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To dream or not to dream: The
effects of immigration status,
discrimination, and parental
influence on Latino children’s
access to education
Elz_bieta M. Goz
´dziak
*Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University, 3300 Whitehaven St. NW, Suite 3100,
Washington DC 2007, USA. Email: emg27@georgetown.edu
Abstract
The study focused on the experiences and everyday lives of migrant children who,
through a range of different routes and circumstances, happen to reside in the United
States without legal residence status as well as citizen children who live with at least
one unauthorized parent. It aimed to show the multiple ways in which lack of legal
status affects the lives of young migrants both directly and through their parents,
shaping their social worlds and, more importantly, their chances for the future.
Through exploration of services and resources available to these youngsters the
study aimed at shedding light on migrant children’s encounter with public services
and the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the immigration system at a time of eco-
nomic downturn and radical reform of public services. Regarding education, the
research centered primarily on access to and experiences with formal schooling.
Keywords: Latinos, children, youth, education
Unauthorized migration has gained an unprecedented prominence in public discourses
about immigration and immigrant integration. Unauthorized immigrants account for one-
fourth of all immigrants in the United States, yet they dominate public perceptions about
all foreign-born and are at the heart of the current immigration policy debates (Sua
´rez-
Orozco, Youshikawa et al. 2011). Unauthorized adults living in the shadows have been the
object of policy discussions and the subject of significant academic inquiries for a number
of years. Relatively less is known about unauthorized children and citizen children living
with unauthorized parents, although the body of knowledge about these populations is
growing (e.g. Abrego 2006;Martı
´nez 2009;Gonzales 2011;Sua
´rez-Orozco, Darbes et al.
2011; and in particular Yoshikawa 2011). There are roughly one million unauthorized
children and youth coming of age in the United States and more than four million citizen
MIGRATION STUDIES 2014 1–23 1of23
doi:10.1093/migration/mnu021
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children living in families with at least one unauthorized parent (Passel and Cohn 2010). In
other words, one in ten children living in the United States is living in a mixed-status family
(Passel 2006). Children of unauthorized immigrants make up approximately seven percent
of school-age children (Passel and Cohn 2010;Passel and Taylor 2010).
1. The study
This article is part of a larger study on unauthorized children and youth’s access to formal
education, healthcare, and livelihoods.
1
The study focused on the experiences and everyday
lives of migrant children who, through a range of different routes and circumstances,
happen to reside in the United States without legal residence status as well as citizen
children who live with at least one unauthorized parent. It aimed to show the multiple
ways in which lack of legal status affects the lives of young migrants both directly and
through their parents, shaping their social worlds and, more importantly, their chances for
the future. Through exploration of services and resources available to these youngsters the
study aimed at shedding light on migrant children’s encounter with public services and the
complexities and idiosyncrasies of the immigration system at a time of economic downturn
and radical reform of public services. Regarding education, the research centered primarily
on access to and experiences with formal schooling. However, discussions regarding the
role of support systems, including parental support of their offspring’s schooling and
involvement in their children’s education, revealed cultural differences in the conceptual-
ization of education versus schooling and parental support versus involvement in the
migrant children’s education, reinforcing findings of other researchers (e.g. Auerbach
2006; Rayan et al. 2010; Kennedy Cuero and Valdez 2012).
The research included one year of continued ethnographic fieldwork in three different
neighborhoods in the Washington DC metropolitan area: Chirilagua, Virginia, a neigh-
borhood on the border of Alexandria and Arlington (also known as ‘Arlandria’); Langley
Park, Maryland; and Columbia Heights, DC. The case study approach allowed for a sys-
tematic empirical inquiry into the nature of immigrant children and their families’ atti-
tudes, behaviors, value systems, and household strategies. It provided an opportunity for
interaction on a micro-level to map their social worlds rather than test a particular theory,
while at the same time presenting some limitations, especially in regards to generalizability
of research findings.
Washington DC is notable in that, although it had virtually no immigration for most of
its recent history, it has emerged as a leading immigrant gateway community in the 1990s
(Singer 2004). In 2000 the foreign-born residents placed the metro DC (District of
Columbia) seventh on the list of all metropolitan immigrant destination areas (Singer
2003). Latin American and Caribbean immigrants make up 40 percent of all immigrants
in the region. Washington’s largest immigrant group hails from El Salvador (Singer 2007).
According to the American Community Survey, in 2011 Latinos constituted 12.1 percent of
the Washington DC metropolitan area residents.
At the same time the number of African-Americans living in Washington DC ‘plum-
meted by more than 11 percent, with blacks on the verge of losing their majority status in
the city for the first time in half a century’ (Morello and Keating 2011). However, while
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African-Americans may no longer constitute the majority of residents in the city, at 50
percent of the total population and 72 percent of the DC Public School (DCPS) student
body, they outnumber Latino students who make up only 14 percent of DCPS students.
These demographics significantly impact access to resources and affect relationships be-
tween immigrant and black school children.
The suburbs under study present considerably different demographics. At 76.6 percent
of the total population, Latinos dominate the demographic landscape of Langley Park.
Moreover, with 22 percent Latinos identifying as being of Salvadoran heritage, Langley
Park is the largest Salvadoran community in the United States. The Langley Park public
school students reflect these demographics. Arlington public schools include a more diverse
student body with 48 percent white, 26 percent Latino, 13 percent Black, and 11 percent
Asian students. However, these statistics do not tell the whole story as Arlington public
schools are increasingly segregated along racial and class lines. For example, Carlin Springs
Elementary School in South Arlington—the part of the county where many immigrants
and moderate-income families live—has more poor students than all nine elementary
schools combined in North Arlington, the wealthiest, predominantly white, part of the
county. This racial segregation has increased between 1998 and 2010 (Millar 2012). Magnet
schools such as the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology have a minuscule
number of Latino students. In the school year 2011/2012, Latino students comprised only
2.06 percent of the students at Thomas Jefferson, while almost two-thirds of the students
were Asian. Research shows that racial and socioeconomic school isolation has massive and
lasting impact on student achievement. ‘Almost 50 years ago the Coleman Report, widely
regarded as the most important educational study of the twentieth century, found that the
most powerful predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of a child’s
family. The second most important predictor is the socioeconomic status of the classmates
in his or her school’ (Kahlenberg 2012: 1).
2
The research team conducted a total of 24 individual interviews with children and young
adults (11 males and 13 females) and one group discussion with eight young adults (two
women and six men). The respondents ranged in age from 12 to 22 years old; the majority
of the youth were between 15 and 19 years of age. While we did not ask directly about our
interviewees’ immigration status, all of the youth volunteered this information.
