Introduction

Mixed-Status Families

The children in this study—Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni—are all members of mixed-status families. Mixed-status families include members with different immigration statuses. According to 2021 estimates, more than 16.7 million people live in mixed-status households that include at least one undocumented member.1 Approximately 6 million of the people in these households are younger than 18 years of age.2 Most of the children growing up in these families are U.S.-born citizens like Hazel, while others are undocumented minors like Catalina and Aurora. Still others arrive in the United States without authorization or in possession of temporary travel visas, then begin the process of applying for more permanent resident status, as in the cases of Pita, Tere, and Jenni. A decade ago when I began this project, the mixed-status families in P.S. 432’s school community resembled national trends in that younger children were U.S.-born citizens while their older siblings and parents were undocumented.3

As this book will show, children growing up in mixed-status families learn about how state-defined categories—like “citizen” and “noncitizen,” in the parlance of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services—organize their lives starting at a young age.4 These early lessons inform children’s beliefs about their own belonging and affect their participation in public institutions like schools. In the coming pages, we learn from children in two kinds of mixed-status families. We will meet families—like those of Aurora, Catalina, Pita, and Hazel—from Mexico and Central America known as “long-duration unauthorized immigrants.”5 This phrase refers to the settlement patterns of undocumented immigrants who came to the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s and who, in a departure from previous migratory trends, did not move between the United States and their country of origin in a cyclical fashion because the militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border made the journey too treacherous to attempt more than once.6 As undocumented adults have immigrated and stayed in the United States for longer stretches of time, they have also given birth to increasing numbers of U.S.-born citizen children. As a result, mixed-status families from those countries of origin now tend to include undocumented parents and older undocumented children who had crossed the border (like Aurora, Catalina, and Pita) along with a growing number of younger U.S.-born children (like Hazel).7 We will also meet families that illustrate a revolving door–style immigration characterized by frequent travel between their country of origin and the United States. Family reunification is the primary means by which Dominican immigrants like Tere and Jenni obtain visas to immigrate.8 Such visas enable a freedom of movement unavailable to the undocumented children in this study.

I have chosen to focus on children from mixed-status families because they are a little-known but important part of our public school population. Members of mixed-status families have extensive experience navigating differences of citizenship within their family of origin, making the immediate family unit a microcosm of national variations in immigration statuses and their attendant realities. Moreover, their growing presence in U.S. schools helps to challenge reductive or essentialized notions of Spanish-speaking immigrant families. I have often heard educators gloss over the linguistic diversity of immigrant families when they refer, for example, to a family’s “home language,” as if there were only one. Mixed-status families make clear that this is a misnomer in many immigrant homes, where parents and children were born and raised in different linguistic and cultural contexts.

Similarly, we tend to talk about a family’s “country of origin” as if all members of a household share the same nationality. Mixed-status families highlight that millions of children in the United States do not share the same country of origin, or immigration status, as their parents or siblings. Homogenizing views of immigrant families are a problem because they limit educators’ understanding of their students’ experiences. This can adversely affect schooling when educators are less equipped to develop curriculum, pedagogical supports, and opportunities for parental participation that support student learning.9 For decades, educational researchers have argued that building on children’s and families’ funds of knowledge to develop culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy is an essential part of fostering children’s linguistic and academic learning. Yet we know little about the sociopolitical and cultural backgrounds of this growing number of students living in mixed-status families and attending public schools.

This Study

This project took place in Brooklyn, New York, in a neighborhood that I call Vista. State and citywide demographic data make clear why Vista—and why Catalina, Aurora, Jenni, Tere, Pita, and Hazel’s experiences—is representative of larger demographic trends. Around the time of this study, the undocumented population of Latin American immigrants in New York State was primarily composed of people from Mexico (19 percent), followed by the Dominican Republic (9 percent), Ecuador (8 percent), and El Salvador (7 percent).10 In New York City specifically, most undocumented individuals came from the Dominican Republic, China, and Mexico; the Mexican population was the fastest-growing undocumented group among the three.11 Of the nearly 1 million immigrants who lived in Brooklyn at the time, nearly 7 percent of them lived in Vista.12 Immigrants living in this part of Brooklyn hailed primarily from China and Latin America. More specifically, Vista’s foreign-born residents came from the following countries: China, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and El Salvador.13 Many Chinese families, like their Latin American counterparts, experience the harsh realities of living undocumented in the United States. This project, however, focused specifically on Vista’s Spanish-speaking families with whom I was able to establish relationships of mutual trust in Spanish that are fundamental to this kind of ethnographic project.

