Conclusion
A Lifetime of Knowing
We have been listening to the voices of Pita, Hazel, Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, and Tere, who are among the 16.7 million people currently living in mixed-status households.1 We’ve heard them directly and indirectly discuss the significance of citizenship in their lives, revealing a deep understanding of the relevance of immigration status to their past, present, and future. We’ve learned to listen to their meaningful silences, to those moments when their refusal to disclose or discuss citizenship has spoken volumes. Grasping the significance of citizenship when it comes to schooling can help educators, policymakers, professors, and researchers to more fully realize the promise of Plyler. Notably, mixed-status families were among the plaintiffs who—having experienced firsthand the inequalities produced when their undocumented children were denied a free public education while their U.S.-born children could attend public school—risked retribution and deportation to participate in the trial.2
Plyler’s important protections, however, have come at a cost by producing domains of silence where we should instead be vocal advocates for students from mixed-status families. By prohibiting educators from inquiring into families’ immigration status when they register for school, state and local education departments have instituted a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Educators may remain ignorant of their students’ immigration status, and project this ignorance onto their students, assuming that awareness of its significance only dawns on young people as they approach legal majority. Our silences have left this growing student population to study in the shadows.3 Meanwhile, students engage in a spiraling curriculum of citizenship with their peers and family members. Their always deepening, if not always explicitly expressed, understanding of how juridical status affects their lives is often missed or underestimated.
School policymakers’ and educators’ overfocus on implementing Plyler when families register for school—an attempt to secure children’s rights to a public education by ensuring that they can attend without needing to disclose immigration status—may give the impression that citizenship only arises for parents and guardians as an issue at the time of enrollment. This book demonstrates that immigration and education policies are in fact inextricable throughout students’ experiences of schooling. We have gained a deeper understanding of the material and symbolic connections between these domains of policy and have seen how, from a young age, they shape children’s perceptions of themselves and their families while coloring memories of their past and thoughts about their future. We now know that children of all ages, starting as young as seven years old, are engaging in conversations about their birthplace and immigration status. And we have learned that whether they choose to speak out or remain silent in school, children make real-time calculations about the risks associated with disclosure out of a deep sense of responsibility to their families and friends. Recognizing both the knowledge and inquietud of these children is essential for understanding the complexity of the contemporary public school classroom in the United States.
Chapters 1 through 4 provided ethnographic accounts of the study’s methods and findings. In chapter 1, I argued that the ways in which we collect data (our methods) are directly related to the conclusions that we reach (our findings). This is especially important for understanding this book’s contribution to the existing literature on immigration. By conducting longitudinal participant observation with children, I have been able to observe how and when they demonstrate the significance of citizenship in ways that they would have been unable or unwilling to report during interviews. Relying on direct elicitation can lead to a view of children as ignorant of citizenship’s significance and reproduce a long-standing view of childhood as a time of innocence. I have also shown how elementary-age students took up co-researcher roles in this ethnographic study and shaped my thinking about the ethics of research about citizenship. In so doing, they demonstrated precisely how much they knew about what was at stake in talking about citizenship outside of their families. Together, the focal students and I developed approaches to ongoing informed assent and consent through collaborative data analysis that infused this ethnography with participatory approaches to recording everyday life. We have seen the ways in which audiovisual research methods could both resemble and run counter to the surveillance technologies with which these children are accustomed to living.
Chapter 2 theorized a spiraling curriculum of citizenship, the learning process by which children gain ever-deepening understandings of what it means to have or lack papers over time and across settings. Two sets of examples demonstrated how and when papers circulate in the lives of children and how conversations about papers that take place at home affect children’s learning about when to broach the subject at school. First, we examined the moment when Catalina’s younger brother launched a show-and-tell sequence of their family’s passports during one of my first visits to their home. This exchange exemplified how school literacy practices and immigration documents shape conversations at home about citizenship, access, and belonging from a young age. Second, we examined the ways in which school documents sent home evoked undocumented parents’ and children’s concerns about the potential for disclosure. The school lunch form and the middle school social studies homework assignment shaped Jimena’s (Catalina’s mother) view of the school and also prompted Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, and Pita to consider what they would do if they were asked to reveal their immigration status. As adults and children encountered these dilemmas, they co-constructed a set of norms for speaking out or remaining silent about their immigration status that then shaped their participation in school.
Chapter 3 offered us a view of the focal girls’ classroom experiences during their fifth-grade school year, focusing specifically on the ways in which they expressed the significance of immigration status through writing, talk, and silence. I first chronicled the ways in which Catalina’s and Pita’s written accounts of their important early childhood memories—of their families of origin, of border crossings, and of sibling’s birthdays—were inflected with their preoccupations about citizenship. In their written responses to school assignments that did not directly mention immigration, they explicitly and implicitly referenced the ways in which formative moments in early childhood were also moments of reckoning with their sense of belonging in the United States. Crucially, we saw how the prospect of publication—that is, of more widely disseminating these assignments—led to different responses by Catalina and Pita that correlated with their juridical status. Catalina, who lacked papers, encoded her published narrative so that only a careful reading could yield insight into the implications of her story. Pita, who had recently obtained papers, published an explicit story of crossing the border that sought to challenge negative perceptions of immigrant families. Both the form and content of these assignments therefore revealed a sophisticated reckoning with citizenship status and disclosure. The second part of the chapter focused on the ways in which Aurora and her peers reframed classroom conversations that oversimplified complex terms like diversity and nationality while also raising their fears about disclosure. I described the dilemmas of disclosure that Aurora faced in real time, the inquietud she felt in those moments, and the resourceful ways she responded.
