Grace Cornell Gonzales and Alicia Rusoja wrote the article “'I Have Been Getting Involved for My Children:' An Un/documented Latina Mother’s Immigrant Rights Practice as Family Engagement" in the latest quarterly issue of The Educational Forum.
Often, educators think about family involvement as a checklist of sorts. Do parents come to parent-teacher conferences? Do they help their children out with homework? Do they volunteer for field trips and the PTA? It’s no wonder that these traditional conceptions of family involvement, rooted in white middle class norms, often exclude and marginalize families of Color. Latine/x families have often been portrayed as uninvolved and uninterested in their children’s schooling. Yet we know—both from decades of research and from personal/professional experience in home, school, and community spaces—that Latine/x immigrant families leverage home knowledge and literacy practices to teach language and culture, model resilience, and pass along valuable home knowledge. We also know that Latine/x communities engage in powerful activism and organizing around issues of immigrant rights; however, schools and teachers are often unaware of this organizing and how it may be connected to what happens in their own classrooms.
In this article, we looked at the experience of María, an Indigenous (Otomí) un/documented Latina mother who migrated to the United States from Mexico, and who participates, along with her children, in immigrant rights organizing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. María sees her community organizing practice as engagement in her children’s education. First off, we recognized how she sees community, home, and school spaces as integrally connected, and views her involvement as an extension of her core work as a mother. She explained: “I have been getting involved for my children because I believe that if I don’t do anything to help them, we won’t be able to change. We will be in the same situation but now in another country.” However, this commitment to being active in her children’s schools and in the streets to fight for her family’s own well-being does not end there. Instead, María conceives of her activism as serving the whole community as well as future generations, in addition to her own children. She explained: “This is for everyone’s wellbeing and this wellbeing for which I am fighting now will be useful to my children in the future, and if not to my children then to future generations that will come after.”
María also conceives of activism as rooted in learning/teaching in community. This learning/teaching process is inherently intergenerational. She talks about how her own mother’s way of getting “involved in lots of things” has influenced her. But this intergenerationality doesn’t just imply elders teaching younger generations. Instead, it is bidirectional, with children and younger generations also having valuable things to teach to their elders. In this regard, María discusses how her own children, through their activism alongside her, have taught her and influenced her to continue in the struggle. For example, María’s son Erick encouraged María to teach with her example: “Like Erick also says: show others, by example, that you are capable of doing things. And he says, if you are capable of many things, you will demonstrate this, and you will teach others because you can do it even if you are afraid.” In this way, María sees learning and teaching as passed between generations and as a fundamental part of community organizing.
Parents like María bring such richness to their children’s lives through their wisdom and commitment to organizing. And yet schools are often unaware of the community organizing practices of immigrant families and communities and read these same parents through deficit lenses. We encourage all educators to become aware of parents’ community activism and out-of-school teaching and learning practices, and to see these as meaningful engagement in their children’s education. We also encourage schools to learn from the intergenerational and bidirectional learning/teaching that happens in communities, and to bring these dynamic and authentic types of learning into classroom spaces as well.
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Grace Cornell Gonzales is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Her research focuses on family engagement in dual language programs, as well as multilingual literacy pedagogies. |
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Alicia Rusoja is an assistant professor at U.C. Davis. Her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of Latinx/Chicanx studies, critical education/critical literacy studies, and university-community/research-practice partnerships.
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