A Spiraling Curriculum of Citizenship

Passport Show-and-Tell

Catalina’s family, the Mendozas, lived in a third-floor walk-up apartment on one of Vista’s main avenues. Six family members shared this two-bedroom apartment: Juan and Jimena (parents), Jimena’s brother (tío, uncle), and four siblings, including Catalina (ten years old), her two brothers, Carlos (seven years old) and Toño (five years old), and her youngest sibling, Karla (three years old). Catalina lived in a typical mixed-status family: she, her parents, and uncle were undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Her three youngest siblings were all U.S.-born citizens.11 When Jimena immigrated to the northeastern United States from Central Mexico, Catalina initially remained behind with her maternal grandmother. At the age of two, Catalina boarded a plane from Mexico City to New York City with a woman her family paid to escort her. Since then, Catalina has lived in Brooklyn with her mixed-status family.

One of the most striking instances of children demonstrating to me just how much they knew about citizenship and its importance took place during one early visit that I made to Catalina’s home in April 2014. I arrived on a weekday afternoon to meet Jimena and her four children as they settled in after arriving home from school. Catalina sat at the computer table alternating between completing her math homework and practicing writing her name in bubble letters. Meanwhile, her younger siblings took the opportunity to show me all their favorite toys and books. This was only my third family visit, and the children were still getting to know me; it was important to them that I also learn more about their home and each of them.

Jimena invited me to sit beside her on the couch as she recounted details of her family life and living conditions, occasionally glancing up at three-year-old Karla, who kept repeating “mira yo, mira yo” (look me, look me) while hopping up and down to get our attention. A few moments later, seven-year-old Carlos brought over a small plastic envelope containing something he wanted to show me. He leaned against the sofa’s armrest and waited until Jimena finished telling me about the repairs she wished the building manager would make to their rented apartment. When Carlos found an opening in the conversation, he stood up tall and declared, “Nuestros pasaportes” (Our passports). Jimena continued talking, Karla kept clamoring, and Carlos stood firmly, waiting for me to turn to him. A few moments later, I did. He proceeded to show me each family member’s passport, one by one. These documents differed by nationality. Some were Mexican passports; others had been issued by the United States. The fact that he shared them with me on this visit underscored his understanding of their significance and my role: these papers, and which one belonged to which family member, told an important story about his family, and Carlos thought I would be especially interested in knowing.

The following two-minute conversation took place that afternoon, and the transcript presents the interaction between Jimena, Catalina, her siblings, and me. This exchange is representative of a routine I have experienced time and again during my visits to mixed-status family homes: very young children displaying their knowledge about citizenship by detailing who had or lacked papers. In this example, young Carlos integrated the knowledge of immigration status that he acquired at home with the discourse pattern known as “show-and-tell,” an activity he learned in school. His command of the show-and-tell genre checked all the boxes of standard early childhood literacy development: he spoke with confidence and fluency, demonstrated prior knowledge, and demonstrated the objects while explaining why they were important to him.12 Carlos’s ability to integrate talk about citizenship with a familiar school-based literacy routine indicates the close association that he had made between immigration papers and school papers—evidence of the spiraling curriculum that we explore in this chapter and throughout this book.

The papers that Carlos showed me represented his family members’ different countries of origin and national citizenship. His parents, uncle, and Catalina all shared Mexican citizenship, while he, Toño, and Karla all had U.S. citizenship. When I asked him what he was showing me (turn 1), he immediately evoked the construct of having or not having papers—“pero mi tío no tiene” (but my uncle doesn’t have them) in turn 3—beginning to establish an intrafamilial difference that he would more fully explain in a moment. Carlos noted that his uncle was out working. It was typical for the undocumented adults in the family to work long hours in service industry jobs and then to study English by taking classes offered by community organizations and local libraries. These efforts helped to sustain the household and prepare its members to avail themselves of immigration reforms that President Obama promised to implement at the time. Throughout Carlos’s presentation, his younger sister, Karla, continued playing, and I continued talking with Jimena. On seeing Karla’s birth certificate, I turned to Jimena to confirm Karla’s full name (turn 7). I was still getting to know the family and had, till then, only heard her referred to by her middle name. Jimena confirmed Karla’s full name, and on hearing it, Karla cooed (turn 9).

