Abstract
Research on new immigrant incorporation and schooling inequalities has almost entirely neglected the experiences of schooling for children of immigrants in new destinations. Additionally, while the ethnographic literature on children of immigrants focuses on high school students, recent studies show that patterns of minority achievement deficit become set in significant ways by middle school. Using participant observation, this study investigates the experiences of immigrant and second-generation Mexican American youth in a small-town Pacific Northwest junior high school in order to understand their low academic achievement when compared with the U.S.-born Anglo youth at the school. Building on the segmented assimilation model and stratification literature on minority youth in school, this study finds that the school community marginalizes Mexican American students. This study highlights how marginalization in school for Mexican American youth is not limited to the urban high school setting, and that school factors across different contexts persist in creating academic disadvantage for Mexican American youth and especially for boys.
The academic achievement gap for Latino 1 youth in the United States is stark. Two related examples of this achievement gap are the low test scores and low rates of high school completion for Latino students across the country; these low completion rates and low test scores are especially acute in comparison with their white counterparts (Gándara and Contreras 2009; see also, Jensen and Sawyer 2013). Latinos are also “the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority group” in the nation, increasing the need to understand their low levels of academic achievement (Gándara and Contreras 2009, 5). Studying the schooling experiences of Latino students contributes to understanding the ways in which school context and the quality of relationships in school can academically disadvantage Latino youth, resulting in an academic achievement gap.
Studies of Latino schooling experiences tend to focus on urban high schools where coethnic minorities are well established and the numerical majority ethnic group (e.g., Kasinitz et al. 2008; López 2003; Valenzuela 1999). Recently, researchers from a variety of disciplines have taken critical notice of new sites of Mexican immigrant incorporation; these new areas are mostly in small to midsized towns (e.g., Marrow 2011; Massey 2008; Kandel and Parrado 2006; Durand, Massey, and Capoferro 2005; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005). In contrast with the traditional urban context, many (while certainly not all) of these towns are changing from being nearly all Anglo to significantly Latino as the immigrants primarily hail from Mexico. The majority of Latin American immigrants are still concentrated in traditional gateways; however, a significant number are in these new high-growth areas (Hirschman and Massey 2008). While researchers have studied the experiences of Latin American immigrants to new destinations in the Midwest and Southeast United States (e.g., Fennelly 2008; Gouveia, Carranza, and Cogua 2005; Grey and Woodrick 2005; Shutika 2005; Sizemore 2004), little research has focused on the school experiences of the children of immigrants in these new destinations. 2 My research addresses this break in the literature, focusing on the schooling experiences for Latino youth in a new destination context.
This paper draws on the segmented assimilation framework and the stratification literature on minority youth in school in order to learn more about how students fare in a school context different from urban schools. Urban cases have comprised the bulk of the research out of which the segmented assimilation framework emerged. In addition, this study explores the junior high experience as another type of uninvestigated case, but also because studies have demonstrated junior high is a point for intervention (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). 3 This paper argues that face-to-face interaction in the school context is a critical variable, which disentangled through ethnographic exploration can fill out the segmented assimilation model to more clearly demonstrate the social dynamics of producing divestment and stigmatization for Latino children of immigrant families. In this paper, I address the question, Are teacher–student interactions affecting Latino student academic achievement/integration? How so?
The stratification literature on minority youth in school (e.g., Becker 2010; Gándara and Contreras 2009; Valdéz 1996; Waters 1996; Gibson and Ogbu 1991; Matute-Bianchi 1986) illustrate the importance of exploring interactions at school as crucial to investigating how children of immigrants are incorporated into their communities. Research on the incorporation of Latin American origin immigrants into U.S. society, and Mexican-origin immigrants specifically, suggest that there is reason for concern that they will experience downward mobility and join marginalized sectors of society (Portes, Fernandez-Kelly, and Haller 2009; see also, Donato, Stainback, and Bankston 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2001). The seminal study of children of immigrants by Portes and Rumbaut (2001; see also, Valenzuela 1999) argues that the urban context is a critical contributor to the marginalization of minority groups. They maintain that the context of urban poverty and ghettos for U.S.-born minorities sends a message to newer minority groups about their life chances and provides a normative model for resistance strategies grounded in perceptions of hostility from mainstream institutions such as school (2001, 60–61). Yet, in many of these new destinations there are no established minority youth cultures (disaffected or not) for them to model after. In the community of this study, the immigrant population is at an early stage of their U.S. experience, as most of their families have been in the United States less than ten years.
The setting for this study arguably could not be more different from similar studies of schooling for children of immigrants in the United States. For this study, the setting is a school in a small community in the Pacific Northwest where the Latino students are primarily Mexican-born and make up 20 percent of the total student population. 4 At this school, the newer generation has no long-term established coethnic minorities from whom they can model, and studying school interactions can show the production of race and gender in the classrooms, hallways, and other school spaces to see how these processes may contribute to the disproportionately low academic achievement of the Mexican-descent youth.
This study investigates the experiences of Latino children of immigrants in a specific school context. The following section describes the role of climate of reception in shaping academic stratification of immigrant youth as conceptualized by the segmented assimilation theory and suggests how some of the theory’s main features may be extended to study interactions in a specific school environment. Next, the section discusses the literature on ascriptive processes and youth rebellion shaping academic stratification, which conceptualizes urban school patterns in racial and gender socialization of Latino youth from immigrant families focusing on students’ relationships with their teachers. This literature develops a basis for comparison with new immigrant destinations in a small-town context and offers key conceptual factors to extend the climate of reception framework.