Chapter 4 examined a monthlong study of immigration reform which culminated in an interview with members of their local high school Dream Team. I attended closely to the ways in which Aurora inflected this school-based project with preoccupations about her future as an undocumented student. We followed Aurora’s real-time adjustments to—and refusals of—an assignment that would both force disclosure and identify belonging with birthplace. We also tracked her expressions of inquietud as the assignment unfolded. At the time of the study, Aurora and her classmates were about to enter middle school, and they were attentive to the ways in which policies like DACA and the Dream Act might open up new educational opportunities in high school and beyond. We also saw them vividly display their metalinguistic awareness about the significance of citizenship and the ethics of speaking out and remaining silent.
Interlude I and Interlude II, preceding and following chapter 4, respectively, move with the children throughout and between school settings to better understand the landscapes and sociopolitical contexts of their daily lives. The interlude as a form was meant to draw attention to the liminal but crucial spaces that the students traverse—spaces outside of (but never unrelated to) the classroom. The interludes sought to bring students in mixed-status settings out of the shadows by illuminating the complex topics that they are grappling with even in their casual conversations with peers. Taken together, the interludes chronicled the children’s walk through their neighborhood on our way to and from the interview with the Vista High School Dream Team. By attending to their speech and body language, we learned about the children’s perceptions of the buildings we passed, the law enforcement officers that we encountered, and one another. As we walked alongside them, we witnessed their fear, listened to their songs, and observed their playful attempts to move through a neighborhood that is home to their families while at the same time full of risks inextricable from their immigration status.
I began this book with a consideration of how institutional criteria for ethical research—encoded in concepts like criteria for inclusion, risks posed by the study, and beneficence—took on new meanings as I listened to the students talk about this study. As I have explored elsewhere, researcher training in conducting qualitative educational research tends to focus on gaining access to study sites and establishing trusting relationships with potential gatekeepers.4 University IRB committees, along with core textbooks in our field, are primarily concerned with resolving ethical dilemmas before a researcher’s study is approved—in other words, before the researcher begins fieldwork. I have argued that this emphasis on the research design phase results in our overlooking important ethical concerns that arise when we are ready to exit the field. In addition to addressing ethical issues that arise as we establish relationships with children and families, it is also essential that we consider the ethics of reciprocity and beneficence after the completion of our formal period of data collection. This is especially true in educational research with children from mixed-status families who are threatened by the traumatic and forced exit of deportation and whose access to social services are always precarious.
Now, as I both bring this book to a close and trouble the notion of closure, I emphasize the importance of rethinking exit as it pertains to beneficence: the edict that our research should do no harm and “maximize possible benefits.”5 Just as in chapter 1, where I challenge the notion that risk and beneficence were knowable in advance, I want to raise questions about exit as a hard stop in which the relationships that developed during our research suddenly dissolve. In this project, maximizing benefits has meant sustaining relationships; by looking for opportunities to establish a sense of ongoingness, I have become a mentor to and advocate for the focal girls. I am cautious about describing this as “reciprocity” because the term suggests that the girls gave me something that I can return in kind, running the risk of flattening inherent inequalities in the researcher/researched relationship. For example, after years of publishing and presenting this research, I have experienced considerable career advancement; however, I do not pretend that any amount of my expertise or advocacy could bring the girls and their families the same material and financial stability that I have obtained as a result. Instead, I think of my ongoing relationships to the girls as a lifelong process of acompañamiento, which Andrea Dyrness and Enrique Sepúlveda III define as “accompanying young people in their citizenship formation” in a way that centers “migrant youth as experts and co-researchers of their own experience.”6 This conclusion represents my attempt to live out this ongoingness by not merely ending the book with a discussion of the past but rather by bringing my ethnographic account into the present.
One site of my ongoing advocacy and support has been trying to help Pita, Hazel, Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, and Tere manage the shifting terrain of DACA. This has meant helping all of them to learn about the program so that they themselves could apply or share the information with eligible friends and family. This federal immigration policy was enacted in 2012 when President Obama signed an executive order providing young undocumented immigrants with protection from deportation and authorization to work. As I explained in chapter 4, Obama created this program during his second term as president after Congress failed to pass the federal Dream Act, which would have provided a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. Although DACA does not offer immigrants a pathway to citizenship, it does provide existing DACA recipients with a social security number that temporarily authorizes them to seek employment and protects them from deportation. (Depending on where they live, DACA recipients may also be eligible for in-state tuition and financial aid for higher education, health care benefits, and driver’s licenses.) DACA applicants needed to meet the following criteria: entering the United States before the age of sixteen and being younger than thirty-one years old in 2012, residing in the United States for five consecutive years since 2007, having no criminal record, and being enrolled in high school or the military or having the equivalent of a high school diploma. DACA holders are required to renew their temporary status every two years. By combining temporary authorization with educational advancement, DACA intensified the families’ hopes for obtaining U.S. citizenship through schooling.
