Introduction for Now We Are Here
Introduction
“I THINK PEOPLE DON’T UNDERSTAND how much we want to live,” Adriana, a 15-year-old migrant youth from Brazil explained to me. “When people ask me: why did you come here? I tell them that’s the wrong question. The right question is: do I have the right to have a good life, to dream?” As we sat at the cafeteria of Adriana’s school in the U.S., she continued:
If we were all equal, like we should be or like we are in the eyes of God, don’t you think people would understand when someone leaves their home? Sometimes I feel like only the rich get to have a purpose and me and my family we have to explain and explain ourselves . . . wanting a good school, good education, having a chance . . . is that a crime? Quase tenho que pedir desculpas por estar aqui [I almost have to apologize for being here]. Well, here I am now . . . now we are here.
Adriana, along with her family, made their way from Brazil to the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. They were detained together and released after almost two weeks. Upon their release they made their way to Massachusetts in the hope of forging a better life for themselves.
This book describes the lives of 16 migrant families from Latin America who experienced detention and/or separation at the border during 2018–2019, telling a story that interweaves parental sacrifice, children’s and youth’s articulations of embodied migration, teachers’ understandings of the trauma experienced by these families, and the consequences of a global pandemic on already vulnerable families. The instability these children and parents faced in their homelands and during detention and/or separation was compounded by exposure to housing and food insecurity, unfamiliar and (at times) seemingly menacing environments, interrupted schooling, prejudice and discrimination, anxiety about the future, and the threat of illness. This is the story of how the promise of a good life, anchored by the constructed ideal of a good American education, underwrites the migratory decisions, trajectories, and experiences of families traveling from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to live in the U.S.
Migrant families who were detained and/or separated at the border hold on to the promise of an education in the U.S. as a signifier of stability and prosperity for their children. While migrant families experience rupture, violence, fear, and uncertainty before they leave and during their journeys north, the idea of U.S. schooling represents, for parents and children alike, a safe and constant environment where opportunity lives. Books and articles have documented the economic push and pull factors that cause people to move; other work has analyzed the negative impacts of draconian immigration policies on larger education trends. Now We Are Here examines how migrant parents and children explain their pasts and their reasons for migrating, and how they center U.S. education in their narratives of their present and future.
The book asks: How have multiple disruptions—migration journeys, harsh border policies, a global pandemic—shaped the experiences of migrant children and their families in the U.S.? How did migrant parents and children experience education and schooling once they were settled in the U.S.? It also analyzes how teachers and schools responded to the knowledges migrant children and their families brought to school before and during the pandemic.
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Every day, all over the world, families make one of the most difficult decisions of their lives: to leave their homes in search of a safer, better life. For migrant parents with children, education is a key motivator of migration. Migrant families leaving Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras struggle with poverty, corruption, unemployment, and a lack of hope for the future. When the fear of staying outweighs the fear of fleeing, people leave. While migration flows are not new, in the last few decades immigration policies have become increasingly consequential to how migrant children experience life, come of age, and adapt in the U.S. Intimate stories of migrant families’ sacrifices, motivations, and decision-making remain untold. For migrant families, dreams of a better life are closely related to the ability to provide their children with an education in a stable school environment. Based on three years of ethnographic research with 16 families from four countries in Latin America who crossed the border between 2018 and 2019—the height of extremely restrictive immigration policies like the zero-tolerance policy, commonly known as “family separation,” and the Migrant Protection Protocols, commonly known as the “remain in Mexico policy”—Now We Are Here shows how the idealized chance for a better education in the U.S. counterbalanced the destabilizing effects of U.S. immigration policies and a global pandemic on migrant families.
Between 2018 and 2019, migrant families faced several challenges upon their arrival in the U.S. In addition to the strain imposed by hostile immigration policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, they faced numerous social and institutional pressures that impacted their ability to build secure lives. Families left behind structural violence, domestic violence, poverty, lack of educational opportunities, and unemployment, but also their beloved homelands. After going through separation and/or detention at the border and being reunified and/or released together, families encountered yet another challenge: a global pandemic. Surviving these multiple disruptions required determination.
The idea of providing a different path for their children was a crucial motivator for families that requested asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. Parents often invoked improved educational opportunities to justify migration to themselves and to their children, even as they faced immigration policies that threatened and separated their families. Once in the U.S., parents sought to ensure a fair shot at educational opportunities for their children to counter the compounded consequences of the multiple emergencies their families experienced. Disruptions like relocation, separation, and detention threatened parents’ visions of themselves as good caregivers and stable providers. In this book I illustrate how migrant families are potent in their determination but vulnerable within a U.S. immigration system that was designed to undermine their lives. I argue that the idea of providing a better life through educational opportunities is migrant parents’ currency of love for their children: to guarantee an education in the U.S. justifies the sacrifices of the immigrant journey and, most importantly, shows care. While children are the assumed beneficiaries of their parents’ sacrifice, this book demonstrates that they are also agentic individuals who articulate their own understandings of migration and education, thus challenging linear assumptions of achievement and success.
The book follows families from the time they were first reunified and establishes their narratives of motivations, difficulties, perseverance, and agency as they experienced detention and separation and settled in the U.S. Migrant parents focused on their continual effort to be “good” parents and their sense of agency in providing stability for their children. However, the book also narrates parents’ feelings of guilt, shame, and fear regarding their decisions to leave their home countries. As they recounted the violence and poverty they experienced back home, they also reflected on the immigration policies they faced once they requested asylum in the U.S. Parents’ love for their children was unwavering: care came in the form of migration, and education was their goal for improving their children’s lives. To migrate is to care.
Migration Trends
Searching for hope and improved living conditions continue to be top priorities for populations that leave their homes to migrate. Many migrate to survive. This phenomenon is especially pertinent in the case of youth and family migration: young professionals and/or caregivers of young children lose hope that opportunities at home will improve for the new generation. While each of the countries of origin in this study has a particular historical relationship with the U.S., families and children had lived experiences in common—independent of their nationality. I use the concept of methodological nationalism (Beck, 2006; Chernilo, 2006, 2011; Dyrness & Sepulveda, 2020; Levitt, 2012; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) to show how we can understand the experiences of migrant families from different nation-states in the U.S. as they relate to one another.
