On the Abolition of Belonging as Property: Toward Justice for Immigrant Children of Color

Abstract

Belonging matters in early childhood. Despite its importance, the majoritarian conceptualization of belonging is seldom problematized. In the US, the politics of belonging draws racialized lines of inclusion and exclusion, (re)inscribing longstanding racialized systems of inequity and injustice. Through critical race and Latina feminist perspectives and methodologies, an immigrant mother and son of Color examined their lived experiences. Findings unveil the urgency of upending formal racialized notions of belonging—for example, citizenship, co-naturalized with whiteness. Attending to the palpable consequences of ideological and relational borders that exclude and subjugate immigrants of Color, implications call for abolishing belonging as property and cultivating collective healing.

Keywords

belonging immigrant students urban education harm trauma young children exclusion race identity early childhood politics of belonging belonging as property justice immigrant children of color

Belonging matters in early childhood; it has been shown to impact young children’s cognitive and socioemotional development in paramount ways (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Belonging affects infant attachment, transitions, and young children’s beliefs in their potential and capacity (Over, 2016; Stratigos et al., 2014). Belonging pervades young children’s lives, impacting their identity and (im)possible futures. When young children feel a sense of belonging, they develop confidence and a positive self-concept and racial identity (Abawi & Berman, 2019; Byrd et al., 2017); when they “are deprived of a sense of belonging, it has negative consequences for their well-being” (Over, 2016, p. 1). Undeniably a key and prominent value of early childhood education, belonging is pervasive in research studies about child development and visible in early childhood education frameworks throughout the world (e.g., Over, 2016; Stratigos, 2015; Sumsion & Wong, 2011).

Despite the importance and centrality of belonging to early education and child development, not all young children have their need to belong met. That is, belonging is deeply political and racialized (Yuval-Davis, 2004, 2006). Recognizing that majoritarian definitions of belonging in the field of early childhood education tend to be naturalized and are seldom problematized in ways that align with equity and the pursuit of justice for young children of Color who are members of marginalized communities (Pustulka et al., 2016; Souto-Manning et al., 2021), I seek to understand the relationship between belonging and young children who are first- and second-generation immigrants of Color (henceforth referenced as immigrant children of Color to convey their positioning in society).

Literature Review

Belonging, “a fundamental human need, essential for the good health of individuals and communities” (Stratigos et al., 2014, p. 171), does not simply happen and is not a given. Recent literature reviews have unveiled how belonging is deeply intertwined with societal hierarchies of power, being political and enacting exclusion (DeNicolo et al., 2017; Pérez & Saavedra, 2017; Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018). While early childhood education theory and policies have embraced the rhetoric of belonging in the early years (Stratigos, 2015; Sumsion & Wong, 2011), belonging norms continue to protect the interests of whiteness by centering the dominant, white, monolingual child—who represents characteristics associated with power in education and society as well as majoritarian global North onto-epistemologies (Pérez & Saavedra, 2017; Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018; Souto-Manning et al., 2021). By upholding narrow and overly simplistic majoritarian conceptualizations of belonging, the field of early childhood education has been central to the denial of belonging of young immigrant children of Color (Sumsion & Wong, 2011).

Several studies detail how the ways young children and their families negotiate belonging are deeply informed by hierarchies of power pertaining to cultural practices, racial and gender identities, and communicative repertoires (Abawi & Berman, 2019; Byrd et al., 2017; Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018). Too often, young immigrant children of Color are told—through words, actions, and pathological paradigmatic positionings—that they do not belong (Souto-Manning, 2018; Souto-Manning et al., 2021). The majoritarian conceptualization of belonging in early childhood education does not fully consider how deep emotional belonging is, and how profoundly harmful its denial can be. Not belonging impairs the self-esteem and self-actualization of young children, serving to exclude, marginalize, and harm.

Young immigrant children of Color are often told that to belong they must reject the communicative practices, values, and experiences of their families and communities (DeNicolo et al., 2017; Pérez & Saavedra, 2017; Souto-Manning & Rabadi-Raol, 2018). Whether they were born to immigrant parents of Color or are themselves first-generation immigrants, their identities are constantly under siege (Suarez-Orozco, 2000) and they often feel pressure to mirror majoritarian practices. Amidst such pressures and their yearning to belong, many undergo processes of erasure and assimilation, eventually experiencing an “assimilative shift over time in their ethnic self-identities and sense of belonging” (Rumbaut, 2005, p. 113).

DeNicolo et al.s’ (2017) literature review denounces belonging within the context of classrooms and schools as excluding and subjugating immigrant children and youth of Color. Belonging reinscribes persistent education inequities that marginalize immigrant children of Color in the US. Critically problematizing normative conceptions of belonging in the context of the US requires inquiring into how belonging and not belonging are related to identity for immigrant children of Color. After all, belonging and citizenship are co-naturalized; “those without citizenship in the United States are positioned as not belonging” (p. 501).

In early childhood education, dominant conceptualizations and majoritarian stories of appropriateness exclude immigrant children of Color. Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol’s (2018) review of literature examined how these dominant, typically unmarked stories center the values, voices, and identities of the white monolingual child who engages in white ways of being and communicating (which are also often unmarked). Those who do not abide by notions of appropriateness aligned with monocultural white American values and practices and monolingual white English communicative practices, and do not embody Americanness as whiteness (Morrison, 1992), are denied belonging. Indeed, early childhood education in the US has been shown to align to global North onto-epistemologies as a compass, a hierarchy of power that excludes immigrant children of Color. Pérez and Saavedra’s (2017) literature review unveiled the extent to which this compass sanctions belonging to those who embody and enact global North onto-epistemologies, while excluding and denying belonging to those who embody and enact global South onto-epistemologies. This compass serves to devalue, silence, and attempt to erase the humanity, knowledges, and values of immigrant children of Color.

