Connecting the immigrant experience through literature

A 3rd grader traumatized by losing a parent to immigration problems finds her own voice, perspective, and agency through an immigration-infused curriculum.

“My dad did have papers, but the police take them away because my uncle had a . . . he was drinking beer and he gave it to him . . . oh, my goodness . . . they took the papers away.”

How did Maria, a 3rd grader, offer such a revelation to her classmates and her teacher? Maria was among the 20 3rd graders, primarily from Mexican immigrant homes, in my classroom where we were exploring and negotiating their understanding of changing policies around immigration and the anti-immigrant sentiments in their small southeastern U.S. town.

A curriculum grounded in students’ lives can promote engagement and deeper levels of thinking.

During the year when I was Maria’s teacher, I learned that her father had been deported and that her mother left her in the United States for a long period of time each year in order to visit her husband in Mexico. Maria, a U.S. citizen, struggled mightily living without her father and mother during the year. Although Maria’s story is heartbreaking, she was not the only 3rd grader confronting life without a parent, a grandparent, or a sibling.

I spent two months observing and exploring how Latino 3rd graders who read critical multicultural texts communicated and constructed meaning through face-to-face and blogging discussions. What role would literacy play in their understanding of immigration policies?

During my time as Maria’s teacher, many new stringent immigration enforcement measures were beginning in the Southeast — especially in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Georgia passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011, which increased the state’s enforcement powers, penalized individuals transporting undocumented immigrants, and gave law enforcement the right to detain individuals suspected of not holding proper legal documentation. Similar laws in Alabama gave schools the authority to question the legal status of students (Hing, 2011). Disparaging remarks by politicians and individuals reached my young learners, thanks to the media.

My students were slowly realizing that differences existed among their family structures. Several students had at least one parent who was born in another country and was not a U.S. citizen. However, any child born in the U.S. is a citizen, affording the child but not the parent the rights associated with being a citizen (Brabeck & Xu, 2010; Landale, Thomas, & Van Hook, 2011).

Making curriculum relevant

Students like Maria were silently struggling with issues surrounding immigration, but they had few opportunities to take up these issues during the school day. In spring 2013, I designed a study unit and text set around current immigrant issues. I selected literature that opened a window for students to unpack the complexity of their situations. The text titles included Let’s Go See Papa (Schimel, 2011), Harvesting Hope (Krull, 2003), Waiting for Papa (Lainez, 2004), America is her Name (Rodriguez, 1998), and My Diary from Here to There (Perez, 2009). According to Rosenblatt (1978), as children read literature, they bring with them cultural, social, and political knowledge that influences their interactions with the text. In this study, students were able to bring their knowledge of immigration policies and cultural understanding of moving to a new country to make sense of texts that discussed immigration issues.

Students had many opportunities to read and write responses to literature, discussions, and multimodal texts. They engaged and initiated whole-group, face-to-face discussions on text and continued discussion on their class blog, where I was initially the facilitator. Students wrote responses in their journals to questions I posed and to issues in text and illustrations.

Maria’s story

Maria was a 9-year-old girl of Mexican descent. When she entered my 3rd-grade classroom in August 2012, she was reading at a 2nd-grade level. She often struggled to put sentences together in English; as a result, she often code-switched between Spanish and English when she found it difficult to explain something in English. She received additional content-area support through an early intervention program in reading and math.

During the second half of the year, Maria’s demeanor noticeably changed. When she returned from winter break, I learned that her mother had left the country to visit her husband in Mexico; Maria was living with her grandmother and an uncle. She began coming to class appearing as if she had just awakened. She often left her reading glasses at home. She completed homework less frequently than at the beginning of the year.

As I spoke more with Maria about how she was feeling about her mother’s serial return year after year to be with her father, I gathered that she needed a space or format to help her deal with such loss.

In read-aloud discussions, Maria often raised her hand but then retreated and said nothing. Her engagement increased as she read texts related to her experiences as a child of an immigrant deported to Mexico. As Maria noticed similarities between herself and characters she was reading about, she took a more meaningful role in discussions and began to tell her story. In our discussion of Let’s Go See Papa, as students discussed the ramifications of the main character leaving her home country to be with her father, Maria said she agreed that the young girl should leave. As we read texts that aligned with Maria’s own story, she opened up about her feelings to a wider audience, her classmates.

