Abstract
More than 100,000 Central American youth have migrated alone to the United States across the Mexico-U.S. border. Referred to as “unaccompanied minors,” many of the youth are faced with boundary producing processes within the struggling U.S. school systems they attend, including linguistic and political boundaries. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of a North Eastern U.S High School serving approximately 400 Central American youth, this chapter discusses boundaries as encompassing more than geopolitical territorial borders, and considers the manifestations of social practice and discourse, such as, how boundaries manifest in educational institutions, through narratives, and through symbolic domains. More specifically, this chapter examines the role of digital narratives/testimonios the youth tell as a pedagogical space for the sharing of their common experiences, histories, and memories. More importantly the chapter considers how through multimedia narrativity the youth can come to understand their social worlds, and begin to construct identities and to contest political processes. Overall, this chapter explores how public education contributes to border producing practices, and how shifts in curricula can provide support for youth to negotiate transnational identities, explore new languages and knowledge, and to navigate their new schooling systems and communities.
Published Version
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