Mobility and the Children of Langley Park's Immigrant Families

Abstract

In Langley Park, Maryland, a predominantly immigrant working-class neighborhood, school-children perform well below state norms and have a high dropout rate. Contributing factors are embedded in the schools and school system, the neighborhood, the family, and a generalized process of marginalization. Of special interest is the turbulence caused by residential mobility, school staff and peer turnover, and other elements of instability in the lives of the schoolchildren. About half of the children in elementary school have significant absences during the school year. Therefore, programs enhancing stability may enhance education. These include increasing the neighborhood's value to the family and making the neighborhood's housing more affordable. The children of immigrant families who live in Langley Park, Maryland, do not perform well in school-at least as indicated by standardized tests. Furthermore, many of them drop out before completing secondary school. This article presents various measures of school performance and explores residential mobility as well as a variety of other factors contributing to school performance. I begin with a brief background on the focal neighborhood, then consider and explain school performance. My involvement with the Langley Park neighborhood began in 1994; somewhat accidentally, I selected the neighborhood as the site for a needs assessment to be conducted by my graduate urban planning students under my direction. The neighborhood-its residents-so interested me that I developed additional projects that would enable my students and me to understand better the situation of what I came to realize were marginalized working-class immigrants. What has followed includes a dozen publications, creation of a nonprofit organization, starting a monthly neighborhood newspaper, participating on a dozen government task forces, and even a summer in Quito, Ecuador, in an attempt to improve my Spanish. I have concluded that education is the core challenge for Langley Park's residents and their allies, and that is why the issues raised herein are important. LANGLEY PARK, MARYLAND The Langley Park neighborhood, covering about 0.85 square mile, is located in suburban Maryland's Prince George's County, about seven miles northwest of the White House (Hanna, 1997; Hanna et al., 1995). It was once the core area of an estate, the prize-winning 1924 mansion of which (now unoccupied) still stands at its center. In the early 1950s, it became the Langley Park suburb and was settled by returning European American GIs and their families. The 900-square-foot houses initially went on the market for $10,000. During the 1970s, busing began and mortgage-excluding redlining declined, leading many European American residents to leave the neighborhood and many African Americans to replace them. During the 1980s, in large part due to the civil wars in Central America, Hispanic immigrants came to the neighborhood, some directly from their home country, others as part of the dispersion of immigrants from the District of Columbia and elsewhere. Langley Park is now predominantly Hispanic1 American, although other sending continents are represented. This diversity is displayed in the extraordinarily international set of property owners; on one block, we find Ayoub, Cabrera, Chan, Hafenrichter, Igwe, Nguyen, Ramkissoon, Singh, Wright, and many others. The neighborhood's official census total is 16,214 (see Table 1). Many people did not participate in the census out of fear or for some other reason, so the current informal estimate is about 20,000, of whom at least half are Hispanic American. Walking along the neighborhood streets or shopping in the local stores, it is clear that Spanish is the predominant language. I do not recall, over my eight years of research in the neighborhood, overhearing one conversation between Hispanic Americans that took place in English. It should be noted that Langley Park is composed of two subneighborhoods. …