As we know from chapter 2 and chapter 4, Aurora and Catalina were aware of the promise of DACA as early as ten and eleven years old; by that age, they had already set their sights on entering the program as soon as they turned fifteen and became eligible. Yet they were equally cognizant of the contradictions in federal approaches to immigration policy that simultaneously extended benefits like DACA to a subsection of undocumented immigrants while also restricting entry and ramping up deportation for others. In 2014, as they prepared to graduate from P.S. 432, the girls and their family members closely followed news reports of protesters nationwide calling on President Obama to stop the soaring number of detentions and deportations. The girls often talked about the contradictions between Obama’s pro-immigrant campaign rhetoric, his DACA program, and the punitive policies that had earned him the nickname of “deporter in chief.”7 That same year—two years after DACA started—Obama announced a related program called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which would have extended similar benefits to the undocumented parents of U.S.-born or green card–holding children. DAPA had the potential to help each of the mixed-status families in this study, but it was immediately challenged in the courts and never implemented.
Because I remained in close touch with Pita, Hazel, Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, and Tere when they started high school and turned fifteen years of age, I bore witness to their upset when Donald Trump was elected after promising to revoke DACA. On September 5, 2017—just two days before their first day of high school—Trump announced that the program would be phased out.8 Existing DACA holders would retain their status until further notice, but only renewal applications received by that October would be considered, and no new applications were accepted.9 From 2017 to the present, a staggering number of legal battles have ensued over the lawfulness of the program itself and over the executive authority of the president to implement or terminate the program. Immigrant advocates argue that Trump did not follow due process in revoking the program, while immigration restrictionists question whether Obama had the power to institute the program via executive order in the first place. In December 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration violated procedures for ending the program and reinstated DACA (without ruling on the integrity of the program itself). Between December 2020 and July 2021, there was a brief reopening of the program and new applications were accepted; however, a U.S. district court in Texas subsequently declared the program unlawful and once again barred any new applicants while granting a stay to current DACA holders.10 President Biden’s administration has since appealed the 2021 Texas ruling and, at the time of writing, a Supreme Court ruling on the program’s lawfulness is still eagerly awaited.11
The upshot of these dizzying shifts in policy is that young people like Aurora and Catalina are still unable to participate in DACA, despite having watched for over a decade as the program was created, debated, and ultimately closed to them. As they tried to make sense of this shifting landscape, each one took a different approach. Aurora waited until Biden became president to submit her application, but, as she explained it, “my application stayed in limbo.” These many years of uncertainty have felt to her like “a very huge up and down having to think about all of these plan B, plan Cs, saying to myself should I stay here or go back,” leaving her wondering about whether she can pursue a career in this country. Catalina, who decided not to submit her DACA application amid such uncertainty, resigned herself to searching for alternatives to DACA because “it’s been like this for a long time and it’s not the only thing that’s going to help me. I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
Trump’s election didn’t just have implications for DACA policy.12 The focal students’ four years of high school were shadowed by the hatred, fear, and uncertainty produced by his and his administration’s anti-immigrant talk and the punitive policies that they justified by villainizing the undocumented and stoking racism. “The Trump Effect”—a phrase coined in a 2017 report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center—refers to an increase in children’s experiences of being bullied and to a rise in “uncivil political discourse” at school.13 The phrase also denotes the fear that permeates schools around the country. Students at all grade levels began vocalizing concerns that a wall would be built to keep them out, or that their loved ones could be deported at any moment. I also saw evidence of the Trump Effect in mixed-status families between 2016 and 2020 as they grew more anxious and lived with greater degrees of stress while at the same time finding fewer outlets for expression at school and in their neighborhood. Fears of detention and deportation rose, as did uncertainty about participating in the few social services to which they had access.14 Parents like Jimena wondered whether the public charge rule that Trump expanded to include basic social services like nutritional benefits and health insurance would negatively affect them if they had the chance to apply for U.S. citizenship in the future.15 All six families worried whether they would ever be able to reunite with family members still living in Mexico, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.
This sketch outlines just one view into the broader political rhythms that have formed the backdrop for my relationship with the girls from 2014 through the first years of the coronavirus pandemic and into the present. Although I could tell the story from other vantage points—the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on their own identities and their sense of justice, for example—I have stayed close to a narrative focused on the explicit intersections between citizenship and schooling that I have witnessed over time. As the rest of this conclusion will show, I have gained this lifespan view through my ongoing acompañamiento as Pita, Hazel, Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, and Tere have found their way through high school and beyond. This has meant remaining in consistent touch after the formal period of data collection and continuing to listen to them and their families for nearly a decade. Together, we have continued to complicate traditional notions of study closure and exit from the field.
