I came to the United States at the age of eight. I left my home, my friends, my cousins, my grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, and my dog, Chiquitillo. My parents, like many immigrant families, wanted to provide their daughters with a future that they did not see available for us in Mexico. Growing up as an immigrant child, however, was far from easy. I often found myself questioning my identity, trying to make sense of my new geography but never quite feeling like it was home. This experience of straddling borders is the impetus for my interest in immigration. Living and growing up in Arizona provided me with an informal education about what it means to be an American, and what it means to belong or be seen in many ways as an outsider. āIt is like living in a home without foundation, sin tierra para plantar nuestras raicesā (Maldonado, 2013). Immigrant children continue to grow up straddling borders both through their physical bodies and through their language and culture; their identities can remain in liminality, which can impact their sense of agency in the world.
(Angeles Maldonado)
The border is a highly politicized geographical space in which the violation of human rights is justified and rationalized under the fabricated knowledge that the border is a place of danger. It delineates through walls and policies who gets to belong by strategically attacking the identities of those it seeks to exclude. It is imperative to understand the political climate of the borderlands as well as its geographical history, as it sheds light on the ways in which this context impacts people who live there. Historically, Arizona, for example, straddled two countries and is on indigenous land. Arizona was part of the state of Sonora, Mexico until 1848, when the United States took possession through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is ironic, therefore, that many regard Mexican migrants as outsiders. Still, the border region has been made to be a space of indistinction, where policies and laws exist and are intentionally designed to delineate and demarcate the land through the systemic criminalization and racialization of people of color while safeguarding White Supremacy.
The United States is experiencing an identity crisis. President Trump ran a campaign with the promise of building āa giant beautiful wallā and āMaking America Great Again.ā Beyond this problematic divisive nativist discourse, a series of laws and immigration policies, under the lie of concerns for public safety, have had the direct result of inciting fear (Toomey et al., 2014) and the deportation of families who have resided in Arizona for many years. Police and immigration agents target and criminalize migrant communities in the name of safety; yet immigrant families are the ones whose safety becomes jeopardized. The trauma inflicted upon families has only escalated during the Trump administration. On April 8, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a āzero-tolerance policy,ā calling for the prosecution of all individuals who entered the United States āillegally.ā This strict criminalization of migration resulted in heinous acts by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, including the unforgivable practice of separating children from their parents upon apprehension at the US/Mexico border. Immigrant families detained are crowded into cells known as hieleras (ice chests) due to intentionally set extremely cold temperatures. Children, some as young as three months old, are detained in facilities for children, some of which were discovered to be unlicensed, and reports of child neglect and physical and sexual abuse within these sites have been reported.
Living undocumented in the borderlands can also mean living in over-policed neighborhoods, where racial profiling and discrimination, criminalization, transient employment, low wage jobs, long work hours, employment insecurity, underpayment, underfunded schools, a lack of access to health-care and insurance, working under the table, and a heightened risk for injuries, health hazards, due to exposure to chemicals, and poor or dangerous working conditions exist (Panikkar et al., 2015). People may fear calling the police, where the police and other agencies are known to actively collaborate with ICE and may also restrict seeking public assistance or interacting with governmental agencies for other reasons (Toomey et al., 2014).
Another policy that directly affects immigrant children in Arizona is the Structured English Immersion (SEI) model, requiring all instruction, text, and work produced by students be in English only. This model has received backlash as to its validity regarding its effectiveness (Krashen, Rolstad, & MacSwan, 2007). The model has been criticized for its infringement on childrenās civil rights (Rios-Auguilar, Gonzalez-Canche & Moll, 2010) via linguistic imperialism (Jimenez-Silva, Bernstein & Baca, 2016): an attempt āto capture the way one language dominates another, with Anglo centricity and professionalism ā¦ within a structure in which unequal power and resource allocation is affected and legitimatedā (Phillipson, 1992, p. 54). The SEI model, as compared to bilingual models, strips away one of the most prevalent cultural identifiers immigrant children have, their native language.