Climate of Reception
Segmented assimilation proposes that a particularly negative climate of reception for Mexican-origin immigrants helps explain why Mexican-origin immigrants do worse economically than immigrants of other nationalities, while their children are at a disadvantage when it comes to academic achievement (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993; see also, Feliciano and Rumbaut 2005). Family structure and parent socioeconomic status are also considered in the model (Portes, Fernandez-Kelly, and Haller 2009). As well, a study of two different new destination towns shows variation in social and economic outcomes for Mexican immigrants as shaped by differing contexts of reception in each town (Donato, Stainback, and Bankston 2005). According to the segmented assimilation thesis, the climate of reception is reflected in three different modes of incorporation: government, society, and the coethnic community. For each mode, incorporation can be neutral, positive, or negative, and together these modes describe how well the group is integrated, and the quality of integration denotes the type of assimilation pathway for the group. These modes of incorporation are mediating factors that assist or inhibit parents in guiding their children’s acculturation pathway. These modes interact, as the wider social net of coethnic communities may play a helpful or obstructive role, mediating experiences with discrimination, common societal and governmental reception (filters) with which children and their parents may struggle.
The segmented assimilation model in its current form is not a sufficient framework to study the experiences of Latino children of immigrants in a specific school context. However, by extending and specifying each of the aforementioned incorporation modes (government, society, and the coethnic community), the model can be developed to capture school-specific dynamics.
Government factors: school and district administrative policies
Administrative support in the successful adaptation of the Latino students is expressed in policies at the school and district levels. Examples of such policies would be allocation of resources, choices in curriculum, tracking, and activities sponsored by the school.
Host society: Anglo teachers and students
Societal climate of reception in the segmented assimilation model refers to the presence or absence of prejudice from U.S.-born whites toward an immigrant population. In the specific school context, the “societal climate of reception” refers to the presence or absence of prejudice from Anglo teachers and other staff, students, and parents.
Coethnic networks at school
A concentrated coethnic community with many entrepreneurs or professionals is the most favorable scenario for new immigrants, because immigrant group members can use those social resources to counteract other types of disadvantages. The availability of a coethnic community in the school context is indicated by the presence or absence of Mexican-descent students, parents, and staff as well as their cohesiveness and ability to meaningfully support each other in ways that compensate for the challenges of discrimination and other obstacles.
Ascriptive processes and youth rebellion
Valenzuela (1999) finds that many teachers have negative attitudes and low levels of support for Mexican American youth they characterize as rebellious against school and these attitudes are key factors in the high rates of low achievement and dropout for Latino students. However, she also finds there was no lack of interest in learning by the youth (see also Suárez-Orozco and Qin 2005). Teachers’ relational engagement with students can be divided into four areas: teacher expectations, selective engagement, skill, and teacher attitudes. Low expectations from teachers are an indication of a support deficit for students (Suárez-Orozco and Qin 2005; see also Valenzuela 1999). Another means to support Mexican-descent students is teacher skills. Spanish language, biculturalism, or knowledge of their immigrant students’ cultural background would all be examples of this type of teacher skills. A teacher’s skill deficit would then be indicated by the teacher’s inability to meet the needs of their immigrant students because of linguistic or cultural barriers. This study explores the interactions between Mexican American youth and their teachers at the school with a focus on attitudes and support levels.
Gender, in combination with other social locations, has been shown to be a critical factor in shaping academic achievement. Gendered teacher perceptions and the types of roles available and reinforced for each gender/ethnic group in school shape expectations and put some students at higher risk of low academic achievement. Support deficit and negative attitudes by teachers has been found to be particularly the case for boys, and especially U.S.-born children of immigrants (López 2003). This paper builds on understanding gendered schooling experiences of varying support from teachers (e.g., Suárez-Orozco and Qin 2005; see also, López 2003, and Valenzuela 1999).
Investigating experiences of Mexican-descent youth from inside a small-town junior high school can shed light on their experiences within a new immigrant frontier. Exploring the interactions between students and teachers is crucial to investigating how the students are incorporated into their new community, and if, like their urban counterparts, they experience marginalization in school. To reiterate, this paper addresses the question: Are teacher–student interactions affecting Latino student academic achievement/integration? How so?
Study Site and Methodology
The site of this study is Mossyville Junior High School, in Mossyville, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. 5 Mossyville is near my hometown where I grew up and I spent time in Mossyville as a child. Mossyville is characteristic of a new immigrant destination community in a new gateway state. Like many new destinations, Mossyville is experiencing a high influx of new Latin American–origin immigrants. As late as 1996, Mossyville Junior High had fewer than 2 percent Latino students; by 2006, they had 20 percent Latino students. As of 2012, about 30 percent of the students were Latino (U.S. Department of Education 2014).
Mossyville is the only junior high school in this small town of roughly twenty thousand people and the school has fewer than four hundred students, the majority of whom are from working-class families of various gradations of low income. 6 Drawing from conversations with Latino students and parents, as well as school staff, it seemed clear to me all of the Latino students are of Mexican descent. The non-Mexican students at the school are U.S.-born Anglo Americans, and the majority of the Mexican American students are foreign-born. Most of the immigrant families came from Michoacán to Mossyville between 1999 and 2004. The immigrant families are mostly two-parent households and the parents primarily work in the local factories; however, some parents work on farms.