Immigration status has impacted their educational pursuits so profoundly that a mean-
ingful discussion about access to education was not possible without mentioning one’s
status. This was particularly true about older adolescents discussing college aspirations.
Incidentally, the author, who is an immigrant herself, often brought up her own experi-
ences of living in the United States without papers in the early 1980s. This information was
eagerly discussed both by the youth and their parents and facilitated an honest exchange
about the effects of undocumented status on immigrant families.
Ten of the interviewed children were citizen children born in the United States but living
in largely undocumented households. One youth had a Temporary Protected Status (TPS),
while the remaining non-citizen children were unauthorized. They came from El Salvador,
Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, and Colombia. In addition, we interviewed 17 parents (13
mothers and four fathers): six parents were interviewed individually and eleven parents
participated in two different group discussions. Five of the parents lived in a household
where all members were undocumented; two were part of documented households, while
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six lived in mixed status households. Four of the interviewed parents did not disclose their
immigration status.
Additionally, the research team interviewed 15 stakeholders assisting Latino children and
youth in pursuing their educational goals and held a group discussion with 20 college
students tutoring Latino children attending primary public schools in Columbia
Heights, Shaw, and Petworth neighborhoods of DC. The stakeholder group included gov-
ernmental officials in the Office of Latino Affairs (OLA) in the Mayor’s Office; teachers,
college counselors, and social workers in DC Public Schools; administrators and teachers in
two different charter schools; case managers working with low-income families in each site;
a program manager at a youth center with offices in DC and Langley Park; members of an
intentional community living side-by-side with low-income Latino families in Northern
Virginia; a gang prevention specialist in Alexandria; and a teen pregnancy prevention
expert working out of an educational campus in Washington DC.
The research team also conducted participant observation of parent training programs,
adult English as a second language (ESL) classes; a parent leadership gala and graduation
ceremony; a needs assessment session conducted by immigrant teens in Columbia Heights
on safety and security in the neighborhood; a summer theater program at the Gala Hispanic
Theatre for at-risk youth; various community meetings, Christmas, Holy Week and Easter
celebrations organized by the Sacred Heart Church; and a Three Kings’ celebration orga-
nized by the Gala Theatre.
A few words about the positionality of the research team are in order. In addition to
expertise in immigrant integration research, the primary investigator and author of this
article brought to this project important personal experiences, including first-hand experi-
ence of being an undocumented immigrant; intimate familiarity with the Columbia
Heights neighborhood where she has been living for the past 20 years; and personal rela-
tionships with many Latino neighbors and their children. The author’s daughter, fluent in
Spanish, has been a great asset as well. She worked with Latino youth at the Gala Hispanic
Theatre and introduced the research team to many of the young Latino thespians as well as
community leaders. The two research assistants on the project included a male graduate
student from Spain residing in Columbia Heights and an American female undergraduate
student with a long history of volunteering with a program serving immigrant children in
Arlandia and working with deported migrants in Mexico. These relationships and experi-
ences provided us with the cultural and social understanding of the immigrants’ realities in
the communities and schools under study. At the same time our ethnicity and socioeco-
nomic backgrounds positioned us outside the community. Our outsider status provided us
with a degree of neutrality regarding the variety of comments and sentiments expressed in
focus groups, individual interviews, and during more casual encounters, but it also de-
manded that we adhered closely to the collected data.
In this article, I tell a story of the challenges Latino children living in the Washington DC
metropolitan area face in pursuing formal educational opportunities. I focus on unauthor-
ized children and citizen children living with unauthorized parents and examine the ways in
which, in the experiences of these children, their legal vulnerability intersects with different
forms of discrimination and parental/family influences and affects their access to schooling
and their educational attainment. Theoretically, I engage with a range of concepts: ‘sus-
pended illegality’ (Gonzales 2011); acculturation and integration (Portes and Zhou 1993;
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Portes and Rumbaut 2006); social capital (Portes 1998); and stigma and stereotype (Guyll
et al. 2010). This engagement is discussed somewhat tangentially, as the main purpose of
this research and resulting publications is to inform policymaking and program design.
Towards these ends, I argue that unauthorized status alone is not adversely affecting formal
education of the Latino children in this study. While regularizing their families’ immigra-
tion status would go a long way towards facilitating access to post-secondary education and
improved educational outcomes at all levels, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals), the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, and
comprehensive immigration reform alone are not a panacea for the challenges this group of
Latino children and youth face in accessing formal educational opportunities, persisting in
school, and graduating from high school or college. Whether the same can be said about
Latino children and youth in other places in the United States is a question for a larger
debate. Studies of a single setting do not identify explanatory issues the way comparative
research does (Reitz and Zhang 2011). However, since characteristics of host commu-
nities—schools and neighborhoods—do shape the reception and integration of immigrant
children and their families, these findings will likely apply to similar localities. My own
research in other new settlement areas and re-emerging gateways (Goz
´dziak and Martin
2005;Goz
´dziak and Bump 2008) suggests many similarities with this study in terms of the
challenges faced by immigrant children and youth and points to differences between
communities with strong community leaders and child advocates and those localities
that have not yet had a chance to develop such mechanisms. And finally, this study was
part of a comparative project including two case studies: Washington DC metropolitan
area and London UK. A comparative report stemming from this research discusses simila-
rities and differences
2. Legal vulnerability and K–12 education
Alejandro came to Washington DC from San Miguel in El Salvador when he was 10 years
old. About his journey from Salvador to El Paso, he said: ‘I traveled by everything. You
name it and I was on it: plane, bus, truck and on foot.’ The journey took him about three
weeks but it seemed ‘like forever’. He was separated from his mother for over three years.
She came, he said, ‘because we were very poor; we had no money’. When he arrived in
Washington DC, he was placed in fifth grade. He did not speak any English, and he found
school very hard. Alejandro reported that he was not doing well academically or socially. He
missed a lot of school because he didn’t feel like he really understood what was going on in
class. By ninth grade, he dropped out. On advice of his aunt, he went to the Latin American
Youth Center (LAYC) in Columbia Heights and got connected with the Next Step School.
