Mexican Immigrant Students Research Articles

A teacher’s facilitation of Mexican immigrant students’ border crossings in a dual-language classroom

ABSTRACT This ethnographic study utilized border theory to examine how a bilingual Latinx teacher created equitable instruction for Mexican immigrant second-graders in a 50–50 dual-language (DL) classroom in the U.S. Midwest. Approximately half the students in the DL classroom came from Spanish-speaking, working-class homes, and half from English-speaking, middle-class homes. The teacher reduced linguistic borders when she drew from her personal experiences and knowledge of bilingualism to forbid linguistic discrimination, separated students’ second-language mastery from their conceptual understanding, and facilitated translanguaging (bilingual individuals’ use of integrated linguistic resources). She promoted class border crossings when she intentionally grouped students and told the English-dominant students that they were disrespecting their Spanish-dominant classmates when they refused to speak Spanish. Borders that the teacher could not change were the high status of English at the school and the English-dominant students’ expectation that the Spanish-dominant students would help them with their Spanish but that they did not have to reciprocate. Educational implications included training DL teachers so that they know how to reduce the privileges of the English speakers and how to support translanguaging. A call for more classroom research to address the power dynamics between language-minority and majority students in DL classrooms was made.

The permanence of departure: Young Mexican immigrant students’ discursive negotiations of imagined childhoods allá

This article draws from a three-year ethnography with elementary school students from mixed-status Mexican immigrant families in Pennsylvania to explore the ways that they imagined potential childhoods and schooling in Mexico. Through attention to their stances and deictic choices during school-based talk, our findings reveal how going to Mexico was positioned as a permanent departure, and one that students often named as occurring soon, despite the fact that repatriation was extremely rare. We show how understanding children's discursive constructions of their imagined binational lives provides a mechanism for children to discursively try on and become familiar with an unfamiliar childhood, and thus, make such childhoods more inhabitable if they were to move to Mexico. We argue that understanding these processes is particularly important in increasingly anti-immigrant climates in which children from undocumented families may be facing possibilities of repatriation due to immigration policies.

Capital, Alienation, and Challenge: How U.S. Mexican Immigrant Students Build Pathways to College and Career Identities.

This article considers how the global "academic pipeline problem" constrains immigrant, low-income, and ethnic minority students' pathways to higher education, and how some students build pathways to college and career identities. After aligning theories of social capital, alienation/belonging, and challenge and their integration in Bridging Multiple Worlds Theory, we summarize six longitudinal studies based on this theory from a 23-year university-community partnership serving low-income, primarily U.S. Mexican immigrant youth. Spanning from childhood to early adulthood, the studies revealed two overarching findings: First, students built pathways to college and career identities while experiencing capital, alienation/belonging, and challenges across their evolving cultural worlds. Second, by "giving back" to families, peers, schools, and communities, students became cultural brokers and later, institutional agents, transforming institutional cultures. Findings highlight the value of integrating interdisciplinary theories, research evidence, and educational systems serving diverse communities to open individual pathways and academic pipelines in multicultural societies.

Tracking Students Through Life: A Critical Structural Analysis of Academic Tracking of Mexican Immigrant Students in the United States and Korean Immigrant Students in Japan

Students in the United States and Japan from high and middle socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are afforded greater academic opportunities due to the systemic presence of hegemony in public schools (Darvin and Norton in J Lang Identity Educ 13(2):111–117, 2014). Minority and immigrant students, the majority coming from low SES, are more likely to suffer the negative effects of tracking. This paper explains how Mexican immigrant students in the United States, and Korean students in Japan are tracked into lower-level courses throughout their educational careers. Using critical structuralism as a theoretical framework, the paper analyzes the two educational systems and explains the implications of tracking on students’ access to higher education. The paper presents mediating mechanisms against the negative effects of lower-level tracking, while arguing for college preparatory education for Mexican and Korean immigrants in the U.S. and Japan respectively.