There was a clear academic achievement gap between the Anglo and Mexican American students, both at the junior high and across the school district. One measure of this achievement gap is the test scores in math and reading. The percentage of Mexican American students not meeting statewide goals in math was double that of the Anglo youth in each elementary, junior high, and in high school. Moreover, the gap between the two groups increased with each additional level of schooling. That is, for the Mossyville school district, the achievement gap was present but smallest at the elementary school level, higher at the junior high, and greatest among the high school students. 7
I performed field research at the Junior High for fourteen months. I gained access to the research site in the summer of 2006 when I met with the Superintendent of the school district, Mr. Campbell. At this meeting, I proposed to volunteer my services informally as a Spanish–English teaching aide in their junior high school to conduct my research. A friendly school staff member, Alice, later that day invited me to stay in her home while I did my work just blocks away from the junior high school. I accepted her offer and moved in during the early fall until the end of the year, spending four to five days per week at the junior high school. The next year, I visited the junior high school once or twice a month for the duration of 2007.
The greatest bulk of data is from classroom observations, but I also spent time in the other schools in the district, school sporting events, volunteered at parent–teacher conferences, and carpooled with parents, teachers, and other school staff. I went to Latino parent meetings, school staff meetings, and I “hung out” with kids, teachers, and other staff before, during, and after school. 8 I volunteered informally as an in-classroom teaching assistant in a total of twenty-six different classrooms of varying school subjects and students. My main informants included the majority of all the teachers and staff at the junior high, as well as majority of Mexican American students and a small number of Anglo students. My greatest entrée was with the girls. Given my female status, the fact that I dressed casually and did not have a formal role at the school, and was at times asked for a hall pass (confused for a high school student), they might have considered me somewhere between their peer and an adult. My white status marked me as an ethnic outsider to Mexican American students, but an ethnic insider to the almost entirely Anglo school staff. While the Anglo students did not generally take interest in me, the school staff did. The school staff overall seemed to value the volunteer work I did at the school. I had additional entrée with particular staff members because my mother had taught at a junior high school in a nearby school district with a staff member’s parent.
I analyzed the data using content and narrative analysis strategies. The term content analysis is usually attributed to the process of applying a coding scheme to data, such as field notes or interviews (Berg 1989, 238). I began my content analysis by going over the data guided by the theoretically informed research questions. Leaving the coding partly open allowed for reflexive research design to reshape the coding instrument, which, following an extended case method approach, was primarily built on preexisting theory (Burawoy 1991). Informed by the themes that emerged in the first-pass analysis, and guided by my research questions, I created a coding instrument to systematically code the field notes using a qualitative software program, Transana. To create the actual coding instrument, I first created an outline where I transformed each of my research questions into working hypotheses. Next, I identified mechanisms corresponding to each hypothesis. These mechanisms were the major relevant themes that emerged during the first-pass analysis. I subsequently constructed competing hypotheses, which mirrored the working hypotheses grounded in the theory. These competing hypotheses aided the systematic analysis to look for negative cases in the data, thus safeguarding against researcher recall bias (Johnson 1999). This instrument also had space for alternative hypotheses and related mechanisms in the data, which might explain student achievement. These codes made room for new emergent themes and categories rather than pushing the data to fit a fixed set of categories.
For the structured content analysis, I needed to define a unit of analysis to code the raw field notes, breaking them up into manageable segments (Berg 1989). The unit of analysis I coded for in my field notes was an individual scene as defined by Goffman (cf. Goffman 1973). A scene describes one action or a series of actions in the field notes that coalesce together meaningfully in the description. The narrative analysis that I performed was appropriate with data telling a story. In these cases, the story was the unit of analysis, and I analyzed these stories by looking for key themes and concepts, both manifest and latent (Riessman 2002). I layered narrative analysis over the content analysis of the field notes to capture more of the richness of the data. Analyzing stories also helped to evaluate the analytic choices stemming from content analysis. In this way, narrative analysis was a triangulation strategy (Baca Zinn 2001).
Teacher Interactions and Institutional Constraints
In this paper, I focus on the impact of students’ interactions with teachers, also drawing from institutional and student interactional data since these factors interrelate with one another. I find that teachers are negatively affecting Mexican American student achievement, and the institutional structure of the school compounds this dynamic. The main teacher–student interactional features are low teacher expectations, teacher skill deficit, selective teacher engagement, and negative teacher attitudes. These features lead to a lack of support from teachers. However, this support deficit varies by the gender and generation of the Mexican American student.
Teacher Attitudes
Teacher attitudes are the overarching theme of the findings presented in this paper. In this section, I explore the major patterns in teacher attitudes communicated via their interactions with students and my conversations with teachers, and tease out some of the potential sources of these attitudes. In particular, I explore discriminatory remarks and ethnocentric framing. Such remarks and framing demonstrate teachers’ attitudes toward Mexican American students that often result in a stigmatizing outcome and may be academically disadvantageous to the student.
Problematizing the student
Teachers demonstrated their support deficit for their Mexican American students by problematizing low-achieving Mexican American students individually and suggesting that their students’ low achievement was solely the students’ fault, as well as by placing the blame on the students’ families. “They don’t ask questions,” or “I don’t know if they are understanding,” or with reference to the student’s parents, “They don’t value education in the home” were all common sentiments among teachers. Moreover, low-achieving Mexican American students for whom teachers thought language was not a significant barrier were often characterized as lazy or difficult or otherwise purposefully not doing the work. Even the few school staff members who in general made efforts to support their Mexican American students put down their Mexican American students at times in this way. Ms. Hernández, the English Language Learner (ELL) program assistant, evaluated a group of some of her low-achieving students in conversation with me: “They just copy off each other, one has it, and the others copy, I think they’re just lazy; they can come in during lunch to get help.”
