Transborder DisCrit: Dreaming Across Disjunctures from Mexico

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents’ hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary to reveal how undocumented parents advocate and dream across disjunctures in search of access to educational supports and humanizing futures for their children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. Findings reveal how intersecting forms of undocumentedness, or exclusion from papers for access and belonging, constrained families’ access to movement across geopolitical borders, schooling and health-care institutions, and documented diagnoses needed to access learning supports. In the implications, we explore what approaches to policy, education, and research might look like if they centered the experiences, subaltern knowledges, and humanizing dreams of transborder parents.