Interrupting the politics of being and belonging in early childhood education requires recognizing and centering global South perspectives, which legitimize the lived experiences of immigrant children of color. Global South onto-epistemologies are sites for the abolition of deficit constructions that pathologize and disempower children of Color, upholding and fostering belonging for young immigrant children of Color. Pérez and Saavedra propose that this requires “our engagement in oppositional politics” (p. 21) via the ongoing problematization of the purpose of early childhood education as pertains to the positioning of immigrant children of Color.

Belonging serves to border and order, attributing value judgments regarding who is included (who belongs) and who is excluded (DeNicolo et al., 2017; Yuval-Davis, 2004). Indeed, the purported neutrality of belonging is challenged by its firm commitment to exclude based on the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, language, citizenship, nationality, and other markers as axes on “grids of power relations in society” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 199). Because belonging is a complex and political process through which “the boundaries of group membership are produced and reproduced” (Stratigos, 2015, p. 48), it is neither a given nor a competency to be achieved by young children (Sumsion & Wong, 2011). As such, belonging must be reconceptualized as an aspect of justice, a right of every child and a core responsibility of the field of early childhood education and society writ large.

Informed by this literature review, I conceptualize belonging as a theoretical and philosophical concept that politically enacts inclusion and exclusion, granting and denying belonging. Because I attend here to how borderings—between inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belonging—are racialized, with respect to immigrants of Color, I employ critical race theory (Bell, 1980, 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1990; Harris, 1993) in combination with Latina feminism (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016; Latina Feminist Group, 2001) as lenses to reread the politics of belonging in the context of the US (Yuval-Davis, 2004, 2006). This conceptual framework affords the overdue examination of connections between the majoritarian story of belonging and longstanding systems of racialized in/equity and in/justice that are maintained and upheld by the politics of belonging.

Conceptual Framework

Yuval-Davis (2004) has detailed how “belonging tends to become ‘naturalized’ and thus invisible in hegemonic formations” (p. 216). Under purportedly neutral aims (Bell, 1995), belonging centers dominant interests, excludes immigrant children of Color, and serves to uphold racial inequities and systems of racial subjugation (Anzaldúa, 1987; Bell, 1980; Harris, 1993). Belonging is a site of harm for immigrants of Color; to perform belonging, “some of us conform to the values of the [white American] culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 20).

To analyze how majoritarian stories and conceptualizations of belonging position and affect young immigrant children of Color, I employ critical race theory (Bell, 1980, 1995; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1990; Harris, 1993), which attends to how these stories and conceptualizations are entangled with systems of racial subjugation, as well as to how race-based ideologies and hierarchies are ingrained in notions of belonging. I also employ Latina feminist epistemologies, which attend to the embodiment of exclusion and the pain it inflicts (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016; Latina Feminist Group, 2001).

Employing a framework shaped by both critical race and Latina feminist perspectives allows for a shift toward expansive notions of belonging that reflect the possibility of positioning oneself as agent and subject (Pérez Huber et al., 2020), rather than “the object of others’ domination” (Harris, 1993, p. 1713). Predicated in the abolition of borders that exclude and harm immigrants of Color (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019), this shift necessarily entails liberation from such domination (Anzaldúa, 1987).

The conceptual racialization of belonging is visible in how conceptual categories (e.g., American, citizen) become co-naturalized with whiteness, whereas others (e.g., immigrant, foreigner) “become the marginalized and de-legitimated categories of blackness” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 9). These conceptual categories “suggest how, in a racialized society where whiteness is positioned as normative, everyone is ranked and categorized in relation to these points of opposition” (p. 9). Co-naturalized with Americanness, whiteness governs whose expressions are censored and sanctioned and constructs immigrants of Color as criminals while simultaneously sponsoring our exploitation and dehumanization (Anzaldúa, 1987). And while those who are constructed as white hold power in society, have the power to exclude, are constructed as citizens, and inherently belong to the society in which they live, those who are othered and whose citizenship is constantly questioned and destructed must prove their deservingness to belong day in and day out. For such individuals and groups, processes of assimilation, erasure, and subjugation are central to belonging, “a political process in which the boundaries of group membership are produced and reproduced” (Stratigos, 2015, p. 48).

Anti-Black ideologies uphold whiteness as “a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination” (Harris, 1993, p. 1715), communicating a lack of belonging to those not aligned with the priorities and agenda of whiteness. The importance of belonging is influenced by perceived threats; “the emotional components of people’s constructions of themselves and their identities become more central the more threatened and less secure they feel” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 202). This means that belonging tends to be important to immigrants of Color; after all, many feel constantly threatened and are persistently constructed as threats (Anzaldúa, 1987). This feeling can be apprehended through cultural intuition, which can be cultivated and sustained from personal experiences combined with ancestral wisdom (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1994) and community memory (Delgado Bernal, 1998). Cultural intuition opposes distortions of our histories and questionings of our humanity as immigrants of Color.

Even as dominant stories of belonging in the US uphold the durable structures of racial subjugation and entangled forms of bigotry, the guise of neutrality keeps belonging largely invisible and uncontested as a property of whiteness. As legal scholar Harris (1993) explained: “The origins of whiteness as property lie in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights” (p. 1714). As property, belonging sustains borders and safeguards boundaries that protect dominant interests while excluding and subjugating immigrants of Color under the cloak of national identity, language, and citizenship (Anzaldúa, 1987; Yuval-Davis, 2004).

In the US, belonging is the property of whiteness; “whiteness and property share a common premise—a conceptual nucleus—of a right to exclude” (Harris, 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness is not limited to those who are identified or identify as white; after all, these categories change—for example, “citizens of Mexican descent were considered White, though over time, political, economic, social, and cultural shifts have forced Mexican Americans out of the White category” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 8). Regarding whiteness as conceptual, Ladson-Billings has explained that despite her Black racial identity, she might be “positioned as conceptually White in relation to, perhaps, a Latino, Spanish-speaking gardener” (p. 9); her racially subjugated positioning might be mitigated by her class and social position: “for that moment I become ‘White’” (p. 9).