When some teachers talked about their Mexican American students, they would tell me that a number of the students play the “I don’t understand” game where the teachers believe the student does understand but states they do not understand to evade their work. Mr. Mellen explained one of the ELL kids as “just lazy more than anything else; she’s ELL, but plays the game.” I asked what he means by that. “I don’t understand,” he says mockingly, indicating this student only pretended to not understand. Another characterization of this type of teacher attitude is captured by a different teacher’s narrative where she described some of the low-achieving Mexican American students for whom language was not the main issue. Ms. George gave me the example of one student whom she suggested was “sneaky,” to explain to me how he evaded his work by pretending to not to understand.
One potential source of these teacher attitudes is frustration, which was most evident in routine outbursts from teachers who saw many Mexican American students. One illustration of this is a comment by Mr. Jones during class. “Ok,” declared Mr. Jones, “I don’t want to wait forever for you guys to figure it out; besides, half of you aren’t doing it anyway.” I had not noticed that students were not doing the work. The students looked at each other with some combination of surprise and embarrassment. No one said anything.
Next, Mr. Jones and Ms. Hernández had a short conversation among themselves, but loud enough for the students and me to hear. They traded comments of frustration and disappointment in the kids. Mr. Jones then turned to the class and raised his voice, “It makes me upset, mad, frustrated. You do fine on the board, then on your own I see Ms. Hernández teaching it all over again in Spanish, you’re not listening!” His voice still quite loud, “I’m not angry,” he told them, “I’m frustrated, where is the problem?” Pause. “I have no idea what to do, I tried, I broke it down in the most simple way, I give up, and I am a master at teaching. I’m convinced that part of the problem is you’re not putting in the effort.”
This field note excerpt is rich with a variety of themes. I would however, like to focus on a few key points. His outburst reflects not only his willingness to embarrass his students, and reveal to them his frustration, but also reflects his limited notion of how one might serve these students. Teachers often coped with not meeting their Mexican American students’ needs by problematizing the student, in effect humiliating them for not performing academically as the teacher would have liked them to.
Confirming Anglo student dominance
A particular dialogue in a study hall classroom about having music in Spanish at the upcoming school dance demonstrated the support by the teachers of the assumed hegemony of the Anglo students at the school. In this case, the teacher teased and embarrassed two Mexican American students in front of their classmates for attempting to bargain for some claim to the social space. Mr. Windom, the teacher, did not seem to notice the discomfort of the other Mexican American students in the room or solicit their participation in the conversation. He allowed the Anglo students participating to mock the girls as well, and only cried, “Racism!” when one of the Mexican American girls made fun of Anglo music:
Isabel (Mexican American student), “More Mexican kids would come to the dances if they played Mexican music . . . there aren’t any now.” Dan (Anglo student), looking pissed, “There shouldn’t be any—we don’t understand their language, they can understand ours, no Hispanic music.” Smiling broadly, Mr. Windom responds to the students, “Is it Hispanic or Mexican?” “Mexican,” Isabel says firmly getting a bit flustered. Mr. Windom’s smile conveys this amuses him more. Mr. Windom tells Isabel, “ . . . So there’s about 24 songs . . . so, what if I did like 4 songs, that’s 20 percent . . . you wouldn’t be happy if we did play 20 percent Hispanic songs—” “—Yeah, better than nothing,” Isabel replies sounding agitated. Mr. Windom argues back that he did play a Spanish song at the last dance; this comment really flusters both Daniela (a second Mexican American girl participating) and Isabel. In a chorus, they immediate protest, “No you didn’t! Did not!” Mr. Windom replies, “Did too!” he is visibly enjoying this. Mr. Windom retorts now that he couldn’t play songs in Spanish, because they might have “bad words . . . and how would I know?” They point to the option of having Ms. Hernández or myself screen the songs for bad words. Mr. Windom next begins to poke fun at “Mexican rap” music. “It’s not rap!” Isabel argues back. “I don’t think the words rhyme in Spanish,” an Anglo boy interjects.
Next, the teacher led the students down an alternative path in the conversation that had no relevance to the discussion at hand, beauty pageants.
“What about this,” Mr. Windom changes the subject; his tone suggests he thinks this new topic is a rebuttal of some sort. “Did you know there’s a Black Miss America? Where White Anglo-Saxons can’t participate—” he says with emphasis. “—What about a Brown Miss America?” Isabel interjects, “there should be one.” “Why?” an Anglo boy interjects, pauses a split second, “racism or something?” Another Anglo boy interjects fervently, “No Hispanic music, [it’s] stupid.” Mr. Windom shoots him a look that silences him. Daniela calls out, “Stupid White music.” Mr. Windom now looks at me, “See that’s racist, that’s racist right there,” pointing at Daniela. I try to give no significant reaction. “What do you think; should there be a Black Miss America?” Mr. Windom asks the class. A chorus of “No!” comes from some of the Anglo students. Daniela calls out, “Yes,” pauses, “just, kidding,” and smiles shyly. The whole time the only other Mexican American students currently in the room are looking down and say nothing; they seem visibly uncomfortable.
