How to Tame an Imaginary Border: Critical Transgression in Immigrant and Refugee Education

A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Conversations about the unique needs of immigrant children and recommendations for better teacher preparation are futile if society and educators do not have the will to do the right thing

—A. Lin Goodwin

We are immigrants. And the descendants of immigrants. And the descendants of the descendants of the descendants of those unwillingly dragged across waters and borders. The offspring of attempted erasure. We inhabit lands where shifting boundaries breed border consciousness and border tongues (Anzaldúa, 1987). We are the transgression. We are the hemorrhaging and the scab and the healing all at once. We be untamed crossroads, a confluence of the imaginary borders that sought to bind us, but birthed us instead. Periodt.

In 2017, South Korean artist, Kimsooja, showcased an installation entitled, To Breathe – Zone of Nowhere, depicting the intermixed symbols of 30 different national flags layered onto each other to the point that they are not individually distinguishable (Kimsooja, n.d.). However, this cross-pollination of nationhood symbols is not working to convey the corny melting-pot message that we are used to in the United States—one that purports inclusion by luring everyone into a boiling cauldron of whiteness. Instead, it works to challenge the illusory intent of state sovereignty and nationalism that lay the foundation for exclusionary and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Over the last three decades, increasing mainstream anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States has been paired with educational legislation that underscores America’s ongoing disregard and contempt for immigrants and refugees of color in America: English only laws that seek to sever students from the languages of their people under the assertion that “immigrant parents are eager to have their children acquire a good knowledge of English, thereby allowing them to fully participate in the American Dream of economic and social advancement” (Arizona Secretary of State, 2000); laws banning Ethnic Studies to prohibit any form of education that “advocates ethnic solidarity” (House of Representatives, 2010); and laws attacking “Critical Race Theory” and banning books centered on the ethno-racial, linguistic, cultural, and historical identities of people of color (Alfonseca, 2022).

Imagined political communities

To Breathe’s visual commentary on the “breakdown of hierarchies, transcendence of boundaries, and blurring of the distinctions between different countries” (Kimsooja, n.d.) throws shade at the very nature of borders and nation-ness that shape the geo-politics of immigration in America. What is their function? How do national symbols work to reify imagined boundaries between groups of people? How might we imagine futures that are not configured around national hierarchies bordered around race, language, culture, and identity? And to invoke Chicana scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa, what emotional and political residue must we contend with as we work to challenge the unnatural boundaries that seek to prohibit the perceived other? When we embrace the concept of “nation” as an imagined political community (Anderson, 1991) it textures our understanding of the historical emergence of nationhood and nationalism as socially constructed cultural artifacts that work to organize various constellations of imagined sovereignty and community.

Imaginary borders and boundaries between lands and people are the geopolitical manifestation of colonial, racist, and imperial histories that work to maintain social hierarchies. Border culture theorists argue that the altering of territory, identities, languages, and consciousness occurs when borders grate against the land and hemorrhage through a process of deterritorialization (Anzaldúa, 1987; Saldívar, 1997). It is within these physical and metaphorical borderlands that attempted eradication of language, identity, and history occurs. Thus, in the spirit of Anzaldúa, who taught us that “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (1987, p. 374), this issue takes up the complexity of cross-generational, intersectional immigrant education in the United States, resisting the metaphorical and very real borders that seek to tame, control, and circumscribe the full humanity of immigrants.

Switchin’ up

How America imagines the borders and boundaries of its imagined political community is shifting. In the Fall of 2014, demographics started switchin’ up in schools across America and for the first time children of color outnumbered white children (Goodwin, 2017). These changing demographics also have been reshaping racial and cultural profiles on the state level as incoming immigrants and refugees shift from entering “traditional receiving states, such as California and New York, to emerging gateway communities in the Midwest and Southeast” (Hopkins et al., 2015, p. 408). For first generation students and teachers of color, for daily border crossers in places like El Paso, Texas, for families migrating from the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and the Middle East, for refugees who leave home only because “home is the mouth of a shark,” and who “only run for the border when [they] see the whole city running as well” (Facing History, n.d.), the social construction of borders, nationhood, sovereignty, and by extension, “immigration,” has huge implications. This urgency is underscored by the fact that education is one of the only rights that immigrants have access to regardless of authorization status, meaning “educators and school leaders have access to immigrant families in a way that other institutions don’t” (Saco et al., this issue).