I now want to look at two recent moments in our ongoing relationship that echo many of the themes this book has explored and that offer snapshots of how they navigate the complexity of citizenship in the present. First, I will describe the process of helping Jenni obtain access to the technology she needed to participate in remote learning when schools were closed in spring 2020. Second, I will share conversations that I had with the group about their postsecondary options, along with excerpts from a meeting that I arranged with a public school teacher and DACA recipient. This will allow us to bring into relation the significance of citizenship for the girls at two important educational thresholds: their completing elementary school (chapters 2, 3, and 4) and their graduating from high school.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States in March 2020, existing social and economic disparities became even more painfully visible. Since the pandemic began, immigrant families have been disproportionately affected in nearly every domain of life, including food and housing insecurity, unemployment, health insurance, and educational and digital access.16 As New York City went into lockdown, I began hosting weekly Zoom meetings to bring the group—by then all of them were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old high school juniors—together in a virtual community of mutual aid based on our long-standing trust and openness in a time of upset and isolation. These virtual meetings were especially important to have in quarantine, when they were managing the shock of being more socially isolated than ever before while also having to take new kinds of risks to contribute to their family’s survival.
Our meetings were meaningful for me, too; I benefited from seeing the group regularly at a time when I found myself severed from the social world beyond my home. During this period, I was homeschooling my two daughters (my eldest, Lucía, was born at the start of this study in 2013, and my youngest, Marcela, was born two years later), and they would often join us at the start of our Zoom meetings. Lucía and Marcela have always known Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Jenni, and Tere, and I’ve tended to refer to them all as my girls; it was joyous to see my girls chatting and laughing together. However, because the following pages are precisely about how I’ve followed the girls out of childhood and into young adulthood, I will refer to them as young women for the remainder of the book.
During the early days, all six of these young women were responsible for running family errands—picking up medicine for sick relatives, shopping for household groceries, retrieving packages from a UPS store because packages could not be reliably delivered to their buildings—at a time when leaving their homes was frightening. Catalina talked about not “feeling safe,” while Aurora declared in one of our Zoom meetings that “being outside feels illegal.” The mapping of their own preoccupations with immigration status onto the feelings they had being in public was indicative of their childhood experiences living in neighborhoods saturated with surveillance and policing.17 These connections also mapped onto widely circulating discourses and policies related to migration at the time. Trump and the right-wing media that disseminated his views spread unfounded claims about migrants from Latin America being the ones who spread the coronavirus in the United States, using this misinformation to justify the increased detention and deportation of migrant children and to further militarize this country’s southern border.18 Over time, as institutions began to reopen, these young women also had to obtain and manage new forms of documentation—for example, vaccination cards and Covid-19 test results to attend in-person classes for those enrolled in college.
The pandemic lockdown was unprecedented, but many of the pandemic realities that the group shared on Zoom actually entailed a deepening of the already existing responsibilities they shouldered within their mixed-status families. Some of them had, for example, always played a significant role in helping family members treat long-term health problems, like Jenni’s mother’s diabetes and Aurora’s younger sister’s congenital birth conditions. But now frequent visits to the pharmacy and hospital had been become dangerous for high-risk family members attempting to avoid contagion, and it was increasingly difficult to attend medical appointments without regular public transportation services. They shared experiences of loss and illness exacerbated by unstable living conditions and unsafe working conditions. Jenni shared that “quarantine been a little stressed out, stressful. Like two weeks ago my friend’s aunt died, the lady I used to be so close with, she died of coronavirus and it was really painful because I spent a lot of time with her in the summer when I used to be in the shelter and I had no place to be.” Pita, whose undocumented uncle was hospitalized with Covid-19, commiserated: “I truly feel for people who had people pass away. A lot of my family from Long Island have been affected by it and one of my uncles was in the hospital and intubated. So it’s tough. I don’t like stressing all the time because it gets to me too much.” They all described heightened levels of anxiety and depression as they mourned their losses and cared for vulnerable loved ones.
Gaining Access to Remote Learning
At the end of each weekly virtual check-in, I asked, “Do you have what you need for the coming week?” This is when I learned that Jenni lacked the hardware and wireless internet connection that she needed to participate in remote learning. Even though she could connect to our meetings, she often experienced unstable connections as she pirated service from neighboring apartments and businesses. She explained:
I do have a tablet but the problem is I don’t have internet. I was calling la compañía (the company) y no me cogieron el teléfono (and they didn’t pick up the phone). I was going to get [a Department of Education iPad] pero yo no sé (but I don’t know) if there was a certain date that you had to get it and I couldn’t go. I been trying to finish certain works on the phone but it’s hard because I don’t understand it.
Jenni faced a number of intersecting challenges that were making it hard for her to get connected. She was an English language learner navigating an unfamiliar high school system; she lacked the money needed to purchase a device or pay the monthly fee for Wi-Fi; and she received little information from her school alerting her to the available resources. Accessing help had become more complicated for Jenni because the city had just relocated her and her mother from temporary transitional housing to an apartment in a public housing unit on Staten Island. This move meant leaving Brooklyn, living farther away from her high school, and losing proximity to neighbors, friends, and school staff whom she would have otherwise sought out for support.
I was determined to help Jenni get the technology she needed for virtual learning. This would ultimately require more than a dozen phone calls and several trips to Staten Island. The questions of exit that I explored above came to a head when I saw that I had a chance to leverage my knowledge of the public school system to help Jenni obtain the resources required to stay in school. This was an opportunity for me to live out the principle of beneficence even though I was no longer beholden to the IRB’s regulations. This time, instead of offering Jenni an iPod, as I had back when she was in fifth grade, I was advocating for her to obtain the iPad that she needed to complete her junior year of high school.