By changing the subject to beauty pageants for different ethnic groups, he seemed to be attempting to illustrate an instance of what he perceived to be “reverse-racism” as a rebuttal to their requests for music in Spanish at the school dance. It seemed he perceived this shift in topic to be appropriate, and I suggest that it reflects his ethnic prejudice. These attitudes held by a teacher are communicated to students as acceptable. The interactions in this scene send a message to the Mexican American students that they are secondary to the Anglo students. Moreover, comments by Anglo students that I observed did not even register to the teachers as problematic. Thus, the Anglo students learn from their teachers the appropriate attitudes and behavior, including intolerance toward meaningful inclusion of ethnic minority groups at the school. Also, the Anglo boy who asked his teacher, “Why, racism or something?” received no attention, his question would not be answered. This rare instance of seemingly benevolent curiosity was cautious and un-nurtured in this environment. Only Anglo student remarks that confirm the teacher’s ideas of white hegemony are considered.
The illustration from the school dance shows how teachers give Anglo students hegemonic claim to the school. This interactional dynamic was also clearly observable in the practice of teachers’ validating Anglo students’ complaints of Mexican American students speaking Spanish. One illustration is Juan’s experience he narrated to me in class one day with frustration. Seeing that the teacher was not within earshot, he told me his story with several friends backing him up. He explained he was speaking to Julia in Spanish, emphasizing that he had to because otherwise she wouldn’t understand, and that one of the Anglo boys in the class complained to the teacher they were speaking Spanish. “Mrs. Downing came over and told us to speak English so that they could learn more English, but they don’t understand English unless you speak it really slow, and then they don’t know it that well; most of the time I talk with Julia or Fernando in English, they don’t understand.”
Most teachers explained any mention of a lack of social integration as a language barrier issue. When asked, however, most school staff members could not explain why the Mexican American students proficient in English still “choose to self-segregate,” as the teachers phrased it. Nearly all staff reported that the “Hispanic students just like to be together,” and “they are more comfortable together,” which was not communicated by these staff as an indication of any problems regarding integration. Rather, they seemed to accept that the two ethnic groups would naturally choose to isolate themselves from each other. The few Mexican American students who did socialize with the Anglo students and/or participate in school activities did not associate with the other Mexican American students. Thus, it seemed that students must choose sides.
Gendered Experiences
In the classroom, the behavior of the Anglo teachers suggested they identify more with their Anglo students, understand them better, and engage with them more generously both socially and academically. Moreover, the teachers generally communicated lower expectations and negative attitudes toward their Mexican American students, which frequently had a prejudicial effect. These attitudes regularly communicated frustration with their low-achieving Mexican American students. Boys, particularly long-term or second-generation immigrant ones, received more stringent and frequent negative attentions from their teachers, but in particular tended to be simply ignored. The experience of being embarrassed or ignored by their teachers in and outside of class surely helped facilitate the boys’ disengagement from the academic process.
The Mexican American students who demonstrated strong English skills but were not having a lot of academic success were routinely seen by their teachers and other students to have “attitude problems,” often characterized as the students’ lack of trying to succeed. Not incidentally, these students were mostly long-term or second-generation immigrant boys, several of which were in Special Education because they were thought to be “emotionally disturbed.” Many of these Mexican American boys were also described as “difficult.” One example is Mr. Harris’s Special Education classroom where the students were all long-term or second-generation immigrant Mexican American boys. When I asked if I could assist in his class, he asked me rhetorically, “Why would you want to work with these kids;” he continued, “They’ll find any excuse not to work,” he joked to me in front of the students.
There is also history class with Mr. Rodney, who prides himself on being a “tough guy,” which takes the form of humiliation or chastisement toward the Mexican American boys. Mr. Rodney lectures, and then solicits student participation by asking the students questions to answer in front of the class. He asked a yes/no question of a Mexican American boy, Jaime. “Yes,” Jaime answered quietly, seeming uncomfortable in the spotlight. “What do you know, he speaks!” Mr. Rodney exclaimed in response to Jaime, his tone mocking and annoyed. Jaime made no reply, shrinking into his chair.
Another example of a humiliating approach to student “attitude problem” characterization is Ms. Packer’s science class. She described to me one of her students by saying, “It’s not a language issue; it’s an effort issue.” It is noteworthy that she stated this opinion in front of the boy and his classmates, surely embarrassing him. “Somebody didn’t study, did they?” Ms. Packer asked rhetorically to a Mexican American boy, loud enough for most to hear. Then she said loudly to me, “I know it might look like there are some gaps, but it’s not a language issue at this point, it’s an EFFORT issue, he needs to be accountable, he’s been offered help, but he needs to put in the effort.” She wagged her finger at him as she spoke. She is within earshot of most students, and her tone indicated she was disappointed in him. “Measures have been taken with him,” she explained to me.
More often than humiliation, however, the Mexican American boys whose teachers described them as having “attitude problems” were routinely ignored. This disregard often meant simply that their teachers did not approach them in class even when the students’ inattention or scant progress toward their task was apparent. Furthermore, struggling Mexican American boys often claimed their teachers did not care what they did.
