID, and then being punished for being “an immigrant.” The way she spoke mirrored the content of her story. Starting slowly, she elongated her vowel sounds (“or something maybe”) but began to speak much more quickly as she quoted the language used when police demand papers (“your ID” and “he’s an immigrant”). The final words in the story—shifting from the police officer’s command “you may arrest him” to “take her back”—uttered in increasingly hushed tones is as close as Aurora came to articulating what she actually feared might happen to her.

As we know, Aurora’s spiraling curriculum of citizenship commenced at a young age. On biweekly trips to flea markets in and around the city with her parents to sell women’s clothing, Aurora had witnessed them being asked for their documents; at times federal agents would ask them to show their driver’s licenses at traffic checkpoints set up by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, while at other times local police would ask them to display their vendor licenses at the markets.15 The anxiety produced by these encounters is evident in the stories that Aurora told throughout the Causas de Quinto unit. At the same time, Maysi and Manuel, U.S.-born peers with immigrant parents, also worked to articulate their connections to what the class was studying. The students’ differing levels of vulnerability to surveillance and deportation, evident between U.S.-born and undocumented members of Ms. Daniela’s class, shaped their preparation for the interview, and they carried this awareness into their visit with the Dreamers the following day.

Interviewing the Dream Team

As we know from Interlude I, the walk from P.S. 432 to Vista High School was fraught with Hazel’s concerns about papers and Aurora’s revealing uncertainty about which of the buildings we passed were factories or schools. Once we arrived at Vista High School, Aurora’s anxiety was palpable as we stood for several long minutes in front of the security desk under the school safety officer’s gaze.16 Ms. Janet met us in the lobby to sign us in to the building and then escort us to the fourth floor. The fifth graders could not contain their excitement as they walked through the fourth-floor hallway; they whispered loudly about the high school students we passed, and they shouted out things they noticed (like the lockers they imagined using in the future).

We entered the classroom where the interview would take place, where three Dream Team members awaited us, seated at a long table at the front of the room. The fifth graders took their seats and took out their notebooks. The high school panelists started the interview with a formulaic introduction that each of them repeated: “Hi. My name is ____. I am a ____ grader, and I am part of the Dream Team.” However, they quickly turned to a more substantive description of their group. Nina, one of the panelists, explained:

Okay. So the Dream Team is a group uh- of stu- a group of students. Undocumented students and supporters who- Wait, okay. We’re a group of undocumented students and supporters. We just basically try to make- Okay. Oh gosh! I’m nervous. Okay, so, yeah, we just try to make this space as like comfortable for everyone, for undocumented students especially and it’s a confidential space. So everything stays within the group.

These brief opening lines communicated a lot: Nina’s version of the “two kinds of kids” formulation that we heard from the teachers (“undocumented students and supporters”), her own sense of anxiety (“Gosh! I’m nervous”), and one of the key purposes of the Dream Team—to “create a comfortable space for everyone” and “for undocumented students especially.” Her metapragmatic commentary about the group’s norms—“it’s a confidential space so everything stays within the group”—underscored the importance of mutual trust and discretion. By sharing this rule with us at the start of the interview, Nina was in effect asking us to follow it as well. I asked permission from the three Dream Team members to publish interview excerpts here; two students, Sula and Nina, agreed to have their voices included in this chapter.17

Throughout the course of the interview, the high schoolers talked about their activism. Their testimonios—just like their introductions—started out in general terms and grew more specific over time. This paralleled a shift in the questions that the fifth graders asked, beginning with broad ones like “why is this important?” To this, the high schoolers described the importance of taking political action. One of the panelists, Sula, explained that she “wanted undocumented students to feel like there’s like people all over the place that supports them with like their situation,” while Nina recounted that “a lot of undocumented students want to have a better future. So that was a way of showing support and like a way of showing how like they really want this too, like they wanted this to like really like pass.” The students articulated the many ways they could support one another—by creating student clubs founded on confidentiality, by showing up to protests together, and by calling on local and state politicians to support legislative reform that would create opportunities for undocumented students to apply for financial aid to pursue higher education and ultimately provide a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

As she spoke more about the group’s activities at Vista High School—specifically their work in recruiting new members to join the Dream Team—Nina talked in greater detail about her peers and herself. Gaining visibility and welcoming new members was important for the Vista High School Dream Team because, Nina went on to say, “in our school there are some undocumented students as well. So for them to know that there’s someone here for them. And there’s a group that they can join.” She shared that her motivation for being a part of the group was personal: “I joined it because it benefits me and then I wanted to learn more about it and like what can I do not just for myself but for my family as well.” With each student’s turn, we learned more about why the high school students chose to be part of the Dream Team: to take actions in the present that could lead toward a better future, and to advocate for educational opportunity and citizenship that would benefit them, their loved ones, and the broader communities that they belonged to.