Thankfully, Jenni attended Vista High School (which we visited in chapter 4), where Ms. Janet, the Dream Team faculty advisor, was still teaching. My first phone calls were to Ms. Janet, who put me in touch with Jenni’s guidance counselors, who explained that she was indeed falling behind in school, in part because she lacked reliable digital access to school now that it was completely virtual. They redirected me to a district-wide office where staff were working to manage the distribution of devices to students. After one attempt to have the iPad delivered directly to Jenni, the device went missing; deliveries to her new home were unreliable. Several three-way phone calls later—Jenni and I contacted Department of Education staff together—I was able to arrange for the iPad to be sent to my house so I could drive it to Jenni and ensure that she received it. This process took over a month, so I lent her my personal iPad as a stopgap in the meantime.
Once we obtained the device, we faced the challenge of arranging for the internet service that Jenni needed to use it. After another round of phone calls, we were able to secure three months of free service because Jenni qualified for a student discount. On one of these calls, a service provider asked for Jenni’s name, date of birth, address, and social security number. I distinctly recall Jenni’s long silence in the wake of being asked for her social security number; I stepped in to ask why that information was necessary. The representative quickly explained that she did not need to provide a social security number to obtain the service and router, but that she would have to be accompanied by her mother, who would need to show a form of government-issued identification in order to activate it. After hanging up with the internet company, I called Jenni to ask about her silence and to see if she had any concerns. She explained: “Ohhh thank you, I got it it’s just that I don’t like to give that information. Even if it’s a company or anything so yo le dije así (I just put it that way).” Jenni had obtained a green card in fifth grade, when we first met, and so had a social security number. She had recently informed me that her mom had also obtained a green card, meaning that they were more secure than before when it came to their juridical status—or, in her own words, she was “chilling with that.” Still, her silence spoke to her sense of vulnerability, and Jenni implemented the lessons learned from her spiraling curriculum of citizenship: never disclose any information that could reveal your or a family member’s citizenship status.
This exchange threw into relief the moments when students in mixed-status families face the risk of disclosure when trying to access basic resources. Even for Jenni—who was now a legal permanent resident but had lived for many years in a mixed-status household as her parents worked to obtain authorization—the request for her social security number gave her pause. Recall that in chapter 2 school lunch forms requiring Catalina’s mother to enter in four Xs in lieu of a social security number also made her think twice about completing the application for much-needed nutritional resources. In both cases, institutional requests for a state-issued identification number produced a chilling effect—a quite different sense of “chilling” than Jenni’s use above—which I helped to mitigate by redirecting the conversation (in the case of the phone call with the internet provider) and explaining the process (in the example of completing school paperwork). Even as school policymakers’ guidance prohibits educators from asking families for this information when they enroll in school, there are many other moments in a child’s schooling trajectory when they or their guardians are asked to furnish information that can point to their immigration status. As we have seen, these requests can instill fear in mixed-status family members and prompt them to take protective measures—measures like ending the exchange before they are able to access the resources that they need.19
Getting Help with College Applications
Against this backdrop of heightened anxiety and isolation, Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Jenni, and Tere considered their postsecondary options. Let’s turn now to a second example of how their knowledge of immigration status has continued to shape their schooling experiences from childhood through young adulthood. At the end of our first meeting in March 2020, Catalina brought up the subject of college, declaring, “I’m scared and I feel like I’m nine”—noting how old she had been just before this study began. Perhaps she was suggesting that I had a role to play in easing this transition now, just as I had back then. For all of us, their graduation from high school echoed that earlier transition from fifth grade to middle school, making vivid how far we’d traveled together and how their spiraling curriculum of citizenship continued to deepen across the lifespan.
Lockdown had brought their college preparatory activities to a halt, ending SAT classes, internship and volunteer-based programs, and the part-time jobs that had helped them to cover the fees associated with college entrance exams and applications. All six of them attended underresourced public high schools that were unable to provide their students with much-needed academic and mental health counseling services. It took months for any of these students to regain contact with their guidance counselors and homeroom teachers. Their sense of urgency about attending college despite these setbacks reflected a desire—a desire they’d had since elementary school—to make good on their parents’ sacrifices by obtaining school documents (diplomas) that they hoped would lead to obtaining immigration status (papeles) in the future. It also reflects their ongoing focus on hyperdocumentation as a strategy for obtaining education-related papers that they could leverage to access more opportunities, or that could serve as a proxy for U.S. citizenship and belonging absent a change in their immigration status.
Our conversations led me to think that helping the group to apply for college was another form of beneficence that I could offer at a crucial educational moment. Drawing on my professional know-how and connections as a professor at the City University of New York—one of the schools they were applying to—I created a structure of support that included recurring check-ins, meetings with current CUNY students and alumnae, and meetings with professors and admissions officers. We also established a writing schedule focusing on their personal statements along with Zoom-based work sessions on topics like soliciting letters of recommendation and completing the online application. I answered many of their practical questions: What is the difference between a college and a university? Do I have to complete many different applications, or is there a common app? How do I format my résumé? We also broached the difficult subject of disclosure as it related to drafting their personal statements.
