After the American Dream: Immigrants finding New Opportunities in Mexico (original) (raw)
Profile Issues in Teachers' Professional Development, 2013
This article has at its core the unraveling of factors that have influenced the identity of those who have been caught in between two worlds (Mexico and The United States) and whom will be called pre- and in-service returnees from now on. A qualitative approach was chosen in order to delve deep into the participants’ lived experiences through narrative inquiry which in turn aided in the discovery of the elements that have influenced their identity construction. The data suggest that those same elements have been crucial in the creation of a small culture among the participants at a teacher education program in teaching English to speakers of other languages at a Mexican university.
Youth Return Migration (US-Mexico): Students’ citizenship in Mexican schools.
Children and Youth Services Review, 2020
This paper explores how nineteen teenagers who, having been raised and educated in the United States and forced to return, adapt and participate to the Mexican school system. This work specifically analyzes their adaptation process in three Mexican public High Schools in the State of Puebla, and how they negotiate the process of participating within a Mexican school setting while negotiating their sense of belonging to the US and Mexico. In this study, we explore different ways in which return students enact their own bilingual and bicultural citizenship through their educational process in Mexico. To a greater extent, we try to convey the idea of looking at multiple forms of participating in, or outside, classrooms settings while constructing and maintaining their communicative repertoires as a way of reclaiming their citizenship in both countries, the US and Mexico.
Children’s voices about ‘return’ migration from the United States to Mexico: the 0.5 generation
Children's Geographies
Since 2004, our research has focused precisely in those minors who 'returned' from the United States to Mexico. Our interest has been to know the social, geographical, educational, and symbolic trajectories of those migrant children and adolescents who are part of the contemporary move of returnees. Based on the children's narratives (all collected before US November 2016 federal election), we now have a multifaceted response to the question: How and why are young Mexican migrants returning from the United States to Mexico? Some of these returnees were born in Mexico and arrived to the United States when they were young. International migration literature describes them as members of the 1.5 generation. But others were born in the United States and often started school there. They did not 'return' to Mexico, they arrived to their parents' home country for the first time in their lives. We call them the 0.5 generation.
Children and Youth Services Review, 2020
This paper explores how nineteen teenagers who, having been raised and educated in the United States and forced to return, adapt and participate to the Mexican school system. This work specifically analyzes their adaptation process in three Mexican public High Schools in the State of Puebla, and how they negotiate the process of participating within a Mexican school setting while negotiating their sense of belonging to the US and Mexico. In this study, we explore different ways in which return students enact their own bilingual and bicultural citizenship through their educational process in Mexico. To a greater extent, we try to convey the idea of looking at multiple forms of participating in, or outside, classrooms settings while constructing and maintaining their communicative repertoires as a way of reclaiming their citizenship in both countries, the US and Mexico.
Children's Geographies, 2014
The paper has two goals. The first is to present the main quantitative findings drawn from four surveys we conducted in Nuevo León (2004, n=14,473), Zacatecas (2005, n=11,258), Puebla (2009, n=18,829) and Jalisco (2010, n=11,479) using representative samples of children aged 7 to 16. We classified children in the following categories: (a) children who are returnees (who were born in Mexico), (b) international migrant children (born in the U.S.), and (c) mononational Mexicans. Among the second group, we distinguish children who had school experiences in the U.S. and those younger transnationals who came to Mexico before enrolling in school. The second goal is consider these children's cosmologies, revealed through interviews and survey responses, and to interpret the ways children explain their return migration from the United States to Mexico within the context of increasing voluntary and forced-return migration to Mexico. So data drawn from our mixed methods inquiry add younger voices and complicate sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. Children and 'return' migration Migration between the U.S. and Mexico has long included 'return migration' (i.e., those from Mexico returning to Mexico after a stint in the U.S.), but that portion of the migration equation has received comparatively less attention than movement from Mexico to the U.S. (Gaillard 1994). Similarly, while migration may often be 'pioneered' by adults travelling without children, it has long been noted that children migrate in large numbers as well (Passel 2011; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2002). Nonetheless, children's participation in migration has also been comparatively under-emphasized (Dobson 2009, Ensor and Gozdziak 2010). Based on our 10-year research project studying children with prior backgrounds in the U.S. who we encountered in Mexican schools in five Mexican states, we found that, at the start of the 21 st Century's second decade, Mexican schools (for grades 1 to 9) hosted children with prior experience in U.S. schools. We have also found that, as a partially overlapping population, these Mexican schools also enrolled children who had been born in the U.S. Not only is it misleading to call these children retornados (they are not returning to Mexico, but rather immigrating to it), but these latter children are also U.S. citizens per U.S. law, although they are also Mexican citizens based on the citizenship rights conferred by their parentage. In the contemporary context of return migration from the U.S. to Mexico, this paper aims to a) show the main quantitative findings in four of the five state level surveys we conducted in 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2010, b) analyze and interpret children's answers and narratives related to that migration, including their negotiation of a new or returned-to community in Mexico and their continued relationship with those in their past place(s) of residence. In doing this, we tried to respond to Dobson's (2009) call for 'unpacking
From Nuevo León to the USA and Back Again: Transnational Students in Mexico
Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 2008
The movement of Mexicans to the United States is both longstanding and long studied and from that study we know that for many newcomers the attachment to the receiving community is fraught and tentative. The experience of immigrant children in U.S. schools is also relatively well studied and reveals challenges of intercultural communication as well as concurrent and contradictory features of welcome and unwelcome. What is less well known, in the study of migration generally and of transnational students in particular, is how students moving in a less common direction -from the U.S. to Mexicoexperience that movement.
Undocumented families’ rates of repatriation to Mexico from the US have risen throughout the Obama administration, and this trend will likely increase under Donald Trump. This study describes the experiences of Mexican born youth who grew up in the US and are back in Mexico. While these children are participants in their families’ migration, their input is rarely sought in decisions to leave or return to a country. This article shares transborder students’ voices on their struggles to find their identities as Mexican, American or some combination of the two. They reflect on their schooling experiences across countries, and how these challenges are compounded when they are new to learning in Spanish or indigenous languages in Mexico.