The school-based component of this study took place at P.S. 432, a dual-language Spanish–English elementary school where classroom instruction was divided between the two languages. Despite the nearly equal numbers of Latin American and Asian residents living in Vista, this neighborhood school primarily served the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants. At P.S. 432, the average number of students labeled Hispanic and classified as English learners was well above city averages. In 2013, 40 percent of the student population in New York City and 41.2 percent of the students enrolled in the various public schools located in the Vista neighborhood were Hispanic. However, at P.S. 432, the average number of Hispanic children enrolled totaled 91 percent—again, well above these city and neighborhood averages. The citywide population of children labeled English learners was 14 percent, while the averages in Vista and at P.S. 432 were much higher, at 48.2 percent and 41.5 percent, respectively. P.S. 432’s student body also reported poverty rates of 96 percent, well above the city average of 20.9 percent.14

This book follows Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni from 2013 to 2015. This period spanned two academic years, including their last year of elementary school and their first year of middle school. I took a multi-sited ethnographic approach to conducting fieldwork in their school, homes, and neighborhood.15 The first year of the project took place during the 2013–14 school year, when I visited their fifth-grade dual-language classroom on a weekly basis. My visits typically began at 8:00 AM with the start of the school day and continued until dismissal at 2:30 PM. As an ethnographer, I relied on long-standing principles of participant observation that involved joining in the everyday activities of the school while also developing ways of watching and recording these activities. As one example, I purchased a marble-cover composition notebook identical to the ones that students used, and we carried them throughout the day while working at desks, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and walking through the hallways. The children used their notebooks to complete their assignments; I used mine to take field notes. As part of my school-based data collection, I also gathered teaching materials, student work, and other curricular artifacts, as well as over two hundred hours of recorded talk among the six focal students, teachers, and peers.

In addition to the recordings, which I will discuss in greater detail in chapter 1, I also engaged in two other data-collection activities. First, I visited Catalina’s, Aurora’s, Pita’s, Hazel’s, and Tere’s homes, all located in Vista within a few blocks of one another and P.S. 432. Over time, I focused my routine home visits on Pita, Aurora, and Catalina’s families because each girl had been or was undocumented and because they all lived with younger U.S.-born children. While all six girls have made major contributions to the study, these three girls will increasingly become the focus of this book. I visited their homes monthly and audio or video recorded interactions between these three girls, their parents, and their siblings. In addition, I accompanied their families to immigration clinics run by community organizations, after-school and middle school programs, and local cafés and shops. Second, I adapted my fieldwork in response to the children’s own desires for increased involvement. Early in the project, the girls began to ask me what I was hearing in my recordings, and they wondered if I could share the files with them. I made arrangements with Ms. Daniela and other school staff to hold a weekly after-school meeting, which I called our grupo de análisis (data analysis group). During these meetings, I played excerpts of the recordings so that all six focal students could hear them. We co-constructed a set of protocols for listening and responding to what we heard, always returning to the overarching question of what their experiences could teach their teachers about the lives of children from mixed-status families.

The second year of the project, which took place during the 2014–15 school year, involved weekly sessions of our grupo de análisis held at P.S. 432. By that point, all six students were attending middle school, but—after consulting with them and their parents, and with the support of Ms. Daniela and her principal—we decided to continue meeting at P.S. 432. This not only allowed this project to continue on a weekly basis but also created a familiar space for the girls to return to as they navigated the significant changes associated with early adolescence and middle school. I held a dozen group meetings in fall 2014, and I continued to meet with Catalina’s, Pita’s, and Aurora’s families outside of school. This formal period of data collection culminated in January 2015, when I held a Three Kings Day celebration in Ms. Daniela’s classroom to thank the families and teachers for their involvement. From that moment to the present, I have remained in close contact with the group in a less formal, but no less meaningful, mentoring role. The afterword to this book, coauthored with Catalina, Pita, Aurora, and Hazel, was written ten years after the project’s initial phase had ended.

The two years that are the focus of this book were formative for Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni for at least two reasons. First, the focal families’ attempts to change their immigration status and household composition involved a confrontation with immigration policy that shaped the children’s consciousness and our conversations. Pita’s immigration status changed during these years as she and her mother became residents (officially called “lawful permanent residents”). Family members in other households worked to bring relatives to the United States, with differing degrees of success. Jenni’s mother was able to obtain a visa and relocate to Brooklyn from the Dominican Republic; Catalina’s grandmother obtained her first tourist visa, while Aurora’s grandmother was unable to do so successfully. Hazel’s older brother immigrated from El Salvador to the United States and began his life as an undocumented high schooler, while Tere traveled to the Dominican Republic to mourn the death of her grandmother. These experiences, in turn, shaped the conversations that the six children, their parents, and I had throughout the course of this study. I use the words that the girls and their parents used to describe these immigration-related processes and papers rather than translating them into the official language of U.S. immigration policy.