One of the final questions posed during the interview was “What made you brave to do this act?” This question was simple, but it communicated an understanding of the risks involved in disclosure. It also opened on to the following exchange between the Dream Team members Nina and Sula and Ms. Daniela’s student Maysi.

Nina and Sula focused on the sense of collective purpose that they felt as a way of explaining how they had surmounted any individual hesitation that they experienced as activists. Nina described the importance of the interpersonal relationships involved—talking with other students (turn 2), working to positively influence public perception about immigration (turn 6), and advocating for the Dream Act (turn 4). Earlier in the interview she had also mentioned how much she had learned from the YLC community organizers who had worked closely with Ms. Janet and the Dream Team members over the last year.18 Sula added that speaking out as a group instilled pride in her and countered the negative perceptions or responses that they faced during public demonstrations (turns 3 and 7).

The students repeatedly made connections between the personal experience of growing up in a mixed-status community and the political context in which undocumented members of that community are denied access to rights and opportunities. As they vacillated between these micro and macro perspectives, they co-constructed a set of conditions—of camaraderie, trust, and confidentiality—in which they and other students could talk about their undocumented loved ones.

Maysi shared her parents’ immigration status and attempts to pass the citizenship test (turn 8), while Nina mentioned her undocumented mother (turn 9), making clear that her involvement in the Dream Team connected her to a broader immigration rights movement that also affected them in a deeply personal way. The connection between parents’ and children’s previous immigration experiences and their futures was strong. For Maysi and her peers, this interview and the visit to Vista High School foreshadowed their own sense of possibility about whose footsteps they would follow and which rights they would have access to.

Writing Thank-You Letters

The day after the fifth graders’ interview with the Vista High School Dream Team, Ms. Daniela asked them to write thank-you letters to the high school panelists. Ms. Daniela asked her students to consider why this might matter: “I want you to think what are all the reasons why it’s important to thank these high schoolers for their activism.” The children talked in pairs. Aurora and Maysi had the following exchange in which Aurora referred to her undocumented status. Although Aurora had shared this before in the private small group conversations that took place in our grupo de análisis meetings, this was as close as she’d come to disclosing her status out loud in the classroom.

Aurora jump-started the conversation with Maysi right away while also grappling with what she would say. Fidgeting with the iPod in turn 1, the recorder picked up muffled sounds as she covered the lapel microphone (djun djun) and rubbed it against her shirt (scritch scritch). Across turns 1 and 3 Aurora repeated the phrase “I think it’s really important” five times—as if to work up the courage to state her next thought—and she kept repeating the word “apparently” while also noting that she was doing so. This chatter was a kind of hedging; Aurora was both asserting the importance of this letter-writing activity and what she was about to say while also dismissing her own ideas as merely speculative (“apparently”). At the same time, Brandon spoke loudly into the microphone, further heightening Aurora’s awareness that what she was about to say would be heard by others.

After taking a momentary break from talking to reread Ms. Daniela’s instructions, Aurora began to describe an “us” that recalled the Dream Team strategy of claiming membership in a mixed-status community without necessarily divulging individual status. But as she spoke, that “us” began to sound more like a “we” that specifically situated her within an undocumented group of students. Starting off hurriedly, in turn 7, Aurora began her disclosure with the phrase “some of us are not. in. doc.” switching between English and Spanish with the start of the word indocumentado (undocumented, as she had earlier with graduados). Then, in the same turn, Aurora changed her pace noticeably—speaking loudly and at a more normal speed—to explain that the Dream Team’s work was important because it would “help” students and future generations. Her change in delivery paralleled a change in topic; she had moved from talking about her own lack of papers to describing her future as a student (“later on when we’re in high school and we’re gonna turn into college”). We can see, however, that Aurora understood the Dreamers’ activism in relation to her own uncertain future and to the future of other undocumented student “generations that are coming.”

Ms. Daniela—who had been walking around the classroom listening to the conversations among the pairs—overheard Aurora’s contribution and exclaimed, “That’s so powerful!” Surprisingly, Aurora asked if she could share her ideas with the whole class. When Ms. Daniela regained her students’ attention and asked for pairs to share their ideas with the whole group, Aurora was the first one to be called on:

↑Um? Hhhh. That? I think they’re- I think the Drea^tapmers^taptap? are^tap not just^tap doing it by.^tap by their act? ^tap The Dream Act? they’re not just doing it for themse:::lves? to get. ↑to get a better future::: and for. but if^fftya? But I think they’re also^taptap doing for the gene^taprations^tap that are^tap coming^tap cuz, apparently hhh. If if^{ffff mmmiffff} If we were just growing up- right? and what they’re doing right now? like they^scritch win^scritch what they wanna do? they. ^taptap how you^tap say it? ^taptap They reach^tap their^tap goal^tap what they^tap wanted to do? so that’s really gonna help us when we wanna go to hh college hh cuz then we’re not gonna be fighting anymore^ffff. °That’s ri:::lly cool^swissshhh yeah^swissshhh cuz we’re °°not ri:::lly gonna be:::fighting. Yeah. ^{taptaptaptaptap} Ne-na:::h-no-you-di-nnnn-t.