Conceptualizing belonging as the property of whiteness affords the understanding that we cannot and should not think of race, racial classification, or belonging as objective or fixed conditions (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). The concept of belonging as the property of whiteness is visible in the Brief for Homer Plessy (Supreme Court of the United States, 1895) which stated: “belonging . . . is property in the same way that a right of action of inheritance is property” (p. 549). According to white supremacist aims, property indexes whiteness—and whiteness is a “property of overwhelming significance and value” (Harris, 1993, p. 1748). It is thus essential to understand how belonging tends to be a property that does not belong to intersectionally-minoritized immigrant children of Color.

With the awareness that racism is pervasive, ingrained, and ordinary in US society, and the understanding that “majoritarian stories are not often questioned because people do not see them as stories but as ‘natural’ parts of everyday life” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 28), I join critical race theorists’ attack on norms and systems that disempower people of Color (Bell, 1995) and reject “traditional research paradigms that have distorted or omitted the history and knowledge” of immigrants of Color (Delgado Bernal, 1998, p. 574). In doing so, I seek “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America” while (re)committing to liberation (Crenshaw et al., 1995, p. xiii). I attend to the centrality of race, racism, and entangled systems of subjugation in dominant conceptualizations of belonging, challenge dominant ideologies, engage in the pursuit of justice, recognize the significance of experiential knowledge, and draw on interdisciplinary perspectives (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001). This is a framework and approach that supports possibilities for disrupting and challenging the status quo of belonging, which excludes (or at least marginalizes) immigrant children of Color.

Methodology

Through critical race methodology, I centrally position my values and lived experiences as a first-generation immigrant mother of Color, critically attending to power relations in society. From this paradigmatic position and with these aims, I critically problematize the political aims of belonging and consider how the majoritarian story of belonging pertains to and positions immigrants of Color, asking:

What happens when belonging is denied to young immigrant children of Color?

What can we learn from the stories of immigrants of Color about belonging?

I answer with a counterstory from my own lived experience and those of my (now adult) son, through writings and safeguarded memories—what the Latina Feminist Group (2001) has called papelitos guardados.

Drawing on my personal and professional experiences as a first-generation Afro-Latina immigrant and mother, I use counterstorytelling to expose, analyze, and challenge majoritarian stories of racial privilege. Delgado (1989) affirms the value of this type of undertaking: “Oppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation” (p. 2436). Counterstories have the potential to “shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 32). I would also add that majoritarian research paradigms are inadequate to frame (let alone capture) the experiences of persons of Color, and counterstories provide an alternative pathway to crucial understandings. Ultimately, I seek to offer insights that enable us to move toward a conceptualization of belonging grounded in firm commitments to equity and justice. This is because “[m]embers of marginalized groups, by virtue of their marginal status, are able to tell stories different from the ones . . . scholars usually hear” (Delgado, 1990, p. 95). Stories such as mine “deserve to be heard” because “they reveal things about the world that we ought to know” (p. 95).

Composed through reflections, reactions, and realities that came to light in dialogue with my son about his reflections on his own lived experiences, my counterstory centers our voices as a call to upend—or at least interrupt—the exclusionary norms of belonging common in the US. Through counterstorytelling, I seek to counter and displace “preconceptions and myths . . . about black criminality” that “shape mindset—the bundle of received wisdoms, stock stories, and suppositions that allocate suspicion, place the burden of proof” on one party or the other, and tell us in cases of divided evidence what probably happened” being “as determinative of outcomes as are the formal laws” (Stefancic & Delgado, 2017, p. 50). Because deprivation from a sense of belonging inflicts social, emotional, and psychological harm, I conclude that belonging must be regarded and established as a right, rather than a racialized privilege awarded in ways that align with and uphold societal power dynamics rooted in racism and entangled systems of exclusion.

With the recognition that “majoritarian methods purport to be neutral and objective yet implicitly make assumptions according to negative stereotypes about people of color” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 29), I purposefully and deliberately engage a methodology that centers the rich ways of knowing and honors the powerful legacies of communities of Color. I reject notions of typicality as indicators of trustworthiness and methodological critiques calling for more accuracy in stories (Farber & Sherry, 1993). Critical race methodology afforded me the development of a story “grounded in real-life experiences and actual empirical data . . . contextualized in social situations that are also grounded in real life” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 36).

Analysis

To craft the counterstory presented here, I engaged my cultural intuition, “ancestral wisdom, community, memory, and intuition” that has influenced my own personal and professional experiences and reading of the existing literature by and about immigrants of Color, visible in my process of giving meaning to, understanding, and identifying pertinent data (Delgado Bernal, 1998, p. 565). As an Afro-Latina woman who is a researcher, immigrant of Color, and mother of children of Color, my cultural intuition has been cultivated and sustained through my personal experiences as an individual, a mother, and an early childhood educator committed to justice, as well as through “collective experience and memory” (p. 564) regarding assimilation, erasure, loss, and resistance. Centering myself and my voice, I engage in “a complex process that is experiential, intuitive, historical, personal, collective, and dynamic” (p. 568).

Cultural intuition was at play as I collected and analyzed a variety of data, including artifacts such as reflective journal entries, an essay my son had written, and pláticas that served as “a way to pass on familial, cultural, and historical stories” (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016, p. 107). In our pláticas, we shared stories, deepened our relationship, and revisited our lived experiences vulnerably. These pláticas also served as a much-needed site for healing. These data were threaded to narrate our intergenerational experiential knowledges as mother and child who identify as (first- and second-generation) immigrants of Color. I offer biographical and autobiographical analyses (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) via a composite, multivocal story that is socially, historically, and politically situated to unveil experiences of not belonging that are directly connected to racism, nationalism, and entangled forms of bigotry and systems of subordination.