Second, as these six focal students graduated from fifth grade, they began to assume new levels of responsibility and independence. This involved traveling without their parents to and from home and school, thereby expanding the places where I conducted fieldwork. I gained new insights into what it is like to move through the city and borough as a student from a mixed-status family when we began to meet more frequently in the public spaces of their neighborhood. I was able to observe the real-time decisions that they made about when to participate in or withdraw from conversations about immigration as they arose in these nonschool settings.

The two years spanning 2013 to 2015 were also a formative time in the development of social movements that have shaped ongoing conversations about immigration and racial justice in the United States. The events chronicled in this book took place during the middle two years of Barack Obama’s second term as U.S. president. After failing to deliver the comprehensive immigration reform known to many mixed-status Spanish-speaking families as la reforma (the reform), Obama signed the executive order—called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—in 2012. The undocumented, youth-led movement for immigrants’ rights drove much of the conversation during this time. They focused on coming out as undocumented in an effort to draw attention to the many contributions that they and their families make to this country and to push for a pathway to citizenship.16 The Black Lives Matter movement established itself as a visible grassroots presence in the United States calling for justice in light of ongoing state-sanctioned attacks on Black life. Although the focus of this study ended during the Obama administration, I remained in close contact with the girls during their high school years; I witnessed how the racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his administration directly affected their lives. Throughout this book, I track how these large-scale events are registered and refracted in the focal students’ everyday talk at school and beyond.

Children as Innocent

This book takes up a call issued by Carola Suárez-Orozco and Hirokazu Yoshikawa to focus empirical research on the “unique immigration-status socialization experiences” that take place during middle childhood.17 “Middle childhood”—the period from six to twelve years of age—has been referred to as the “forgotten years of development because most research is focused on early childhood development or adolescent growth.”18 In order to fully appreciate how much children know, we first have to question the commonly held view of childhood innocence: that children remain unaware of their immigration status until they approach adolescence and young adulthood. The transitional period from elementary to middle school, which includes the developmental period of middle childhood, is formative for children in their socialization to citizenship. As I will show, during this time, they become discerning speakers with a rapidly developing metalinguistic awareness regarding when and how to talk about their and their loved ones’ immigration status. Despite this reality, there is still a widely held view of immigrant children as unknowing.19

One of the sources of this view lies in the interpretation of the 1982 Supreme Court ruling Plyler v. Doe, which, as I briefly described in the preface, protects undocumented children from being denied a public education. At issue in the case was whether the superintendent of a school district in Plyler, Texas, could withhold public funds and instead charge tuition to undocumented students residing in its district. The Supreme Court held that the Texas law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by restricting free public education to U.S. citizens or “legally admitted aliens.”20 The Court held that the Texas schooling law was inconsistent with federal immigration law and policy. Unlike state restrictions on employment, for example, state and local policies restricting education on the basis of immigration status infringed on federal powers and constituted, in Justice Brennan’s words, a “ludicrously ineffectual attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigration.”21 Justice Blackmun added in his concurring opinion that school officials were hardly in a position to determine which “aliens” were entitled to residence and which would eventually be deported. Any efforts to draw such lines in the context of education, he noted, would involve the State in the administration of federal immigration laws and were bound to be “fatally imprecise.”22 As a result of Plyler, undocumented children and youth residing in the United States were granted protection under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time.

While the Supreme Court in Plyler granted all students a right not to be denied a public education on the basis of immigration status—what Michael Olivas has referred to as “blanket enrollment permission”—it did not provide school districts and employees with specific guidance about how to safeguard this right.23 In the decades since Plyler, federal and state governments have stepped in to provide guidance to educators on how to protect undocumented students’ rights to attend public school.24 In 2014, for example, the New York State Education Department sent a memo to school leaders warning them to avoid any actions that could “chill” or “discourage undocumented students from receiving a public education.”25 This echoed the federal “Dear Colleague” letter of the same year, which advised districts to rethink the documents they ask guardians and parents to provide during enrollment because they may deter them from completing the process. In some states, for example, schools require a driver’s license as proof of district residency, but adults cannot obtain one without immigration papers. Such requests may scare undocumented families away from enrolling their children in school because not having a driver’s license could be interpreted as an admission of not having citizenship.26