To begin, it would be inaccurate to assume that a common country of origin shared by a group of people would generate similar experiences within that group. Regional inequalities across each of these countries, rural and urban divides, race, ethnicity, language, class, gender, and religion all deeply influenced the experiences of children, youth, and parents in this research. Thus, while it is important to contextualize the individual migratory relationships between the U.S. and Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, respectively, following the work of many scholars (Abu El-Haj, 2015; Dyrness & Abu El-Haj, 2017), I challenge the assumption that the nation-state is the primary factor affecting similarities and differences in migratory experiences.
The four countries of origin represented in this research have experienced ebbs and flows in their migratory streams to the U.S. However, between 2018 and 2019, the families in this research found themselves in similar predicaments. Upon surrendering themselves to Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border, all were detained and some were separated.
According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP, n.d.), there were 107,212 apprehensions of family units (defined as individuals, including children under 18 years old, arriving together with a family member) at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018 (October 1 to September 30). Apprehensions of family units at the southern border has increased significantly over the past few years, rising from 75,622 in fiscal year 2017 to 107,212 in fiscal year 2018 to a whopping 473,682 in fiscal year 2019, before declining precipitously during the COVID-19 pandemic (42,180 in 2020). The U.S. government considers apprehensions to be a proxy for unauthorized crossings and immigration at the border, though some individuals may attempt to cross multiple times.
Tables 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 show the numbers reported by CBP and the U.S. government, but do not account for other types of crossings. I have included Mexico for comparison. Notably, between 2018 and 2021, U.S. CBP reported more contacts with Honduran nationals than with any other group, despite the fact that Honduras has a smaller population than El Salvador, Guatemala, and Brazil. While the nature of its collection makes this data both incomplete and imprecise, it is important to note that Hondurans consistently have more interactions with U.S. border officials than other Central American groups, suggesting that Honduran migration is making a noteworthy contribution to the growing Central American population in the U.S. Guatemalans and Salvadorans rank second and third, respectively, among Central Americans when it comes to the most common contacts between migrants and Border Patrol. Among Guatemalan migrants, there has been an upward trend in emigration from the Western Highlands, with rural communities keeping pace with Guatemala City, contrary to past trends. While Salvadorans still made up the largest percentage of Central American immigrants in the U.S. (37.1 percent in 2021), the Honduran population grew by 47 percent between 2010 and 2021 (Ward & Batalova, 2023). This trend is likely to continue in coming years, as working-age Hondurans report deep dissatisfaction in their home country and a desire to migrate when possible (Ward & Batalova, 2023).
TABLE 0.1 Total Apprehensions by Country and Year, 2017–2023.
Source: Customs and Border Patrol Website.
TABLE 0.2 Total Apprehension of Family Units by Country and Year.
Source: Customs and Border Patrol Website.
TABLE 0.3 Total Apprehensions for Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC).
Source: Customs and Border Patrol Website.
Contemporary Central American migration trends are most attributed to the confluence of extreme poverty and escalating violence perpetrated by gang affiliates throughout the region since the 1980s. However, it is important to situate the origins of these trends in relation to the destabilizing effect of U.S.-backed civil wars and the deportation of gang affiliates from the U.S. to Central America that began before the 1980s (Batista Willman, 2017; Massey & Pren, 2012). Between 1898 and 1994, the U.S. government intervened to influence regime change in Latin America at least 41 times (Coatsworth, 2005). When President James Monroe implemented a type of protectorate in the 19th century, commonly known as the Monroe Doctrine, it meant that the U.S. would be constantly involved in everyday politics and policy in the Latin American region, often intervening on behalf of authoritarian and right-leaning forces. In his most recent book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis (2024), the journalist Jonathan Blitzer details how U.S. intervention in Central American countries influenced migratory patterns. While media and politicians tend to call the large numbers of people escaping complicated realities in their homes a “surge” or a “flood” of migrants to the border, Blitzer argues that the Cold War mentality of the U.S. and the alleged fight against communism in the region removed options and hope for the future for many in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, among other countries. In 2024 anthropologist Jason De León published Soldiers and Kings which furthered the argument of needing to understand deeper histories of often overlooked human aspects of border policies.
While violence is certainly one factor, emerging data on Central American migration reinforce researchers’ assertions that it is a complicated phenomenon motivated by personal, economic, political, and environmental factors. Poverty and violence doubtless contribute to migration from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador alike, but it is important to note that experiences are not homogeneous across the three countries. Each government’s response to the challenges posed by criminal groups, economic inequality, climate change, and COVID-19 has influenced the conditions that lead to migration. In addition, public perception of domestic and international opportunities can influence migrants’ decision to leave their country of origin.
Calculations of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita place Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in the bottom third of all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the World Bank (World Bank Group, 2023). As of July 2021, approximately 73 percent of the Honduran population lived below the poverty line. More than half of these citizens were classified as living in extreme poverty. A public opinion study conducted in 2019 reported that working-age Hondurans experienced deep dissatisfaction with the state of the country and a lack of confidence in their personal professional prospects, which led many to express an interest in emigration (Montalvo, 2019). This same study highlighted that a significant percentage of Hondurans felt that their own economic situation, as well as that of the country writ large, was getting worse over time. These statistics were also associated with high levels of food and housing insecurity. The survey found that young Hondurans tended to be more motivated to migrate than they were to vote in domestic elections, a statistic that highlights growing disillusionment in the country. Guatemala also has a high poverty rate with extreme disparities between urban and rural populations, though general disillusionment is not as prevalent in the reported literature (Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala, 2015).
Hopelessness about the economic situation in these countries may contribute to another pressing problem: rates of juvenile violence and gang affiliation. Extortion, violent crime, and the recruitment of children and teenagers into gangs have long been concerns for Central American governments. On the whole, violent crime in the region was decreasing for several years but has recently been on the rise. Gangs are notorious for extorting small, hyper-local businesses, such as subsistence farmers and street vendors, who are already struggling to make ends meet. When families are unable to pay, they often make the decision to leave home to avoid retribution. Those who stay report that paying cuotas (fees/tithes) increases the economic pressure they already feel (Burnett, 2021). More Salvadoran and Honduran migrants have reported violence as a motivating factor, while migrants from Guatemala are more likely to ascribe their decisions to economic reasons and, relatedly, to indicate plans to return to Guatemala at some point in the future (Creative Associates International, 2019). Rates also vary within countries. While Guatemalan migrants on the whole are less likely to report experiences with violence, urban migrants cite more instances of violence than those from rural communities (Instituto Nacional de Estadística Guatemala, 2015).