I chose to present my findings as a counterstory because narratives are deeply entwined with identities. “Identities are narratives, stories people tell themselves and others about who they are (and who they are not)” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 202). My counterstory of belonging brings together my personal and professional experiences as an individual, mother, and early childhood educator with my child’s reflections and narratives of his own experiences growing up as an immigrant of Color in the US, speaking back to the majoritarian story of belonging. Four threads—data collected during the research process, literature, professional experience, and personal experience—were put into dialogue through a counterstory framed by Yuval-Davis’ politics of belonging and informed by critical race theory and Latina feminist epistemology.

Procedurally, I started with a story written by my (now adult) son for his college application essay, in which he recalls and reflects on his experience as a two-year-old (about to turn three). After reading and reflecting on his experience (which he portrayed unprompted in his college application essay), I journaled my own reflections. Rereading my journal entries, I sought to identify “emotional hot points” and “heightened language” by stopping to highlight passages from my journal entries that elicited pauses, tears, deep breaths, and other embodied signals of emotionality (Cahnmann-Taylor et al., 2009, p. 2536). Identifying my emotional response patterns allowed me to understand the data more fully and respond artfully by integrating my son’s essay and my journaling with papelitos guardados, notes I had kept in writing, in memory, and pictorially about the time and the phenomenon to which he referred (Latina Feminist Group, 2001). After crafting brief trans/scripted counterstories—scripted across transcripts—my son and I engaged in pláticas to debrief.

Through pláticas, a common practice in our household—gathering around the table for an undetermined amount of time to talk, share, and explore issues and experiences in depth—we sought to further understand our collective experience of racialized and exclusionary politics of belonging to examine the concept of belonging from our positioned perspectives (Lawrence, 1992). As Fierros and Delgado Bernal (2016) have shown, pláticas are spiritual undertakings that engage all five senses and provide “potential space for healing” (p. 113). Each was a dialogical site that afforded us the privilege of self-discovery “in relationship to ourselves and others” (Torre, 2008, p. 44).

As sites to address trauma and heal, our pláticas explored how the politics of belonging—marked by whiteness as property—had caused us emotional harm, impacted our social interactions, and inflicted self-doubt in both of us. We engaged in four pláticas, each lasting between 40 and 90 minutes. These pláticas took place at our dinner table and in our kitchen as we each engaged in meal preparation and cooking. Our dialogue was organized around a grocery store incident and experiences living in a town with “urban characteristics,” moving to New York City (an “urban intensive setting”), and a critical race analysis of both sites as instantiated in our experiences and reflections (Milner, 2012).

The emergent counterstory was thus crafted through sharing, listening, challenging, and reflecting on our lived experiences, centering our experiential knowledge. It not only counters majoritarian stories, which tend to pathologize and/or exclude immigrants of Color, but also denounces the harm inflicted by majoritarian stories of belonging that uphold white supremacy and position belonging as property. Such harms are antithetical to the jurisprudence of the 14th Amendment, which formally sanctions both of us as belonging, protected by our status as US citizens. Importantly, our counterstory of not belonging is prefaced by the words of Dixson and Rousseau (2006), who remind us that if we fail to put aside “traditional paradigms and ‘hear’ the counterstories and challenges to the dominant discourse reflected in this work” (p. 4) we are likely to miss the point.

Findings

I remember vividly that, when I read my son’s college essay, I was expecting to engage him in conversations pertaining to the content and writing process, but was deeply unaware of the emotional work it would entail. Amidst tears, I wrote: “Truth be told, I had no idea that the incident which had taken place in less than an hour in a supermarket 14 years prior had impacted him emotionally so much.” I knew that each time he protested my attempts to trespass expected behaviors, feelings of inadequacy reignited. I reflected in my journal: “Maybe for him, it would have been much easier if I had given in, acted white, spoke English. But that would have erased who I am.” You see, in the US, even though there is no official language, anyone who does not benefit from the co-naturalization of citizenship and whiteness is expected to approximate whiteness. One way of “passing” can be achieved through acquiescing to English. Passing means erasing part of yourself. Passing means giving up on any form of resistance. Again, and again, passing meant internalizing oppression. Most of all, passing meant acting in ways that pledged allegiance to whiteness (Bell, 1995; Harris, 1993).

As I read his essay, I realized that 14 years earlier, as he was about to turn three, my son had understood how I did not belong and negotiated numerous related tensions as he yearned to belong, a common yearning for all humans (Anzaldúa, 1987; Yuval-Davis, 2006). I had rejected passing as embracing “self-denial,” and I recognized the privilege of such a choice. Cheryl Harris’s grandmother is an example of someone who did not have such a choice. Harris (1993) recounts how in the 1930s, after her mother’s family migrated from Mississippi to Chicago, her grandmother took a job at a retail store. To feed her family, her grandmother found herself “transgressing boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between dualities . . . bifurcated into light/dark, good/ bad, white/Black” (p. 1711). Every day, her grandmother entered “the white world, albeit on a false passport, not merely passing, but trespassing” (p. 1710). Then, at the end of the day, as she went from her workplace to her home, she removed “her mask, and reentered herself. Day in and day out, she made herself invisible, then visible again, for a price too inconsequential to do more than barely sustain her family and at a cost too precious to conceive” (p. 1710).