He did very well there and received his General Educational Development (GED) within a
very short time. In addition, he got certified in Microsoft and during the summer of our
first interview he was teaching a computer class at LAYC. Alejandro is committed to fur-
thering his education. He is taking classes at a community college and is working towards a
two-year degree in life sciences. He hopes to get a scholarship to the University of Maryland
and transfer there. He didn’t understand how undocumented youth can pursue higher
education and on what conditions, but he trusted that his counselor at LAYC would help
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him figure things out. I checked with Alejandro recently and indeed LAYAC successfully
helped him apply for DACA. Alejandro is interested in becoming a medical examiner. He is
also very passionate about performing arts and has been participating in Paso Nuevo, an at-
risk youth theater collective at the Gala Hispanic Theatre.
Alejandro’s story illustrates many of the challenges unauthorized youth face in pursuing
educational goals. Similarly to other unauthorized children, Alejandro had legal access to
public elementary and secondary school. Since 1982, based on the Supreme Court’s seminal
decision in Plyler v. Doe, children in the United States, irrespective of their immigration
status, have a constitutional right to free public education from kindergarten through high
school graduation (K–12). However, despite this fundamental right, Latino children’s path
to formal education is far from straightforward. Many people think that because unauthor-
ized children have legal access to primary and secondary education, advocacy efforts should
focus mainly on post-secondary education. But having legal access to K–12 education does
not mean that Latino children—both unauthorized and citizen children—have access to
the resources and the support needed to do well in school and obtain a high school
diploma.
Nationally, 40 percent of unauthorized young adults, ages 18 to 24, have not com-
pleted high school. Unauthorized children who arrive in the United States before the
age of 14 fare slightly better—72 percent finish high school (Passel and Cohn 2009). On
average, in the DC–Arlington–Alexandria Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), 25 per-
cent of all high school students, native and foreign-born, do not graduate. There are
160 public high schools in this area; 19 of them are considered among the nation’s
lowest-performing schools. In Chirilagua, where the foreign-born constitute approxi-
mately 46 percent of the total population, 42 percent of all residents are without a high
school diploma. Graduation rates of Latino students at T. C. Williams High School—
where 31 percent of the student body is Latino—are 52 percent. In Langley Park, where
Latinos constitute 76 percent of the population, with 66 percent foreign-born, 51 per-
cent of all residents, native and foreign-born, have less than ninth grade education.
Graduation rates among Latino students at High Point High School in Langley Park
hover around 69 percent. Thirty-two percent of Columbia Heights residents do not
have a high school diploma; the average for the District of Columbia is 15 percent.
Graduation rates in the neighborhood differ dramatically among schools: at Bell
Multicultural High School 90 percent of Latino students graduate, while at Cardozo
Senior High School only 53 percent finish high school. Community leaders attribute the
high graduation rates at Bell Multicultural to a unique partnership the school has with
the Multicultural Career Intern Program (MCIP), a non-profit organization, housed
within the walls of the Columbia Heights Educational Campus, which provides a wide
range of services: teen pregnancy prevention and support, parenting classes, youth
development, summer enrichment programs, and pre-college counseling.
Many interviewees—migrant children, teachers, and community leaders—attributed the
high dropout rates to lack of sustained familial and school support. Alejandro was lucky
that his aunt not only encouraged him to get his GED, but also knew where he should look
for the assistance he needed. The support he found at LAYAC kept him motivated even
when things seemed bleak and he couldn’t get his scholarship to transfer to University of
Maryland or get a job to help out with his school expenses.
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2.1 Teens that who never dropped-in an American school
The above statistics do not convey the difference in the dropout rates that occur across
groups because, ironically, many teen migrants never ‘drop-in’. Indeed, the literature on
immigrant children and youth is chock-full of studies on school dropouts as well as
students who do well in schools, often against all odds, but fewer scholars (Fry 2005;
Oropesa and Landale 2009) focus on immigrants who arrive in this country as adolescents
and immediately take up waged employment.
Javier came from Guatemala when he was 14 to join his brothers. He first lived in Kansas
where two of his brothers still reside. He came to the United States even though there is
plenty of work in agriculture in Guatemala, but it does not pay well and he wanted to make
more money. After three and a half years in Kansas he moved to Silver Springs, Maryland to
be with his other brother. Javier prefers the DC area to Kansas because he is more comfor-
table in a larger urban environment and the city is more interesting than Kansas. He lives
with his brother, who also works in construction, and they help each other with rent and
living expenses. Javier attended school in Guatemala for six years. He said he was never
particularly interested in school and started working at a young age. His younger, 12-year-
old, brother wants to keep studying and Javier is very supportive of this decision. Javier
says: ‘Once you grow older, you realize the value of studies.’ It seems that it never occurred
to Javier to enroll in school once he got to the United States because he was already working
in Guatemala. He came to the United States to work, not to go to school. Javier wants to
learn English because he sees the importance of knowing the language. He cannot com-
municate in English. He could not even say: ‘I am looking for work’ or ‘I am a painter’. He
has worked various construction jobs, mostly in painting. He rarely has steady work and
works mostly as day laborer.
The kids that never ‘drop-in’ are a hidden population and are difficult to identify. The
research team met a number of Latino youth who have never dropped-in to an American
school; some of them worked while taking classes at the Next Step Public Charter School, a
bilingual GED and ESL program affiliated with LAYC in Columbia Heights. Isabel
Martı
´nez suggests: ‘these youth experience life stages of childhood and adolescence that
differ from mainstream characterizations and thus adopt older age-graded identities that
do not coincide with full-time schooling in the United States’ (2009: 34). Indeed, some
respondents pointed to cultural definitions of childhood and adulthood and said: ‘By now I
wouldn’t be in school anyway. I am not a child.’
Community leaders suggested that these adolescents are pressured by their families to
contribute to the household income and are not encouraged to enroll in school, However,
they not only have the right to education, but school attendance is compulsory until 18
years of age in Virginia and the District of Columbia and until 16 years of age in Maryland.
Others indicated that while these teens seemingly came to the United States to reunite with
their parent/s, the families that now include US-born children and stepparents are not
always eager to support them financially. Hence, the need to trade school for employment.
Many of the young people interviewed in the course of this study felt abandoned by their
families. Cesar remarked:
I don’t know why, but my mom abandoned me twice: first when she came to the
States and left me with my abuela, and later when I came here. She told me she paid
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for the coyote to take me across the border, but now I have to repay her. I wish I never
came.
It is difficult to estimate how many adolescents are in Cesar’s situation, but interviews
suggest that these numbers are not insignificant.
Another group of young adults included individuals who migrated on their own and
had no other choice but work. Unaccompanied children and youth migrating on their
own do not have the luxury of choosing school over work. Lack of legal status prevents
them from accessing any publicly funded programs and absence of family, including
distant relatives or friends, means that they must work to survive. Their unauthorized
status means that their access to employment is limited and they are often exploited.
