Constrained Inclusion

Introduction

When Belen reflects on her experience at her local community college, it is with a mix of frustration and resignation. Although she was a promising high school student, being undocumented means that community college was the only affordable route available for her to continue her education. Still, grateful for the opportunity, she was determined to make the most of the experience. A series of events wore her down, and when I speak with her on a warm spring day, the frustrations of the previous 2 years are apparent. Misinformation about what classes are transferable, experiences of racism in the classroom, a hostile climate toward undocumented students, and the pressures of working full-time, going to school full-time, and fulfilling her familial responsibilities as both a daughter and older sister have taken a toll on Belen. Despite her hard work, she is still far from eligible to transfer to a 4-year university, and once she is eligible, she cannot imagine a way she will actually be able to afford it.

Belen graduated high school the year the California DREAM Act went into effect; she was in the first cohort of students who stood to benefit from this historic legislation. However, nearly 3 years later, there are indications that the legislation that promised to create an easier path toward higher education for undocumented students in California has not entirely lived up to these hopes. Belen says,

I thought once the laws changed, it would be more like . . . the people in the financial aid office would be more knowledgeable about stuff, but they are like “What are you talking about? AB540 student? What’s that?” . . . And I know it’s supposed to be easier now, you know, for undocumented students to go to college, but it doesn’t feel very easy. (Belen M., personal communication, February 12, 2014)

Belen came of college-age amid a shifting political terrain in her home state of California, where she has lived since immigrating to the United States at the age of 11. New statewide legislation has passed in recent years, ushering in a set of policies that have been nationally hailed as a model of support for undocumented students. However, as the first generation of students navigate this new political and educational terrain, some fractures are becoming visible. I find that though the undocumented student movement has secured important victories on federal and state levels, significant barriers to higher education for undocumented youth persist. This article illuminates the unique challenges faced by undocumented community college students in California’s agricultural Central Valley, a group of young people who have been marginalized in the broader body of literature about undocumented college students, deprioritized both by geography (because they are located in the often-overlooked agricultural belt of the state) and constructions of prestige (because they are community college students, not yet in the 4-year university system). This study seeks to illuminate the experiences of students at that important axis of marginalization.

Drawing on more than 2 years of qualitative fieldwork and 30 interviews with undocumented community college students in the Central Valley, I argue that undocumented community college students navigate an institutional landscape of “constrained inclusion,” characterized by a disconnect between the promise of inclusion embodied by recent legislation and the reality that citizenship status continues to fundamentally encumber their educational experiences. This article examines the ways in which citizenship status uniquely shapes both the access and persistence of undocumented community college students in the Central Valley despite these recent policy changes, and ultimately concludes that though these policy interventions are critical, many of the state’s most marginalized undocumented students who aspire to attend college continue to be turned away, pushed out, and left behind.

I begin by situating this study in the political economic context of the Central Valley of California through a discussion of the changing political landscape in the state around undocumented students, then briefly review the relevant literature, and explain methods. I then extrapolate on my idea of “constrained inclusion,” and close with a brief discussion of significance and implications of this study.

Research Methods

This article draws on data gathered during the first phase of a qualitative ethnographic research project on the experiences of “illegality” among undocumented community college students in California. The broader study is concerned with how the educational experiences of undocumented, Latina/o community college students who do not fit the dominant “DREAMer” profile of academic excellence are shaped by new policies aimed at easing educational access for undocumented students. This article analyzes data from interviews conducted between 2013 and 2015 with 30 undocumented community college students living in California’s agricultural Central Valley.

All interview participants are undocumented, Latina/o, between the ages of 18 and 26 years at the time of the interview, and living in the Central Valley. Interview participants are either currently enrolled in community college or have enrolled in the previous term with plans to re-enroll. The decision to include students who were not enrolled at the time of the interview, but had been enrolled and planned to re-enroll, was necessary to account for patterns of non-consecutive enrollment term-to-term because of financial challenges. All names are pseudonyms.

Participants were primarily recruited through outreach to relevant offices at area community colleges; some were recruited through personal contacts in higher education and snowball sampling. I produced an electronic and hard copy flier that staff members and students were asked to share, which laid out the purpose of the study and invited students to contact me if they were interested in participating in an interview. College staff and students were instructed to not simply introduce me to students who fit the criteria, because doing so would constitute a breach of confidentiality about citizenship status, but rather to instruct students to contact me directly. I secured approval from the Institutional Review Board at my home campus, and secured verbal consent from all interviewees. Interviews were audio recorded on a mobile phone, and were conducted in a semi-private location of the interviewee’s choosing such as the library on campus, the public library, or a neighborhood cafe.

