The Lessons of Immigration: We Want to Hear from You

And scroll down for a children’s story about stars, family, and loss

This week we want your help.

We want to know what kinds of lessons you learned about immigration while you were a student. If you were ever a teacher, we also want to know what kinds of lessons you might have taught about immigration.

Even if your answer is “nothing” or “not enough,” we want to know! Please comment below (and you can always email us here).

We want to know about your experiences learning about immigration because we want to compare the lessons shared here with the information encountered in classrooms. Part of our goal with La Cuenta is to account for the continually amounting costs of undocumented survival in the U.S. that we share here each week. These are often invisible to most individuals in this country. Schools are complicit in overlooking the humanity of those the U.S. labels as undocumented.

Talking with one of my doctoral advisees and a former high school teacher, Rita Kamani-Renedo, we struggled to pinpoint the specific moments that young people encounter lessons about immigration in U.S. schools. As we reflected on the lessons taught in our respective high schools (in California and New York), we could point mainly to lessons of American progress and exceptionalism fueled by European immigration. Students might learn about Ellis Island and the notion that “good” immigration happened a long time ago.

But we know that students learn, every day, the ways borders cleave families and policies limit the freedoms of those around us. The hidden curriculum of immigration learning is taught long before kids enter our classrooms and lingers on the screens of nightly news and the headlines of articles and social media posts.

If not in schools, where did your formative experiences learning about immigration take place?

Propina

Back when I was a high school English teacher in South Central Los Angeles, the majority of my students came from Mexico and from Central America. Daily, my classroom was filled with the lessons learned from immigration experiences and the global forces that stretched families across the distances of time and place.

Recently, I stumbled across samples from an assignment where I asked my students to create autobiographical children’s books. The majority of my students focused on aspects of family members going to or leaving the U.S. and I want to share portions of one student’s story about a character she called “Mini-U.” This student imagined her family as a constellation of stars, their love burning brightly, even as they are scattered across the sky. Below are a few pages of this story as one way we might offer lessons of immigration to children from children:

Mini-U and her stories

Hello! My name is Mini-Y and I am going to to tell you the stories of my past. When I was 2 years old, I was living with my family in a big shiny sky. We were together, my dad Fegi, my mom Eli, and my brothers Sami and Odi.

We liked to explore the universe. This time we went to another planet called Mars. This planet was not really fun at all because it was really hot, even though we were protecting each other with the feeling of love. This was a strong feeling that formed our family.

Many of those fieldtrips were really fun, but one time, my dad Fegi decided to go explore the sun. He told us that he was going to go to bring us more light for our dwelling. That was a hard time for all of us. My mom, Eli, was really sad and my brothers, Samy and Odi, too. I felt worried because the days were passing and there was no signal of my dad.

Fourteen years later, my dad appeared. He was not the same star that I knew. He acted indifferently with us. I felt defrauded by the promises of my dad. He came with new thoughts. He told us that he had found another family in the sun. My heart broke down into middle pieces. My mom and my brothers felt pain.

Mini-U is a reminder of the lessons we could learn in schools if we choose to center youth voices.