Between 2015 and 2018 both the drought and the coffee blight had devastating effects on precarious populations that depended on farming for their daily subsistence, as well as their income (World Food Programme, 2019). These ecological events exacerbated existing economic inequalities affecting Honduras’s rural population, encouraging some families to undertake internal migration to nearby cities, where they hoped to find more opportunities for employment. Others decided to leave the country altogether. As analysts at the Brookings Institute point out, climate migration cannot be disentangled from other motivating factors (Bermeo & Leblang, 2021). When poverty, violence, and corruption make internal migration unsafe, families displaced by climate events are more likely to move internationally, meaning their movements are actually attributable to a complex intersection of factors (Reichman, 2022).
The case of Brazil follows some of these trends. While the country is the largest economy in Latin America with a gross domestic product (GDP) of US$2.2 trillion—significantly higher than El Salvador (US$34 billion), Guatemala (US$104 billion), and Honduras (U$34.2 billion) (World Economic Outlook Database, 2023)—analysts have pointed to Brazil’s economic crisis and political instability as key drivers of increased migration, including flows to the U.S. (Waters & Batalova, 2022). Beginning in 2012, Brazil experienced multiple periods of economic slump characterized by soaring joblessness, compounded by escalating criminal activity, widely reported corruption cases, and unstable political conditions (European Central Bank, 2016; Mantoan et al., 2021).
The number of Brazilian immigrants residing in the U.S. has grown steadily over the past four decades (Migration Policy Institute, 2024). However, the scale and destinations of migration outflows from Brazil have changed notably in recent years. Between 2010 and 2019, as Brazil’s economic woes continued, the Brazilian population in the U.S. increased from approximately 340,000 to over 500,000 (Coritz et al., 2023). Other sources bring this number to 1.9 million Brazilians in the U.S. (Simon et al., 2023). This surge has been attributed to pull factors like the steep appreciation of the U.S. dollar against Brazil’s currency and disillusionment with economic prospects and safety (Gombata & Fagundes, 2022). Additionally, Brazilians have increasingly used the U.S.-Mexico border as an entry point (Barrucho, 2021; Hessom, 2020; Lupion, 2021). U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions of Brazilians jumped from around 3,100 in FY2016 to a record high of nearly 57,000 in FY2021. Similarly, Mexican immigration authorities detained approximately 300 Brazilian migrants in 2016 compared to nearly 17,000 in 2021 (Waters & Batalova, 2022). Brazilians have joined other Latin American nationals transiting through Mexico to seek entry to the U.S. (Barrucho, 2021).
During the time families in this study left Brazil (2018–2019), political instability—marked by ongoing corruption scandals and uncertainty—further eroded trust in government institutions and influenced migration choices (Barrucho, 2021; Oliveira & Segel, 2022). There was a transition in power in which President Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate on the far-right, defeated Fernando Haddad, a candidate from the Workers Party, with the majority of the votes. In 2018 the nation’s homicide rate reached 30.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, rising from 29.9 recorded in 2016 (Darlington, 2018). Poverty levels increased as Brazil’s economic woes deepened, limiting access to healthcare, education, and social services for many lower-income citizens (World Bank, 2020). As basic needs went unmet, socioeconomic push factors exacerbated individuals’ desire to migrate abroad (Stargardter, 2021). In summary, the confluence of economic hardship, currency depreciation, political instability, rising crime, and diminished social conditions in Brazil pushed increased numbers of Brazilians to migrate between 2017 and 2019, most notably to the U.S.
All the factors recounted thus far—the history of U.S. intervention, poverty, restrictions on employment, food insecurity, gang violence, and climate crises—have presented challenges to governments already facing intense (inter)national scrutiny. Perceived changes in international politics can give people considering migration hope for a better future elsewhere. While the factors described above are not new, reporting suggests that families are more likely to make the journey to the U.S. when they believe the political environment to be more welcoming. Even though the Biden administration was consistently restrictive when it came to immigration policy, after the 2020 election rumors circulated that the president intended to reverse the worst elements of Trump-era policy, particularly when it came to families. The expectation of more open access to asylum and related pathways following the 2020 U.S. election may have encouraged more families to risk migrating. There is also some evidence that increasingly robust transnational social networks are contributing to regional migration trends (e.g., among low-income families from the Western Highlands of Guatemala), a phenomenon known in the theoretical literature as “cumulative causation” (Kaldor, 1970). While some migrants undertake the journey with specific plans to enter the U.S., others initially intend to journey to Mexico and Belize, which are slightly more accessible destinations for those who cannot afford to pay the high smuggling fees required to enter the U.S.
In Massachusetts, where this study takes place, the top country of origin for migrant populations is China, but about 40 percent of the foreign-born population or about half a million people in the state are from Latin America (Migration Policy Institute, 2023). This data may be undercounting the undocumented population. Central Americans and Brazilians each make up 9 percent of the foreign-born population. Almost 40 percent of migrants arrived in Massachusetts since 2010 (Migration Policy Institute, 2024). According to the latest available data from the American Immigration Council (2022), there were approximately 150,000 immigrant children under the age of 18 living in Massachusetts as of 2019. The Migration Policy Institute (2024) estimates that in 2019, around 55,000 immigrant children in Massachusetts had at least one parent who was unauthorized. Many of these families are likely from Latin America. A 2016 report from the Boston Foundation found that over 40 percent of children in the Boston metro area were from immigrant families (Edozie et al., 2016). While it did not break down data by specific countries or regions, Latin America continues to be a major home region of immigrant families.
Immigration Policy and the Border
The U.S. has a complex history of immigration policy that has faced criticism for its restrictive and discriminatory nature. Scholars such as Ngai (2004), Zolberg (2006), and Daniels (2004) have explored how immigration laws have historically marginalized specific groups. Ngai’s work highlights how the concept of an “illegal alien” emerged through laws like the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” and excluded Native Americans and African Americans. This contributed to a racialized foundation in U.S. immigration policy. Legislation like the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Immigration Act of 1917 further entrenched racial and national origins as determinants of lawful entry and status. These laws created a framework for categorizing immigrants and controlling immigration based on racial and national stereotypes, with significant impacts on Mexican migrants in the early 20th century.
