Cruel Optimism: Migration and Schooling for Dominican Newcomer Immigrant Youth

Abstract

What is the relationship among migration, education, and socio-emotional well-being? This article draws on ethnographic research with Dominican youth to examine the impact of maternal migration on young immigrants and their educational aspirations. We detail how the youth come to conflate mother love, the sacrifices of migration, and educational investment. We argue that this conflation represents a "cruel optimism" (Berlant 2011), wherein the impossible object of desire-social mobility through schooling-impedes well-being. [Schooling, Dominican, socio-emotional well-being, maternal migration, affect theory] ¿Cuál es la relación entre la migración, la educación y el bienestar socio-emocional? A partir de una investigación etnográfica con jóvenes dominicanos en Nueva York, este estudio examina el impacto de la migración materna sobre los jóvenes inmigrantes, y sus aspiraciones educativas. En éste detallamos cómo los jóvenes llegan a confundir el amor materno, los sacrificios de la migración y la inversión educativa que ellos mismos hacen para cumplir sus expectativas y las de sus madres. Argumentamos que esta confluencia representa una forma de "optimismo cruel" (Berlant 2011), en la que el objeto imposible del deseo-la movilidad social a través de la educación-impide su propio bienestar.

The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on the Nation’s Schools

“…There is a growing literature on immigrant students and schooling in both sociology and anthropology that looks at the ways in which social position in immigrant destinations can constrain opportunity. This often occurs through ignorance of immigrants’ cultures as well as stereotypes about their abilities and aspirations (Bartlett, Oliveira, & Ungemah, 2018; Hamann, Zúñiga, & Sánchez Garcia, 2010). Lowenhaupt, Mangual, Dabach, & Gonzalez (2019) also take a socio-anthropological lens to the ways in which educators respond to their immigrant students depending on the context of their arrival.…”

Sacrifice and Indebtedness: The Intergenerational Contract in Chinese Rural Migrant Families

“…I begin with an inquiry of the motivational bases for rural migrant families' intergenerational contract in their endeavors to maximize their collective welfare. Similar to transnational labor migrants (Bartlett et al, 2018) or Chinese middle-class migrants abroad (Huang & Yeoh, 2005), rural migrant parents and their substitutes in this study regard children's education as a social mobility project that tops the family agenda (Gu & Yeung, 2020). Parents and grandparents expressed soaring hopes for the adolescents' future educational achievement and indicated their support "as long as he/she could make it!…”

“…However, empirical evidence suggests that migrant children's educational achievement is systematically suppressed by structural inequalities rooted in China's rural-urban divide, including the rural-urban education gap at the school level (Hannum, 1999), and migrant children's persistent disadvantage in accessing quality education in cities (Gu & Yeung, 2020). By ignoring these glaring structural inequalities that blockade the children's educational opportunities, these families' single-minded investment in and high expectations for children's education comprise a kind of "cruel optimism" (Bartlett et al, 2018) that pit these structurally disadvantaged children against the imagined limitless potentialities attached upon them.…”

Education, merit and mobility: Opportunities and aspirations of refugee youth in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp

“…On the other hand, the promise of education as a vehicle for advancement in constrained contexts such as refugee camps can function as ‘cruel optimism’, in which ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 1; also see Vavrus, 2007). Numerous studies of im/migration in settings of encampment and resettlement underscore the illusive promises of education towards social inclusion and mobility (McWilliams & Bonet, 2016; Bartlett et al ., 2018; Poole & Riggan, 2020). Material and symbolic educational returns are rendered more tenuous in the context of encampment, where the purposes of schooling are circumscribed within a refugee’s ‘unknowable future’ (Dryden‐Peterson, 2017).…”