The Next Step School has set modest educational goals for these young men and
women: to improve their literacy in Spanish and English in order to improve their
employment prospects in fields that require good communication skills. The school
offers GED training but the teachers indicated that, realistically speaking, they would be
very pleased if the students learned to speak English and acquired some literacy and
numeracy skills in English. These competencies would serve them well and could even
lead to some upward mobility in the labor market. One of the students said: ‘I don’t
want to wash dishes for ever. I would like to be a waitress, but my English is not good
enough.’ Another one said: ‘I get crappy jobs because I cannot read a measure tape. I
don’t even have a feel how long a foot or a yard is.’
2.2 Beyond immigration status: parents’ education and social class
What are the factors that contribute to dropping out of school or never dropping-in? Legal
vulnerability is not the sole element; it intersects with many other issues plaguing children
and youth in unauthorized households. Parental engagement with their children’s school—
a positive predictor of academic achievement, higher self-esteem, and higher rates of high
school completion and college enrollment—is often a challenge for immigrant families.
While many of the immigrant parents we interviewed had high educational aspirations for
their children—some told us that the very reason they came to the United States was so
their children had better educational and employment opportunities—few had the
resources to realize these goals. Many had very limited education themselves and as a
result were only semi-literate in Spanish and illiterate in English; thus, they were unable
to help children with homework. College students who tutored immigrant children in DC
public schools talked eloquently about problems stemming from low levels of education
among their tutees’ parents.
Low education of immigrant parents is a big problem. Some adults have been here
for 20 years and they do not speak English at all. Some parents are barely literate in
their own language. My tutee told me that he has never seen his mother read a
newspaper or a book in Spanish or in English.
A Latino sophomore at Georgetown lamented that her tutee did not know the pleasures of
going to the library for story hour or curling up with a book on a rainy afternoon. ‘She goes
to church right across the street from a public library, but she has never visited [the
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library].’ Lack of reading skills was the biggest problem the tutors identified. One tutor
praised the sixth grader he was working with:
He is a smart kid, good at math, except word problems. He is in sixth grade but he
reads at a second grade level. He is embarrassed by his poor reading skills, so he
refuses to read, which is making it harder for him to improve.
Employment pressures—many parents worked more than one job or worked graveyard
shifts—also contributed to parents’ increasing inability to actively engage with their chil-
dren’s education. Parents’ involvement with their children’s education and engagement
with schools decreased as the children got older. Participant observation at parenting
programs organized by the Mayor’s Office of Latino Affairs (OLA) at several primary
schools in Columbia Heights suggests that Latino parents of small children are eager for
their children to succeed in school and meet developmental and educational milestones.
We met with several groups of mothers—fathers seemed to be less involved in their
children’s education—who took pride in their children’s progress at school, participated
in a variety of parenting programs, and attended parent–teacher meetings. However, with
few exceptions, parents of high school students were not interested in their children’s
achievements or problems at school. It seems that parents who have limited education
themselves aspire for better education for their children but that does not necessarily mean
a lot more formal education: finishing primary or middle school seems sufficient. Jamie’s
mother who supported her children throughout primary and secondary school thinks her
role ended there.
Jamie’s mother has the financial means to contribute to her children’s education. She
owns several businesses—a restaurant, a pool hall, and a beauty salon—and is doing
quite well but will not contribute to her children’s education. Luckily Jamie’s younger
brother, Juan, received a full scholarship to an Ivy League university and graduated last
year without needing his mother’s financial help. Jamie was not so lucky. Nevertheless
he did enroll in a public university in upstate New York. First he wanted to major in
engineering because he thought it would be a marketable degree, but while in college
he discovered his love of writing and switched to English. After three years in New
York, Jamie decided to transfer to the University of Maryland, because he could live at
home and save money. Unfortunately he still owed New York tuition so Maryland told
him he could not transfer until all of his financial obligations were resolved. When we
talked in the summer of 2010, Jamie moved back home and was taking classes at
Montgomery College while working for tips in his mother’s restaurant; she would not
pay him wages. Just before Christmas, he got a job as a cook in an upscale restaurant
in DC. He wasn’t taking any classes during the fall. He needs very few credits to
graduate and fears that Maryland will not allow him to transfer if he does not
attend the university for a whole year. His plan was to work for the rest of the
winter and summer in the restaurant and transfer to Maryland in the fall of 2011.
He worked very hard and took every possible overtime shift. He often worked 70–80
hours a week to make enough money to pay his student loans. His mother told him
how glad she is that ‘he is following in her footsteps’. I checked in with Jamie and
indeed he is not in college and is being groomed by the restaurant owner to become a
head chef. He plans to apprentice to a chef in paris.
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The story is quite different when it comes to middle class immigrant parents. There is a
sizable community of Bolivians in Northern Virginia. The Bolivian parents interviewed in
the course of this study were poor and unauthorized but middle class, with at least a high
school diploma and, in many cases, a college degree obtained in Bolivia. As will be shown
later in this article, these parents were much more supportive of their children’s education
than poor, unauthorized working class parents or parents coming from very rural back-
grounds. Other researchers (e.g. Portes and Macleod 1996) also discuss the effects of class
on educational progress of children of immigrants, but equate class with economic status.
The Bolivian parents’ class standing was not related to their current economic status but to
their educational capital obtained in the country of origin. While they were fairly well off in
Bolivia, they have not been able to rebuild their economic standing in the United States
because of their undocumented immigration status.
Researchers have written extensively about the propensity of Latino immigrant parents
to provide ‘noninterventionist’ moral support (apoyo) and ‘indirect guidance’ (among
others through consejos or narrative advice) for education (e.g. Auerbach 2006) and
noted how such support is often invisible to educators and as a result dismissed as unim-
portant (Mehan et al. 1996). Others criticized ‘the mainstream dominant discourse perpe-
tuated by schools about the hegemony of English and the valuing of white, middle class
definitions of academic success and parent involvement’ (Kennedy Cuero and Valdez 2012:
317). Given the size of the sample, it is hard to dismiss offhand these arguments. On the
other hand, the collected ethnographic data suggest that parents of primary school children
provided both moral support—mothers told young girls how the demands to help their
own parents with farming or babysitting prevented them from staying in school—and
actively engaged in their children’s education—many mothers attended parenting classes
and were eager to discuss the effects of TV and video games on child development and
wanted to know about bilingualism. Mothers who were monolingual and could not help
their children with homework discussed the need to set aside a place in the home for
children to study, eagerly hosted college students who tutored their offspring. However,
as demonstrated above, working class immigrant parents’ enthusiasm for their children’s
schooling waned considerably around middle school. With few exceptions, mostly middle
class immigrant parents continued the support and involvement through high school
and college.
