Projecting the Voices of Mexican-Origin Children

Abstract

The current rise of immigration to the United States is being accompanied by a dramatic increase of newly arrived immigrant children to American schools. Therefore, there is a clear need to gain an understanding of the way in which the children themselves conceptualize achievement and how they attribute success and failure in their new unfamiliar surroundings. We examined immigrant children's narratives elicited by a modified version of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) (C. Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco) collected in two separate studies. The first study, Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents (C. Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995) is archived in the Murray Research Archive, Harvard–MIT Data Center, Harvard University. The second study from which we drew data is the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study (LISA) (C. Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, in press). In this combination of current and archival data, we applied a unified methodology to the analysis of narratives of a widely diverse group of students. The archival data contain narratives of different generations of Mexican-origin adolescents—Mexicans residing in Mexico, Mexican-born immigrants to the United States, and children in the Mexican American second generation. We also examined data from the Mexican immigrant children in the LISA study at two points in time—shortly after they arrived in the United States and 5 years later. We focus on how success is conceptualized in the narratives, the extent to which these stories invoke feelings of inadequacy, and whether success is conceptualized as an individualistic endeavor or an affiliative endeavor. We found that the TAT narratives reflected the reality of the participants' lives: Although initially they tended to search for help from others as they adapted to their new homeland, over time, they seemed less inclined to search for assistance from their parents, teachers, peers, or community members—it is possible that they gave up the search after several years of facing negative responses. The combined analysis offers an intricate window into the psychological and interpersonal world of immigrant children that enriches the information gathered through the other methods we employed. From this work, we can confirm the psychological and interpersonal cost of immigration for these children.