For critical (immigrant) education

Because systems of education have long played a central role in actualizing the social and political ethos of those in power, this issue takes up the current landscape of critical immigrant and refugee education in America. For the opening Kitchen Table Talk we convened Sandra Saco, Monisha Bajaj, Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, Dolores Delgado Bernal, Rita Kohli, and Kevin K. Kumashiro for a rich dialogue about what anti-oppressive and critical (immigrant) education looks like in this post-Trump era. The Kitchen Table Talk works to complicate flat immigration narratives that do not take multi-generational grief, struggle, agency, and legacy into account robustly. Beginning with a small artifact that represents their relationship to the issue’s topic, each author comes to the table with deep wisdom and reflection, challenging us to look at immigrant experiences intersectionally, to understand the history of compulsory education that contours current immigration education politics, and to center immigrant realities as a means of creating critical educational environments of refuge, healing, and truth.

In this issue’s For the Culture section, we highlight the power of public art to transgress, to break down walls and imaginary borders. We feature images of a sculpture called “Move Into the Future” designed by undocumented creative strategists, with a team of Black, immigrant, and Native artists, including sculpture director Wyatt Closs and artists Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Mer Young, and Alex Arzu. This racial justice sculpture “calls on the viewer to reflect on our shared histories and future.” Located in Houston, TX at Emancipation Park, the public artwork is made possible through United We Dream, the largest undocumented and immigrant youth led network in the United States that believes there is no racial justice without dignity for immigrants.

School is the setting for A. Lin Goodwin and Rebecca Stanton’s “Lessons from an Expert Teacher of Immigrant Youth: A Portrait of Social Justice Teaching.” The authors focus on the practice of Daphne, an exemplary or master teacher based in a New York City secondary school. The authors bring to view Daphne’s motivations, inspirations, and curricula as a social justice teacher of immigrant students.

Nikhil Tiwari, author of “Making (Critical) Meaning of Meaning-Making: Complicating the racialization of Asian Indian American Youth,” counters the ways Indian American issues are often perceived as unworthy of scholarly study—given the popular construction of the population having seamlessly assimilated into the US. The author provides a critical examination of an Indian American school-based event to advance scholarly understanding. The annual event in focus is an iteration of Gura Vandana, which translates to Teacher Reverence, that took place in 2019 in Broad Plains, Wisconsin. Leveraging the theoretical frames of transmodalities and critical bifocality, the author worked to uncover the racializing processes serving as the through line for the meaning making of the Guru Vandana, particularly relevant given the event in India is practiced as a private and individual affair (guru pooja) and was made public in the context of a majority white teaching force, in the case of this study. Readers comes to understand the ways Guru Vandana functions as a site where Indianness is both framed and understood as contesting and (re)producing racialization, stereotypes, and caste subjectivity.

The minoritization and marginalization of migrant students is the focus of “The Not-So-Hidden Curriculum: How a Public School System in the United States Minoritizes Migrant Students” by Janese L. Free and Katrin Križ. Utilizing sociological theories, the authors examine “the biases of the public education system towards migrant students from the viewpoint of migrant educators in one Migrant Education Program (MEP) in the United States.” Results from interviews with 20 educators uncover class and racial biases held by the migrant educators toward migrant students and their families. These biases create a hidden curriculum where, for example, English language proficiency is centered and a particular kind of entitled and intensive learning from students is expected. Importantly, the authors discuss the “incompatibilities between these ideologies and migrant students’ realities, especially their economic, social, and linguistic challenges.” In the end, Free and Križ make clear that whether “overt and recognized or implicit and difficult to recognize” negative assumptions about migrant students is consequential to their academic achievement and social mobility.

