Youth Return Migration (US-Mexico): Students’ citizenship in Mexican schools. (original) (raw)

Youth return migration US-Mexico Students’ citizenship in Mexican schools Children and Youth Services Review

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.

Centering Transborder Students: Perspectives on Identity, Languaging and Schooling Between the US and Mexico

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.

Bybee, E. R., Whiting, E., Jensen, B., Savage, V., Baker, A. Holdaway, E. (2020) “Estamos aquí pero no soy de aqui”: American Mexican Youth, Belonging and Schooling in Rural, Central Mexico. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. 52 (2) 123-145.

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for "American Mexican" students-Mexican-heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US-born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American-Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world. [belonging, transnationalism, immigration, latina/o, civic identity]

"Estamos aquí pero no soy de aqui": American Mexican Youth, Belonging and Schooling in Rural, Central Mexico

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2020

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for "American Mexican" students-Mexican-heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US-born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American-Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world. [belonging, transnationalism, immigration, latina/o, civic identity]

Return migrants from the United States to Mexico: Constructing alternative notions of citizenship through acts of (linguistic) citizenship

Journal of Language and Politics. , 2022

This article examines Mexican return migrants belonging to the 1.5 generation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Our analysis disaggregates the notions that these return migrants have regarding "being Mexican" and speaking Spanish after spending most of their lives in the U.S. Building on critical citizenship theories (Isin 2008, 2009), specifically on the concepts of status, habitus, and acts, we analyze how these return migrants experience and build notions of citizenship in Mexico while they develop additional linguistic repertoires in Spanish and acquire basic knowledge of Mexican culture. Our findings suggest that return migrants go through various simultaneous learning processes to acquire Mexican habitus in Mexico even though they acquire formal citizenship. This learning process we argue occurs amidst multiple social, linguistic, and cultural tensions that trigger important acts of (linguistic) citizenship through which returnees found their own definition of what it means to be Mexican"