2.3 Stigmatized identity and discrimination
The youth in this study reported significant ethnic stereotyping by teachers, administrators,
and peers. Several community leaders echoed these sentiments. One of the schools had a
program where students could sign up to be teacher’s assistants. Four Mexican students
signed up but none of the teachers wanted to work with them, because ‘Mexicans are lazy
and use their lack of English language competency as a crutch not to work’. The teacher
who reported this story said she was ‘surprised to hear those opinions voiced so openly, but
not shocked’, because such sentiments are not unusual. She decided to give the students a
chance and was very pleased with the outcomes. ‘Those students were the hardest working,
most polite, and punctual student aids I’ve ever had’, she said.
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Ethnic and racial stereotyping often leads Latino students to be overlooked, excluded, or
negatively tracked and results in unequal educational opportunities. Community leaders
and Latino educators were very critical of the DC Public Schools’ attitude towards Latino
students. One advocate said:
DCPS does not value you as an individual, they put you down because you cannot
speak English and your literacy in Spanish is not up to par either. There are no
incentives to move forward.
An expert on bilingual education remarked that Latino students are marginalized
within the DCPS system. ‘In a school system where the majority of students are
African-Americans—with their own set of educational challenges—it is virtually
impossible to get anyone focused on the Latino kids.’ He felt that both Latino
students and Latino advocates are marginalized within the public school system. He
met with me in his official capacity and was therefore reluctant to talk about overt
discrimination, but remarked that he sometimes wonders ‘where neglect ends and
discrimination begins’.
A school counselor working with immigrant students in a suburban school said that
teachers often discriminate against Latino students and peers bully them because of their
accent and language abilities. She added:
It is difficult for immigrant children to communicate with peers who do not speak
Spanish. These limitations often lead Mexicans to self-segregate. Migrant children
make friends within their migrant network, creating an insulated cultural and lan-
guage bubble.
Latino students, however, were not without blame either. Indigenous students from
Guatemala and Black Latinos experienced discrimination from within the Latino commu-
nity as well. Recounting being teased and bullied in high school, Benjamin said: ‘It was just
like in Guatemala. They judged me by my clothing. I didn’t have a lot of friends.’
Benjamin’s story is quite typical of indigenous students who do not speak Spanish and
are seen as ‘different’ from other Latinos. Black students from the Dominican Republic, for
example, were accepted neither by the wider Latino community nor by their African-
American peers. Even the local Catholic churches discriminated against Black Latino chil-
dren. One community leader said: ‘The priest always fusses when I include black children in
the Christmas pageant or Easter Passion.’
In fact the relationship between Latino students, including Black Latinos, and African-
American students is quite interesting. The Gala Hispanic Theatre’s summer program for
at-risk youth included both Latino adolescents and African-American students attending
the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. After a performance at the end of the program, the
young actors took questions from the audience. Someone asked what the students learned
from their experiences. Several African-American students spoke very eloquently about
how working side-by-side with immigrant youth made them appreciate the newcomers and
expanded their horizons. These speeches seemed quite insincere and the sentiments were
articulated for the benefit of the VIPs in the audience: Stevie Wonder, the
African-American singer-songwriter, and Jim Graham, Ward 1 council member, were in
attendance. Participant observation of the program during two consecutive summers and
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interviews with the program coordinator contradicted these statements. The program
coordinator remarked:
These Duke Ellington kids sure know how to talk the talk, but try to get them to eat
lunch at the same table with the Latino kids! They can barely tolerate them on stage,
but backstage all they do is bad-mouth them. They think the Latinos don’t speak any
English, so they think they can get away with anything.
I interviewed some of the African-American students and asked them about the discre-
pancy between the narratives and the observed behavior. One girl just shrugged her
shoulders, but another one rolled her eyes and said: ‘Please! These kids have everything
handed to them, they come here and take things that are rightfully ours!’
Discrimination by school officials, teachers, and peers is not conducive to good experi-
ence in school. Fist fights and physical violence experienced by many of those interviewed,
as well as gang violence, further discourage Latino students from attending school; many
skip school often or drop out altogether. On the first day at school Alejandro was ‘kicked in
the chest by a big girl. She seemed so big, maybe six feet tall. She was black.’ He did not
report the incident: ‘No, I did not do anything. I did not know where to go. I told my friend
and he told me “Man, there is nothing you can do”, so I just sat there on a swing.’ Poor
relationships with classmates, the majority of whom were African-American, contributed
to Alejandro’s dropping out of school. He felt he had no allies in teachers. ‘No teacher is
going to say anything against a black kid. Not when the quarrel is between one of us and one
of them!’ Black Dominican students, however, also indicated being discriminated by tea-
chers and shunned by African-American classmates. A prominent Afro-Caribbean com-
munity leader has been working hard for years to give his community the same respect and
political clout enjoyed by African-Americans in Washington DC. These complex dynamics
are borne out both in empirical studies and theoretical literature and seem to be related to
racialized ethnic labels applied to Latinos on the basis of physical appearance and Latinos/
as’ racial self–identifications (Golash-Boza and Darity 2008), which are fluid and contex-
tual, and can vary over the course of one’s life, or even the course of one’s day (Rodrı
´guez
2000) and do not parallel processes of racial categorizations and identification in Latin
America (Rodrı
´guez 1994;Duany 2005).
How are the experiences of Latino children in the metro DC schools different than or
similar to other parts of the country? Building on earlier research, Hamman and
Harklau (2010: 157) analyze educational outcomes in Latino communities in new
settlement areas in light of two competing hypotheses, suggesting that: 1) ‘in areas
with little history of anti-Latino institutionalized racism and little record of Latino
school success or failure, educational improvisation might lead to better outcomes
than in areas with long established racialized patterns of weak Latino educational out-
comes’; and 2) ‘racialized patterns of interaction with and schooling for Latino com-
munities in California, Texas, or Chicago are carried into and recreated in new settings,
leading to similar or even poorer educational outcomes’. The Washington DC metro-
politan area is an emerging but relatively new immigrant gateway; however, it seems to
be suffering from racialized interactions between Latinos and established residents that
result in regretful school experiences and poor educational outcomes, particularly in
resource-poor public schools. On the other hand, a strong Latino advocacy community
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dating back to the early 1980s accompanied by proliferation and growth of public
charter schools has made significant strides in educating young Latino children.