Feeling the weight of the conversation that we were having, I introduced a bit of levity by joking about the awkwardness of taking passport photos. Looking at the next document that Carlos handed me, I joked and made a funny face as I exclaimed, “Yo siempre salgo horrible en las fotos!” (I always come out terribly in photos!). Carlos chimed in with “yo también” (me too), and Jimena laughed as she concurred with “a mí no me gustan” (I don’t like them). Twelve turns later—after bantering about silly faces on passport photos—we continued our conversation about the process of getting the children’s passports. Jimena referred to a previous conversation we’d had about preparing Carlos and Toño for a trip they were making to Mexico that summer. Jimena was planning to have a trusted adult—one of the boys’ madrinas (godmothers) who had papers—accompany them to Mexico and back. The sisters would be staying home that summer: Catalina could not travel internationally because she was undocumented, and Karla would not go on the trip because she was too young. Jimena and Carlos recounted when and where the family went to have the U.S.-born brothers’ passports issued.

In turn 13, I started to ask a clarifying question about who had gone for their passports that day—was it all of them or some of them?—and I paused when I couldn’t quite figure out how to ask the question without excluding Catalina. Without hesitation Jimena clarified by saying “los tres [hermanos]” (the three [siblings]) in turn 14, marking the fact that the three youngest siblings shared U.S. birthright citizenship while Catalina did not. Carlos stayed focused on the fact that they’d gone to the neighboring borough of Queens for this important event (turns 12 and 15), while Catalina noted a different location. Her mention of Manhattan (turn 16) is notable because it is where the Mexican consulate is located—the offices Catalina would visit if she was ever able to change her own immigration status. In that moment, little five-year-old Toño interrupted the display of their U.S. passports to point out Catalina’s Mexican passport (turn 19). Catalina picked up on my earlier comment about passport photos and noted that she didn’t like hers either.

In the closing stretch of conversation, Carlos began to put away the family’s important documents. Karla—the youngest of the bunch—listened in closely and clamored to see her passport too.

Karla insisted on knowing where her passport was (turn 23) but wasn’t getting an immediate answer, so I repeated her question (turn 25) while Carlos started to say something about one of his siblings as a baby. Toño chimed in, but Carlos spoke over him to explain that the only passport yet to be issued was Karla’s, and he began to remove the documents from my hands, effectively ending the exchange. I noted that he was putting them away and I asked where they were stored (turn 28). Carlos tucked the documents back into their plastic envelope and returned the envelope to the glossy gift bag that hung on a hook high above the sofa. It was striking to me—given the relation of birth and citizenship—that he was storing these important documents in a gift bag meant for a baby shower decorated in pastel colors with the words “Come on, Baby” written along the side (turn 30).

As he hung the “Come on, Baby” bag on the wall, Carlos stated matter-of-factly: “No me acuerdo, pero teníamos los papeles cuando crecimos. Entonces Catalina no” (I don’t remember, but we had papers when we grew up. So Catalina did not). This was Carlos’s most explicit declaration of the meaning of the passports he’d just shown me: that he and his younger siblings shared the same birthplace and were therefore in possession of the same documents while his older sister Catalina was different because she was born in Mexico and so lacked papers. Carlos’s reference to being too young to remember suggests that he is talking about being born or being a baby, underscoring his grasp of the relationship between birthplace and citizenship, an association made vivid by the “Come on, Baby” bag. The fact that Carlos knew where the documents were stored and that he solemnly displayed and then stowed them demonstrated just how central these papers were to the family. Yet this sophisticated display was only possible at home because Carlos would never bring these documents to school.

Although Catalina—the oldest child and the only undocumented sibling in the Mendoza family—was largely quiet during this exchange, she welcomed the opportunity to talk more about it with me a few months later, after Carlos and Toño had made their trip to Mexico. One afternoon as I walked her home from school, I brought up Carlos’s passport show-and-tell; she remembered that visit clearly. I described how surprised I’d been when he shared the family’s passports with me so early on in our relationship; it had seemed to seamlessly follow his display of favorite toys. I explained my theory—that somehow Carlos knew this was an important set of objects in the house—and I asked Catalina for her sense of why Carlos had chosen to share the papers. Did she think he understood their importance? She offered:

I think he does know because they [our parents] showed him that when he was six or seven. He left to Mexico, yeah, and um, he said that um this book, they showed them to a man and there was other papers that they showed. That’s what he said so that he could go to Mexico.

Catalina went on to explain that Carlos and Toño had been sent to Mexico with a trusted adult so that they could visit their grandmother. She wished she had been able to make that trip to visit the rural part of Central Mexico where her abuela (grandmother) still lived, and where she herself had remained when her parents left Mexico for the United States. It was only after they had crossed the border and found some stability in New York City that they sent for Catalina; without papers, it was too risky for Catalina to attempt a visit to Mexico.