Wha::t?

The shift between what Aurora said to Maysi and what she chose to share with the class is telling: Aurora chose not to repeat the more direct reference to herself as also being undocumented (“some of us don’t have documents”) when she addressed her peers. Aurora muttered her closing comments to herself—“that’s really gonna help us” and “we’re not really helping”—as she grappled with the uncertainty that she felt about her own role in the Dreamer movement. She both acknowledged her indebtedness to the Dream Team for bravely taking a stand and worried that she might not herself be capable of “fighting” and “coming out” in order to advocate for change.

Working to make principled choices about what to disclose or disguise, Aurora communicated her inquietud. She replaced the nervous chatter from her conversation with Maysi (her repetition of “this is important” and “apparently”) with fidgeting (represented in the superscripts above), which was picked up by the microphone as she addressed the class. Toward the end of her turn, Aurora spoke so quietly that her speech was recorded by the iPod but was inaudible to her peers. She began to speak in a slow, staccato, and distorted way, as though imitating a robot. Perhaps Aurora’s robot voice represented the voice of the device itself, scolding Aurora for the discourse it had just recorded (“Nuh! No, you didn’t”)? Or perhaps she was distancing herself from the emotional intensity of the moment by speaking in a nonhuman voice. This moment was not so private either, as another student looked at her strangely and she responded, “What?” For my part, I heard Aurora’s adoption of this artificial voice as a way of expressing the dehumanizing force of restrictive immigration policies that reduce people to mere legal categories.

A look at the letters that Aurora and Maysi wrote that afternoon highlights which of the themes raised during the Causas de Quinto unit they most wanted to convey to the high schoolers. Both girls made personal connections between immigrant rights, student activism, and the possibility of social change. I have transcribed their letters below:

The children’s letters are revealing of their own lived experiences. As an undocumented student, Aurora honed in on the significance of the high schooler’s disclosures (“you were honest”) and expressed a firsthand understanding of the pain caused by family separation (“I know that you feel terrible”). It is also notable that Aurora tried to imagine a solidarity in which difference disappeared entirely: “your goal is everybody goal.” Meanwhile, Maysi—a U.S.-born student with immigrant parents—emphasized her plans to join the Dream Team as an ally (“you showed me” and “because of you . . . I want to be”). These two pieces of writing exemplify the “two kinds of kids” trope that we heard from Ms. Daniela, Ms. Janet, and Nina throughout the interview process. For both types of students, the interview itself involved visions of their own future selves.

Every part of the encounter with the Vista High School Dream Team reveals the depth and sophistication of these fifth graders’ understandings of how their own futures are inextricable from questions of birthright citizenship and the possibility of immigration reform. Listening in on the class preparations, their visit, and their processing of the experience also vividly demonstrated how the students are capable of constructing metapragmatic norms for discussion of immigration status. And we have also seen the fifth graders reveal both their deep association between educational advancement and belonging and their ambivalence about this association—their knowledge that, despite the rhetoric of equalization, barriers to their educational, social, and economic advancement persist.

The preparation for the interview itself was a fascinating instance in which the children in this study became researchers. As they learned about youth leadership in the immigrant rights movement, they developed ethical standards for talking about citizenship, including a set of norms for asking interview questions that preserved students’ rights to silence. They were able to enter into these rich discussions about the metapragmatics of talk about citizenship precisely because they were so attuned to the importance of U.S. citizenship for themselves, their families, and their community. These students made explicit the need for confidentiality, they varied deictic language to encode a sense of proximity to or distance from the undocumented experience, and they managed their own disclosure through more and less explicit references to their and their loved ones’ immigration status.

Before and after the interview, Ms. Daniela’s students expressed their appreciation of and admiration for the Dream Team student activists. Across these exchanges, we observed the students’ multiple expressions of solidarity with the immigrant rights movement. In these moments, the children also communicated their own sense of uncertainty. Some children proudly took up the role of ally, while others, like Aurora, grappled in sophisticated ways with how to balance self-protection and solidarity. Aurora was clear that if NYDA were signed into law, her life could meaningfully change because she would have more educational opportunities in the near future. She was also ambivalent about whether she would be brave enough—in the words of her peers—to run the risks of public disclosure and political action on behalf of her community. The visit with the Dream Team inspired her most public disclosure but also her most palpable expressions of inquietud. The girls in this study had been living with a deepening spiral of understanding their own immigration status and its implications for education and belonging for many years. This knowledge was inextricable from their senses of their past, present, and future.