Pita and Catalina reported that their parents had begun narrating college access as the final point in their own immigration journey. Their parents believed that by obtaining a college diploma, their daughters would have more stable lives in the United States. As a result, the parents would become free to return to their countries of origin. Pita explained:
I mean my mom like has always told me that my future is here. Like she- we- that she was like “Oh you know someday I just wanna like move back to El Salvador,” because she likes it over there and she wants to like, I guess, age over there. And she’s like. And it- it- it makes me like anxious. Like honestly it- it stresses me thinking about like growing up and you know, having so many responsibilities.
In chapter 3, we saw that these students’ academic ambitions are inextricable from their sense of responsibility for the fate of their parents and siblings. Now, as they approached legal adulthood, their own schooling was once again linked to fears of separation. Catalina added:
My parents also told me like later when my siblings grow up and they’re like sustainable and they could take care of themselves they’re gonna have to go because that’s where they were born so they could like be with their parents and stuff. And it like makes me kinda anxious too. It’s not like I depend on my parents, but I’m used to having my parents around me and I just don’t feel grown up enough to like separate from my parents.
Catalina talked about this potential for family separation in the future tense, but we know that she has been living with the fear of her and her parents’ separation from deportation from a young age.
In addition to needing a space to share these feelings, the group enlisted me in sorting through the exclusionary policies, misinformation, and confusion that Donald Trump left in his wake. During one of our meetings, Catalina shared her concerns about answering questions regarding “immigration status” when she encountered it “in applications where it says you have to have a visa or be a resident.” As they moved farther along in their applications and references to immigration status became more explicit, they faced new dilemmas surrounding disclosure and access. The more subtle—but still anxiety-producing—references to birthplace and nationality that we witnessed in elementary school were becoming increasingly overt in higher education. This prompted many conversations about college access for undocumented students. During one Zoom session Aurora said:
I had questions about that. Mainly because um [my friend’s mom] she’s a teacher and she has DACA right now, right? And she’s also like also been telling me about like colleges and like we speak about this together cuz I see her do whatever like her work and everything. And she asked me she’s like um that are we- like if I would be allowed to be like going to college without like an active social security number and all of that. And I was like so there is a program in which it allows you to um go to college without an active social security number. But my question was because she said that for certain programs like going for hours or as a nurse just studying for certain- for a lot of, like, career paths you need your active social security number for them to even let you in. Not only for- she was like “I’m not even talking about like payment just like, just for you being inside?” So like that was my question, would like the program would help you with that?
It was clear that she and the other group members were unsure about what federal and local immigration policies might affect their educational opportunities, and that their concerns hinged on whether programs would grant them temporary authorization the way that DACA would (having what Aurora called an “active social security number”). The instability of the DACA program made the college application process infinitely harder to manage.
In one of our early college prep meetings in May 2020, when we began brainstorming topics for their personal statements, Pita, Aurora, Catalina, and I had the following exchange.
Ariana:
If you had to write your essay RIGHT now::::, what would your instinct be? Would you ↓want to talk about something persona::l, a:::nd about your fa:::mily history, and your um immigration let’s say? Or do you feel like that would ↓not be something you would wanna write about?
Pita:
I feel like it should be. Like. Um. In like one way I guess if you would write about it, it would like show others how even though you’re this even though you:: like were able to achie::ve ma::ny thi::ngs and. You know::. Being succe::ssful despite the fact that you’re ↓undocumented or whatever. But at the ↑same time, you don’t really know who::’s gonna to read it and if they’re gonna define you:: by like if you’re ↓undocumented or not. Like I feel like I’d rather not to take like the risk of writing about it? Because I don’t want to be like defined by it. It like depends on who it is that’s gonna read it. Right?
Aurora:
Yeah I agree with you. I feel like there’s a lot of like stereotypes out there about like people that are undocumented. And it’s. Like we never know who is actually reading it. Yeah. Yeah.
Catalina:
I don’t know- I don’t know it’s like. A difficult topic.
Ariana:
What makes it hard?
Catalina:
Cuz I mean if you say:: it . . . cuz you wanna go to college. You know? And like, I don’t ↓know. Like Pita said. Depending on who reads it. Some people are >kinda crazy<. I don’t know it’s-
Pita:
Would you write about it?
Catalina:
I don’t know::? Mmm:::
Aurora:
I feel like it’s a yeah and no. Not only because of like who’s reading it but it’d be hard for them to try to- like a lot of people say “oh, I understand.” They actually really don’t understand the pre:::ssure of like them being able to do so much stuff. ↑And they take >a lot of things for granted< that we don’t because we know we don’t have them. Um. And ↑I don’t know. I feel like- I feel like some people don’t see that and others do. But it ↓depends. I feel like a lot of things, like me personally a lot of things I do it’s because I also wanna make my parents proud. And the fact that they did the whole pro:::cess of trying to come here. For a better future, not ↑like for them but for ↓me. And yeah. °I don’t know.
In some ways, these responses echoed concerns they have had about disclosure since they were children: proving their sense of self-worth through educational achievement, making their parents proud, and feeling a responsibility to represent their mixed-status communities. Their careful attention to questions of audience is also familiar; this was central in their decision-making about what stories to share in chapter 3 and in their preparation to interview the Dream Team in chapter 4. Their explicit mention of fear was striking. Pita talked about the “risk of writing,” Catalina worried that “some people are kinda crazy,” and Aurora was distrustful of people’s ability to “understand the pressure” that she faced. After knowing them for a decade, I could see how the persistent—and now heightened—fear of disclosure made drafting a personal statement for a college application fraught and full of inquietud. At the same time, they believed—and were often told—that attending and graduating from college was a crucial step toward becoming U.S. citizens and experiencing a sense of belonging in the United States.
