Migration Narratives

Abstract

Migration Narratives presents an ethnographic study of an American town that recently became home to thousands of Mexican migrants, with the Mexican population rising from 125 in 1990 to slightly under 10,000 in 2016. Through interviews with residents, the book focuses on key educational, religious, and civic institutions that shape and are shaped by the realities of Mexican immigrants. Focusing on African American, Mexican, Irish and Italian communities, the authors describe how interethnic relations played a central role in newcomers’ pathways and draw links between the town’s earlier cycles of migration. The town represents similar communities across the USA and around the world that have received large numbers of immigrants in a short time. The purpose of the book is to document the complexities that migrants and hosts experience and to suggest ways in which policy-makers, researchers, educators and communities can respond intelligently to politically-motivated stories that oversimplify migration across the contemporary world. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Boston College.

Scaling and the formation of borderland subjectivities: A study of identity construction among Chinese international students in the United States

“…In this light, the borderland trope suggested that traditional dichotomies such as home/host, local/newcomer, and insider/ outsider were insufficient for capturing the complex realities of living and learning as cross-border students and the affordances of their cross-border mobility. Echoing arguments of scholars in the broader field of migration studies (Wortham et al, 2020), the findings of this study conveyed a clear message that research on international student identities needed to seriously engage with the concept of in-betweenness (Dai, 2022). As illustrated through Yi's story of navigating his feelings of foreignness and Tong's story of making sense of her Shanghainese-ness, these students actively nurtured a critical and creative state of in-betweenness, wherein "outsiderness and insiderness were not dichotomous, but were instead heterogeneous and blurred, with porous boundaries" (Perrino & Wortham, 2018, p. 2).…”

Turning friends into objects: A letter struggling with analytic distance in the New Latino Diaspora.

“…All of this constituted a longstanding, 9-year friendship that I developed with you all. But when the time came to write a book about my project in the town (Wortham et al, 2020), I faced a challenge. I needed to write about you, instead of talking to you.…”

“…As you experienced and described to me, Mexicans did not fit neatly into these familiar divisions. My 11-year project in Marshall explored processes of social identification and interethnic relations in the town (e.g., Clonan-Roy et al, 2016; Nichols & Wortham, 2018; Wortham et al, 2020). As more and more Mexicans moved to Marshall, both longstanding residents and your fellow immigrants asked and answered questions such as: What types of people are the immigrants and the hosts?…”

Memórias e histórias de professores brasileiros em escolas bi/multilíngues de elite

“…Neste capítulo, discuto, inicialmente, outro conceito fundamental que ajudou a compor a base teórico-metodológica do trabalho, o conceito de narrativa autobiográfica. Além disso, examino, a partir de Wortham (2001), os conceitos de posicionamento e de identidade utilizados como base para a análise das narrativas dos professores-participantes do estudo aqui descrito.…”

“…Fonte: Adaptado de Wortham (2001) A partir da análise das narrativas, ficou nítido que alguns professores participantes fizeram uso de figuras de linguagem para narrar seus posicionamentos em relação ao seu repertório linguístico, ao de seus alunos e quanto ao cenário em que atuam. Dessa forma, fez-se necessário, também, considerar as figuras de linguagem como pistas indexicalizadoras, assim como o fez Bizon (2013), em sua tese de doutoramento.…”