Across the 20th and early 21st centuries, U.S. immigration policy saw varying degrees of restriction and reform. The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed national-origin quotas, favoring certain European immigrants, while the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 shifted focus toward family reunification and skilled immigrants, signaling a major demographic shift. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act under Reagan offered amnesty to undocumented immigrants yet increased employer sanctions. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 emphasized border enforcement. Post-9/11 policies, like the USA Patriot Act and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), increased surveillance and prosecution. More recently, initiatives such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 attempted to provide temporary relief for certain undocumented migrants, although deportations remained high under the Obama administration.
One week after taking office in 2017, President Trump issued the first in a series of orders restricting entry into the U.S. of individuals from several Muslim-majority countries. Facing multiple lawsuits and losses in court, the Trump administration issued revised versions of the travel bans, and the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the third iteration in Trump v. Hawaii in 2018. Following the Supreme Court victory, the Trump administration continued to revise and extend the restrictions, imposing additional limitations with respect to nationals from Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2022), in mid-2017, prior to the implementation of the 2018 “family separation policy,” the El Paso program initiated a practice where adults crossing the border without legal authorization—a misdemeanor for first-time offenders—were arrested and prosecuted. This policy applied even to parents traveling with young children. The children were removed from their parents’ custody, and many families lost the ability to locate or reconnect with their children due to the absence of an organized government system for reunification. By the end of 2017, this approach expanded, with authorities separating families throughout the entire U.S.-Mexico border region, including those presenting themselves legally at official ports of entry. Official lawsuit documents explained that in July 2017, the Trump administration initiated a policy of separating migrant families at the border to discourage immigration (Ms. L et al. v. ICE, 2018). Started quietly by the Department of Homeland Security through Customs and Border Protection personnel at border facilities in Texas, the policy was eventually publicized on May 7, 2018, when the U.S. Attorney General announced that under the “zero-tolerance policy,” all migrant parents entering unlawfully between ports of entry with their children would be criminally prosecuted and separated from their children. Any accompanying children under the age of 18 were handed over to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The policy resulted in the haphazard separation of over 5,500 children from their parents, most of whom were seeking asylum from countries in Central and South America—and many of whom entered the U.S. at official ports of entry (Ms. L et al. v. ICE, 2018). Most of the children were ages 12 and under; more than 200 were under 5 years old (Ms. L et al. v. ICE, 2018). During this time, children were sent to facilities sometimes thousands of miles away from their parents (A.I.I.L. v. Sessions, 2019). Separated family members were often not told when or if they would ever see each other again—and many did not see each other again for months or an entire year. In many instances separated children were detained in dreadful conditions with no way to communicate with their parents for days, weeks, or months. Parents had no idea how their children were being cared for or by whom.
In her book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (2021), historian Laura Briggs states: “Separating children from parents is more than just another version of a larger mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers or enslaved and indigenous people. Taking people’s children participates in a very brutal kind of political punishment, a symbolism—and reality—that is meant to be starkly tangible, crude, and cruel” (p. 6). As Briggs demonstrates, the U.S. government practice of separating and detaining families is older than we may care to remember. Briggs examines three episodes in recent history in which the government systematically removed children from their families. The first is slavery and its aftermath through the decades after World War II: with the support of the federal government, Southern cities put Black children in foster care as punishment for Black adults’ activism, thus pathologizing families (p. 11). Second, Briggs investigates the removal of Native children to boarding schools during the Indian Wars in the 1870s; the “schools” were effectively military-run detention centers (p. 46). These actions were meant to tame the revolt and to “civilize Indian children” (p. 53). Finally, Briggs narrates anti-communist wars in Latin America, contending: “You can’t get to 2019 at the Southwest border of the United States without going through Cold War Latin America” (p. 78). During the Cold War in many countries in Latin America, children of perceived communists or leftists were taken from their parents and placed in adoption agencies.
In December 2018, the Trump administration implemented the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “remain in Mexico” policy. It required certain non-Mexican asylum seekers who arrived through the southern border of the U.S. to wait in Mexico until their immigration court hearings in the U.S. Bellino and Gluckman (2024) argued that the MPP undermined due process in the United States and access to asylum procedures by forcing migrants to wait in unsafe Mexican border towns. Over 68,000 people were subjected to MPP between January 2019 and February 2021, when President Biden first ended the policy; less than 1 percent successfully obtained asylum in the U.S. (American Immigration Council, 2025). The Biden administration reinstated the policy in December 2021, but it was formally ended again in 2022.
Between the Obama and Trump administrations, the cap on the number of refugees admitted to the country was drastically reduced from 85,000 in 2016 to 18,000 in 2020. Under the Biden administration the cap was 125,000 from 2022 to 2024 (Migration Policy Institute, 2024); however, the actual number of refugees admitted was lower at 25,000 in 2022 and 60,000 in 2023. The discrepancy between the number of allotted spots versus the number of refugees admitted shows the complicated process of accepting people through the so-called legal pathways (in 2022 over 239,000 people applied and in 2023 over 465,000).
During the pandemic the Trump administration invoked Title 42, which allowed for the quick expulsion of migrants arriving in the U.S (Gramlich, 2022). These removals took place under an obscure clause of U.S. health legislation: Section 265 of Title 42, which is a Public Health Service act from 1944 aimed at preventing the spread of communicable diseases in the U.S. Thus, if and when the Centers for Disease Control determines that there is a disease that could easily spread, health officials—with the support of the president—can prohibit the entry of persons from other countries.
Thus, one cannot untangle the long history of U.S. immigration policy from the present iterations of highly restrictive border enforcement. It is crucial that we understand the lives of these 16 families in a fuller historical context. Furthermore, migration policies compound over time, and presidents and administrations have more similarities than differences in terms of approaches to immigration and policy. According to a briefing by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (Straut-Eppsteiner, 2024), “the number of pending cases (backlog) in immigration courts has grown each year since FY2006 and has ballooned in recent years. It exceeded 1 million for the first time in FY2019, reached nearly 2.5 million at the end of FY2023, and was approximately 3.6 million at the end of FY2024” (p. 1). The lack of will across parties to reform immigration policies will persist as long as immigration is used as a scare tactic or for inauthentic actions in elections.