The Plyler ruling has been celebrated for its far-reaching impact because it set a precedent for protecting immigrant children’s access to public schooling despite challenges from state and local governments seeking to deny immigrants full access to educational opportunities in this country.27 Michael Olivas considers the Plyler decision significant for two reasons. First, it resolved the dispute over “whether the state of Texas could enact laws denying undocumented children free access to its own public schools.” Second, the decision issued a strong protective imperative regarding a “larger, transcendent principle: how this society will treat its immigrant children.”28 The Court argued that undocumented children were “innocent” and should not be penalized for the actions of their parents.29 Roberto Gonzales argues that “by establishing the legal inclusion of ‘innocent’ undocumented immigrant children in the American public school system, the ruling laid the groundwork for them to benefit from the same opportunities for inclusion that had existed for generations of schoolchildren before them.”30 Commentators have lauded the decision for allowing hundreds of thousands of children to obtain an elementary and secondary education, and for preventing anti-immigrant policymakers from restricting schooling access in order to deter immigrants from seeking opportunities and making new lives in this country.31 Indeed, legal scholar Justin Driver has called Plyler one of “the most egalitarian, momentous, and efficacious constitutional opinions that the Supreme Court has issued throughout its entire history.”32

For all the material and legal gains won in Plyler, however, the decision itself also reinforced exclusionary logics that glorified childish innocence in contrast to adult wrongfulness. Central to Justice Brennan’s majority opinion was a view that children should not bear the guilt of their parents. “Those who elect to enter our territory by stealth and in violation of our law should be prepared to bear the consequences,” he wrote for the majority. “But the children of those illegal entrants are not comparably situated.” The Texas law, Justice Brennan wrote in the closing lines, was “directed against children, and imposes its discriminatory burden on the basis of a legal characteristic over which children can have little control.”33 That the child should not bear this burden was premised on an understanding that their parents should. Children’s innocence in the immigration context gained meaning through a juxtaposition with “guilty” adult migrants.34

Innocence, of course, connotes more than the absence of guilt. It can also imply unknowingness or ignorance, as if children were unaware of their immigration status. One important reflection on this kind of innocence can be found in Jose Antonio Vargas’s 2011 autobiographical essay in the New York Times Sunday magazine entitled “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” in which he recounts learning about his immigration status.35 He chronicles key turning points in his life as an undocumented Filipino immigrant, beginning with immigrating to the United States in 1993 at the age of twelve. Vargas describes being sixteen years old and trying to obtain a driver’s license using fake documents that his custodial grandfather had given him without explanation. When the clerk at the department of motor vehicles whispered to Vargas that his papers were fake and warned him never to return to the office, Vargas confronted his grandfather and learned that he was undocumented. Aviva Chomsky cites Vargas’s experiences in her book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal as evidence that “children, of course, don’t usually know much about status and immigration law unless their parents choose to explain the status issue to them.”36 She attributes this to the fact that “their main interaction with state authority is through school” where children are treated equally because of Plyler and therefore “may never confront the issue of documentation in their daily lives.”37 As we will see throughout this book, childhood innocence is far from universal. I have observed that children growing up in mixed-status families today do in fact understand citizenship’s significance, and they demonstrate just how much they know at home and at school.

Scholars like Suárez-Orozco and Yoshikawa have described how children sometimes experience “a dawning awareness of their own legal status” in middle childhood.38 When students make social comparisons between their household and other households, a “concern over the family’s legal vulnerabilities” might “seep into consciousness.”39 However, Suárez-Orozco et al. tend to view undocumented children who are “ensconced in the family and provided with public education from kindergarten through twelfth grade” as protected from “fac[ing] full on the consequences of their condition.”40 It is not, many believe, until undocumented youth realize that they are unable to participate in “social rituals” that “define personhood in early adulthood” that these young people find themselves “awakening to a nightmare” of legal exclusion.41 This important research has identified barriers that undocumented adolescents face when they find themselves excluded from opportunities like applying for a driver’s license and federal financial aid for postsecondary study. Such studies argue that the Plyler ruling creates inclusive conditions throughout the early years of K–12 schooling, so as a result children do not have to confront institutional barriers resulting from immigration status until they reach adolescence or young adulthood.42

The children in this study, along with those I worked alongside in mixed-status families in California and Pennsylvania, have a lot in common with the young people whose lives are depicted in the research and reporting cited above. But they also differ in a fundamental way: they were born nearly two decades later. The children I know well were all born around 2002, in the years immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. What this means is that children like Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni have grown up in a time when an unprecedented amount of governmental attention and money has been spent on surveilling, detaining, and removing immigrants from the United States. Racism and xenophobia, coupled with restrictionist immigration policies and the militarization of the U.S. border, existed well before September 11, 2001, but that year marked a turning point. After that time, immigration policy shifted from a focus on policing exterior boundaries and ports of entry to a concerted effort to surveil, detain, and deport people already living in the country’s interior.43 It is startling to think that Immigration and Customs Enforcement—also known as ICE—was only created in 2001 with the signing of the Patriot Act. This means that for many children growing up in mixed-status families, immigration status became central to their families’ kitchen-table conversations, the ambient noise of TV and radio news cycles playing in their homes and local businesses, and their dreams and nightmares.44 Their awareness of juridical status—and their strategies for negotiating its implications—began well before adolescence, as they will recount in the coming pages.

