Notes on Immigration, Youth, and Ethnographic Silence

Abstract

The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) migrant youth are often found in between narratives, complicated by the current political climate that makes it difficult for migrant students to disclose information about their lives. In this two-year ethnography of a public school that serves LGBTQ young people, the author suggests that teachers and education practitioners must learn to not only recognize the subtext of student narratives—the recognition of ethnographic silence and to listen for what is not being said—but also to create safe spaces in schools where LGBTQ migrant students feel comfortable to reveal identities without fear of reprisal.

Acknowledgments

Cindy Cruz is a Provost's Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Education and Latino Studies Program at Cornell University.

Notes

¹“Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding knows in one way or another that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individualized freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body.” (Warner, 1993, p. xiii) Queer, then, becomes an identity based on political resistance to larger societal norms that make LGBTQ identities deviant.

²All names and places have been changed to protect the anonymity of the participants.

³The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, or welfare reform, was signed into law in 1996 by President Clinton. This change in assistance to needy families replaced Aid to Dependent Families and placed time and funding restrictions on the families who were eligible to apply (Louie, 2000).

⁴Traffic—the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation (from http:/www.bayswan.orgtraffickdeftraffickUN.html, accessed 12/31/2006).