Education as Currency of Love in Multiple Disruptions
As a researcher, scholar, and teacher, I am rooted in the field of anthropology of education. According to Levinson and Holland (1996), anthropology of education examines “how local forms of education both shape and are shaped by larger political and economic forces” (p. 1). Methodologically, I anchor my understandings of how people experience life in the tradition of ethnographic work. The anthropological field, long defined by the study of cultures, came under fire in the 1980s when scholars challenged the static notion of culture as a “cause” to explain and justify everything. In “Writing Against Culture” (1991), Lila Abu-Lughod argued that “culture” as a bounded, homogeneous, and coherent system tends to essentialize and oversimplify societies, reinforcing the notion of the “other.” Abu-Lughod called for anthropologists to move “against culture” by focusing more on local contexts, power relations, and the agency of individuals to negotiate and resist dominant norms. It is in this tradition that my ethnographic work exists. By focusing on the lives and experiences of children, parents, teachers, and educators at the local level, I connect everyday realities to broader patterns in immigration, capitalism, and the global political economy. What does it mean to spend almost three years with a group of 16 families and teachers who have navigated the travails of the modern world? How do we push back against the idea of culture as monolithic and unchangeable when there is so much migratory movement across borders and boundaries?
When thinking about these multiple contexts of existence (home countries, transitional spaces, the border, and the U.S.), migrant parents elaborate their decisions to leave in a reciprocal stance: it is for the children, but the children also must show effort, progress, and a form of advancement in their education. When French sociologist Maurice Mauss published his work The Gift in 1925, he argued that gift giving is not simply an act of generosity or altruism, but rather it creates social obligations and is integral to economic and social relations. For many parents, to migrate is to care, but it is also a gift they give to their children: the gift to live, survive, and thrive. However, this gift is not without the setbacks, traumas, and complications that larger macro structures subject families and individuals to during migratory processes, including violence, detention, and in some cases separation. Often, the hope for a better education is the gift that keeps parents fighting for a better life.
Joining anthropology and the field of education, I stitch together a working definition of education as currency of love to explain how parents articulate their commitment to their children’s education as a backdrop for migration. Families in this research asserted that to migrate is to care. The concept homes in on articulations of reciprocity between families and their newfound home, but also accounts for the role of institutions (U.S. government, public schools, police, hospitals, employers) in complicating or facilitating migrant families’ everyday lives. This dynamic concept of education as currency of love surfaces in the gratitude and loss expressed by families upon arriving to the U.S., but also in the often unspoken expectations they have of their children. When parents make the constrained decision to migrate, they often justify it as intended to provide a better life for their children. However, when pressed about what it means to provide a better life for their children, parents anchor those hopes in education—a good education—as a possibility for advancement in their children’s lives. Thus, the idea of education as currency of love, as a way that love can be exchanged between parents and children, emerges. When parents enroll their children in U.S.-based schools, when they watch their child go into a building that they assume is safe and provides children with the best possible start to their lives, when children are able to graduate, learn to read and write, challenge themselves in schools—that is where much of parental love is located. To provide a quality education is to love.
The context advanced in this book is based on three major disruptions in the lives of 16 families over three years: leaving their home countries, being detained and/or separated at the border, and facing a global pandemic. Taken together, these three dimensions exacerbated existing educational inequalities for migrants in the U.S. and were connected to breakdowns in care structures at home and the challenges that came with remote schooling. This complex constellation of stressors has also been referred to in psychological literature as compounded trauma (Garcini et al., 2024) and compounded loss (Cardoza, 2021). I borrow from this literature to map out a framework based on how families discussed their experiences: as a “series of emergencies” or “new nightmares,” but maintaining their affirmation, “Now we are here.” Caregivers and children, when telling their stories, started with their reasons for leaving their countries of origin in the first place. They then spoke about the pain and grief that detention and separation brought about for them, only to be hit by a pandemic that directly affected their hopes and dreams for a better life. Families discussed the multiplicity of ways in which their lives were affected by uncertainty, but their focus, dedication, and resolve never wavered.
Migration Studies
This study is situated within the sociohistorical context of U.S. immigration policies, the effects of which ripple across the border and throughout Latin America. In an era of heightened immigration enforcement, migrants have little stability or certainty in their migratory routes or settlement possibilities (Abrego, 2014a; De Genova & Peutz, 2010; Meyer & Boggs, 2016; Zatz & Rodriguez, 2015). What happens when people migrate? Sociologists of im/migration located within the field of education have long argued that there are patterns associated with how Latinx immigrants live their lives in the U.S.
Traditionally, sociologists of im/migration and education have focused their studies on modes of incorporation and assimilation once migrants arrive in the U.S. They have found that Latinx immigrants tend to migrate with lower levels of formal education, higher rates of undocumented status, and are more frequently from working-class backgrounds relative to other national origin groups (Feliciano, 2020; Lee & Zhou, 2015), causing Latinx youth to face greater incorporation obstacles (Telles et al., 2008). They have also argued that immigrant youth’s educational performance and attainment outcomes are influenced by parental socioeconomic status (Bean et al., 2015; Lee & Zhou, 2015) and class mobility (Roksa & Potter, 2011), family structure and community dynamic (Cavanagh & Fomby, 2012; Rumbaut, 2005; Terriquez, 2012; Zhou & Bankston, 1994), and the preparedness of schools to receive them (Dabach, 2014; Hurie & Callahan, 2019; Rodriguez, 2019). These processes are uniquely marked by “illegality” for undocumented immigrant youth (Abrego & Gonzales, 2010; Gonzales, 2016).
Scholars have long sought to understand the adaptation processes of immigrant children whose lives are marked by vulnerable immigration status and the trauma of separation (Gibson, 1988; Portes & Rumbaut, 2014; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995), as well as by im/migration policies that have become increasingly consequential in shaping how immigrant children adapt, come of age, and experience life in the U.S. (Gonzales, 2016; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011). This book answers the anthropological question of what happens when families migrate, but it expands on this literature by engaging with an understudied population—detained and/or separated families shortly after reunification in the U.S.—and challenges fixed conceptions of assimilation and linearity that inform much of the rationale advanced in the sociology of im/migration.
Anthropological studies of migration have focused less on migration flows and more on how individuals respond to these global processes. The study of culture, which includes the study of the interaction between beliefs, behavior, and social relationships, has resulted in an emphasis on adaptation, culture change, identity, and ethnicity (Brettel & Hollifield, 2023). Studies suggest that migration challenges norms and ideals of family life that involve gender hierarchies (Coe et al., 2011), especially gendered roles and the division of household labor (Gálvez, 2011; Hirsch, 2009). However, women’s roles in the household and outside of the home vary tremendously according to social and geographical locations (Dreby & Schmalzbauer, 2013).