“No Es Verdad”: Children Share What They Know

What did Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni have to say about the claim that students tend to become aware of their immigration status later in life? In fifth grade—when they were ten and eleven years old—I asked them to think with me about the discrepancy I observed between scholarly assumptions of innocence and the different kinds of knowledge they had displayed in our time together. I started with a deliberately provocative overstatement: “Almost everyone who studies immigrant children thinks that they don’t realize their migratory status, let’s say, if they have papers, no papers, have visas, what have you. [The research says children] don’t know until they’re sixteen or seventeen years old.” Their first response was to shout out cries of disbelief.

I elaborated on the statement a bit further, and Aurora and Pita conjectured why some children—the exceptions, in their mind—might grow up unaware of the realities associated with their immigration status. Their first thought was that the decisions parents make to talk to their children about immigration status are personal and idiosyncratic. Aurora suggested that parents might choose to have this conversation based on their own bravery, underscoring the sense of strength needed to overcome the kinds of exclusion that mixed-status families face. She also acknowledged that parents manage information according to their beliefs about how their children will react, because the realities associated with members’ immigration status shape the material conditions and the social-emotional well-being of the entire family.

They also suggested that degrees of economic privilege in the United States might inform how much children would have to confront the disenfranchising realities of living in the United States without authorization. Both Aurora and Pita offered up the idea that a child might have degrees of awareness that are based on their families’ class position.

Pita and Aurora went on to hypothesize—drawing on their firsthand experiences—that children’s memories of crossing the border could shape how much they know about their circumstances. Pita explained that a traumatic border crossing experience could be indelible in a child’s mind, prompting a desire to understand the circumstances leading up to such an event.

This intersectional view of mixed-status immigrant childhoods—from the perspective of immigrant children themselves—demonstrates a complex metalinguistic awareness that involves a burgeoning understanding of class, border-crossing experiences, and parental decision-making from a young age.45 The insights offered up by Catalina, Jenni, Aurora, and Pita underscore the importance of listening to children account for their own lived experiences. As Barrie Thorne poignantly argued two decades ago in Gender Play, “It distorts the vitality of children’s present lives to continually refer to them in a presumed distant future. Children’s interactions are not preparation for life; they are life itself.”46

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, whose own research on immigrant childhoods has shown that immigrant children negotiate encounters with the state by translating for their parents, has asked us to reconsider our beliefs about children in light of the central role that they play as language brokers between their families and our nation’s public institutions. In a study of immigrant students’ displays of “transcultural and translingual competencies” in an after-school program serving elementary school students in Los Angeles, Faulstich Orellana concludes: “Their behaviors and actions revealed a normalization of processes and practices that may seem unusual from a dominant-culture and adult-centric standpoint. Thus, children helped make the familiar strange for all of us, so we could see and understand in new ways.”47 We can call the six girls in this study our brokers because through their words and actions, they make visible a childhood marked by an immigration status that may otherwise go ignored by adults in schools.

Children as Knowing

When I first started working as an ethnographer alongside mixed-status families in 2008, both academic and mainstream writing on immigration offered few examples of children explicitly broaching the subject of immigration status. However, there was one newsclip that I often shared with my audiences when I presented my research. The video from May 2010 contains an exchange between Michelle Obama and a second-grade student during a national tour undertaken by the first lady in support of President Barack Obama’s proposed immigration reform package.48 Seated in a circle in an elementary school gymnasium in Maryland, Michelle Obama leaned in as one young girl nervously recounted: “My mom says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn’t has [sic] papers.” Obama replied, “Yeah, well that’s something that we have to work on, right? To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right?” As Obama went on speaking, the young student interjected: “But my mom doesn’t have any papers.” As other children excitedly waved their hands to be called on, Obama ended the exchange with, “Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens.” At the time, this newsreel constituted the only mainstream representation I could find of immigrant children explicitly sharing their knowledge about immigration status.

There is now a growing body of ethnographic research that demonstrates how children are aware of immigration status at a young age. In her study of teasing routines in two Mexican families living in Southern California, Fazila Bhimji found that very young children were enlisted in interactions explicitly referencing the threat of deportation that families face daily. When two-year-old Esmeralda followed her mother’s playful prompts to tease her aunt by threatening to call la migra (a colloquial phrase for immigration enforcement agents), this child communicated her understanding that la migra was a commanding authoritative presence to be obeyed.49 In Arizona, children substituted la migra for cops in the game cops and robbers.50 While planning the content for a zine during a collaborative storytelling project led by Jocelyn Solis in New York City, one undocumented fourteen-year-old boy drew a maze entitled “Can you get to New York without running into la migra?”51 And in her ethnographic study of transnational motherhood, Gabrielle Oliveira explored the ways in which Facebook simultaneously fostered connections among siblings of different ages separated by national borders while also producing tension between them by making visible the material and social inequalities that they faced.52 My own research alongside mixed-status Mexican families in southwestern Pennsylvania has shown that parents evoked threats of deportation when talking with their four- and six-year-old children about the importance of performing well academically in school.53

