Transborder DisCrit: Dreaming Across Disjunctures from Mexico

ABSTRACT

Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents’ hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary to reveal how undocumented parents advocate and dream across disjunctures in search of access to educational supports and humanizing futures for their children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. Findings reveal how intersecting forms of undocumentedness, or exclusion from papers for access and belonging, constrained families’ access to movement across geopolitical borders, schooling and health-care institutions, and documented diagnoses needed to access learning supports. In the implications, we explore what approaches to policy, education, and research might look like if they centered the experiences, subaltern knowledges, and humanizing dreams of transborder parents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our tongues and fingers fly across the Spanishes and Englishes that make up our multilingual worlds. If you come across a word you do not know, see if it looks like a word you know in one of your languages, ask an amigx, or use Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/).

2. All names are pseudonyms.

3. All quotes were originally spoken in Spanish and were translated by us, both Spanish-English bilinguals.

4. Aligning with DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013), we use dis/ability and dis/abled to highlight the false abled/disabled binary. We also acknowledge that the slash in dis/ability has been critiqued by some scholars, who see it as erasing disability.

5. Growing out of and extending critical race theory, LatCrit is Latinx critical theory, and UndocuCrit is undocumented critical theory.

6. LatDisCrit is theorizing of Latinx dis/ability, critical intersectionality studies across contexts of the Global South and Global North.

7. We use im/migrant to dislodge understandings of sending and receiving contexts that reify false dichotomies and directionalities of movement across borders.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fulbright Association [Fulbright Garcia-Robles in Mexico]; Spencer Foundation [Naed/Spencer Post-doctoral fellowship]

Notes on contributors

Sarah Gallo

Sarah Gallo is an associate professor of language education and urban social justice education in the Department of Learning & Teaching at Rutgers University. She identifies as a white, queer, bilingual mother who forms part of a transborder family whose lives unfold within and across institutions on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. Her scholarship has been supported by Fulbright, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation and appears in journals such as American Educational Research Journal and Harvard Educational Review.

Anel V. Suriel

Anel V. Suriel is an educativista doctoral candidate specializing in language education at Rutgers Graduate School of Education. She is a first-generation, bilingual educator who identifies as Dominican American and is also the mother of a neurodiverse child, which informs her alliance and advocacy with familias for equitable educational access for bilingual children with learning needs. Her research interests include language education policy, language teacher education, anti-racist education, and the identity formation of bi/multilingual students in U.S. classrooms.