Scholars of migration have produced an important body of work pertaining to newly arrived immigrants in the U.S. Areas of inquiry include parental narratives of sacrifice and hoping for a better life for their children (Boehm, 2016; Dreby, 2010; Gallo, 2017; Yoshikawa, 2011); immigrant mothers’ advocacy for their children’s education (Dyrness, 2010); transnational childhoods (Orellana, 2009); gender and health disparities (Gálvez, 2011, 2019), intergenerational care (Yarris, 2017); and the fate of unaccompanied minors (Heidbrink, 2020). More specifically, scholars of anthropology and education have provided deep ethnographic knowledge on the relationship between language, education, and im/migration (e.g., Bartlett & Garcia, 2011). Researchers have also documented the structures of care that are created when families migrate or are separated across borders (Dreby, 2010; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Hirsch, 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Horton, 2008; Parreñas, 2005). This book builds on previous anthropological work on immigration that discusses parental care and sacrifice as ways to provide a better life for children. Within the anthropology of migration, I think with Yarris’s (2017) concept of care as an affirmative moral stance, which is an expression from parents of unconditional support for their children.
To Migrate Is to Care
Initially, the study of care was the domain of medical anthropologists, who investigated the intimate act of caring for the body of another (see Smith-Morris [2018] for a review of four examples among many; also, Kittay [2011] for a discussion of the ethics of care and dependency). More recently, however, scholars have begun to pay attention to the cultural, linguistic, and political implications of caregiving, particularly as they pertain to transnational relations (Arnold, 2021; Baldassar & Merla, 2013; Ticktin, 2011). Ethnographic research on care in the context of migration illuminates the myriad ways people forge and maintain connections in light of the restrictions they face in their daily lives. Such research draws attention to both the personal and the public dimensions of carework, confirming the importance of care as a socially sustaining activity while showing how care-in-practice responds to broader forms of cultural and political mediation.
Care—in all its forms—is integral to social functioning, but it has also been a source of intellectual contestation (Buch, 2015). Care is typically understood as “a set of (ritualized) practices that are part of how people maintain and enhance relationships” (García-Sánchez, 2018, p. 168). Scholars have expanded on this idea to include the notion of obligation, describing care as an ethical commitment in which people feel compelled to “take care” of one another even when such actions run counter to or are otherwise distinct from individual interests (Engster, 2020). Feminist theorists situate this imperative within specific social and political contexts, drawing attention to how care’s deep association with femininity affects its allocation and social value (Cockburn, 2005; Fisher et al., 1990; Gilligan, 1982). This perspective provides critical insight into care’s relationship to lived experiences of inequity (i.e., who is obligated to provide care and how this affects care’s perceived value). At the same time, feminist perspectives have been criticized for universalizing concepts developed via a myopic consideration of social norms observed in the West and Global North (Nadasen, 2017, 2021; Raghuram, 2016; Thelen, 2021; Yeates, 2012). As a corrective, other scholars have positioned the ethics of care in a broader political frame, defining care as an assertion of hope proffered in response to global economic, interpersonal, and ecological crises (Tronto, 1993). This understanding of care takes the same embodied practices configured elsewhere as emblems of “femininity” and uses them to develop language to explain how interpersonal actions articulate with efforts to craft a better future for one’s community (Held, 2006).
Ethnographic Lens
This ethnographic study, begun in the fall of 2018 and completed at the end of 2021, illuminates the consequences that shifting immigration practices have had for families’ lived experiences, children’s educational experiences, as well as teaching in schools. As a method, ethnography offers a window into the complexities of real-world situations and highlights experiences, perspectives, and truths that are often silenced or sidelined. Ortner (2006) described ethnography in the following way: “Of course [it] means many things. Minimally, however, it has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing” (p. 43). Ortner explained that ethnographic thinness comes from a failure to understand internal politics of dominated groups and their cultural authenticity as well as from issues “surrounding the crisis of representation—the possibility of truthful portrayals of others (or Others) and the capacity of the subaltern to be heard” (p. 62). Edward Said (1978) argued that representations of other cultures are inherently political and tied to relations of power, meaning that anthropological knowledge production is not objective or value neutral. Anthropological knowledge, rather, served to “other” non-Western peoples and legitimize Western political and cultural domination. It helped justify colonial projects of control and influence.
A postcolonial, self-reflexive approach was thus needed to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, acknowledge subjective standpoints, and elevate Indigenous agency and authority over cultural representations. Tuhiwai Smith et al. (2018) subsequently argued that Indigenous communities have long been subjected to having research done “on” or “about” them by external researchers, but rarely “with” or “for” them, perpetuating power imbalances. Following this tradition, the work by Alonso Bejarano et al. (2019) in Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science proposed methodology like community-engaged research, participatory action research, and Indigenous research paradigms that promote self-determination and social justice.
I follow a long tradition of migration scholars who have conducted ethnographic work with populations with vulnerable immigration status through the development of trust and time (Abu-Lughod, 2000; Boehm, 2012, 2015; Brennan, 2018; Brettel, 2003; Dreby, 2010, 2015; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020; Foner, 2005; Gallo, 2017; Gonzales, 2016; Heidbrink, 2014; Heyman, 1995; Levitt, 2001; Mahler, 1995; Menjívar, 2000; Parreñas, 2021; Smith, 2006). In keeping with this approach, I narrowed the focal topics of this research over the course of data collection as major events influenced people’s lived realities (Blommaert & Jie, 2010). The key feature of ethnographies of migration and of migratory processes is that the researcher “moves” with the participants, adjusting according to how participants tell stories about their mobility.
The Work
I spent between 22 months and three years with a group of 16 families from four different countries in Latin America. The participants in this research were 30 children and youth ranging from 4 months to 18 years old living in the U.S., 24 parents, and 5 children and young adults living in their home countries. To that I added 18 teachers and community members with whom I interacted, resulting in at least 77 formal participants during those years. These families moved as a unit to escape complex contexts and encountered policies at the border that targeted their very existence—that threatened the integrity of the migrant family as such. Three main criteria were used to select families for participation in this study: (1) families experienced detention and/or separation at the border in 2018 or 2019, under the zero-tolerance policy and/or the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP); (2) families asked for asylum upon entry at the U.S.-Mexico border; and (3) families lived in the state of Massachusetts and had at least one child under 18 enrolled in K–12 schools.