Mexican-immigrant students transforming challenges into opportunities at a border school in the United States

As children of Mexican immigrant families enter schools in the United States of America, they face differences between their prior schooling experiences and the expectations in the new schools. Research on immigrant children has examined language and academic adaptation variables, yet little consideration has been given to the perspectives of children and their families and teachers. Utilizing principles of interactional ethnography, we examined elementary school student and their family and teacher perspectives about the differences between the children’s prior schooling in Mexico and their current experiences in an elementary school located in Ollin, a town in Texas, near the Mexico border.
 Over the course of one academic year, we interviewed ten children, eight parents, and six teachers, conducted observations in schools on both sides of the border, and collected relevant documents to examine the larger social and educational contexts participants referenced in the interviews. Using an ethnographic perspective, discourse and contrastive analyses, and triangulation of sources and types of data, we focused on children’s perspectives to uncover the challenges they faced and the ways they overcame the challenges in their new, post-migration, school in Texas. 
 Children foregrounded two primary challenges: language and play time. However, we discovered that the children, their parents and teachers did not let the challenges stop their educational opportunities. Instead, despite the challenges, children, with support of peers, teachers, and parents, actively transformed the challenges and constructed new opportunities for learning and adapting to their post-immigration school. This paper demonstrates how focusing on children’s perspectives makes visible that children and immigrant families become active agents of change, transforming challenges into learning opportunities. In the ongoing deficit models of education and negative rhetoric about immigrants, the paper shows how the people themselves take ownership of their schooling and create social and educational welfare for themselves and others. Understanding immigrants’ active participation in their schooling has a potential to impact the ways other families, educators, and policy makers view and describe their own and others’ experiences of learning, schooling, and international migration.

Understanding Mexican immigrant students in American schools: A case study of two Preparatorias in México

English language learners are a diverse and fast-growing segment of the student population in the United States. Faced with the double challenge of keeping up with grade-level content while learnin...

Mexican Ancestry, Immigrant Generation, and Educational Attainment in the United States

After introducing alternative perspectives on assimilation and acculturation, we use the 2002-2012 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study to model differences in educational attainment for students sampled as high school sophomores in 2002. We focus on patterns observed for the growing Mexican immigrant population, analyzing separately the trajectories of 1 st , 1.5 th , 2 nd , and 3 rd + generation Mexican immigrant students, in comparison to 3 rd + generation students who self-identify as non-Hispanic whites and students who self-identify as non-Hispanic blacks or African Americans. The results suggest that the dissonant acculturation mechanism associated with the segmented assimilation perspective is mostly unhelpful for explaining patterns of educational attainment, especially for the crucial groups of 1.5 th and 2 nd generation Mexican immigrant students. Instead, standard measures of family background can account for large portions of group differences in bachelor's degree attainment, with or without additional adjustments for behavioral commitment to schooling, occupational plans, and educational expectations. The broad structure of inequality in the United States, as well as the rising costs of bachelor's degrees, should be the primary source of concern when considering the prospects for the incorporation of the children of recent Mexican immigrants into the mainstream.

Mexican Immigrant Students' Schooling Experiences and the Construction of Disengagement in Mathematics Learning Contexts

Through an ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach, this study draws attention to the plight of 4 Mexican immigrant high school students and their pursuit of education and mathematics learning. Their elementary school stories and experiences show a deep relationship between the learning contexts in which these students largely do school (i.e., an English learner context) and the nature of students' relationships (or lack thereof) with teachers and their process of disengagement from mathematics learning and school. Doing school is used to convey a key distinction from simply attending school. Attending school assumes uniformity/neutrality in how students might experience schooling and is a passive way of describing student participation in school. Doing school implies that students make sense of and respond to their schooling experiences in different ways and accounts for how these experiences are shaped and/or influenced by other forces (e.g., structural forces, social forces) in and out of school.

Bullying of Mexican Immigrant Students by Mexican American Students

This article reports on a study using qualitative methods to investigate intracultural bullying, specifically, bullying between Mexican American (MA) and Mexican immigrant (MI) high school students. Previous research has reported specific cultural conflicts and discrimination within ethnic groups due to differences in acculturation. The purpose of this study is to determine whether this phenomenon is reflected in bullying within a high school context. In-depth interviews are conducted with 6 students from each group (MA and MI) in Grades 9 through 12 at a predominantly Hispanic public school in the state of Washington. The data reveal that bullying does occur between the two groups, with Mexican American students consistently bullying Mexican immigrant students. Two major themes emerge from the data: language barrier and superiority. There are also four themes that arise from the Mexican American student participants that were not found among the Mexican immigrant student responses. These themes are bullying cycle, isolation, alienation, and school factors. Recommendations for practice are discussed.

