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"Now We Are Here": An Ethnography of Families' Hope, Loss, and the Education of Migrant Children in the U.S.
Gabrielle Oliveira, Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and of Brazil Studies, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Abstract: Parents from countries across Latin America have had to make the constrained choice to leave their country-of-origin homes and undertake the journey north to the United States. In 2018 and 2019, as migrant families sought better lives and survival, many of them encountered U.S. government policies that would forever shape their lives. While there is constant attention to border enforcement issues from the media and some politicians, we rarely get to have an intimate look at the lives of immigrant families in the United States. What happens to families and children after they are released from detention and/or reunified from separation?
This thee-year ethnographic research centers on the lives of 18 migrant families from Latin America who experienced detention and/or separation at the border during 2018–2019, telling a story that interweaves parental sacrifice, children’s articulations of embodiment and migration, teachers’ understandings of the trauma experienced by these families, and, ultimately, the impact of a global pandemic on already-vulnerable families. Now We Are Here tells a human moral story of migrant families’ perseverance as they care for their children. The book shows how the idealized chance for a better education in the U.S. counterbalanced the destabilizing effects of U.S. immigration policies and a global pandemic on migrant families. I argue that the idea of providing a better life through educational opportunities is migrant parents’ currency of love for their children: to guarantee and provide an education in the U.S. is to justify the sacrifices of the immigrant journey and show care. While children are the assumed beneficiaries of their parents’ sacrifice, this book demonstrates that they are also individuals with agency and voice who articulate their own understandings of immigration policy and education. In this presentation I focus on two chapters of the book that describe how immigrant children experienced everyday classroom instruction and the consequences of a pandemic on their schooling. The education inequalities experienced by these families became exacerbated during 2020 and 2021 as immigrant parents were essential workers and children were home. Ultimately, I highlight the crucial role that education plays in shaping the sense of sacrifice, the pursuit of hope, and the reconciliation with loss for both children and parents.
Gabrielle Oliveira’s research focuses on immigration and mobility — on how people move, adapt, and parent across borders. Her expertise includes gender, anthropology, transnationalism across the Americas. Merging the fields of anthropology and education through ethnographic work in multiple countries, Oliveira also studies the educational trajectories of immigrant children. She is the author of Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and their Children in Mexico and in New York City (NYU Press). The book has won the inaugural Erickson and Hornberger Book Award by the University of Pennsylvania's Ethnography Forum and the award for book of the year by the Council of Anthropology and Education.
Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Oliveira received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. She was the recipient of the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and she has been also awarded a postdoc fellowship from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation to study the consequences of the 2018 zero-tolerance policy on family separation under the Trump Administration. Oliveira is also part of a group called "Colectiva Infancias" that has won a grant from the National Geographic Foundation to assemble a public-facing website on the stories of immigrant children who migrate within the Americas.
Oliveira has been engaged in studying Brazilian migration to Massachusetts and has extensively focused on how immigrant children and families navigate newfound educational systems amid a global pandemic. She has worked closely with teachers in dual language programs whose students are Brazilian working to understand what the constraints are in educational practices in and out of classrooms. Her publications can be found in journals like Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education; Bilingual Research Journal; TESOL Quarterly; Global Studies of Childhood; among others.