Socioeconomically able to reject the harms and the strains that tend to be part and parcel of passing, which Harris’s grandmother eventually found too much to bear, I was also conceptually white within the context of my profession as a Ph.D. holder in the position of professor. Yet, I was constantly questioned and told that I did not belong. Though I had an American passport and my son had been born in these United States and had, per the 14th Amendment, citizenship (formal belonging), my passport was often questioned and viewed as “false,” and my presence often challenged as illegal. My ways of being were often situated as undesirable acts of trespassing that were punished by suspicious looks, raised voices in response to straightforward requests for clarification, demands to “go back to your country,” and outright calls to “Speak English, you are in America!”

My son’s college essay began:

I was a spirited toddler, to say the least. But I think I outdid my previous exploits when I found myself with fists and feet bouncing off the floor of my local Publix supermarket yelling at my mom “NO MORE PORTUGUESE!” – refusing to stop until the whole store noticed, much to her chagrin.

As I read his 650 words on the page, a flood of emotions led to a stream of tears. I revisited my trauma, my self-doubt, my feelings of inadequacy as an immigrant mother of Color raising my child bilingually in the US. I remembered how we had formal citizenship but were constantly told we did not belong through everyday microaggressions such as Where are you from? followed by Where are you really from? and Where are your people from? Such interactions constantly communicated that despite my American passport, I did not belong here. Formally, yes, I am a citizen. Nevertheless, I was rarely read as such.

Around the time the incident that opened my son’s college essay took place, I had written a poem that captured some of the tensions I had undergone as I was denied belonging and experienced harm, nearly losing myself as I contemplated assimilation:

My grandmother’s name was Maria

Maria Luiza

My mother’s name is Maria

Maria Suely

To honor them, I was named Mariana

Mariana in Brazil, flowing together as a river

Mary Anna in the United States,

separated by wide borderlands

As I immigrated, my name, like my heart, became two,

broken, taken apart.

Why can’t they say Mariana

pronouncing the r in Mariana as /d/?

I constantly asked myself.

In the beginning, I wanted to change my name

From Mariana to Anne, Mary, or Louise.

I just wanted not to stand out,

not to be so noticeably different

By changing my name to an American one,

I too would become American

As if in a magic trick.

Perhaps by having an American name

no one would notice my accent ¹

As written in this poem, captured in papelitos guardados from almost two decades earlier, it was clear that, much like my son, I had come to internalize persistent messaging I had received verbally, through gestures, judgments, and other physical, emotional, and psychological affronts: “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to . . . where you belong” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 75). I understood all too well the need to belong. This denied belonging also shaped the experiences of my child, especially when he trespassed the norms expected by whiteness. An example had happened that fateful day in a grocery store in a community marked by “urban characteristics” (Milner, 2012), alongside Confederate flags.

Yuval-Davis (2006) explains that belonging comprises “the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers . . . to promote their own power positions within and outside the collectivity” (p. 205). Thus, even as a college professor with a Ph.D., within the context of a society committed to continuing to uphold whiteness as property, I was sent, again and again, the message that I did not belong. As the mother of a young child of Color who identifies as a second-generation immigrant, I was repeatedly given the message that if I did not want my child to experience the emotional trauma I experienced, I had better raise him in ways that assimilated him into the majoritarian story of the US, a story of power and individualism authored by those in power to exclude and subjugate intersectionally-minoritized individuals and communities. In this narrative, those who are not the numeric majority are positioned as lesser than, and are devalued and marginalized in society (McCarty, 2002). My son’s citizenship as an American was tenuous, as he was constantly constructed as “other” (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019) and pushed toward settler colonial belonging that was imbued with emotional, psychological, and historical harm.

His essay conveyed the complexity of the situation and situated the event within a politics of belonging that furthers the interests of whiteness as property:

I think it’s fair to say that nobody there fully understood the situation. Because I was three, I didn’t see the value of being bilingual. The judgmental Publix shoppers, surrounded in the strip mall by Confederate flags, didn’t seem to understand that I was not just a bratty “foreigner,” but a toddler in identity crisis.

Although my son was, indeed, just a young toddler, and we had moved away from the setting with urban characteristics where we lived during his earliest childhood years, he remembered that the strip mall was decorated with Confederate flags, deemed by many in that state to represent Southern pride and equate to belonging there. He knew that I was being read with judgment. And he also knew that even though he had been born in the US, Publix shoppers read him as a “foreigner” and enacted conceptual and relational borders that denied him a sense of belonging.

He knew it was easier in the setting where he was growing up to favor English. As noted in his essay, English was the only language he heard aside from conversations with his parents and calls with family in Brazil. Portuguese made him feel unique, but sometimes toddler him did not want to be unique. He just wanted to fit in. Noting the connectedness of Color and the language of supremacy in the US, he wanted to fit in, to bask in the advantages reaped “by virtue of being constructed as white” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 75). Whether consciously or unconsciously, at age two he knew that “culture and language . . . multiply the privileges of those who approximate” white ways of being, behaving, and communicating (p. 75). He was highly aware that “being the child of a first-generation immigrant of color with accented English in the South made me stand out.” This reality mitigated his belonging because, in association with me, he at least partly lost the privileges of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993).

Longing to belong, he admittedly preferred English, self-imposing processes of assimilation, white proxemics, and erasure—even as a young toddler. He already knew that belonging was predicated on him speaking English (Yuval-Davis, 2006), “the only acceptable language in society” (Castillo, 1995, p. 39), although he also knew Portuguese as the language of his “childhood, family, and community” and that his mother “may not be able to rid herself of an accent; society has denigrated her first language,” leading her to “become anxious and self conscious” (p. 39).

My son’s reflective essay conveyed his conflicted identity development and emotional turmoil, capturing his difficulty navigating the tenuous identity of being a multilingual child of Color and a tenuous state of belonging to dominant American society. Membership in the latter was predicated on racial privilege, on the accrual of “advantages by virtue of being constructed as white” through white cultural and linguistic practices by “those who approximate them” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 75). As a two-year-old, about to turn three, he already understood the privileges of fitting in and performing whiteness. He also understood how this put him in a precarious position of deeming his mother’s linguistic and cultural practices inferior and/or inadequate. He occupied what Anzaldúa (1987) called “psychological borderlands.”

