Abstract
Drawing from in-depth interviews with university-level transnational students in Mexico, we highlight these students’ resistance and agency in the face of US legal and educational policies that have marginalized them and other undocumented students. We also illustrate pitfalls and possibilities that students encounter in a Mexican system that has not anticipated their presence. The interviewed students viewed return migration for higher education in Mexico as a strategy that could allow them to access/develop their imagined identities as college-educated professionals and one day, legalized citizens of the United States. At the time they made their decisions, before Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, two students saw returning to Mexico as their best option for eventually becoming college-educated, US citizens and two other were trying to build their lives as global citizens. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the existence of students like this for higher education and social policy in both Mexico and the United States.
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Notes
Other contributors to this special issue (for example, Seif, Ullman and Núñez-Mchuri) offer different estimates for the total number of undocumented students in US schools. Our point is not to challenge these other figures, nor to disagree with other published research (for example, Hoefer et al (2009) estimating 3.2 million undocumented children and young adults below the age of 24 living in the United States); rather it seems unsurprising that estimates vary given the difficulty of tallying a population interested in living with a low profile and the fact that both the US economic recession and anti-immigrant hostility have precipitated population movement.
If undocumented students aspired to attend college in Arizona, this was possible only if they paid international student fees (the highest tuition category available).
To respect participants’ confidentiality, the names provided in this study are pseudonyms.
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Acknowledgements
This research was approved and co-financed by the Universidad de Sonora, under the División de Humanidades y Bellas Artes, and by the Mexican Council of Science and Technology Project (CONACyT) CB-2012–01:“Migración y retorno de niños y jóvenes migrantes: aulas fronterizas frente a la globalización” coordinated by Dr Gloria Ciria Valdéz Gardea. Thank you to the editors of this special issue, especially Char Ullmann, Hinda Seif and Guillermina Núñez-Mchuri for their support and thoughtful feedback throughout the whole process.
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Cortez Román, N., Hamann, E. College dreams à la Mexicana … agency and strategy among American-Mexican transnational students. Lat Stud 12, 237–258 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.24