Mr. Jones, a teacher who saw most of the Mexican American students in the school, reflected one morning before class on the differences in academic performance between the boys and girls. Mr. Jones explained to me:
I find it easier to work with Hispanic girls; they seem to be more motivated educationally than the boys are. Yes, I think the girls do better than the boys do; the girls tend to ask more questions than the boys. The girls tend to complete their homework better than the boys. I think the Hispanic girls tend to do better in school than the Hispanic boys and I think that if you looked at the general progress reports outside of my classroom, you’d see that would hold true, probably the same. Boys are more challenging because the boys always looking for something else to do, wanting to do something else. Maybe that’s the nature of boys, I don’t know.
Teachers and administrators have noted that Mexican American girls tend to perform higher academically than Mexican American boys, but still lower than either Anglo boys or girls at this school. The experience of Mexican American girls with their teachers also reflects gendered teacher attitudes that often did not serve these girls well in the academic process either. The attention they received from teachers was routinely social in nature. One of the embedded lessons Mexican American girls appeared to be learning was that being docile in class won them teacher approval and sometimes positive teacher attention, but usually did not appear to translate a great deal into meaningful assistance in their studies. However, it arguably helps to keep them more engaged in the academic process.
This type of gendered teacher engagement was particularly evident in male teachers’ interactions with Mexican American girls. Not only were these girls the ones who principally interacted with the male teachers; these interactions much of the time had a flirtatious tone to them. This observation pertained specifically to the Mexican American girls, and not the Anglo girls. For example, one afternoon in a school hallway, Isabel hugged her male teacher, telling him he is, “Terrible,” in a flirtatious way, to which he responded positively. Another example is a male teacher with a group of Mexican American girls hanging around his desk. One girl, seated on top of the desk, played with the teacher’s hair, talking to him as she put his hair in little braids. This same teacher allowed a different female student, Rosa, to give him a shoulder massage during class while the rest of the students were supposed to be working at their desks but mostly chatted socially with one another.
It appears many of the Mexican American girls are learning to procure attention in the academic process by being compliant, and even conducting themselves at times in flirtatious ways to gain this attention from their male teachers, attention that these teachers readily give them. Thus, teacher attitudes tended in general to be more positive toward Mexican American girls than boys, and these attitudes appeared to be signs of facilitating the girls’ engagement in the academic process. Nonetheless, the gendered lessons these girls receive in school consigns them to subordinate role expectations that have the capacity to limit expectations for their academic achievement by sending a message to the girls that the foremost expectation is social behavior. Likewise, they learn it is not as important to be academically successful, as long as they act compliantly, and in particular aim to be pleasant to males as a manner of gaining access to their attentions and potential status attainment in the school community.
Institutional Constraints
Teachers in the school are on the frontlines of a large academic bureaucracy, responsible to serve students, and by that, to make ends meet with limited resources. Teachers felt they were in a difficult position to serve all students sufficiently; frustration with their Mexican American students was clearly evident. A lack of institutional resources to serve Mexican American students is likely one source of this frustration, as teachers routinely noted it as a problem. The school selectively allocates resources, such as for services, in a way that benefits certain students and not others. Some examples of this selective resource allocation are monolingual English-speaking administrative staff, English-only announcements for all school activities, English-only materials home to parents, and the monocultural skill sets of hired staff.
The school’s formal and informal system of tracking students appeared to play a role in facilitating teachers’ low expectations for their Mexican American students as well as having a generally negative impact on student achievement. Perhaps there is a place for tracks in school, if they are thoughtfully put together. However, my experience at the school suggested that these tracks are not well thought out, and short-change some students. What I observed in the tracks of ELL-majority classes, ELL-only classes, and Special Education (SPED) classes was that these tracks did not serve the Mexican American students well academically.
First of all, the tracking system in the school limits Anglo and Mexican American students’ exposure to each other. The groups are separated into different classrooms, where the minority ethnic group is often the majority in many of the classes, and the Anglos in the class are those who the school has decided either have learning disabilities, or are slow learners. Therefore, the Mexican American students only interact in class, if they interact at all, with the Anglo students the school has deemed are learning challenged. While it is contentious whether those Anglo students are appropriately served by their position either (labeled as cognitively challenged), it sends the message to Mexican American students with no identified learning disability that they too are challenged cognitively. This is not a hurdle with which the Anglo students must contend.
Moreover, the Mexican American students are overrepresented in low tracks and underrepresented in the higher (more academic) tracks. Mexican American boys are particularly overrepresented in SPED; however, evidence that the Mexican American students in low tracks or SPED were meaningfully evaluated ranged from limited to nil. In addition, teachers often raised the question of potential learning disabilities for low-achieving Mexican American students not already placed in SPED. On several occasions, teachers pointed out current students who were under review for SPED and who the teachers had already decided were “Special Ed” even though their evaluation had not yet been completed. Many teachers, when reflecting on these Mexican American students’ low achievement, narrated this perception to me.
It creates disadvantage when students are placed in low academic tracks or SPED without being evaluated and when these classes are merely watered-down versions of the curricula of the more academically tracked courses. Rather than offering an appropriate curriculum, many of the ELL classes appeared to be babysitting stations for low-achieving students.
The direct lack of support the actual ELL program receives from the school administration was both a commonly expressed problem for the staff working within the program and something I observed. Even when this support deficit was not expressed or “played down” by staff, it was evident from a variety of angles. From staffing, to resources for course materials, or simply attention and energy to support the program, it was evident that this program is not a priority for the school or district administration, and that more than anything the administration just wished the issue of meeting these students’ needs would go away. Anything more came across as lip service.
