Transnational Mexican-Origin Families' Ways of Knowing: A Framework Toward Bridging Understandings in U.S. Schools

Abstract

Transnational students and families are those who cross real and metaphoric borders, spanning countries, to engage family and community in meaningful ways. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, I show the distinct ways of knowing of four Mexican-origin, working class families and how the U.S. schools where the children from these families study hardly recognize these ways of knowing. The families’ ways of knowing can be characterized as a form of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, or knowing, under three interweaving categories: Nepantlera or in-between, bridge-building knowing; sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing; and chained knowing, in which families are chained in their knowing to the realities of the U.S./Mexican border and their extended communities and families who also are impacted by the border. The article shows that schools recognize neither transnational practices, such as return trips to Mexico, nor transnational ways of knowing. Educators may strengthen their own ways of knowing and create a more equitable pedagogy for all students if they learn to help co-construct the bridges families such as the ones in this study have already begun to build.