Researchers attending closely to children’s language and literacy practices have also shown that children express their knowledge about citizenship—and what is at stake in having or not having papers—in a variety of ways. Solis found that the process of collaborative storytelling—which often involved creative approaches allowing children to first draw, then narrate their experiences—created opportunities for them to share their strengths and preoccupations. In one conversation between children and adolescents in the same community-based literacy program mentioned above, Solis recorded a five-year-old’s narration of a drawing that represented migration from Mexico to the United States. The child described the perils of walking, not flying, to the United States, which sparked a telling exchange between two other participants about their and their families’ arrival and the risks and surveillance involved in crossing a militarized border.54 Sarah Gallo’s study of undocumented fathers and their children showed how together they constructed narratives of police encounters and family deportations that they shared with their teachers and with one another.55 Inmaculada García-Sánchez, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, and I have all witnessed the ways in which children—through their drawings and descriptions of what they have drawn—express connections between the large-scale national context of immigration and their own childhoods.

Children’s participation in everyday conversations across settings is shaped by their perceptions of the risks associated with immigration status. In some cases, young children abroad worry about becoming estranged from family members who have left their home countries to live in the United States as undocumented migrants because they know they cannot see them on a regular basis.56 In other contexts, U.S.-born children who have returned with their undocumented parents to their country of origin fear being bullied for being outsiders.57 I have witnessed children as young as six years old describe the ways that citizenship can limit their freedom to travel between countries, the ability to visit with loved ones, and their family members’ access to health care.58 Children do not always respond to direct questions about the risks and realities associated with juridical status; instead, they demonstrate their knowledge through drawing, play, and other means. As a result, I have learned to listen carefully to children’s stories about immigration status and to attend to how those stories might encode knowledge they do not share directly.

Speech and Silence

As we have already seen, children share their understanding of citizenship’s significance in many ways that do not only—or even primarily—involve explicit references to nationality or immigration status. They do, however, move between school and family contexts where the concept of citizenship saturates everyday life and where talk about citizenship can be fraught. Schools are fascinating places to study speech and silence because of the many rules that dictate teacher and student expression. Put another way, schools are highly metalinguistic spaces where talk about communication is a defining feature of classroom life. Just consider how much time teachers spend telling students when to speak or not to speak (“turn and talk with your partner” but “be quiet in the hallways”), how to initiate talking (“raise your hand and wait to be called on”), what volume to speak in (“use your indoor voice”), and even how much to say (“make a five-minute presentation” or “write a four-paragraph essay”). Homes are equally important sites for the study of speech and silence because parents and guardians explicitly and implicitly socialize children into ways of talking during everyday routines.59 These socializing moments can occur when school forms and homework assignments are sent home, producing a confrontation between the different meanings that educators and family members assign the concept of citizenship.

We will see that children learn to make considered decisions about when and how to share the facts—as they understand them—about their and their loved ones’ immigration status. Here I present a framework for studying just what children from mixed-status families know. My premise is that in order to perceive just how cognizant children are, we have to listen to their words and also attend to their significant silences. While I use speech and silence as a shorthand for the different moments when children disclose or disguise what they know about citizenship, we will explore several dimensions of verbal and nonverbal communication.

The instances of silence that we will examine in speech and in writing, across home and school settings, share two characteristics. First, they count as communication; in other words, silence is to be understood as an action rather than a failure to act.60 Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Jenni, and Tere grew up in families that were actively concerned about the risk of revealing their nationality or immigration status, and all six learned rules about when and where it would be appropriate to do so. Even though their elementary school teachers knew better than to ask them to discuss or disclose their immigration status, topics like birthplace and immigration came up in the curriculum. In these moments students synthesized what they knew about the setting (“should I talk about this here?”), the people (“do I trust this person?”), and the risks (“can my family get in trouble?”).61 All six had learned a set of discursive strategies that they routinely used when making decisions about whether to remain silent or speak up.

Second, a decision to remain silent may be informed by the student’s sense of responsibility to others; withholding expression is not a matter of individual whim. In the case of children growing up in mixed-status families, their silences (as well as their statements) often indicate the complex social norms they have learned about when and how it is appropriate to broach the subject of citizenship.62 Given the vast amount of social and cultural knowledge they leverage when making these decisions, students’ responses tell us a lot about what they believe is at stake in possessing and displaying their knowledge.63 As a result, children’s decisions are evidence of the responsibility that they have learned to shoulder as they care for and protect members of the mixed-status communities to which they belong.64 This book contributes to the broader project of studying children’s language by paying attention to the protective role that silence can play within the sociopolitical context of their childhood.