Interviews ranged from 45 to 120 min in length, and were conducted by me or my research assistant in a mutually agreed upon location. The protocol was divided into three parts: (a) early life, family history, and experiences of migration; (b) educational experiences of pre-college including the process of applying to college; and (c) experiences as an undocumented community college student. The interviews were conducted in English in a semi-structured manner, allowing the conversation to flow freely while also ensuring that all students answered the same questions. Audio recordings were then transcribed in their entirety, and data analysis was conducted from written transcriptions. Interviews were then coded, drawing on a grounded theory approach, and consistent themes were identified.

The California Context: The Valley of Contradictions

Of the estimated 12 million undocumented people living in the United States, one million are children under the age of 18 years (Passel, Cohn, & Lopez, 2011). Thirty years of federal inaction on comprehensive immigration reform has resulted in a generation of undocumented young people growing up in this country with no path to legalization. Despite growing up in this country, and being educated in U.S. schools, undocumented children are repeatedly faced with the constraints of their “tolerated illegality” (Oboler, 2006, p. 15). They are never able to fully incorporate into society because of their lack of citizenship status and face barriers to accessing higher education as well as the inability to work legally in this country. Within this context, a growing cohort of undocumented immigrants raised and educated in the United States presents a unique conundrum; their existence challenges notions of what undocumented people look like and what kind of work undocumented migrants are capable of doing.

The Central Valley is an area that stretches approximately 450 miles through the middle of California, home to nearly 7 million people. This region, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions (Umbach, 1997), is the heart of California’s agricultural industry—an industry that produces more than half of the country’s vegetables, fruits, and nuts (Committee on Natural Resources, 2014). A critical part of this economic arrangement is ready access to a plentiful and elastic reserve army of low-wage labor. The economic geography of the Valley and its proximity to the U.S.–México border have come together to create an economic arrangement that relies on the low-wage labor of Mexican migrants to do the critical farm labor that keeps this Valley’s economy afloat yet simultaneously criminalizes and stigmatizes their presence (Chacón, Davis, & Cardona, 2006). It is assumed that the Central Valley of California is home to 100,000 undocumented immigrants (Hill & Johnson, 2011) who navigate a context of constrained rights and opportunities, living under the constant threat of deportation and family separation. Even the young people who gained a temporary protected status under President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program often live as members of mixed-status families and do not have any long-term options to regularize their status. Their future is even more uncertain now, as President Trump threatens to dissolve the program.

The Central Valley is marked by contradictions. It is a place of agricultural abundance, but many of its poorest residents, who spend their days picking the crops that create this abundance, are malnourished (Bulgarin & Lopez, 1998). It is a place marked by incredible wealth among ranchers and landowners, and is also home of some of the most extreme poverty in the nation (“Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest in Nation,” 2012). It is a land marked by migration and opportunity and also stuck in the intergenerational transfer of poverty that means that many of the children growing up in the Valley will be educated in schools that do not meet their needs (Public Policy Institute of California, 2002) and will end up doing the same back-breaking work their parents do. The Valley is critical to the California economy and to the global market, and production in the Valley is dependent on the wage of a low-wage labor force who are often crushed under the weight of this “prosperity.”

Undocumented children who grow up in the Valley navigate their family’s poverty alongside their own educational aspirations. Despite the profound barriers they face in pursuit of an education, many persist in the quest to achieve their educational goals. Although beyond the scope of this piece, it is important to acknowledge that the economic conditions of the Valley are coupled with vibrant migrant communities built on mutual aid, strong community connections, and resilience. The youth in this study draw on rich “funds of knowledge” to draw on González, Moll, and Amanti’s (2006) work, building on and contributing to the “community culture wealth” (Yosso, 2005) that is frequently a source of motivation for their educational pursuits. In fact, an understanding of the educational trajectories of these young people requires an explicit acknowledgment of the multiple, systemic barriers that they must overcome to continue their education after high school. Many attend community colleges because the cost of even the least expensive, 4-year state university is out of reach for their modest means. Their stories are not those of defeat; they are stories of resilience and resistance.