After one read-aloud, Maria told me that she loved the books we were reading. The stories, she said, reminded her of her father. Maria began to see that her identity as a child of an immigrant mattered. Including critical multicultural literature related to immigration sparked an interest in Maria that other text selections did not. They invited Maria to engage in peer affiliation and societal inclusion, and the texts allowed Maria and her classmates to disrupt the narrative of illegal immigrants and highlight their personal experiences.

Writing letters

Similar to the main character in My Diary from Here to There, Maria understood what it meant to leave a parent or to be left by a parent. Her experience of having a parent live in one country intrigued her in the literature. However, she also was curious about how the character used writing to cope with her distress over moving to a new country. In our read-aloud of Waiting for Papa, Maria revealed that she had begun to write letters, like her classmate Jesus, to campaign for her father’s return. This was the first I had heard of this:

Jesus: When I was here, I had to write letters.

Teacher: Yes, you did have to write letters to the judge.

Maria: That’s what I’m doing.

Teacher: You are writing a letter, too?

Teacher: Do you think it helped, Jesus?

Jesus: (Nods yes.)

Thus, Maria appeared to use the texts and her peers to help her understand and cope with the emotional toll of separation. She found comfort in knowing that classmates and characters in the texts had experienced similar misgivings and thus could learn from their sharing. Moreover, she wrote letters to campaign for her father in the same way that Beto in Waiting for Papa and Jesus, her classmate, did.

Teacher: As we were reading the books, was there anything from any of the books that we read that reminded you of your life?

Maria: When Beto, when he was sending cards for his dad to come because he couldn’t come. He didn’t have papers, and my dad didn’t have papers. I write letters.

Teacher: You write letters to him? OK, did it make you feel good or make you feel sad to hear that story? How did it make you feel to hear the story of Beto?

Maria: Kind of sad.

Teacher: Kind of sad, OK. Why did it make you kind of sad?

Maria: Because that happened to him too.

In our discussion, Maria said she enjoyed reading the texts because “it teaches you how people’s lives are.” From her classmates and texts, she reiterated that she learned she could write letters to the judge and to her father. Thus, Maria learned that although she was separated from her father, she could maintain a connection through writing to him, just as Jesus did. Moreover, she could use letter writing to possibly help her father. I asked how she learned these things, and she said it was from her classmates. Maria’s experiences exemplify the agentive nature of writing.

Conclusion

Maria’s story is a snapshot of the trauma that the child of an immigrant may endure as a result of being separated from family. This exploration into engaging and opening the classroom to discussions about immigration and immigrant experiences created opportunities for inclusion and communication around a topic children are grappling with silently. Maria, who had very little communication with her father in Mexico until her summer stays did not feel as if she could help her father’s situation. However, she began using her classmate’s story as a model in understanding how to negotiate her present situation. Therefore, she was able to consider multiple perspectives of dealing with the immigration process through the critical literacy curriculum in our class. She said Jesus’s story helped her reconsider how she could handle being separated from her family. A curriculum grounded in students’ lives can promote more engagement and deeper levels of thinking. Creating opportunities for bilingual youth to make connections between their lives can help students feeling insecure in their identity as learners and make the classroom environment more accessible (Jimenez, 2000). Maria’s story shows one way that teachers can foster agentive opportunities for young children and support immigrant students in the classroom.

References

Brabeck, K. & Xu, Q. (2010). The impact of detention and deportation on Latino immigrant children and families: A quantitative exploration. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 32 (3), 341-361.

Hing, J. (2011, June 2). The legal case against Alabama’s worst in the country immigration law. Colorlines. http://bit.ly/1FVniPE

Jimenez, R. (2000). Literacy and the identity development of Latino/a students. American Educational Research Journal, 37 (4), 971-1000.

Krull, K. (2003). Harvesting hope: The story of Cesar Chavez. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Lainez, R. (2004). Waiting for Papa. Houston, TX: Pinata Books.

Landale, N.S., Thomas, K.A., & Van Hook, J. (2011). The living arrangements of children of immigrants. Future of Children, 21 (1), 43-70.

Perez, A. (2009). My diary from here to there. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books.

Rodriguez, L. (1998). America is her name. Chicago, IL: Curbstone Books

Rosenblatt, L.M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Schimel, L. (2011). Let’s go see Papa! Toronto, ON: Groundwood Books.