Heather Raymond, D. Jean Clandinin, Hiroko Kubota, and Vera Caine bring to the fore the experiences of Syrian refugee families parenting a child living with disabilities in the context of resettlement in Canada, raising and exploring questions about social inclusion and belonging in “Bumping Places of Social Inclusion: A Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Refugee Families who have a Child who is Living with a Disability.” The authors note that the Syrian “families frequently bumped against what we have termed the dominant story of theory and policy by professionals working with newcomer families living with a child with a disability.” The authors “open questions around the bumping places that families experienced as their life making in Canada bumped against stories of professional institutional contexts.”

In “Hall Pass: DACA Rcipients’ Experiences ‘Passing’ in Higher Education,” Luis Fernando Macías theorizes the term Hall Passing to name and examine the ways Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) of higher education leverage government-issued documentation along with presumptions about their race, speech accent, and background to avoid a plethora of administrative and financial barriers that can be disruptive to their schooling. Through such theorizing, the author communicates how leveraging the resources of being DACAmented should be seen as unearthing the ways students navigate existing inequalities in higher education spaces (with the backdrop of hostile immigration policies) and as an act of subversion and resistance. Through a critical race-grounded methodology, the author examined students’ testimonios where experiences of passing while DACAmented were shared, which are then used to explore white hegemony in PWI institutions.

Anthony Johnston, Don Siler, and Anthony De Jesús in “The Name Game”: Adolescent Racialization in the Era of Trump” offer a sobering reminder of the uptick in “increased incidents of bullying, harassment, and intimidation of non-dominant students during the 2016 election.” Post-Trump, rampant racial hostility targeted at Black and Brown bodies, as well as extreme racial and ideological polarization in (and out of) schools and among students is still ever-present. In this article, the authors draw on critical race and socio-cultural historical theory to examine a particular racial incident where white students make it a “game” to call their Black peers the N-word. Invited by the school in question to provide intervention, the authors “examine how the events, school response, and the vitriolic rhetoric and political discourse in the larger culture contributed to the racialized identities of students who were at the heart of the events.”

Liv T. Davila and Noor Doukmak engage in a critical discourse analysis with focus group data of Central African newcomer immigrants in high school to examine their responses to anti-immigrant discourse in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. More specifically in their article, which emphasizes youth perspectives, “Immigration Debated: Central African Immigrant Youths’ Discourses of Fairness and Civic Belonging in the United States,” the authors explore race and racialization in the ways immigrant and refugee students from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon debated immigration. Across the three focus group interview analyzed for this qualitative study, the findings, which were analyzed through an integrated Western and postcolonial philosophical framework of fairness, demonstrated complex stances youth have on immigration, stances that can both mirror and resist the reproduction of hierarchies of belonging in US immigration discourse.

Belonging repeats as a theme in Kristina F. Brezicha and Chandler Patton Miranda’s “Actions Speak Louder than Words: Examining School Practices that Support Immigrant Students’ Feelings of Belonging.” The authors probe belonging, asking, “How do students’ experiences in two very different schools shape their feelings of belonging?” Fundamentally, the authors explore how “[e]xperiences of othering at school can profoundly affect high school students’ feelings of belonging and influence both their socioemotional well-being and academic success.”

Closing this issue is “It’s David Versus Goliath”: Anti-Oppressive Practice in K-12 Education” by Ashley-Marie Hanna Daftary and Erin Sugrue who leave us with practical recommendations for how to teach for social justice as an approach to confronting racism, bias, and oppression in schools, especially where there is an overwhelmingly white teacher population and an increasingly racially diverse student body. Interviewing 25 teachers, administrators, and support staff, the authors ask, “How do K-12 staff (across disciplines and roles) engage in anti-oppressive practice in their schools?” The educators in the study reveal and the authors make recommendations for anti-oppressive practices that “address the impacts of larger structural injustices on their students and communities.”