I probed further, wanting to know why Catalina thought Carlos would share the family’s papers with me on that day. It was one thing for him to have an awareness that family members had different papers, but it was another for him to find this information meaningful enough to share with me. She explained that even though Carlos knew those papers were important, he didn’t care much about them. Seeing that I didn’t really understand her distinction between knowing and caring, she offered up an analogy:

It’s like my dad’s car. I know that it’s important but if it gets stolen I don’t really [care]. I do care but it’s not that important for me because it’s not mine. . . . It’s not a big deal for me, it’s only a big deal for my dad because it’s his.

The conversation continued:

Across these exchanges, Carlos and Catalina shared fundamental ideas about documentation and what it meant for them. First they made it clear that they know their family members have different types of immigration status because they were born in different places. Building on that basic fact, the siblings understood that having different kinds of papers leads to different opportunities: family members with U.S. citizenship can participate in activities that other family members are barred from (for example, traveling to see loved ones in Mexico). Additionally, they understood that loved ones born in Mexico live with uncertainty about being able to remain in the United States and obtain U.S. citizenship. Finally, and above all, both children expressed just how much they knew about the significance of immigration status, and—at the young ages of seven and ten—they showed us how it shaped their view of the world, their place, and each other.13

The spiraling curriculum of citizenship—how children as young as Carlos begin to understand the significance of papers, an understanding that deepens as they grow—becomes more visible to us as undocumented parents and children interpret the school documents that are sent home. Even though the important protective mandates issuing from the Plyler ruling prohibit educators from inquiring about students’ immigration status, the topic of citizenship arises regularly throughout a student’s educational trajectory. As children move between school and home, they facilitate the circulation of papers that are not as “weighty” as passports but are nonetheless significant in practical and symbolic ways. School documents that travel home can produce the chilling effects that Plyler is meant to prevent, prompting conversations in mixed-status families about how to participate safely in educational programs and activities.

We turn now to two kinds of school documents that circulate in mixed-status families’ homes. We will first examine forms that address parents as the primary audience, as in the case of school lunch forms that public school parents are asked to complete in order to enroll their children in the federally funded free and reduced price lunch program. We will then turn to homework assignments that address children in their role as students, prompting them to broach the subject of immigration with their families.

School Lunch

At each stage of her educational trajectory, Catalina’s understanding of what it means not to have U.S. citizenship has deepened as she has had to make sense of documents circulating between home and school. As she has grown older, she has continued to experience firsthand the ways in which different immigration statuses mean different levels of access and opportunity for her and her siblings. Educators often use the language of citizenship metaphorically—to mean a child’s good behavior or participation, or to attempt to enlist parental involvement—but in mixed-status homes, the term citizenship conjures up much more. As children move between school and home, they facilitate the circulation of papers that travel with them in their backpacks and school folders. As these papers circulate, they often spark a confrontation between the various meanings of citizenship (as juridical status, as belonging, as a standard of behavior).14 Listening in as Catalina and Jimena interpret school documents helps illuminate the disconnect between the educators’ intended meanings and what the documents signify within a mixed-status household.

Jimena asked me if I would help her with interpreting school forms because, in her words, “a Catalina le había dado flojera” (Catalina had a bout of laziness). I have found that in homes where I’m present as an ethnographer, parents will often ask me to play this brokering role instead of their child. On this day, Catalina was present as her mother and I discussed the packet of documents sent home at the start of the school year, which included the school lunch form. Before looking at this particular form, Jimena noted—gesturing toward Catalina, who was sitting beside us—that we would probably need to take into account the fact that “como ella no nació aquí no le dan cupones” (since she wasn’t born here they don’t give her food stamps). Using the colloquial term (cupones in Spanish and food stamps in English) for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Jimena indicated one of the impacts of the differing immigration statuses among her children: as the Mexican-born undocumented child, Catalina was denied access to the same social services that her siblings were entitled to as U.S. citizens.

Shown below is an excerpt from the application that Jimena needed to complete in order to enroll Catalina and her three younger siblings in the free or reduced price lunch program at P.S. 432. The materials included instructions, starting with the following words, which appeared capitalized and underlined at the top of the page:

Despite the form’s bold, bilingual assurance about eligibility, the document nevertheless provoked confusion and anxiety. Translation of these sentences alone proved insufficient because the form went on to ask for information that encoded immigration status, thereby undercutting the family’s confidence in the inclusiveness of the program.

