Knowing silence: how children talk about immigration status in school

Citation

Castillo, J. (2024), "Knowing silence: how children talk about immigration status in school", Journal for Multicultural Education, Vol. 18 No. 4, pp. 589-590. https://doi.org/10.1108/JME-10-2024-243

Mangual Figueroa’s Knowing Silence is a sobering book in an era of hostility and heightened inflammatory political rhetoric against immigrant communities. As the prevalence of dangerous political speech rises, it also spreads across various sectors of public life, including public education. In this context, Knowing Silence is a powerful book because it shows how the impact of immigration policy and discourse is anything but esoteric or neutral, and effects immigrant communities deeply, including with tremendous impact among its young. Mangual Figueroa’s investigation on what students in “middle childhood” (ages 6–12) know about immigration, and how they discuss it among themselves and with the adults in their lives, will be of interest to researchers, educators and activist seeking to better understand what children think and say about immigration status, as well as to those who wish to use that understanding to better support the learning, growth and academic advancement of students from diverse and mixed-status families.

Building upon Mangual Figueroa’s impressive oeuvre of ethnographic research focused on the intersection of education and immigration, Knowing Silence is thoughtfully written and is executed with a great deal of care for the young and vulnerable people who are at the heart of the ethnographic study at the core of the book. Drawing from over two hundred hours of recorded talk captured over a two-year period, the author follows six young girls as they transition from elementary school to middle school and catalogs instances where their lives are shaped by issues related to immigration status across a variety of settings, including at school, at home, on field trips and while walking in the street. Page after page, Knowing Silence achieves what it sets out to do, it shares with the reader the deep understanding young children carry about immigration and the wide range of strategies they use when deciding who to share that information with, and when. In doing so, Knowing Silence reveals a difficult truth, that young children really do know quite a lot about immigration and their knowing makes it difficult to characterize them as “innocent” and free from the troubling effects of a repressive immigration apparatus. For these youngsters, immigration complicates their lives and the lives of their loved ones, and they are aware of it.

Additionally, the structure of the book makes the main thematic elements easy to follow and strengthens its argumentative push, as well. The best example of this is Mangual Figueroa’s decision to frame the study in the context of Plyler v. Doe, a landmark Supreme Court case barring states from denying access to public education based on the citizenship status of students. A key legacy of the case is its barring of schools from gathering information on the juridical status of students, creating an atmosphere of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” However, as Mangual Figueroa writes in the closing pages of Knowing Silence, one of the startling revelations uncovered by the research is that “we have been asking, and students have been telling,” highlighting a troubling dynamic that makes clear the painful inadequacy of the Plyler decision. As a result of this ruling the convenient notion that young children do not know about immigration status is reinforced by the ways that it prohibits schools from asking questions about it in the first place.

Another key strength of Knowing Silence lies in its methodological approach, which can be roughly summed up as a longitudinal ethnographic study. The approach allows for readers to follow along and “listen in” to the ways children speak about and navigate these issues. It also allows readers to see how parents navigate school forms that require “tacit disclosures” of immigration status in exchange for access to services and support, vignettes of student interactions with school safety officers and neighborhood police as these interactions illicit talk around surveillance and criminality, and careful observations of how teachers must navigate murky waters to deliver a state-mandated social studies curriculum requiring students to learn about immigration while barring teachers from prying too forcefully on the immigration backgrounds and experiences of students.

While the ethnographic study cataloged in Knowing Silence was undertaken nearly a decade ago, it does an exceptional job of anticipating the ways that hostile immigration policy and political speech of the past comes back to frustrate us in the present, compounding the current situation we find ourselves in. This is especially the case in how young people come to internalize the ways that immigration policy operates to open and limit possibilities for themselves and their families. What students know about DACA, for example, shapes the way they envision their chances of attending college, pursuing various careers or even contributing to the well-being of their families. Knowledge about the hardships of the immigration journey also limits who can and cannot travel outside of the country and reconnect with other members of the family living abroad. In Knowing Silence, students as young as ten years old openly talk about and imagine what is “possible” for them, and those dearest to them, while weighing a shifting political landscape full of difficult contradictions, which include persistent activist efforts to improve the conditions of immigrant communities and fight for progressive immigration reform, as well as growing reactionary and repressive discourses that target, surveil and criminalize immigrant communities harshly.

Most importantly, Knowing Silence offers a significant contribution, one that challenges researchers and practitioners to take a more humanistic look at the complex lives of the students they aim to work with and support, and that calls on readers to examine deeply the implications of our current immigration system and its effects on our young people. This invitation could not arrive soon enough, as each day brings with it increased attacks and an alarming acceptance of demonization and scapegoating of immigrant communities, all while placing institutional, structural and political failures at their feet. Knowing Silence forces the reader to contemplate the consequences of doing so, especially as they relate to children who are otherwise presumed to be too young, innocent and unknowing to be harmed. Mangual Figueroa kindly invites us to reconsider, and to face the truth about what young people know, and what they offer to teach us, should we just listen.