I wanted to connect them with a mentor who had firsthand experience attending college as an undocumented student. I had recently met an undocumented elementary school teacher and DACA recipient (whom some might colloquially refer to as being DACAmented) named Claudia who I thought could serve as a role model. I met her through Ms. Daniela—who had left P.S. 432 and was now colleagues with Claudia at a different public elementary school—after Claudia had shared her immigration status with her colleagues at the school. After telling the group about Claudia and seeing their enthusiasm about meeting her, I invited her to join us in Zoom to talk about her experiences navigating access to schooling and her career before and after obtaining DACA. Our meeting with Claudia echoed the interview that Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Jenni, and Tere conducted with the Dream Team members back when they were fifth graders, which I had also brokered by connecting Ms. Daniela and Ms. Janet, and which also involved explicit conversations about the metapragmatics of disclosure.
Claudia joined us on the first Sunday in June 2020. In advance of the meeting, I asked everyone in the group to choose an artwork to share during an icebreaker where they would introduce themselves to Claudia. Each of them had some creative practice—ranging from sketching to painting and fashion design—and I thought this would be a good way to prompt them to share something about themselves before we invited our guest to share her experiences with us. After their introductions, Claudia began by explaining that she had immigrated to the United States from Mexico while still an infant, grown up undocumented in Brooklyn, and faced many challenges pursuing a career in teaching. Even though she now had DACA, and while no one in our group had been able to apply for the program, they found common ground in their shared experiences of growing up in mixed-status families. Claudia’s reminiscences were especially relatable for Aurora and Catalina, who immigrated to the United States as toddlers and remained undocumented.
The metalinguistic preoccupation with when and how to talk about their immigration status with others was central to this exchange, which Claudia had joined precisely to disclose the realities she faced as a person who now had DACA but who had grown up undocumented for most of her life. She reflected on the significance of recounting her story during the Zoom meeting:
You know, I always wanted to talk to a group of young um ladies, you know, that are just like me,. You know, it makes me feel- I never you know did this to be honest. I’ve never spoken to other people that are just like me. Um and any other, you know, adults either that are going through the same thing. So I always felt alone in so many ways.
In a way that will at this point be familiar, Claudia’s personal decision about disclosure was inextricable from a broader sense of responsibility to a wider community that now included the six young women she was addressing in this meeting. She went on to explain, “You should always say to yourself that you are a big part of this community and this country, and we’re the ones that are going to make a difference you know.” She assumed the risks of disclosure in order to instill in others a sense of belonging.
After Claudia spoke, the group members took up the topic of the risks and responsibilities associated with disclosing immigration status. Commenting on Claudia’s ideas without addressing her directly, Aurora shared:
I- I just wanted to say that it’s like really um heartwarming to, like, see how, as she said, being like the only person seeing all this around her and not really having anybody that could relate to her. Cuz I feel like nobody could relate to me and, like they have everything, or like they don’t care. And it’s just like, hard because I don’t tell them why I- why I care so much cuz I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like that’s just something that not everyone should know about me. Cuz like I don’t know how people will react to that. Or like thinking “Oh!” or a lot people just make jokes about it. And it’s just really annoying to me. And I know I will get pissed off. So I’d rather not say it.
In Aurora’s mind, there were two kinds of students, echoing a phrase we heard in chapter 4, but with a different formulation. Here, there were those who are undocumented like her, and there were those who have U.S. citizenship and by extension have everything. Among the many risks involved in sharing her undocumented status, Aurora mentioned feeling disregarded, managing others’ surprise (“Oh!”), and experiencing anger at being teased. This harked back to Aurora’s early stories of children tauntingly saying, “I have papers and you don’t. Na-na!” (chapter 1).
Claudia responded directly to Aurora, acknowledging the fear that accompanies disclosure in the context of punitive immigration policies: “I totally get where you’re coming from. And, you know, I was younger, I thought the same way. Like, I never told anyone.” Fear of the threats associated with disclosure had prevented Claudia from speaking out because, as she explained, “I was always scared that maybe I would tell the wrong person. And then that person will always use that against me, whether it’s only immigration, whether it’s, you know, attacking my family, you know, in some type of way.” Over time, however, Claudia decided to share her experiences as an undocumented person growing up and pursuing her career in the United States:
Now like I always let them know who I am, like, “Yes, I’m an immigrant. Yes, I’m a person of color. I’m not like you.” Um. They’re never, I they’re never going to understand the- the struggle and the hardship, even if they tell you, “Oh, I understand you.” “You don’t understand. You don’t know where I came from, you don’t know the hardship that we do, you don’t know what our parents do to try to get us here.” Um. So I don’t feel like people will ever understand. But it’s good to educate them to let them know . . . who we are.