CentroNia, a nationally recognized, multicultural learning community with a pioneer-
ing approach to bilingual education, promotes a curriculum that engages the whole
family and sets the stage for lifelong success. When the school’s founder, Beatriz ‘BB’
Otero, first opened the school in 1986, the program served 15 children, today
CentroNia serves 2,500 children and families across Washington DC and
Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties in Maryland. However, despite innovative
educational practices promoted by CentroNia, the Next Step School or LAYAC, there is
no evidence of any large-scale systemic changes in the local public schools.
2.4 ‘Suspended illegality’
This study suggests that factors such as poverty, parents’ class and formal education levels,
and family strategies favoring employment over schooling are much more tangible in the
lives of unauthorized Latino children than legal status per se. The family’s unauthorized
status is often hidden from the child’s conscious experience (Gonzales 2011), although as
Yoshikawa (2011) points out in his recent book, Immigrants Raising Citizens, the condition
of illegality and everyday experiences of undocumented parents—avoidance of programs
and authorities, isolated social networks, and poor work conditions—adversely influence
their children’s early development whether the child is aware of the family’s immigration
status or not. Many of the interviewed children found themselves in what Gonzales (2011)
calls ‘suspended illegality’ through late adolescence. In kindergarten, primary or even
middle schools they did not have to face full-on the consequences of their immigration
status. ‘The social parenthesis the moratorium affords them gives way in late adolescence to
a time of deep disorientation, of shock, of not knowing who they are or where they belong,
and of anger at their parents for putting them in this situation’ (Suarez-Orozco, Yoshikawa
et al. 2011: 453). However, once they entered high school, particularly in senior year, when
their peers were applying to college, unauthorized children started realizing the effects of
their immigration status on their future after high school. ‘For undocumented youth, the
transition into adulthood is accompanied by a transition into illegality that sets them apart
from their peers’ (Gonzalez 2011: 605). At a recent gathering of unauthorized students
attending Georgetown University, the discussion centered on ‘being different’, especially
when everyone else was talking about study abroad or alternative spring breaks.
Unauthorized students admitted they did not know how to handle these discussions.
They became very emotional recounting their fears of traveling home for holidays. An
event that their citizen classmates take for granted, for unauthorized students takes a
great deal of planning and knowing what kind of mode of transportation to take to
make it home without being stopped by authorities. Students living on the West Coast
or in the Southwest have reconciled to the fact that they may not see their families for four
years. One student who lives in New York City said he figured out how to get home without
being noticed by authorities, but is worried that his parents, who have never been outside
Brooklyn since they came to the United States a decade ago, will be too afraid to travel to
DC to see him graduate.
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3. Postsecondary education: legal vulnerability and
beyond
In recent years, the plight of unauthorized immigrant students has emerged as part of the
larger debate on immigration. Sometimes the issue is brought up within the context of
high-profile cases such as that of Dan-el Padilla Peralta from the Dominican Republic or
Juan Gomez from Colombia. Padilla is the 2006 Princeton graduate and salutatorian who
was offered a scholarship to Oxford; as an unauthorized immigrant he faced a dilemma: if
he went to Oxford, he would not have been able to return to the United States, but if he
stayed in the United States he would not have been able to legally obtain a job. Juan Gomez,
a senior at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown, told my research assistant in
an interview that he would have to look for a job in Canada when he graduates in May 2011.
He had a job offer from J.P. Morgan in their Latin American Banking Division; however,
the job required foreign travel and that was impossible in his legal situation. Juan was
considering employment in Canada because he thought he would have a better chance of
legal settlement there. He attended a Quebec career fair that Georgetown held, in hopes of
establishing contacts with Canadian companies. Juan graduated before DACA was
announced and we lost contact.
Advocates of the DREAM Act, a proposed piece of legislation that would provide a
pathway to legalization for unauthorized immigrant students, almost always invoke stories
of similarly gifted and motivated immigrant students arguing that the passage of the
DREAM Act would enable countless other immigrants to pursue their educational
dreams. Indeed, discussions about the DREAM Act dominate the discourse on unauthor-
ized children’s access to education. Similar discussions followed DACA. However, as
Gonzales points out: ‘the use of star students as the face of undocumented students, to
the exclusion of other stories and trajectories, is both limited and limiting’ (2010: 470).
Researchers and advocates alike bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of unauthor-
ized youth actually moves on from high school to postsecondary education (Gonzales
2010). Fix and Passel (2003) estimate that approximately 65,000 unauthorized students
graduate from high school each year, but only about 13,000 enroll in US colleges. Even with
a promise of in-state tuition in 17 states—the hurdles seem insurmountable for many
unauthorized students (see also Contreras 2009). To the best of my knowledge, there are
no statistics on the number of citizen children living in mixed status families who avail
themselves of in-state tuition benefits. My interviews in the District of Columbia suggest
that few immigrant parents with children born in the United States know about the DC
Tuition Assistance Grant (DC-TAG), a program for DC residents designed to make up the
difference between in-state and out-state tuition. Parents were astounded that their citizen
children could use this program to apply to any public university in the country.
However, lack of tuition assistance is not the only obstacle to postsecondary education
for many unauthorized immigrant children. In order to go to college, one has to success-
fully graduate from high school. Nationally, 40 percent of unauthorized young adults have
not completed high school, and among high school graduates, only 49 percent are in college
or have attended college (Passel and Cohn 2009). It needs to be stressed that unauthor-
ized immigrants who arrive in the United States before the age of 14 fare slightly
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better—72 percent finish high school and 61 percent of those who graduate from high
school go on to college—but these figures are still much lower than for US-born
residents. As indicated above, graduation rates in the studied neighborhoods varied
greatly, but were far from levels ensuring high numbers of college-bound Latino
youth. A recent study by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates that nearly
62 percent of potential DREAM Act beneficiaries would likely fail to gain permanent
(or even conditional) status due mainly to the bill’s educational attainment require-
ments (Batalova and McHugh 2010).
While some parents interviewed in the course of this study pointed to lack of a DREAM
Act as a huge obstacle to their ability to finance their children’s college education, others
were not convinced that such legislation alone would pave the road to higher education for
unauthorized students. Community leaders were equally ambivalent. On one hand, they
worked tirelessly with other local and national organizations to advocate on behalf of
immigrant students: participated in meetings, organized rallies, wrote letters, and educated
immigrant communities. On the other hand, they were cognizant of the fact that the Act
alone will not drastically affect access to higher education among unauthorized students.