Ms. Hernández, the ELL assistant told me one afternoon, “They have to do something with the ELL program to update it; Mr. Jones and I are overwhelmed. We need more Spanish-speakers on staff, there’s only one Spanish-speaker, Mr. Jones [the ELL teacher] can understand, read and write okay, but he can’t communicate much.” She continued, “He’s being asked to modify other classes for the ELL students in mainstream classes; they should have to modify their own classes. When is he supposed to do it?” she asks me, “During what time does he have?”
She shook her head, and then further explained her ideas, “The other teachers should have to get some training.” She gave me the example of a training by the state that they all had to go to earlier this year that was so bad, she told me she could not bring herself to stay for day two. “It was generic and had no specific ideas about how to help students. It was just a lot of information about students who are failing. The state should have better presenters and use that opportunity to give some training, with better presenters. We need more equality.”
Another concerned staff member, Mrs. Amy, explained to me how the English Language Development program was slighted by the school administration in part because it is new and changing but also because of the population it serves. She then clarified, “ELL is a newer and evolving program, and ELD [the English Language Development curriculum] has for the first time in the state become a ‘core curriculum,’ which means that it needs to be treated as such, but because of its newness, and the population it is attached to serving; administrators are not embracing it.” Mrs. Amy identified the administrators as seeing ELD as “supplementary” and something that can be slighted, even though it’s been identified as core curriculum. “And when I try to talk to administrators about it, the attitude I get back is, ‘Could you let it go a little?’” At the end of our talk, she says to me bluntly with emotion, “When it comes to money for the White students or the Hispanics, the White students are going to get the money.”
As a part of teacher frustration with Mexican American youth, teachers generally reported they did not have the language or cultural knowledge they felt would help these students, nor the understanding to teach students in English who were ELL. Consequently, the way the school institution mis-allocates its resources is a large part of the explanation for the teachers’ skill deficit. In this way, the school itself lacked the administrative will to properly allocate resources to serve the Mexican American students, and this largely fueled how teachers interacted with their Mexican American students.
Teacher Narratives
The central themes from my conversations with my main informants uncovered teacher attitudes toward their Mexican American students, which primarily communicated low levels of investment in their Mexican American students and an apparent disconnect from their needs. There were fourteen main informants, constituting the majority of the teachers at the school.
Five of these teachers reported to me there was no noticeable difference between how their Mexican American students were doing and how their Anglo students were doing. They reported the same lack of difference for how their Mexican American boys and girls were doing. They also reported a lack of friction between the two ethnic groups, and did not seem concerned about the lack of Mexican American student participation in the classroom or school activities. Moreover, they answered that having significantly more Mexican American students in their classes now, when they previously had few to none, has not affected their job much and they have not needed to alter their curriculum to serve these students. These same teachers were more calculating in their answers than others who answered questions more freely. The teachers with the calculated answers, who did not see a problem serving their Mexican American students, suggested through verbal and nonverbal cues that they were concerned about what they might say, and how it could reflect poorly on them. This is not to say that these teachers with deliberate answers were doing the most damage to their Mexican American students, but they were the ones I observed to have a greater disconnect or isolation from these students.
Of the remaining nine teachers I spoke with, six saw somewhat of a problem meeting the needs of the Mexican American students at the school, and the other three saw it as really a problem. Two of the three who thought it was really a problem were the ELL teacher and the ELL teacher assistant. These nine teachers were also the ones who reported the Mexican American students were having less success at school, and the boys in particular. They also identified the presence of friction between the two ethnic groups, primarily in the form of separation and a lack of participation in school activities from the Mexican American students, and that this change has impacted their job quite a bit. The majority of the teachers in this second group mentioned a “divide” in the staff between those who “accept” the Mexican American students at the school and those staff who “do not accept” them.
I was struck by the overall divergent claims from the two groups of teachers: the first group reporting they did not see a problem, and the second reporting they did indeed see a problem meeting these students’ needs. The second group, who saw the problem, was also willing to share that this change in student base had definitely been harder for some teachers than others. They reported they felt some teachers’ attitudes toward Mexican American students were lukewarm at best.
One teacher was willing to expand on this sentiment at length to me:
Even in this building, there are teachers who are scared to even interact with the Hispanic students. I understand that on some level, communication is difficult, but there are people who still carry a racial prejudice, there’s no way around that. People make statements as educators, which I find unethical. I think we have a moral obligation to be unbiased in terms of racial, gender, those type of things; however, there are people who have racial prejudices and will make comments like, “Well, our school would be better if the Hispanic kids weren’t here, they should just go back, or, they just need to speak English around me.” They make statements that are either directly and bluntly stating their personal views, or it’s layered with innuendos that they don’t value the Hispanic students as much.
On the whole, my conversations with teachers revealed a spectrum of teacher attitudes toward their Mexican American students, but the spectrum heavily weighed toward teachers with a significant disconnect from their Mexican American students and their needs in the academic process. Moreover, the majority of teachers who did articulate there was a problem meeting the needs of Mexican American students still had no clear idea of how to meet those needs, and, as found by López (2003), even teachers with the best of intentions still criticized and problematized their low-achieving Mexican American students.
The findings of this study point to a routine lack of accountability in taking any action at all to better serve the Mexican American students on the part of the teachers or the school administration. I saw little to no effort on the part of Anglo students, staff or administrators at Mossyville Junior High to engage the Mexican American students to try to understand them, welcome them as they are, or relish the cultural diversity they brought to the school. The Mexican American students were instead given the message to try to Anglicize themselves in every respect to gain greater admission into the school culture. Thus, not only was all responsibility of integration put on the Mexican American students themselves, but also they seemed ordered to give up their ethnic identity for another one. The general sense was that the Anglo members of the school essentially distanced themselves from the Mexican American students, and while they mostly did not mind the presence of the Mexican American students, there was not going to be any effort on their part to be inclusive.