By its nature, ethnography lends itself to long-term work that is somewhat bounded. While sometimes these are physical boundaries, other times they can be relationship based. While I refer to countries of origin in this research, I move away from terms like “sending” and “receiving/hosting” communities commonly used in migration research. I do that as I privilege relationships over locations as a unit of study. Children in this research went to similar schools, after-school programs, churches, restaurants, hospitals, and so lived similar physical experiences. Establishing trust allowed me to observe their homes, schools, playgrounds, church events, among other celebrations. It was important that I could be in spaces with families in order to understand how they moved from one place to another and what spending time together looked like. In this research, I centered the relationships between family members, immigration policies, and the schools around them. Thus, the similarities among these families illustrate how the journey north and migrants’ encounters with border policy coupled with a pandemic upon reunification complicate the survival and lives of these migrant families. The depth with which I was able to conduct this ethnography yielded high exposure (Small & Calarco, 2022). This means that I gathered much more data than I have been able to incorporate into the five data chapters in this book.
I conducted this research in the state of Massachusetts for several reasons. I live in the state, and at the time of research it was home to more than one million migrants who represented 16 percent of the state’s population (American Immigration Council, 2020). Families in Massachusetts had united to sue Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the aftermath of the family separation policy in May 2018. The lawsuit detailed the stories of families from Guatemala seeking asylum in the U.S. Through a local nongovernmental organization and several school districts where I had previously conducted research with Latin American migrant children, I was able to meet families who had recently been reunified or released. I focused on 16 families: 7 from Guatemala, 5 from Brazil, 2 from El Salvador, and 2 from Honduras. Their children were enrolled in and attended different schools in similar towns (see table 0.4). The children interacted with a total of 18 teachers, 9 aides, and 8 specialists, in addition to principals, community center administrators, after-school program coordinators, and others who provided care for them.
As described below, I employed a collection of multimodal digital ethnographic tools in order to continue my fieldwork at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. I followed the tradition of digital ethnographers (Burrel, 2009; Dicks et al. 2006; Emery, 2018; Rodriguez Kerr et al., 2020) who designed their research studies as multimodal ethnographies. While we continued to face restrictions of mobility related to the pandemic, this methodology provided new ways for qualitative researchers and ethnographers who study migration to use both in-person and digital methods.
Data were collected in the following ways in 2018, 2019, and part of 2021: (1) twice-a-month unstructured interviews with the 16 families’ parents and children. Participants’ grouping varied in their homes, and sometimes I would spend more time with the children or the parents, or with the whole family having a meal, for example; (2) three semistructured interviews with each teacher over the research period; (3) twice-a-month classroom participant observation per elementary child and once a month per middle or high school child; and (4) every-other-week participant observations outside of school (home, church, doctor) per family. From 2018 to 2021, I spent four mornings or afternoons every week in the classrooms, schools, and homes of these families. Observations outside of school lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours. I observed parents cooking, cleaning, working, and helping children with homework. I accompanied families to church, to the park, to grocery stores, and to neighborhood festivities as part of these observations. I participated in meetings with lawyers, as well as parent-teacher conferences, and spent time with families at tutoring facilities and in sessions organized by the parental school outreach organization.
TABLE 0.4 Participants.
Source: Author.
Who I am as a researcher matters. While positionality statements have gained traction in more disciplines and fields, the conversation about researchers’ identities has always been an important one. Mario Small (2009), however, warns against the overreliance on identity match as a research strategy. Identity match refers to the degree to which a researcher shares social identities (e.g., race, class, gender) with research participants. Small (2009) argues that a higher identity match can help researchers gain access to communities and build rapport/trust with participants more easily. However, identity match alone does not guarantee high-quality data. Power dynamics related to identities like race or gender exist in any research relationship and must be navigated ethically and carefully. Identity match does not eliminate these issues. Leigh Patel discusses the concept of relationality in her book, Decolonizing Educational Research (2016), in which she advocates for a relational approach to research that centers connections and relationships between the researcher and participants. She critiques more traditional “extractive” research approaches that treat communities as objects of study rather than in relationship with the researcher and each other. Relationality—in contrast to the usual unilateral positionality statements—requires mutual learning, and relationships take time and care to cultivate. My relationship with participants was a familiar one because I had been researching immigration across the Americas for nearly a decade.
I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and Portuguese is my first language. I also speak Spanish, and so I never relied on translation or interpretation during my data collection. Being a teacher was part of my identity when engaging with participants. Professora or maestra were labels commonly used by parents, children, and youth when referring to me. In the U.S. I am often categorized as a person of color mostly because I was born and raised in Brazil. I am sometimes called Latina, Latinx, or Latin American. However, in Brazil, according to the census and sociocultural definitions, I am white. I speak English with my own accent, and while I have lived in the U.S. for almost 17 years, I still feel very much like a foreigner or someone living in what Victor Turner (1969) has called a “liminal space.” This liminality is a state of ambiguity: participants have left behind their previous status but have not yet been incorporated into their new status. Turner describes liminality as being “betwixt and between”: neither here nor there, in a space that resists definition or classification according to cultural categories.
Thus, in many ways my identity as a U.S.-based university teacher, but also as a Brazilian migrant myself who was raising bilingual children and deeply missed her faraway family, merged in this in-between space. Parts of my identity became more or less salient depending on where I was. In schools I was sometimes mistaken for a K–12 teacher, but in teacher-parent conferences or in meetings with lawyers I was consulted and expected to have answers and solutions as an advocate. At participants’ homes I was sometimes put into the role of a researcher, a babysitter, a tutor, a social worker, a mother’s helper, a friend who stopped by to chat, and someone with resources that could support families’ varied needs. Because consent is an ongoing process, my notetaking and recording served as constant reminders that I was a researcher and that I was registering our interactions. One parent, Yanet, described this process in the following way: “I sometimes forget you are taking notes and writing, but then you always remind us . . . you know you can stop telling us now . . . we see you a lot [laughter]!” I did frequently remind participants that they always had the right to have entire conversations with me that would never be written about. As Yanet’s comment indicates, this process was sometimes too repetitive. Although no one ever asked me to leave anything out, reassuring participants that they had the right to set that limit was a key component of authentic ongoing consent.