One Latino community activist and service provider in Virginia remarked:
If a miracle occurred tomorrow and every state in the union had a DREAM Act, it
would only help those students who are already motivated to go to college.
Unfortunately, it would not change the situation of the majority of our clients. I
do not dare speak about these issues publicly very often, but many of the parents we
work with just do not seem to value education. Maybe because they themselves do
not have much formal schooling, they cannot imagine what a college degree would
do for their children’s future.
Her colleague pointed out: ‘We do not have much better results in the Latino immigrant
families with US-born children. College just does not figure in their plans and aspirations
for their children.’ Ironically, most of the interviewed immigrant parents told us that they
came to the United States to secure educational opportunities and economic mobility for
their children.
Immigration status affects immigrant youth’s access to higher education in many dif-
ferent and not always very direct ways. Federal law does not expressly prohibit the admis-
sion of unauthorized immigrants to US colleges and universities. In contrast to
employment laws, no federal statutes require disclosure and proof of immigration status
for students to enter institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, many college coun-
selors and high school administrators are either unaware of the legal provisions or just gloss
over them. The prevailing sentiment expressed in interviews was that ‘these children cannot
go to college; they are here illegally’. Immigrant students confirmed that many teachers and
counselors do not see them as college material. As always, there are exceptions: a mental
health counselor in a DC public school said that she has been working with a Mexican boy
who ‘is an A student, really eager to learn and go on to college, but he does not get the
support from his teachers that he needs. They just don’t see past his accent and his status.’
She is determined to do whatever needs to be done to get him to college.
While immigration status does not prohibit the admission of unauthorized students to
institutions of higher education, it does affect unauthorized families’ ability to finance their
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children’s college education. As indicated above, unauthorized youth are able to avail
themselves of in-state tuition only in 17 DREAM Act states. When fieldwork for this
study commenced, this provision was about to become available to students residing in
Maryland,
3
but not to those living in Virginia. The ability to pay tuition at in-state rates
would certainly help to offset the cost of higher education, but in many situations students
also needed access to additional financial assistance. With the exception of two states—New
Mexico and Texas—unauthorized students are not eligible for state financial aid (Gonzales
2010: 480). Highly motivated students with a lot of social capital and unconditional sup-
port from parents and teachers managed to secure private scholarships to both public and
private colleges.
US citizen children living in mixed status households also feel the brunt of their parents’
unauthorized status. Citizen children are ‘in danger of becoming the unsuspecting victims
of state and federal policies aimed at addressing illegal immigration’ (Seo 2011: 312).
Most readers are familiar with the situation in Arizona where ‘In early 2011, the
legislature ...introduced bills that would deny US citizenship to children of undocumen-
ted immigrant parents and mark them with a different birth certificate’ (Seo 2011: 311–2)
that would possibly revoke their eligibility to public benefits such as in-state tuition or
financial aid. The Alabama legislation barring unauthorized students from attending any
public college received a lot of national attention (Preston 2011). Nationally, less attention
has been paid to citizen children living with their unauthorized parents in Virginia who
have also faced difficulties in accessing educational benefits. In 2008, the Office of the
Attorney General in Virginia published a memorandum indicating that the undocumented
status of parents could effectively disqualify their US-born children from receiving in-state
tuition if the children were unable to independently prove eligibility (Virginia 2008; see also
Seo 2011: 314). The issue is whether unauthorized immigrant parents can be considered
residents of the state and whether minor children can prove that residency independently.
Without going into too many legal details, suffice it to say that many public universities in
Virginia resolve this issue on a case-by-case basis. Interviewed immigrant parents residing
in Virginia shared with us several stories of their college-bound children emancipating
themselves in order to establish eligibility for in-state tuition. Parents felt badly about this
‘symbolic gesture’. One mother said: ‘I know I will always be his mother in my and his heart,
but it still hurts that he had to ask for this piece of paper.’
Parents’ unauthorized status affected citizen children’s access to higher education in
many other ways. A couple of US-born Latino high school seniors stated that they did
not realize how much their parents’ or siblings’ unauthorized status affected their ability to
be successful in applying to college until they set down to write their college essays. Marisol
remarked:
I have the grades to get to a good college, but I don’t have any extracurricular
activities to brag about in my essay. My friends are writing about trips abroad,
community service, sports achievements and I have nothing! All I ever did during
high school was study. My mom told me to lay low, because she was afraid that
someone would tell immigration authorities that both she and my older brother are
here without papers.
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The fear of possible deportation of her family members overshadowed Marisol’s everyday
life. Several community leaders told us that the ‘issue of immigration status just hangs
there’ both for unauthorized children and those living with unauthorized family members.
Many Latino children feel pressure to not get noticed and to never discuss their or their
family’s status with peers. A director of a youth leadership program in the District of
Columbia talked about the constant fear and the psychological effects of immigration
status on Latino youth: ‘Even if they are here legally, they hear every day about someone
having been deported or someone having been shot at—or worse, having died—while
crossing the border. It’s difficult to shake it off.’ The Pew Hispanic Center (Lopez and
Minushkin 2008) indicates that a majority of Latinos worry about deportation. Some 40
percent say they worry ‘a lot’ and an additional 17 percent say they worry ‘some’ that they
themselves, a family member or a close friend may be deported. This is up slightly from
2007, when 53 percent of Latino adults said that they worried ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ about
deportation (Pew Hispanic Center 2007). On the other hand only one-fifth of the survey
Latinos know possible deportees. These statistics include all Latinos, and for unauthorized
immigrants the worry might be substantially greater. Researchers and advocates alike agree
that the condition of illegality—one’s own or that of one’s family members—places many
Latino children in the untenable position of interminable liminality (Suarez-Orozco,
Yoshikawa et al. 2011).
A long-time immigrant children advocate in Washington DC spoke about the effects of
parents’ undocumented status on young Latino children born in the United States:
The number one problem is not undocumented status anymore—relatively few
[unauthorized] kids come these days [to Washington DC]—but the indirect effect
of the undocumented status of immigrant parents, particularly those who came in as
children or teens, and resulting lack of security and feelings of abandonment affect
their parenting skills and ability to raise and educate their children well.