The Shifting Political Landscape

More than a decade ago, undocumented youth who stood on the edge of this uncertain future began a movement for a legislative solution to their situation. This movement sought to revive the promise in the landmark 1982 case Plyler v. Doe, which secured the right of undocumented students to primary public education (Olivas, 2012), and to extend this right to higher education and full legal citizenship. The structural limitations to educational access for undocumented students gave rise to a nascent grassroots movement in the early 2000s. Community-based organizations tied into local regional, statewide, and national networks fought several successful battles related to educational access for undocumented students during this period. The Student Adjustment Act, the precursor to the DREAM Act, was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2001 as a legislation that offered a path to citizenship for undocumented students. Later that year, Texas passed HB 1403 (see Rincón, 2008) and California passed AB 540 (see Seif, 2004), which categorized undocumented students as in-state residents for tuition purposes at state colleges and universities.

In recent years, this movement has secured some critically important wins, and California has been an epicenter of this struggle and these advances. Accompanying AB540, the in-state tuition law that was passed in 2001, the California Assembly passed AB130 and 131, enabling undocumented students to access some forms of financial aid. The laws AB540, AB130, and AB131 have come to constitute what is called the “California DREAM Act,” a package of laws that makes some forms of financial aid available to undocumented college students. The California legislature recently passed a driver’s license bill, and the state’s Supreme Court recently affirmed the right of an undocumented student who passed the bar exam to practice law in the state. Within the context of this shifting political terrain and state-based legislation aimed at easing the path for undocumented students to higher education, California is being held up as a national model for access to higher education for undocumented students. Most of the literature on undocumented college students focuses on students who were successful in high school and who pursued study at a 4-year institution directly after high school graduation. This study is one of the first to examine what this changing context looks like on the ground for students who do not follow this traditional route. The California Master Plan created a three-tiered higher educational system in California—the Community College system, the California State University (CSU) system, and the prestigious University of California (UC) system. The institution of the community college is an important site of access to higher education for marginalized students in the state; undocumented students have flocked to community colleges for the last several years as one of the most accessible paths toward higher education. I find that undocumented students in the Central Valley, who are navigating what is designed to be the most accessible and least expensive tier of the California higher education system, continue to have difficulty both accessing and persisting in college. Their stories and struggles illuminate the reality that this moment of increased educational access for undocumented students is not being experienced as such by all undocumented young people.

Undocumented Students and Community College as a Site of Access

Relevant to this study is literature on undocumented students and higher education, literature on higher education as a site of access for marginalized students, and literature on undocumented students and the community college system. This section briefly addresses these intersecting fields of inquiry.

Research on undocumented students has emerged over the past 15 years (Abrego & Gonzales, 2010; Flores, 2010; Person, Gutierrez Keeton, Medina, Gonzalez, & Minero, 2016), focusing on historic shifts in legislation, undocumented student activism and civic engagement, and educational barriers (Gonzales, Suárez-Orozco, & Dedios-Sanguineti, 2013; Pérez, Cortés, Ramos, & Coronado, 2010). Many undocumented students face shame, fear, frustration, and disillusionment as they navigate higher education (Negrón-Gonzales, 2013; Pérez et al., 2010), and as such, much of this research illuminates the institutional obstacles that undocumented students face as a result of their immigration status (Perez, Espinoza, Ramos, Coronado, & Cortes, 2009), limited financial resources (Chavez, Soriano, & Oliverez, 2007; Person et al., 2016), and lack of understanding from staff and faculty regarding their needs (Huber & Malagon, 2007; Pérez et al., 2010). Pérez et al. (2010) noted that a key to undocumented student success was having a strong support network of parents, faculty, college advisors, peers, and civic engagement. Indeed, activism has emerged as a research focus, as undocumented college students have been on the forefront of a movement toward educational access (Negrón-Gonzales, 2014, 2015). Gonzales’s (2008) work finds that many undocumented students consider activism to be a vehicle for having an impact on their own status in the policy arena as well as informing fellow community members about their rights.

Because most in-state tuition programs for undocumented students target recent high school graduates, there is a lack of literature on older students navigating higher education. Most glaringly, however, is the lack of attention paid to undocumented students at the community college level. The community college is said to promote

the belief that all individuals should have the opportunity to rise to their greatest potential. Accordingly, all barriers to individual development should be broken down. Institutions that enhance human growth should be created and supported. Talent is potentially to be found in every social stratum and at every age. (Cohen & Brawer, 1996, p. 10)

Thus, accessible education was meant to benefit both individual mobility and society (Cohen & Brawer, 1996). Some argue that challenges in the process of transferring students to 4-year institutions have made community colleges as much of a diversion as an access point to higher education (Ornelas & Solórzano, 2004) and in this sense, posit that they have been more of a “revolving door” than a direct pathway to 4-year institutions (Karabel, 1986, p. 27).