Negotiating dehumanizing borderlands deeply affected him, and me, socially and emotionally. It inflicted deep soul wounds, a symptom of the intergenerational historical trauma we were subjected to simply for being who we are (Sotero, 2006; Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020). Our soul wounds reopened each time one of us witnessed the other being denied a sense of belonging, and we were denied a much-needed process of healing. When my soul wound was becoming deep and (nearly) unbearable, by the time he entered kindergarten, I decided to seek a new home for us. As Anzaldúa (1987) has articulated, “I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (p. 16) and on my son. I had to leave home for the sake of our belonging—yearning for and taking action to seek out a kind of belonging that centered our identities, experiences, values, and practices.

I too had undergone numerous tensions as I was denied belonging and experienced harm, nearly losing myself as I contemplated assimilation. I too had come to internalize the persistent messaging described by Anzaldúa (1987), constantly voiced to me through statements, gestures, judgments, and other physical, emotional, and psychological affronts: “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to . . . where you belong” (p. 75). Such experiences led me to understand all too well the emotional and psychological toll of being excluded, of not belonging. As such, I sought to foster belonging for my son, not by espousing or condoning processes of assimilation and erasure, but by removing ourselves from the context in which we were withstanding ongoing trauma. Where every step we took, every move we made was read racially, as passing or trespassing (Bell, 1995; Harris, 1993).

In juxtaposition to our formal status as citizens (our legal and supposed belonging in/to US society through the 14th Amendment, Section 1), and despite prior judicial decisions pertaining to school desegregation (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), my son and I confessed the pressures, doubts, and denials we had experienced living in a “diverse” setting with “urban characteristics” and a population over 50% white. We realized the emotional and psychological toll of being who we are in a predominantly white community, where we were constantly bordered and othered. We saw how being expected to pass or accused of trespassing had led us to internalize the racialized structures of US society, upholding the frequently hidden and unconscious formulas of white superiority.

Although we understand that a critical race analysis of context is interdisciplinary and needs “to situate race and/or its intersections (historical, political, social, geographic, temporal, etc.)” (Pérez Huber et al., 2020, p. 5), and we do not want to make this story simplistic, removing ourselves from a predominantly white site—where we had both experienced emotional and psychological abuse and trauma—we removed ourselves from a context in which we had been (dis)located, segregated, and experienced constant discrimination, a change that allowed us to suspend some of these ongoing psychological strains. In our case, life in a community deemed “diverse” with “urban characteristics” left us in a permanent space of marginalization and subjected to demands that we pass (via white proxemics) or face chastisement for trespassing (when we did not approximate whiteness). This was a setting in which my norm of directness was constructed as bluntness or anger. I was expected to crack a code to white politeness that demands requests be worded as questions. Not doing so meant being judged and othered. My son and I understood the palpable consequences of my actions; “people of color suffer economically for not acculturating” and undergo “psychological conflict” as we embrace our “dual identity” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 85). Yet, I did not want him to feel that “we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie” (p. 85). I knew “what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture” (p. 85) and yearned for a place where he and I could be perceived as fully human, as whole.

Invisible racialized borders were part of my everydayness and anticipating and navigating border crossings demanded significant attention. While I knew there were no guarantees, the exclusion from belonging and psychological harm we had withstood led me to move elsewhere, in hopes of change. With a commitment to repositioning myself agentively, I decided to move to New York City, an “urban-intensive setting” where children of Color are the numeric majority in the public schools. This thinking goes against the very premise of Brown v. Board of Education, 1954—against the idea that the problem for persons of Color has been location and access. For me, it was and is clear that among the ideological legacies of a country wherein racism is ordinary, pervasive, and ingrained are durable borders and mechanisms for exclusion that are deeply ideological and deeply harmful (Davis, 2001).

I was taken aback by my son’s critical consciousness regarding the intentionality and purpose of my actions, as I shared with him during one of our pláticas when we discussed this excerpt from his essay:

Noticing my resistance developing and embracing my identity as a second-generation immigrant of color, my parents made a decision to move to a place where multilingualism was not an exception, but the norm. It took me a while to move on from this phase, enrollment in a dual-language (English and Spanish) public elementary school in an extremely diverse neighborhood and school district helped me understand the importance of languages, picking up Spanish while cementing Portuguese into my identity. As I heard various languages spoken in school, public transportation, and street corner bodegas, I came to see my bilingualism as an asset, instead of a hindrance. I was increasingly able to understand people on street corners and talk with people in stores. Through different languages, I was able to see the world differently. Each required a different kind of thought and understanding, but each provided a different kind of joy.

While his school in New York City was less than 15% white, and could thus be classified as a segregated setting, it was there that my son began to see and embrace the assets afforded by his identity and practices. It was in the context of a white minority and majority of persons of Color that he was “able to see the world differently,” unveiling the affordances of racial affinity to the process and experience of belonging.

The city we had left was not “rural,” as my son recalled and had written in his essay; it had around 100,000 inhabitants and “urban characteristics,” according to the typology developed by Milner (2012), falling into the category of sites that “may be beginning to experience increases in challenges that are sometimes associated with urban contexts” (p. 559), such as immigrant children and multilingual children. As my son captured in his college essay reflection, such sites tend to be characterized by defaults that include pathological portrayals of otherness and ideologies rooted in white supremacy—not only in terms of race, but in terms of communicative norms, values, and other facets (Davis, 2001). Civil War ideology was not only alive but foundational to belonging in that community, state, and region.

