"I am an academic, but I'm also a human and an advocate."

Dr. Sophia Rodriguez discusses the limits and possibilities of academia in relation to immigrant justice advocacy

“Change Stories. Transform Culture. End Inequality.” by Favianna Rodriguez

This week, we’re continuing the conversation between Rita Kamani-Renedo (Stanford PhD Candidate) and Dr. Sophia Rodriguez, whose work explores the intersections of immigration, education, and racialization. In this final installment, we discuss the role of academics in intervening in the violence of immigration policy, and Sophia shares her current work related to immigrant youth well-being. 

If you missed the first parts of this conversation, take a look here and here.

RITA KAMANI-RENEDO: You’ve written about symbolic and discursive violence as well as the very real material violence enacted upon immigrant communities through racialization and processes of othering. Broadly, what is the role of academics in addressing the material effects of racist, anti-immigrant laws and policies?

SOPHIA RODRIGUEZ: There's so many dynamics involved in that. Earlier, when I first started all this work, I think for me, the role I played was…thinking about research as a potential space of healing for students. I constantly asked the students, "Why do you share this with me?” Sometimes there's a lot of extractive research that goes on. There are certainly things that I didn't publish…things I've encountered or heard from students, because those were part of the taking care. They were part of the relationships.

I think it's tricky to answer this question, because I am an academic, but I'm also a human and an advocate. I think those moments where I wasn't sure if my research was going to do harm or help, there's many of those moments, and there's times that there are limits to what we can do. I can't even tell you how many times in the past seven years, I'm like, “why didn't I go to law school?” It would've been so much more useful! 

There are certainly things that I didn't publish…because those were part of the taking care. They were part of the relationships.

RKR: I’ve had that same thought so many times!

SR: I get text messages from kids, from social workers, about how so-and-so got in a fight and he was arrested, he's undocumented. Is he going to get deported? My role in those moments was not to take notes on it, but it was to contact a friend in Hartford where the student happened to be and see if her husband, who was an immigration attorney, could help the kid out. I think that's a moment where there are definitely heavy limits to our role as academics.

That said, the other opportunity is to get this stuff out in the public. I've done all this policy analysis. I just did a media interview a couple weeks ago about [Nikki Haley’s] time as governor in South Carolina. The reporter said, "I want to write about her platform on immigrants, and I see you did this policy work." As academics, we always talk about the implications of our research. I think that if you pay attention to what's going on in policy and in the political discourse, you can be an advocate and use your research to advocate. 

So I do that a lot.

I do that at the state level here in Maryland, give testimony. I have a number of colleagues who've also done that. I also do it at the very local level with the school board, city council, and county council. I think our research needs to get in the hands of different groups. I think our research definitely needs to be in different hands, and that's a privilege of me saying that, because I've also published a lot academically.

RKR: I appreciate the way you’re thinking strategically about the different audiences we have to speak with and can speak with through our work.  

SR: You have to do what you have to do to get your work into venues that are going to be honored by the institutions that we're a part of. But if there's ways to give voice, that's what I try to do, to have a public scholarship agenda.

In terms of the kids, over time asking them why they talk to me or why they share: I think for them it's a form of empowerment, a form of recognition. When we're thinking about adolescents, they're constantly in flux around who they are and what it means. I think a research space can be a place where they share their story and they share with each other. That can be really powerful.

RKR: Part of the work of La Cuenta is naming the costs of undocumented life in the U.S. Based on your work, what do you see as some of the hidden—or maybe not so hidden—costs of living undocumented for the young people you've worked with?

SR: I think this is pretty well documented. I follow Roberto [Gonzales’s] work in this regard. There's just that transition from high school to adulthood. He's talked about this as “Awakening to a Nightmare.” I think it's complicated, because I've studied different types of populations of undocumented students. I've studied those who've been here since early childhood, and I've studied, more recently, newcomers who've been here only a shorter amount of times, zero to two years or so in the country. I think the costs can be different and vary within the community itself of undocumented immigrants.

What I've been learning in some of my more recent work is there's always the discussion about college and college access. I obviously think that's important, but there's also a very large segment of the undocumented population that is not eligible for DACA and maybe may not have the means to go to Harvard on a scholarship and work with an academic who does this stuff. I think the challenge for me is to think through those costs. Who are the hidden faces of these experiences?

RKR: Yes, so much gets flattened in the discourses on immigrant youth. 

SR: On one of the more recent projects we did, we've learned a lot about that feeling of being caught, wanting to pursue workforce or higher education, but also having a commitment to the family. I think that's a barrier, and that's a mental load that young people carry the weight of—do you have to choose between… your family or pursuing goals in the US, which many of them came to the US for? I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase, "We came here for a better life." Even though it's a trope, and it becomes a trope academically of deservingness and meritocracy, for the kids it's also very real. Being here allows them opportunities that they may not have had. I think that feeling of caughtness or limbo—obviously as Roberto has talked about—it remains and persists. 