“But They Just Can’t Do It”

This case begins with a contextual overview of the educational plight of Latino students in U.S. public schools. This pervasive plight has economic and social implications in the lives of these students. Using a Borderlands Cultural Wealth framework, the case focuses on the educational challenges of Mexican American and immigrant students in one of the poorest areas in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. The school principal is faced with the challenge of trying to reform educational practices, but the deficit perspectives of the teachers are in direct contrast to what the students need to be successful.

The Nativistic Legacy of the Americanization Era in the Education of Mexican Immigrant Students

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also characterized by a strong nativist agenda and harsh restrictionistic policies. Developments from the Americanization period continue to influence immigration and education policies in the current era and are visible in the attacks against bilingual education, in mandated English-only laws, in locating struggles over national identity in the schools, and in the narrow focus on the acquisition of English in immigrant education. Identifying nativist themes from the Americanization era that have been reinvigorated in today's anti-immigrant climate makes visible a type of discrimination directed at immigrants that is not often recognized as discrimination due to a Black and White view of prejudice termed racial dualism. In addition to identifying the influence of the nativist legacy of the Americanization period in the current era, the implications of the conflict of legacies between the Civil Rights and Americanization eras for the education of immigrant students are discussed.

Troubling the proletarianization of Mexican immigrant students in an era of neoliberal immigration

In response to Richardson Bruna’s “Mexican immigrant transnational social capital and class transformation: examining the role of peer mediation in insurgent science”, this paper draws on the author’s research on organizing, mobilization and knowledge production among adult im/migrant workers in Canada. While appreciative of the content and concerns of Richardson Bruna’s argument, the paper argues for a clearer position on tensions between agency and structure, and class and capitalist social relations in which to contextualize the schooling of immigrant children in today’s US classrooms. In addition, it explores some implications of Mignolo’s (2000) work on the geohistory of knowledge, notably his concept of ‘border thinking’ for teachers, teacher education, and curricula. Finally, the article suggests the potential of methodological frameworks and approaches of institutional ethnography (Smith 1987), political activist ethnography (Frampton et al. 2006) and global ethnography (Burawoy 2000) to inform research into this field.

Voices from Mexico: How American Teachers can Meet the Needs of Mexican Immigrant Students

In this study 18 Mexican teachers of English as a foreign language in Guanajuato, Mexico were asked for their professional opinion about the teaching of English to Mexican immigrant students in the U.S. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that asked about attitudes toward the U.S. educational system, ways to support Mexican immigrant students, advice for American teachers, and Mexican students’ motivation for learning English. Respondents averaged 4 years of teaching English at various levels ranging from elementary to university. Half of the teachers had received some K-12 education in the U.S. Respondents held generally positive views regarding the U.S. educational system, but felt American teachers could do a better job in teaching Mexican immigrant students. They offered numerous linguistic and culturally responsive suggestions for improving upon the learning of English and the academic performance of immigrant students.

Transnational Messages: What Teachers Can Learn from Understanding Students’ Lives in Transnational Social Spaces

This study investigates how comments that Mexican nationals made about U.S. schools influenced Mexican immigrant adolescents’ perceptions of and experiences in U.S. schools. I investigated the diffusion of this information at three specific points in time—prior to immigration, upon entry to the U.S., and after a few years of living in the U.S. and attending schools here. By sharing information across borders, these Mexican immigrant students and their co-nationals formed a transnational social space, where immigrant children established and maintained productive ties between their country of origin and their receiving country. The themes that these transnational messages revealed included issues of cost of education, concerns with academic quality, value of the English language, social struggles, and racial confrontations in U.S. schools. This article also addresses how U.S. teachers can develop a teaching agenda that addresses the concerns revealed by these transnational messages.