Studies of classroom interaction have shown that student silence can render visible those unspoken assumptions that undergird classroom interaction.65 On the one hand, teachers may treat classroom silence as a deficiency or a form of misbehavior—a sign that their students lack an interest in academic learning.66 Educators’ assumptions about the significance of silence for nonwhite student populations can lead to moralizing judgments of those students, marking them as good or bad.67 On the other hand, Katherine Schultz and Timothy San Pedro have found that student silence in high school classrooms can function as an agentive act of resistance to mainstream curricular and disciplinary practices that place them on the fringes of classroom learning.68 From this perspective, talk that is absent or out of place can be productive. Breaks in normative classroom conversation can prompt teachers and students to reflect on identity categories—such as race and class—that are often taken for granted in everyday talk.69 In order for silence to stop the flow of normative classroom interaction—and in so doing create opportunities for reflection or resistance—it has to be perceptible to members of a classroom community.70 In other words, the student silences described in these studies had to be experienced collectively in order to be understood as an opposition to the expected conventions for classroom talk.71

In the coming chapters, we will listen to a variety of significant silences. Some of these signifying silences will be audible—that is, perceptible, meaningful—to peers but not to teachers, and some will be missed by everyone.72 In those cases where silence went unacknowledged in real time, the recording devices permitted me to listen and listen again to meaningful communication that we otherwise fail to perceive. It is common for a quiet student to go unnoticed within the noisy din of real-time, multiparty classroom interaction. With public school class sizes numbering upward of two dozen students to a room, student silences may be welcomed by teachers. I also consider it a type of silence when a student tactically encodes or displaces information about citizenship status, as when a student withholds one thought but shares another one instead. Students from mixed-status families may omit or reframe references to citizenship even as they express other ideas during classroom conversations or in their writing.73 These moments constitute a kind of silence—a withholding—that may go unnoticed by teachers who do not realize that the original topic was sensitive.74 Here, as in the studies reviewed above, silence is agentive. However, instead of being an act of student resistance felt by others within a classroom routine or discussion, reframing is a strategy for responding to teacher requests or curricular demands while also protecting themselves from disclosure.

The silence of mixed-status families—for example, a parent’s failing to fill out a school form—is likewise easy to miss or misconstrue. Deepening our understanding of the kind of conversations (and anxieties) produced by the way school documents are received in mixed-status homes is essential if we are to understand how juridical citizenship shapes education. Some examples of documents that activate concerns about citizenship include report cards that include a citizenship grade, or narrative reports of student progress that refer to their behavior as evidence of being a good citizen. They may also include school lunch forms that ask for social security numbers, or homework assignments requiring students to interview family members about their immigration experience.75 These school texts include references to state-defined citizenship (as in identification numbers indicating nationality) and to citizenship in a metaphorical sense (as in behavior and belonging). When these materials are sent home, often in a child’s backpack, they enter a familial discursive and political setting where citizenship is equated with immigration status. For parents and children in mixed-status families, these materials can create the chilling effects that Plyler is meant to prevent. In doing so, they can produce an alignment between public school education and an immigration enforcement regime that makes parents hesitant to participate and children even more anxious to speak in school.76 Even when school staff adhere to upholding silences about student immigration status in school, the materials that they send home can prompt anxious conversations about immigration and education between parents and children.

At various points in this study, Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni expressed anxiety and fear when confronted with the possibility of broaching the subject of immigration in conversation with people whom they did not trust. I use the Spanish term inquietud (restlessness) to name these expressions—often nonverbal—of vulnerability around citizenship status. My use of the term inquietud is informed by my reading of Gloria Anzaldúa and her discussion of the emotional states associated with growing up in the borderlands. Anzaldúa describes the fear that can come from the uncertainty of living between multiple frames of reference—nation-states, languages, and more—without a clear sense of belonging which leads to silence. She writes: “Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits.”77 Anzaldúa acknowledges that such conditions can result in a state of “psychic restlessness.”78 This restlessness manifests in ephemeral expressions and fleeting silences that will become perceptible to us in the coming chapters.79

In moments of inquietud, the girls used communicative resources other than talk (for example, remaining silent or using physical objects to make sounds, like tapping a table with a pencil) to express how unsettling it can be to confront the unresolvable ordeal of growing up in the United States under the threat of disapproval, discrimination, and even deportation.80 One of the interventions that I hope to make here is to introduce transcription notations that can represent the sounds and actions that attend expressions of inquietud as they co-occur with speech. Throughout the transcripts included in this book I use transcription symbols borrowed from conversation analysis because they robustly permit representation of paralinguistic communicative resources—for example, the ways that shifts in tone, volume, and speed change the meaning of the words we say. In this notation system, descriptions of a speakers’ affect or actions are typically noted by the researcher in double parentheses. I have tried, whenever possible, to represent the sounds of inquietud within the speaker’s turn of talk—I do so by using superscripts to integrate them within the text instead of separating them out as nonverbal information—because I have found that these sounds accompany words as communicative devices and are not simply actions that occur alongside of or external to the speech itself.81