3.1 Beyond immigration status and socioeconomics: parental support
is crucial
Resilience and perseverance in pursuing educational goals are shaped by relationships with
caring and supportive parents (Gonzales 2010), other family members, and in the absence
of close family members adult mentors. Sadly, few youth in this study have experienced
unconditional parental support of their educational pursuits. As signaled above, Jamie’s
mother was not interested in her children’s education. When her oldest daughter, Elena,
was offered a scholarship to Trinity College in DC, she told her that if she went to an all-
women’s college she would ‘become a lesbian and never get married’. Elena did not want to
enroll against her mother’s wishes. After a very tumultuous adolescence in a female gang
and single motherhood, Elena realized that she needed a college degree to support herself
and her toddler daughter. Currently, Elena is studying nursing and working part-time. Her
mom helps out babysitting and sharing food, but she has never praised her daughter for
doing well in her studies.
Maria, a young local community leader, did go to college and graduated with a BA in
anthropology. Maria is working for a small non-profit organization helping Latino
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immigrant families and homeless African-Americans in Northern Virginia. Her uncles
constantly barrage her mother that she raised such ‘a lazy girl’. They consider Maria to
be lazy because she does not ‘work with her manos [hands]’. Maria’s professor would like
her to come back to school to get a master’s in applied anthropology; she promised to help
Maria secure financial aid. Maria said: ‘I would love to go back to school, but I am sure that
would enrage my uncles even more and they would take it out on my mother.’ A profes-
sional Latina in the DC government also spoke about the lack of understanding of the value
of education among her extended family. She said:
Even my mother-in-law whom I love dearly and with whom I have a very good
relationship could not understand why my husband and I mortgaged our house to
put our two daughters through college.
Speaking about the wider Latino community in the area, she added:
By and large the Latino parents in this area do not appreciate education, because they
themselves have little formal schooling. Educational loans are not even on most
immigrants’ radar screen; it has less to do with poverty and more to do with valuing
education.
On the other end of the spectrum was a group of very determined unauthorized middle
class Bolivian parents in Virginia. They went out of their way to establish several programs
to support their college-bound children or those already attending college, including fun-
draising events, mentoring programs, free of charge college prep, and youth leadership
programs. Although poor, often holding two menial jobs, working graveyard shifts, these
parents worked tirelessly so their children could graduate from college. A Salvadoran
couple with two small children has recently joined this group of Bolivian parents. The
man, a father of two small children, said: ‘I want to be like them. I don’t see parents
like them in my community. My wife must learn English so we can send our children to
college too!’
4. Conclusions
No single factor determines Latino children and youth’s educational prospects and out-
comes. Rather, many different variables conspire against educational achievements of both
unauthorized and citizen children living in mixed status families. There is a large body of
research that points to the educational legacy of unauthorized migration (e.g. Bean et al.
2011;Olivas 2012;Haskins and Tienda 2011), which disadvantages immigrant children,
particularly Mexicans, way into the second generation. Evidence shows that growing up in a
poor household can also adversely affect children’s academic achievements. Poverty cor-
relates strongly and negatively with the probability that a child graduates from high school
(Borjas 2011).
This study shows that comprehensive immigration reform and the passage of legislation
such as DACA and the DREAM Act would level the playing field—the positive effects of
DACA are already visible—for unauthorized children and youth, but would not automa-
tically ensure better access and better educational outcomes for all young Latinos. In
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addition to, or perhaps ahead of, advocacy for immigration reform, including passage of
DREAM Act legislation in every state of the Union, there is a need to work with Latino
immigrant families on realizing the relationship between levels of formal schooling of
immigrant children and parents and their employment on the one hand, and upward
mobility prospects on the other hand. Thus, those concerned with better educational
outcomes for Latino children and youth must also work on improving educational levels
of their parents; literacy and vocational training might go a long way towards accomplish-
ing this goal. A Latina community leader in the District of Columbia remarked:
DCPS does not engage immigrant parents! Schools should have activities for parents
such as multicultural nights, gatherings that would bring together people of different
socioeconomic standing. There is a need for programs aimed at upward mobility for
parents before we even start working with the children.
In order to succeed in school and in college, Latino children and youth need people to
champion their educational aspirations and role models to emulate. Community leaders
interviewed for this study stressed over and over that both are rarely coming from within
the family and kinship networks. A service provider in Langley Park said:
Contrary to popular beliefs and stated attitudes, Latino families in this town do not
support educational pursuits of their children. The prevailing attitude is that when a
kid wants to go to college they are on their own. There is a lot of pressure on the kids
to drop out of school and go to work, especially among low-income families. Go-
getters and parents with higher levels of education have a better attitude.
According to the same community leader, youth who have been in the United States for
only a few years ‘hardly go against their parents’ wishes and do drop out of school even if
they have the grades to graduate and go on to college’. Some community leaders indicated
that there are not enough Latinos ‘who have made it and want to come back to the
community to work with the youth and serve as role models’.
When children and youth look elsewhere for role models, parents are not always happy
about it. One mother indicated that her son has bonded with her employer, a professional
woman who hired Ester to clean her house. The woman gives him books and tries to help
him out with homework, but Ester said: ‘I don’t like her interfering. She is not from my
country; she is going to steal him away from us.’ But motivated children look for support in
many places. Victor, for example, raved about the wonderful teachers who supported him
throughout high school and a counselor who helped him look at colleges in his senior year.
He clearly saw school as a strong support network, not just an academic environment.
It is clear that the kind of assistance and support Latino students need will not come
solely from immigration reform and policy changes, but rather paradigm shifts in our
attitudes toward and programs for Latino children and their families as well as policies
aimed at alleviating poverty of immigrant families. Child advocates and community leaders
alike supported these recommendations. They did not see the push for schooling, emphasis
on good grades, and desire to garner parental support to be an indication of ‘benevolent
racism’ (Villenas 2002), but rather a way to exert individual and community agency.
Conflict of interest statement. None declared.
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Notes
1. The study was comparative in nature and conducted in collaboration with colleagues at
COMPAS in Oxford. See Sigona and Hughes (2012).
2. While the Coleman Report did not focus on immigration status, its findings regarding
family socio-economic status of children’s educational achievement holds true for the
population under study. Undocumented status adversely affected socioeconomic back-
grounds of the children’s families and thus impacted their performance in school.
3. Maryland’s version of the DREAM Act was to take effect on July 1, 2011, but
Republican Delegate Neil Parrot flooded the Maryland Secretary of State’s office in
Annapolis with 55,736 signatures, or 3 percent, of voters from the last gubernatorial
election, that were needed to put the law up for referendum on the ballot for November
2012. The DREAM Act passed in 2012.
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