The lack of effort, accountability, or for some, willingness to acknowledge the deficit in serving these students suggests the presence of ethnic prejudice. The Anglo school community openly did not understand the Mexican American students; they existed within the community, but not as a part of it. This institutional and interpersonal isolation was reinforced by the lack of energy to get to understand this population, which in turn seemed fueled by some combination of tradition and lack of resources, but also ethnic prejudice.
Discussion
This paper focused on one aspect of the context of reception, teacher–student interactions, and there is more to say about the other contexts. This paper briefly explored institutional constraints and student–student interactions as mediated by teacher–student interaction but did not expand on them as separate or foregrounding factors. Future reporting of research on the school experiences of children of immigrants in new destinations should give additional detail to highlighting the role of the school institution and student peer-to-peer interactions in shaping the school experiences of the children of immigrants in new destinations.
Extending the segmented assimilation thesis: new destinations in a small town junior high
This study found evidence that the Mexican-descent students’ experiences were in many ways similar to the marginalization experienced by their urban counterparts, and likewise, reason for concern. In association with Valenzuela’s (1999) study, this finding points to patterns carrying across disparate contexts—an established large urban community where U.S.-born youth of Mexican descent make up the majority of the student population on one hand, and on the other, a small new, rapid-growth community where the Mexican American students are primarily Mexican-born and make up 20 percent of the total student population. However, the explanations for marginalization are only somewhat similar. While Valenzuela shows that the majority of immigrant students do not identify with U.S. minority culture, she suggests that the immigrant students who are academically at risk rebel against school by emulating the behavior of the U.S.-born minority youth. Thus, they learn to be a U.S. minority by example. Moreover, she highlights the impact of the greater contact with disaffected minority youth in the urban setting (Valenzuela 1999, 84).
Portes and Rumbaut (2001) also argue that the urban context is a critical contributor to marginalization. They maintain that the context of urban poverty and ghettos for U.S.-born minorities sends a message to newer minority groups about their life chances and provides a normative model for resistance strategies grounded in perceptions of hostility from mainstream institutions such as school (pp. 60–61). Yet, in this study there is no disaffected minority youth culture that the students might otherwise model. This immigrant population is at an early stage of their U.S. experience, as most of their families have been in the United States fewer than ten years, and already at middle school their marginalization and disengagement from the academic process is obvious. This study could suggest then that Valenzuela’s and Portes and Rumbaut’s studies give too much weight to the urban contact explanation, and that their stronger findings are those that carry across context, that is to say, school factors. Future research should focus on the schooling process.
High school forecasting
This study shed light on the schooling process for junior high youth from immigrant families because there is little academic research that has investigated this pre–high school phase. Also, research using auto regression analysis has demonstrated that junior high GPA has a significant influence on high school GPA even when controlling for important variables such as demographic factors, family structure, and acculturation. Ethnographic research into the junior high process is necessary to better understand what has happened there as the premise to high school performance.
This study found unsupportive teachers, exclusive Anglo peers, and a negligent school administration, among other features of this ineffective school experience. These factors present in the junior high should be considered a foundation for later, more pronounced, and widespread school disengagement for the Mexican American students. What I see at the junior high is potent groundwork for further poor relational engagement for students, especially for second-generation and long-term immigrant boys. However, the majority of the Mexican-descent students at the school are foreign-born, and this generational background shapes their options in drawing on ethnic identities and creating survival strategies to cope with school (Matute-Bianchi 1986). The deferential behavior of many immigrant students with their teachers mitigates the impact of the negative school factors. However, as they continue to fall behind academically and are marginalized by an unreceptive school culture, they may very well develop stronger reactive identities in their high school years, as they draw on an anti-schooling ethos in order to protect their self-esteem.
Conclusions
This small-town case study highlights how negative ascriptive processes are not limited to the urban high school experience and that similar pivotal school factors across different mediating contexts persist in creating disadvantage for Mexican-descent youth in school. This research then raises the question: do Mexican American youth cope better in the urban setting, through oppositional solidarity, even if the academic outcome is the same? Moreover, how precisely do similar school factors interact differently in these contrasting contexts? More specifically, what might be some important nuanced variations of the interpersonal relations of Mexican American students with their teachers and Anglo students, and institutional treatment by the school administration? A comprehensive comparative study of a small-town new destination school and a traditional urban school might help us develop a more robust answer to these and many other questions this study has raised. This case study draws attention to the presence of new immigrant communities in small towns and captures stories of their children’s experiences in the academic process. These stories are reason for concern, but can be mitigated through targeted intervention, and junior high is a critical time to intercede.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul Attewell, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Johanna Brenner, Philip Kasinitz, and José Padín, as well as Editor Jeff Nash and the two anonymous reviewers at JCE for their helpful critiques of earlier drafts. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to the students, teachers and staff at “Mossyville” who allowed me to conduct research in their school. I perform critical analysis for this paper, which is not meant to be critical of individuals but rather social structures, practices, and ideologies informing their actions. It is my aim that this type of critical analysis can reveal some of the patterns in which marginalization happens and the ways in which we might intercede in its reproduction.
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.