All of this is to say that we have to develop new modalities of listening so that we can help attune educators to the lived experiences of their students and so that we can reexamine how and when schools are complicit in silencing students or scaring them and their families.82 If we can develop fluency in talking about the students we serve in mixed-status communities, then we can ultimately break our own professional silences. Just as students’ silences are expressive, so are our professional silences.83 Our professional inability to acknowledge and support students from mixed-status families not only passively reinforces the idea of children’s ignorance but also allows schools to continue creating materials, curricula, and policies that actively undermine our ability to serve these students well.84

In the coming chapters, we will follow Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni during their routine interactions in school, as well as at home and in public spaces. Chapter 1 shows how I put theory into practice by detailing the methodology that I used to collect longitudinal ethnographic data on everyday speech and silence. I specifically focus on the ways in which I recorded talk and interaction, how the students and I co-constructed this research project, and how we negotiated ethical issues together when they arose. Although some scholars might summarize a methods overview in an introductory chapter like this one, I prefer to model a view of research in which the methodology is as the heart of the findings. I will argue that how we listen shapes what we hear in the field.

Chapter 2 takes us into Catalina’s home to show how beliefs about citizenship show up in conversations that she had with her parents and younger siblings. I also examine the ways in which the circulation of documents—school forms, homework, and immigration papers—produce chilling effects as they travel between home and school settings and get interpreted in the context of a mixed-status household. The chapter also examines moments during the school day in which Pita recounted to me the process of petitioning to become a lawful permanent resident—an experience that took place outside of school and that informed our conversations during the school day. This forms an important backdrop to the rest of the book because it shows the ways that concerns about immigration travel across settings to create what I will call—building on the work of Jerome Bruner—“a spiraling curriculum” that troubles the long-standing notion of the home–school divide in educational research.

Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Aurora, Catalina, and Pita disclosed or disguised their immigration status in response to classroom assignments. I closely examine student writing samples and transcripts of classroom interactions in order to identify those moments when children make decisions about engaging in or foreclosing conversations related to birthplace and nationality. I argue that these decisions are purposeful. They are informed by students’ firsthand understanding of the risks involved in speaking or writing about citizenship in a public setting where their audience included peers and teachers. Drawing on theorizations of silence as expressive, I show how the focal students and their peers communicate the importance of citizenship both when they explicitly raise the subject and when they choose to remain silent about it. The connections between what they learn at home about their immigration experiences and status shape their participation in school.

Chapter 4 examines the children’s participation in a monthlong curricular unit in which they studied the Dreamer movement, visited their local high school to conduct an interview with the student-led Dream Team, and reflected on their learning. I track the ways in which Aurora’s decisions to speak out about—or resist disclosing—her immigration status constituted fraught, high-stakes moments at school informed by what she learned at home. This chapter deepens our understanding of children’s spiraling curriculum of citizenship by drawing connections between the ways in which families’ conversations about immigration status at home shape children’s talk about immigration at school.

Interludes precede and follow chapter 4, which chronicles the elementary schoolers’ experiences of interviewing students at Vista High School about immigrant activism. These interludes showcase conversations that the students from P.S. 432 had with one another as they walked through the streets of their neighborhood and examine in detail their encounters with police officers both inside and outside the school buildings. The interludes highlight transcripts of student talk and still images taken from my video recordings to explore how children experience surveillance and policing, as well as how they laugh and play in their local surroundings. These interludes contribute to an ongoing conversation about “liminality”—both in the immediate sense of focusing on transitional routines and places (such as walking through a hallway between classes) and in the sense of acknowledging the ambiguous social status of undocumented immigrant youth (such as living between countries or immigration statuses). Liminality in this sense is not only negative, however; it also invites us to consider the emancipatory potential of living “betwixt and between” those social roles considered normative and acceptable.85

The conclusion, like this introduction, is centered on the book’s themes of speech and silence. It draws on Catalina’s, Pita’s, Aurora’s, Hazel’s, Tere’s, and Jenni’s own words to bring the book into the present. I focus on two moments—navigating remote learning at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and applying for college—during which I helped them navigate the exclusion and anxiety that can attend being a young adult living in a mixed-status family today. The afterword was collaboratively written with four members of this study and shows that the themes of citizenship and belonging, family responsibility, speech, and silence remained constant throughout this formative decade, as the elementary students I met in 2013 grew into my coauthors in 2023.86