After completing the form with her children’s information, Jimena was instructed to enter her name and the last four digits of her social security number. There was also an option that read: “If you do not have a Social Security Number check this box.” At this point in the form, Jimena hesitated and asked me to advise her. She was worried about completing the form because in her mind, entering her name and checking that box was akin to disclosing her undocumented status to the school administration. She was torn. She knew her four children would benefit from participating in the school’s nutritional program (the entire family would, in fact, be better off if they could save money by enrolling), but she also feared sharing her undocumented status because she did not know where this form would end up once submitted. Despite the bold type informing parents and guardians in mixed-status families that their children had the right to receive the food and milk distributed by the school, there was nothing to reassure undocumented adults that they could safely complete the form and secure their child’s place in the free lunch program without risking disclosure, detention, or deportation.

Our conversation that afternoon was inconclusive. I explained to Jimena that I understood her concern and that I did not know if anyone outside of P.S. 432’s school staff would ever see the form. I also suggested that Jimena check in with the school’s parent coordinator—a staff person whom I knew she trusted—for additional reassurance. Jimena did not complete the form in my presence. Instead, she set it aside and noted that she would ask me for additional advice in the future, saying, “Voy a poner los papeles en mi folder para que tú me los lea” (I’m going to put these papers in my folder so that you can read them for me). I heard an intergenerational echo here of Carlos’s language when he finished showing me his family’s passports—“los voy a guardar” (I’m going to put them away)—indicating their shared preoccupation with safeguarding any documents that might relate to immigration status. Jimena did ultimately submit the free lunch form.

Jimena and I had this conversation several years before Donald Trump would try to explicitly marry immigration policy to nutritional benefits provided through schools. In 2020, his administration attempted to amend the public charge rule, which is a criterion by which the U.S. government evaluates applications for legal permanent resident status or U.S. citizenship on the basis of whether the government considers an individual an economic burden to the country.15 The proposed change to the rule would have made a child’s enrollment in a nutritional benefit program like SNAP or the free lunch program a strike against their parent or guardian’s application to become a legal permanent resident or U.S. citizen. This change was never approved by Congress, but the proposal alone received wide media attention and scared immigrant parents away from enrolling in this long-standing social service provided daily in public schools.16 This is only one example of the way in which mixed-status families may come to fear participating in public schools when schools appear aligned with immigration authorities that are punitive and potentially destructive to family life.17

This exchange recalls Vieira’s discussion of moments when “the border thickens” in the lives of mixed-status families—the many moments when policies that seek to deter or detain immigrants move from the border to affect the everyday lives of families living within the country’s interior.18 The Mendoza family’s discussion about a form that ostensibly had to do with nutritional services opened on to other topics relevant to access and belonging. Having noted the difference between Catalina and her three younger U.S.-born siblings, her parents talked more about other schooling-related topics that linked with her immigration status. As Jimena put the school lunch form away, her husband, Juan, talked about how Catalina “necesita echarle ganas en la escuela para graduarse y entrar en college” (needs to put in effort in school in order to graduate and be admitted to college). Although he hoped that all of his children would do well in school, this advice was relevant “especialmente a ella” (especially to her), referring indirectly to Catalina, who was still sitting with us. Juan went on to explain, nodding toward Catalina once again, “Yo fui a una clase de inglés en Jay Street a ver si podría hace preguntas sobre ella” (I went to an English class on Jay Street to see if I could ask questions about her). Juan was pursuing his own study of English to maximize his own eligibility for policies that might grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants, but he was also keen on figuring out whether Catalina herself was eligible for the new DACA program. She did meet the eligibility requirement of having immigrated to the United States before 2012, but she was too young (ten instead of fifteen years of age) to enroll in the program. As a result, her postsecondary options were still unclear, and her need to put in effort in order to overcome the structural inequities she faced was paramount to her and her parents.19

Homework

A big part of being successful in school is completing assignments and homework, and Catalina, along with Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni, were all attuned to the importance of getting good grades and high praise for their schoolwork. We will see signs, as the study progresses, of Chang’s hyperdocumentation, as the children and their families expressed their deep investment in educational documents (report cards, diplomas), conceiving of them either as steps toward obtaining juridical citizenship or as symbolic substitutes for the legal documents that remain out of reach. Still, academic progress in school was fraught—not only because of the complex associations they made between educational progress and self-worth, but also because of the ways in which the school materials they were responsible for completing evoked anxieties about citizenship.

Let’s now turn to a homework assignment that several of the girls encountered in sixth grade, after having graduated from P.S. 432, as part of a district-wide social studies curriculum used in their respective middle schools. I first saw the assignment on a visit to Catalina’s home. It required her to interview a family member about their experience of immigrating to the United States. The homework sheet included four questions, followed by space for the student to write answers to the following prompts:

1. (a) What countries does your family come from? (b) What continents does your family come from?
2. Who in your family moved to the United States (grandma, uncle, great-grandfather, and so on)?
3. How did your family come to the United States?
4. Why did your family come to the United States?