The Hybrid Literacy Practices of Young Immigrant Children: Lessons Learned from an English-Only Preschool Classroom

This qualitative case study examines the literacy practices of an emerging bilingual child in a preschool classroom comprised mostly of recent Mexican immigrant students. It describes how political pressures after the passage of Proposition 203 in Arizona alter the language of instruction in the classroom, even when preschools do not have to conform to this mandate. Data collection included video and audio recordings of students' literacy practices during one school year, field notes, students' work samples, and interviews with students, teachers, and parents. Findings reveal that despite school-sanctioned English literacy practices, emerging bilingual children find ways to draw on hybrid practices and multiple literacies across two languages in student-centered social spaces. The paper concludes with the implications of the study on the education of young immigrant children.

The Transformation of Ms. Corazón: Creating Humanizing Spaces for Mexican Immigrant Students in Secondary ESL Classrooms

This article explores the journey of one English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher who held rigid boundaries that negatively impacted the academic resiliency of her Mexican immigrant students. As she transformed her pedagogical orientation, she created permeability in her curricular practices. With the elements of respeto (respect), confianza (mutual trust), consejos (verbal teachings), and buen ejemplo (exemplary role model) firmly built as the foundation for learning English, the immigrant students were more invested in classroom events.

When ‘literacy is a bennie’: researching contested literacies in bilingual youth radio

This paper presents findings from an innovative school-based youth radio project for Mexican immigrant students. We draw on ethnographic and discourse data collected over an academic year, including multiple data representations from video and audio recordings, radio production artefacts, interviews, and still images. We begin our discussion with a close analysis of a rich moment in the project brought-on by the collision of divergent and contested models of literacy. We then follow the thematic development of literacy across chains of events and contexts to understand how literacy was constructed and enacted in relation to language, identity, empowerment and voice. The findings suggest that although school–community linked collaborations can give rise to contradictions and disturbance, such collaborations have the potential to become productive learning contexts for disaffected and underachieving students and their teachers.

Community and classroom contexts for understanding nature and naturally occurring events in rural schools in Mexico

In this study, we develop a portrait of how teachers in two, rural Mexican, multi-age classrooms (grades 1-6) deliberately situate science instruction within the local community and teach social discourse practices to mediate their students’ transitions between science, school, and community settings. One important means of social mediation was the teachers’ commitment to constructing authentic contexts for instruction. In addition, both teachers facilitated the learning of three sets of social discourse practices that are integral to science teaching and learning: responsibility and autonomy, cross-age interaction and collaboration, and public performance. The social discourse practices that we observed in these classrooms can be seen as potential foundations for engaging in culturally responsive, inquiry-based, science instruction grounded in the ways of learning science that many Mexican immigrant students are likely to have encountered.

On pigs and packers: Radically contextualizing a practice of science with Mexican immigrant students

This paper reports on instructional practices observed in a high school English Learner (EL) Science course serving newcomer Mexican immigrant youth. The school is located in a rural Midwestern meatpacking community in which labor at the hog plant is economically- and racially-segmented; it is the town’s Mexican residents, many of them undocumented, who comprise most of the unskilled labor force. The general purpose of the paper is to document how the economic and racial context of this community influences science instruction in the EL Science course and to describe how this presents particular challenges in achieving equitable science instruction for Mexican immigrant youth in these rural, globalizing places. Entering the data via critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) and then utilizing Barton’s (2003) “practice of science” perspective, with an eye toward achieving “radical contextuality” (Grossberg, 1997), we describe the science events, identities, and structures of the pig dissection lesson and detail how what these students could do with science, as rendered by that lesson, was limited by the roles the teacher attributed to the students, her inability to draw on their funds of knowledge as resources for learning, and the voice and position she allowed them to take up. The data reinforce conventional understandings of schools as sites of cultural reproduction (Bowels & Gintis, 1976), as well as of resistance (Giroux, 1983), but afford us a glimpse of the particularity of those mechanisms within the demographically-transitioning American Heartland, iconic of the era of global capitalism.

Mexican Immigrant Students in Southern Wisconsin: Creating Dialogue Between Parents and Schools

Current immigration to the U. S. consists mostly of individuals from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and brings new kinds of cultural and linguistic diversity to the U. S. The demographic transformation of the United States is already visible in such states as California, which has become a "majority minority" state. This "new immigration" is changing the face of the U. S. in new ways as well, not only in established urban "first ports of entry," but also in smaller towns and semi-rural areas throughout the country.