Claudia not only modeled a conversation between herself and an imaginary listener but also reframed the purpose of the disclosure. For her, disclosure was less about an opportunity to relate to others and more aligned with her sense of responsibility to educate others about the intersections between immigration status, racialization, and representation. She went on to model two other modes of address: what she told herself and how she responded to colleagues who may think less of her for being an undocumented educator:
You know, and I always said that to myself, and I kind of always uplifted me. In like “Okay, you got this far, because you were born here, and you um you know, you have all the benefits in the world to be a better person.” But look,
((addressing an imaginary colleague))
“I’m a teacher just like you, right. And that doesn’t make us any different, I just work ten times harder. And, and, and for that, it’s because I value my work ten times more.”
Both Aurora and Claudia shared a preoccupation with the stigmas they had faced in the past as a result of not having papers. Yet Claudia insisted that disclosing being DACAmented could work against negative stereotypes and change people’s beliefs. This too was something the group had considered at a young age. Recall that as early as fifth grade, Pita believed it was important for her to write and publish her personal memoir, “Frontera,” in order to share the realities associated with being an undocumented immigrant and to help others view undocumented youth in light of their many strengths. A decade ago, when Pita imagined people reading “Frontera,” she hoped that “when they go home they keep thinking . . . and the phone rings and they say I heard a story about a girl, and people hear this and it spreads, so that other people know this well.”
Of course, the dilemmas of disclosure were not resolved in one Zoom meeting, and Aurora remained concerned about the perils associated with sharing her loved ones’ immigration status. She was torn between her desire to express her pride in her family and her worry about the risks she posed to them if she shared their undocumented status. She explained:
I’m really proud of like where I’m coming from and what my family has done, like all of that. I’m really proud to even like mention it and um I feel like if I know it and the necessary people know it, then it doesn’t matter who else knows it. I feel like it’s just the people that are gonna influence in my life should know it. That’s pretty much it. So that’s how I try to keep it.
What it means to hold this knowledge—and whether they should withhold or disclose it—is a question that Aurora, Catalina, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni have lived with and continue to face. When we met them in fifth grade—at ages ten and eleven—we witnessed the many ways that the question of having or not having papers had already entered their consciousness and inflected their experience. Now, as they turned nineteen and twenty, they were still—anxiously, resourcefully—negotiating the realities and risks that attend citizenship status.
All of us listening to the voices of these six students over a span of ten years have broken with the myth of their innocence regarding citizenship status and its implications. But what about our innocence—the innocence of those of us working within education and its related fields? As educators, it’s important that we acknowledge what we know and what we don’t know about how immigration status shapes our students’ everyday lives both within and beyond school. Such an acknowledgment is an important step toward affirming our shared responsibility for providing educational access and opportunity to all students, including those who are undocumented and growing up in mixed-status families.
As public schools serve as intensifying sites of debate over broader social policies of inclusion and exclusion, educators, school policymakers, professors, and researchers will need to develop more nuanced strategies of listening and responding to their students.20 It is time for us to move away from being tongue-tied by existing guidance that leads to “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies in our schools.21 Instead, we must become more conversant and fluent in the ways that children’s educational experiences are saturated with an awareness of immigration status.22 The numbers tell us that we should assume that all classrooms—from elementary school through college—are mixed-status classrooms.
Even though all K–12 schools must admit students regardless of their or their parents’ or guardian’s immigration status, there exists little to no institutional support for educators charged with serving undocumented students and those from mixed-status families. Rarely, if ever, do teachers have opportunities to consider, talk about, and prepare for teaching in mixed-status communities. The guidance issued to educators about how to uphold the Plyler ruling has focused attention on avoiding chilling effects at the time of enrollment, but there has been little discussion of moments that students and their parents may experience as chilling throughout their education. As we have seen, there are many instances where educators’ actions may have unintended effects that instill fear or anxiety in undocumented students and parents, from everyday classroom activities that seek to be inclusive to sending home school forms that in essence require families to disclose their immigration status. In the absence of teacher preparation for mixed-status settings, the onus tends to fall on a select few staff members—usually the ESL teacher or a parent liaison—to advocate for the rights of undocumented students and those from mixed-status households.
All of this means that support for undocumented students is idiosyncratic at best.23 In this book we have met teachers attuned to the intersections between immigration and education. Consider Ms. Janet’s work as an ESL teacher and Dream Team faculty advisor, and Ms. Daniela’s emails to me noting themes that emerged in her student writing and in classroom conversations. We have also seen teachers unaware of the complexities of broaching nationality in the classroom (remember the “stand up if you’re from . . .” activity). I have also shared the ways that I, as a researcher, was able to provide some of the resources the schools lacked: college counseling for a mixed-status groups of peers and connecting students to DACAmented mentors. Too often, undocumented students and their peers from mixed-status families must depend on good fortune rather than good policy when navigating the school system.
We have had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in place regarding immigration status in schools for the last forty years, but as this book demonstrates, we have been asking, and students have been telling. When a teacher asks students to interview a family member about their immigration experience for a social studies assignment and when the school sends home a form requiring that parents enter Xs in the absence of a social security number, we are asking them to disclose their immigration status. We have seen vivid examples of students choosing to explicitly share their understanding of citizenship in their schoolwork and conversation. But we have also seen how students tell us about citizenship with their knowing silences—their redirection, their encoding of immigration experience in writing, and their audible expressions of inquietud. My hope is that this book will help us listen.