Educational Meaning Making and Language Learning: Understanding the Educational Incorporation of Unaccompanied, Undocumented Latinx Youth Workers in the United States

Abstract

Immigration scholars agree that educational attainment is essential for the success of immigrant youth in U.S. society and functions as a key indicator of how youth will fare in their transition into adulthood. Research warns of downward or stagnant mobility for people with lower levels of educational attainment. Yet much existing research takes for granted that immigrant youth have access to a normative parent-led household, K–12 schools, and community resources. Drawing on four years of ethnographic observations and interviews with undocumented Latinx young adults (ages 18 to 31) who arrived in Los Angeles, California, as unaccompanied youth, I examine the educational meaning making and language learning of Latinx individuals coming of age as workers without parents and legal status. Findings show that Latinx immigrant youth growing up outside of Western-normative parent-led households and K–12 schools and who remain tied to left-behind families across transnational geographies tend to equate education with English language learning. Education—as English language learning—is essential to sobrevivencia, or survival, during their transition to young adulthood as workers and transnational community participants.

Immigration Arrests and Educational Impacts: Linking ICE Arrests to Declines in Achievement, Attendance, and School Climate and Safety in California

“…Few studies incorporate students’ perspectives and reports about how attending school under conditions of increased hostility and fear, particularly in the years after Trump took office, may affect them (see Valdivia, 2019, 2020 and Capps et al, 2020 for some exceptions). Prior work that centers the voices and experiences of undocumented immigrant youth and children in mixed-status families has revealed some of their struggles and resilience in the face of unwelcoming environments and major obstacles (Canizales, 2021; Gonzales, 2015; Mangual Figueroa, 2017; S. Rodriguez, 2020).…”

“Si Mis Papas Estuvieran Aquí”: Unaccompanied Youth Workers’ Emergent Frame of Reference and Health in the United States

“…With some exceptions (see Canizales 2021aCanizales , 2021bDiaz-Strong 2021), research examining undocumented youth's stressors has tended to focus on the mental and emotional health tolls of transitioning in social roles from student to worker (Gonzales 2015), from child to parent (Enriquez 2020), or in legal statuses from undocumented to DACAmented (Patler and Pirtle 2018). Common among them is the relentless fear of family separation through deportation (Dreby 2015).…”

Working‐class Latina/o youth navigating stratification and inequality: A review of literature

“…Attention to the rise of unaccompanied youth migration and the rise of teenage Latina/o low ‐wage workers—members of the 1.25 generation‐‐ who support their left‐behind families draws perhaps the clearest portrait of poor and working‐class Latina/o youth's financial labor (Canizales, 2021b; Martinez, 2019). These young people may never enter school (Canizales, 2021a) but experience a coming of age and incorporation experience marked by the primacy of work and urgency of financial obligations to self and family (Canizales, n.d). This scholarship contributes to decades‐long work on the 1.5‐ and second‐generation children of immigrants, demonstrating the labor they contribute to their families.…”

“…Indigenous Latin American youth's cultural labor is evinced in their strategies to “cloak” Indigenous language proficiencies and keep Indigenous identities secret in response to harassment and resulting feelings of shame (Barillas Chon, 2010; Kovats Sanchez, 2018; Machado‐Casas, 2009). Indigenous‐language speakers in immigrant communities strategically claim proficiencies in their native languages, Spanish, or English (Canizales, 2021a, 2022). And some Indigenous young people choose to identify as panethnic Latino/Hispanic, while others identify as Indigenous or as both Indigenous and Latino/Hispanic.…”