Together we moved from that place, where two-thirds of the residents were white and Latinx residents comprised around 5% of the population, to a neighborhood where half of the residents were Latinx and one-third were African American. Knowing that research clearly shows the impact of teachers of Color on the development, academic achievement, and futures of children of Color (e.g., Gershenson et al., 2017), I purposefully and very intentionally enrolled my son in a public school in which over 80% of the students were of Color, the teachers were predominantly Latinx, and bilingualism and multilingualism were normalized. I understood that his future and his wellbeing would suffer unless we found ways to break down ideological borders and abolish pathological paradigms.

As I shared some of my papelitos guardados with my son in our pláticas, we discussed how a few years ago I posted on social media that I was proud my son attended a school with a student population that was approximately 80% nonwhite—and a white literacy scholar responded to my post with surprise. Why would I want my child in what was, from her perspective, a segregated school? The reason is that I wanted him to have fewer experiences of psychological harm, and I feel deeply that “a politics of resistance needs to be directed not only at oppressed people’s social and economic locations but also against their internalizations of forced constructions of self and identity” (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 203).

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between belonging and young children who are immigrants of Color as instantiated in my son’s memories of his experiences of not belonging combined with my reflections as his mother. Through critical race methodology, I centered our values and lived experiences, critically attending to power relations in American society. Findings underscored the harm inflicted by majoritarian definitions of belonging in the field of early childhood education, which tend to be co-naturalized with whiteness. This was compounded by the durable racialized ideological borders and pathological paradigms informing the politics of belonging, which are routinely deployed to exclude young immigrant children of Color.

I am in no way trying to suggest that there are no racial inequities in urban-intensive New York City; there are. Nevertheless, my son was able to see his own story in the lives of classmates, through subway interactions, and at street corner bodegas. This pattern is coherent with Scott’s (1997) finding that children of Color who experienced more interaction and had more contact with white persons experienced more psychological distress. Attending to the meaning, importance, and relevance of the findings presented herein, I return to the research questions that guided this study. They delineate the subsections below.

What Happens When Belonging is Denied to Young Immigrant Children of Color?

When immigrant children of Color are denied belonging, they may experience emotional and psychological harm—not as isolated occurrences, but as an ongoing phenomenon in their lives that becomes part of who they are (and are not). Not belonging tends to lead to feelings of inferiority and attempts to fit in. The intergenerational counterstory presented in this article points to the likelihood that inclusion in/into white dominated sites, even if those sites have “urban characteristics” (Milner, 2012), can be expected to involve normative and relational borders that are rooted in white supremacist ideologies and pathologize immigrants of Color, situating “the problem of race” within those individuals and their communities, rather than as a deeply entrenched system of structural inequities that frame and come to be reinforced through racialized interpersonal power dynamics.

Revisiting the counterstory through the lens of belonging, it is important to note the ways dominant stories of belonging are racialized, co-naturalizing citizenship and/with whiteness. Further, it is important to acknowledge the role of race and tenacious liberalism alike in safeguarding whiteness as property, even when formal belonging and citizenship criteria are met per established jurisprudence. Likewise, it is essential to examine racist myths, such as the myth of meritocracy, with respect to belonging. This is because, for instance, I always worked hard and had earned a Ph.D. as an immigrant, but my citizenship has been and continues to be questionable and questioned. Despite our formal status as citizens, our belonging remains subjective, stamped by racism, and informed by historical ideologies that dehumanize persons of Color (Davis, 2001).

What Can We Learn from the Stories of Immigrants of Color About Belonging?

It is important to understand how (dis)placing immigrant children of Color in predominantly white settings, even if those settings feature urban characteristics, may inflict psychological harm. As Guinier (2004) has underscored, for many children who are racially situated at the margins and repeatedly told they do not belong, “segregated schools provided a sanctuary from psychological conflict” (p. 111). We must acknowledge that placing our Black, Indigenous, and other babies, children, and youth of Color in schools where whiteness reigns ontologically, epistemologically, and ideologically may inflict trauma. Might these be sites where young learners of Color continue to be negatively stereotyped simply for being who they are?

Although the common saying “what doesn’t kill you make you stronger” has been affirmed by social psychologists’ findings that in some cases “the ability to maintain a sense of self-worth in a hostile environment may actually enhance self-esteem” (Guinier, 2004, p. 111), I do not see this as an ethical endeavor. To me, as an Afro-Latina woman, an immigrant, a mother, and an educator, the costs and burdens of passing and trespassing required in white dominant spaces tend not to outweigh the benefits to Black, Indigenous, and other persons of Color. Indeed, to date “there's not much evidence of chronic psychological damage done to blacks’ self-esteem as a result of segregation” (p. 111), yet there is plenty of evidence of the trauma inflicted by/through supposedly integrated schools and schooling, which overwhelmingly continues to (re)inscribe white supremacist mindsets, norms, and frameworks (Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020).

I am deeply aware that socioeconomic privilege allowed my family to extract ourselves from a white majority setting in/through which we were subjected to the unfettered right to exclude that remains inherent to whiteness as property, where urban characteristics are present and the Civil War is still understood as “the war of Northern aggression,” where we were repeatedly denied the right to belong, and where we withstood and had to navigate trauma. While I know location change is not an option for or desired by all families, the intergenerational counterstory offered here is a story of resistance. As a counterpoint to the rights purportedly ensured by the 14th Amendment and legislation such as Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, I note that in my family’s experience, white approximation was a site of harm and exclusion that required committed disruption.

Conclusion

Rarely are early childhood education researchers afforded long-term insights pertaining to the emotional harms withstood by immigrant children of Color and their families, inflicted by a politics of exclusion that defines belonging as the property of whiteness. The counterstory offered here allows us a few such insights. To understand how and why immigrant children of Color, their families, and their communities experience historical trauma, it is important to understand that “trauma is deliberately and systematically inflicted upon a target population by a subjugating, dominant population” (Sotero, 2006, p. 94). In my family’s story, the trauma inflicted by Publix onlookers and others in the community who demanded our passing or sanctioned our trespassing was a well-developed and familiar narrative and action pattern that has long served to uphold the privileges of whiteness and border and others all who deviate from whiteness as the yardstick of humanity. Such trauma “is not limited to a single catastrophic event, but continues over an extended period of time” (p. 94).