School mandates prohibiting educators from inquiring about students’ immigration status do not, of course, prohibit teaching about immigration. However, an assignment like this one, designed to foster home–school connections with immigrant families, can inadvertently produce a chilling effect.

In addition to these scripted interview questions, the homework sheet included an assignment overview, a rubric, and sample text that the students could use as a model for writing their own family immigration stories. The overview connected the students’ study of geography to their family’s experiences of immigration, beginning with the statement: “Geography includes us! While we live in New York, not all of our families’ [sic] have origins in New York.” This claim to a shared immigrant experience was followed by a metaphorical view of citizenship—“we are citizens of the world!”—meant to communicate a sense of equal belonging.20 The rubric detailed the steps that children needed to complete to fulfill the assignment and included language that could be especially stressful for undocumented students living with the realities of surveillance and deportation: “I tracked my families’ migration,” “I collected and recorded my families’ interview answers,” and “I brought in a photo.” Although the final project was meant to celebrate classroom diversity, for students aware of birthright citizenship, juridical differences, and their attendant risks, the assignment evoked surveillance as much as community building.21

After learning about this assignment at Catalina’s apartment, I took a picture of it to share with Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni at our next grupo de análisis meeting. Aurora had an interpretation of the assignment that I found significant. She associated this homework assignment with other clerical systems that she was familiar with. The “blue card” that she references below is a document that all families enrolled in New York City public schools must complete and update annually with their address, demographic information, and emergency contacts. Aurora explained:

Que la escuela quería saber un poco de su pasado de los estudiantes y la manera en que vinistes. Como aquí dice: How did your family come to the United States? So, quieren averiguar un poquito cómo fue tu experiencia viniendo a este país. A mí también me preguntaron esas preguntas, y es como . . . quieren saber un poquito más de lo que tus padres filled out en el blue card. Like un poquito de tu pasado, fue de la inmigración, que es lo mismo. Solo están preguntando: Ohhh, cómo . . . por qué tu familia vino a los Estados Unidos? Que por una mejor vida o por dinero? Cosas así.

That the school wanted to know a little bit more about the students’ past and the way in which you came. Like here it says: How did your family come to the United States? So, they wanted to find out a little bit about what your experience was like coming to this country. They asked me these questions too, and it’s like . . . they want to know a little more than what your parents filled out on the blue card. Like a little bit about your past, it was about immigration, which is almost the same thing. They’re just asking: Ohhh, how . . . why did your family come to the United States? For a better life or for more money? Things like that.

Although the assignment seemed to assume that the children themselves are U.S. born (it did not ask them to recount their own immigration experiences), Aurora went on to imagine that she was being interviewed. She explained that when asked where she is from, “I would say from Mexico but when they ask me if I have papers I say yes.” Aurora, in other words, immediately associated this assignment with questions of birthright citizenship, which made her uncomfortable, and she was frank about how she would misrepresent her immigration status if asked. In her interpretation of this homework document, Jenni also assumed that it was about papeles and residencia (residency).22

This wasn’t the first time Aurora had spoken about resisting the pressure to divulge her immigration status.23 Consider this excerpt from an exchange we’d had after a previous grupo de análisis meeting.

Here Aurora displayed a complex understanding of intrafamilial differences arising from birthplace, and of the relationship between having papers and having opportunities. She also indicated how questions of juridical and cultural citizenship intersect, and how her understanding of belonging is inextricable from her sense of self-worth. Having come to the United States before the age of two, Aurora felt “it’s like I was born here almost.” Given her good academic record of “not really [having] failed anything,” she felt that she deserved U.S. citizenship. This echoes other conversations I’ve had with children in mixed-status homes who equate being eligible for citizenship with the idea of being good—something that can be proven by staying out of trouble, purchasing a house or car, and being part of a household that contributes to society economically.24

This chapter has shown how children in mixed-status families embark, from a young age, on a spiraling curriculum of citizenship in which they come to understand the significance of immigration status, often before they’re capable of expressing such knowledge explicitly. It is a curriculum that unfolds during the course of everyday life and deepens over time as children encounter different kinds of papers that matter to them. School documents sent into mixed-status families often inadvertently evoke anxiety and provoke conversations that further expose children to the realities of their and their loved ones’ juridical statuses. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the relationship between immigration papers and educational documents only grows in symbolic value across the lifespan. In chapter 3, as we return to the classroom setting, we will hear more from Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni about how and when they evoke, through both speech and silence, immigration status at school.