Engaging in the myth of a detached objectivity while conducting research can be harmful to our work. Not acknowledging who the researcher is or omitting how they are perceived by participants would be a denial of our own humanity. Instead, I believe in being transparent and honest about who I am, and when asked, being sincere regarding how I feel about different issues. I have interviewed plenty of people whose perspectives differed completely from how I see the world. However, a rigorous ethnographer would not shy away from being in spaces that are contrary to their beliefs as long as doing so does not jeopardize their personal safety. Migrant families in this research differ in their religious and political beliefs. When I collected data with Brazilian participants there was more shared knowledge between myself and participants about the country, its states, sociocultural norms, and food than perhaps with other participants. There was also more difference in opinions about local and national politics, as well as about policies.
Ethnographers often romanticize the process of data collection and use words like “informants” or being “embedded” in spaces, thus depicting themselves as explorers going on adventures. This reflects anthropology’s long legacy of exploitation. While I acknowledge these tensions in my own work, it sometimes seems as though the responsibility for engaging with our relationality, our ethical duties as researchers, and above all our commitment to the participants who allow us to even be able to write a book falls mostly to social scientists doing qualitative work. I hope this book contributes to continuing the dialogue on these topics and across all disciplines and methods that work with migrant communities.
A Road Map
Now We Are Here moves chronologically through the lives of 16 families. Chapter 1 describes how parents from across Latin America made the constrained choice to leave their countries of origin and undertake the journey north to the U.S. Families that experienced separation and/or detention at the border saw the possibility of enrolling their children in U.S. schools as a possible justification for hardships experienced at the border. The paradox, however, was the cost of this promise. Parents explained that detention and separation at the border forever haunted their dreams as they worried for their children’s well-being after reunification or release. Was it worth it? What have I done? These were some of the questions parents engaged with after reunification.
Chapter 2 takes on children’s narratives of how they understood their mobility, their parents’ decision to migrate, and the journey north. Building on the previous chapter’s focus on parents’ struggles with guilt as well as the hopes that sent them north, this chapter centers children’s accounts of what motivated their families’ migration to the U.S. While children are frequently discussed in both policy and media spheres, they are rarely spoken to in their own individual contexts. In contrast, this chapter centers children as the experts of their own lives.
Chapter 3 focuses on children in classrooms. Children are the supposed beneficiaries of their parents’ decisions to migrate, but they have varying levels of institutional support to succeed academically. While children talked about their migrant journeys in the classroom and offered glimpses of their experiences of detention and separation, teachers were hesitant to engage fully with these experiences. The result was what I call a “pedagogy of silence,” which made many children feel invisible and uneasy about sharing their stories with teachers at school. Teachers, on the other hand, described a type of constrained care in which they felt they could not fully care for their students. Parents, meanwhile, worried that disclosing too much information about their migrant journeys could make their children visible and therefore vulnerable.
Chapter 4 illustrates how the caregiving structures available to migrant parents broke down in 2020 and how those breakdowns shaped children’s schooling experiences. By early 2020, many of the focal families had found their footing in the labor market: they were experiencing steadiness in their jobs and consistently sending remittances to their home countries. When schools closed on March 12, 2020, parents—many of whom were essential workers—had to figure out how to care for their children during the hours they would be working outside the home in a context of already-strained household resources and infrastructure. The promise that educational opportunities would open the door to a better life was threatened and tested again.
Chapter 5 focuses on families’ articulations of what they lost and found during the three years they had been in the U.S. As newcomers who hoped to thrive and provide a better life for their children, they seemed to face constant hurdles. The unstable economy and breakdowns in care deeply influenced how they perceived their ability to care for the family members with them in the U.S., as well as those who had stayed behind. Will things get better? Have we made the right decision? This chapter is dedicated to narratives of recovery in the face of a global pandemic, but not without mourning the losses experienced along the way.
Finally, in the conclusion I offer a look forward: short-and long-term reflections and recommendations that consider the multiple emergencies experienced by families that arrive in the U.S. from all over the world. To migrate is to care, and continuing to survive and to live is a complex task for these families. While the conclusion is the end of the book, these families and more families continue to push forward and attempt to build a life of dignity and purpose. Why is it that the right to a good life is reserved for some and denied to others? The reflections in the conclusion are about education and immigration policy, but ultimately, they are about how children and parents resist oppressive structures that constantly strip away their right to exist and persevere. This is not a romanticized view of migration, but rather a response to what Adriana said in the beginning of this introduction: is it a crime to care?
* * *
Who cares? Parents care. Children care. Educators care. The decisions and motivators of families’ departure from their homelands included parents’ commitment to the possibilities a life in the U.S. could offer their children. On the other hand, children were the assumed beneficiaries of their parents’ decision to migrate but experienced hardships in U.S. schools. While parents had high expectations of how transformative their children’s formal education would be, immigrant children existed in an in-between space of resisting in classrooms and schools, and existing at home. Teachers’, principals’, community workers’, and school staff’s attention to immigrant children’s needs and their asset view approach to children are acts of care. While children’s stories of migration were not always welcomed in classrooms, many educators worked to build meaningful relationships with families. Teachers care.
Harsh border policies coupled with a pandemic put families’ expectations on permanent hold. Migrant parents were essential workers during the pandemic. Uninsured, afraid, and with little social safety net, they pushed through for their children. They also experienced loss and replayed their decisions in their heads over and over. Migration brought a heightened sense of dispossession and loss for parents and children; they met hardship with unwavering hope for the future. The triad of compounded losses—leaving home, border detention, and a pandemic—tied parents’ and children’s prospects for a better life to education. Family migration is an act of care, and love is expressed through providing stable formal educational opportunities to children. The hopefulness expressed through Now We Are Here should not be mistaken for naïveté, a lack of agency, or docility. Parents and children are agentic beings pushing through the suspended nature of their existence—waiting for court decisions about their future.
During one of our final interviews, Julio, a father from Guatemala who migrated with his daughter Luz, asked, “I wonder if they will care?” When asked what he meant by that question, he explained: “Do you think if the government, lawyers, teachers all of the people would care if they knew about all the things we have been through . . . I’m not saying we are victims, I am saying we are fighters . . . I wonder if they would care about Luz more, you know?” This lingering question remains crucial to understanding the multiple disruptions that so deeply affected the lives of families and children. Who cares? The pandemic’s tragic disruption highlighted how recent policies have shaped the educational experiences of migrants in the U.S., demonstrating that states and public schools can lead the change for families who now are here.