And the psychological impact, we don't know much about. I'm a sociologist, so I study these things differently. I'm not a psychologist, but hearing the lasting impact, the mental burden that these young people face as they navigate regular adolescence. Then also being racialized or fearing that their family members are going to be deported, or having to navigate for their families and parents within institutions—because the young people are the ones that are interfacing with institutions, more so than the parents, often. I think those are persistent challenges. I don't know that my work has shed light on anything new in that regard. That's been well documented in the immigrant and education literature.

What I'm more interested more recently in is, how are schools responding to some of these hidden costs, hidden traumas, or lasting effects of the undocumented status? That's where my new work has been venturing into more.

RKR: Do you have a sense of schools' climate, especially in relation to Trump’s presidency, and his possible future return to presidency? What does it look like in terms of young people and immigrant families in schools right now?

SR: That's a great question. I have a couple different projects that are doing some mental health intervention work with schools…I don't think it's worse, necessarily, but I don't think it's better.

There's a huge push I'm seeing across the country. I've been working in multiple districts on these racial equity plans, and I think there's such a commitment to racial equity that it's hard to figure out where immigrant students and families fit into that. A lot of what I've been doing with districts currently is, thinking about how do you create welcoming environments for immigrant families within a larger racial justice agenda, with a lot of competing needs of different groups?

I think one of the challenges is, schools struggle with mental health support, social system connections. I think there's work to be done—especially for newcomers, unaccompanied students… There's opportunities both for social-emotional support and partnerships with community-based organizations. But, I think schools necessarily aren't leveraging those potential partnerships, so a lot of it becomes ad hoc. I've had districts say, “oh, we have a partner.. they do that, or they take care of that”, rather than thinking about the school as a space that might be a hub of these supports, instead of passing it off. I think there's a lot of work to be done at the systems level to connect social service, child welfare and educational systems or organizations. 

RKR: It’s so powerful to think about schools as hubs of support.

SR: That study I did was during the Trump administration and it was horribly amplified, but these racialized positionings of Latinos and immigrant students have preceded Trump and continue. In that sense, a lot of these challenges are…fabricated as this new crisis. I can't tell you how many times I talked to districts and they're like, “oh my God, we had this new thing happening, all these newcomers”. …You've had newcomers steadily for the past decades!

RKR: Absolutely. Wrapping up, can you share what you're working on now?

SR: Yeah, I have three projects that are ongoing. The one for William T. Grant is huge. It's a school district, community organization partnership to reduce inequality for immigrant students.

I'm looking at the Latino student population's sense of belonging within the school, and then how, if at all, schools are engaging in community-based organization partnerships to provide social, emotional, mental health support for immigrant youth and families. That has been really interesting.

I'm working with two colleagues in public health and we're doing a nonclinical mental health intervention in three high schools. It's youth led. All of them are Central American newcomers and some are unaccompanied, some are undocumented or children of undocumented parents. We're trying to understand their experiences and they're creating the substance of that intervention. We hope to scale it up in a local school district. The hope is that this particular intervention that we're piloting with the youth...will be in all the schools to provide support. It is particularly focused around immigrant students. In one of the other interventions, we're trying to look at mental health support broadly for youth in schools to kind of see if there are differences.

RKR: I love that the intervention is youth-led. 

SR: The last project is a trauma-informed ecosystem. It's an intervention that we're trying to do in two high schools where we're talking mostly with the teachers about how they understand trauma, how they respond to it as part of the larger school climate…because I think a lot of these challenges in schools are that teachers don't have time for extra stuff, so we're trying to figure out how we can create welcoming environments that are across the whole school. [Some principals say] "Oh yeah, you should talk to the social worker about that." [But] no, we want to do a school wide intervention. 

There's been limited research on these trauma-informed ecosystems, so we're trying to figure that out as we go. I think overall, these are all connected to increasing immigrant student wellbeing, wellness and thinking about larger systems of support, not just in education but across social service, child welfare…making the school the space where these things might coalesce.

Propina

This week, La Cuenta co-founders Alix Dick and Antero Garcia shared an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle focused on the the crucial role of schools in shaping the ongoing and often dehumanizing debates about immigration in the U.S. today. In short, by primarily teaching about immigration as a phenomenon in America’s past, we have become ill-equipped for considering the present, foundational role of immigrants now.

You can read the full op-ed here with a free “gift” link to bypass the paywall.

We’ll see you next week!