The permanence of departure: Young Mexican immigrant students’ discursive negotiations of imagined childhoods allá

This article draws from a three-year ethnography with elementary school students from mixed-status Mexican immigrant families in Pennsylvania to explore the ways that they imagined potential childhoods and schooling in Mexico. Through attention to their stances and deictic choices during school-based talk, our findings reveal how going to Mexico was positioned as a permanent departure, and one that students often named as occurring soon, despite the fact that repatriation was extremely rare. We show how understanding children's discursive constructions of their imagined binational lives provides a mechanism for children to discursively try on and become familiar with an unfamiliar childhood, and thus, make such childhoods more inhabitable if they were to move to Mexico. We argue that understanding these processes is particularly important in increasingly anti-immigrant climates in which children from undocumented families may be facing possibilities of repatriation due to immigration policies.
Source: Linguistics and Education - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research