This truth emerged again and again in our pláticas, as my now-adult son and I recounted the extent to which racial trauma was pervasive and ingrained where we lived during his early childhood. We shared examples and realized that our individual stories of racial trauma reverberated. As such, we wondered about the affordances of affinity-based groups as sites for healing, a potentially high-impact remedy not currently available by/through US legal or healthcare systems or channels. Importantly, my son and I realized that racial trauma we experienced many years ago has had palpable consequences on our history as a family, as well as physical, psychological, social, and economic effects we can name.

Reflecting on our lived experiences through the creation of our counterstory, we believe that legal and educational systems and society writ large need to move past formal notions of belonging bestowed via citizenship and attend to the palpable consequences of ideological and relational borders that racialize and exclude immigrants and subjugate those whose identities, practices, and legacies do not align in tidy ways (or at all) with the aims of whiteness as property. That is, although we have long known that Americanness and whiteness are co-naturalized, upending these norms will require specific remedies to address the trauma inflicted by the dominant group via displacement, white supremacist ideologies and institutional norms (including implicit bias), physical and psychological violence, economic destruction, and cultural dispossession.

If our counterstory is any indication, locales with urban characteristics that remain demographically marked and governed by whiteness uphold ideologies of deficit, authoring and othering immigrants of Color as pathological and seeking to remedy them. Most of all, our counterstory points toward the need to abolish the politics of exclusion rooted in whiteness as property that is so central to belonging in the US, and instead normalize more expansive and inclusive stories and sites of belonging. New forms of belonging must center “the experiences and knowledge systems of peoples outside the dominant paradigm” (Ladson-Billings, 2000, p. 260), and such attempts must focus on and thoroughly integrate pursuits of collective healing.

Implications

Understanding belonging as property means understanding how—to uphold whiteness as property—immigrants of Color have been emotionally and psychologically harmed across time and space. The trauma experienced as immigrant children of Color and their families are denied belonging is not limited to a single event. It continues over an extended period, impacting the physical and psychological well-being of those traumatized. Moreover, the pervasive and ingrained denial of belonging experienced by immigrants of Color and their children resonate throughout communities of immigrants of Color, comprising a collective experience of trauma and influencing disparities cross-generationally. Such experiences and disparities need to be understood historically, as a longstanding history of harm often marks the lives and experiences of immigrants of Color and their children.

Immigrant children of Color and their families have been displaced (e.g., relocated to refugee camps) and othered (e.g., labeled as English language learners), withstanding psychological violence, losing resources and legal rights to citizenship, and undergoing processes of erasure (including the loss of their linguistic and cultural practices). Efforts to redress the trauma inflicted must entail reparations, “the legal principle of restitution . . . as applied to crimes against humanity” (Muhammad, 2013, p. 147). Reparations “officially acknowledge aspects of . . . undisputed history and . . . provide restitution for these historical wrongs” (p. 150). In the US, reparations must be put in place in tangible and ideological realms—and must override interest convergence, when the interests of immigrants of Color diverge from those of whiteness. Given the undisputed history of harm and trauma inflicted by the politics of belonging as property, reparations are a crucial first step toward addressing associated harms, trauma, and resulting injustices.

Ultimately, belonging as property is the antithesis of what the word “belonging” purports to do, given that it is predicated on a politics of exclusion. While belonging has been shown to be extremely important to young children—having been linked to their learning, development, self-actualization, identity, behavior, and more—belonging does not simply happen. Continuing to enact a politics of belonging that exclude, border, and other immigrant children of Color is to continue inflicting racialized harm, denying the humanity of these children and their families, and upholding white supremacy. Although the US as a country has been based on property rights from the beginning, and belonging has been deemed to be a property (e.g., Plessy v. Ferguson defined belonging as property akin to inheritance), I conclude by calling for the abolition of the majoritarian story of belonging alongside its politicized and racialized borders and propose that belonging be (re)claimed as an undeniable right. We must act to ensure the human rights of immigrants of Color in the US to interrupt and transform the nation’s legacy of dehumanization and exclusion. Prioritizing human and civil rights over property rights is not only just and possible—it is long overdue.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-uex-10.1177_00420859211017967 – Supplemental material for On the Abolition of Belonging as Property: Toward Justice for Immigrant Children of Color

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-uex-10.1177_00420859211017967 for On the Abolition of Belonging as Property: Toward Justice for Immigrant Children of Color by Mariana Souto-Manning in Urban Education

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mariana Souto-Manning

Notes

Author Biographies

Mariana Souto-Manning is professor of Early Childhood Education and Teacher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York, USA. Founding Co-Director of the Center for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development (CITED), Souto-Manning holds additional academic appointments at the University of Iceland and King’s College London. Professor Souto-Manning’s research critically examines inequities and injustices in teaching and teacher education, (re)centering methodologies and pedagogies on the lives, values, and experiences of intersectionally-minoritized people of Color. Souto-Manning regularly collaborates with teachers and engages in community-based research. Problematizing racism, colonization, assimilation, and entangled systems of oppression in schooling and society, she critically examines theoretical and methodological issues and dilemmas of doing research with intersectionally-minoritized communities of Color, considering questions such as “critical for whom?” and “according to whom?” In addition to ten books and numerous book chapters, Souto-Manning has authored or coauthored over 80 peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Teacher Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Teachers College Record, among other journals. She has received a number of research awards, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teacher Education Award and AERA Teaching and Teacher Education Mid-Career Award.

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