Proponents of the community college uphold its role as an accessible institution, which provides educational opportunities to students who would otherwise be locked out of higher education. The low-cost and open admissions policies are a core part of this accessibility (Bailey & Morest, 2006). Moreover,

during the 1950s and 1960s whenever a community college was established in a locale where there had been no publicly supported college, the proportion of high school graduates in that area who began college immediately increased, sometimes by as much as 50%. (Cohen & Brawer, 1996, p. 18)

Some scholars, like Jain, Herrera, Bernal, and Solorzano (2011), seek to reframe the transfer function of the community college by placing the onus on 4-year institutions to create a “transfer receptive culture” (p. 253). Community college students are more likely to be the first in their family to attend college, and a majority of them work at least part-time, markedly more than students at 4-year institutions (Kane & Rouse, 1999; Suárez-Orozco et al., 2015).

Depictions of undocumented youth in scholarly discourse are typically of college students or graduates, often attending prestigious universities—stories that fit within meritocratic conceptions of education (Abrego & Gonzales, 2010). This is despite the reality that community colleges have become the educational home for many undocumented students because it is the most accessible path to postsecondary education (Kim & Chambers, 2015). Historically, there has been a tremendous gap in the literature regarding undocumented students at community college, though recent years have seen some emerge of critical research on this question (Abrego & Gonzales, 2010; Gonzales & Ruiz, 2014; Huber & Malagon, 2007; Nienhusser, 2014; Oseguera, Flores, & Burciaga, 2010). Abrego and Gonzales (2010) write,

We caution against the almost exclusive focus on undocumented students at four-year colleges and universities that we have found in the literature . . . The vast majority of undocumented youth are either at community colleges or out of school. (p. 155)

They go on,

Portrayals of high-achieving students, star athletes, and civically minded young people need to be balanced with accounts of impoverished, troubled young people whose daily lives of struggle are constructed by a lack of legal access, resource-poor urban and rural high schools, a narrow pipeline to postsecondary education, and an adult world rife with legal barriers to full participation. (Abrego & Gonzales, 2010, p. 155)

This study attempts to make a contribution to this endeavor by situating the experiences of undocumented community college students in California’s Central Valley, embedded in this contradiction between prosperity and poverty, as a critical site of inquiry.

“Constrained Inclusion”: How Citizenship Shapes Access and Persistence to Community College in California

In this section, I will draw directly from the interview data to illustrate the ways that citizenship status shapes the educational experiences and educational trajectories of undocumented community college students in the Central Valley of California. Although some of these experiences are tied to other aspects of their social location and identity, namely class, I contend that being undocumented has profoundly shaped the educational experiences of these young people, both as they begin to prepare for college as well as their experiences once enrolled. The data illuminate the ways that despite legislation aimed at making college more accessible, undocumented status continues to shape both the access and persistence of community college students in the Valley. I highlight three findings related to each of these two categories. These students navigate a unique dynamic I call, “constrained inclusion,” constituted by the assurance of inclusion with institutions of higher education as a result of the legislative gains of recent years, while bumping up against the constraints of those gains. I find that the inclusion secured through this legislation is not attentive to the full nature of their immigrant student experience, such that the very premise of inclusion falls short. This is particularly important given the fact that the community college system, as a part of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, is designed to be the most accessible entry point for higher education system in the state. Thus, if undocumented students are facing barriers to access and persistence in this context, these policies need to be reconfigured.

Implications and Conclusion: Toward True Inclusion, Without Constraints

The experiences of these young people—navigating low-wage work, poverty, racism, “illegality”, and education—complicate the emerging story about how policy change has cleared the path for educational access for undocumented students in California. They navigate an institutional landscape of “constrained inclusion,” characterized by the disconnect between the promise of inclusion embodied in this recent legislation and the reality that citizenship status encumbers their educational experiences. These students are the undocumented young people that recent policies have aimed to reach; the students who the California DREAM Act promises to help. However, their stories do not speak to an eased path but instead illuminate the reality that though these policies are important, they are not translating into access for some of the most marginalized undocumented students in the state.

Further research is needed on this population which experiences this double marginalization. In addition to understanding the particular ways in which the community college path presents unique challenges to undocumented students, we must also specifically pay attention to the ways in which political economy, “illegality,” and low-wage work interacts with the educational trajectories and educational access of undocumented young people. Furthermore, research is necessary to analyze the ways in which the Trump presidency will again reconfigure the educational trajectories of undocumented students. On the precipice of what appears to be a new political moment regarding immigration in this country, educational researchers must be particularly attentive to not only the educational lives of undocumented students but also contextualize these young people as members of families and communities who are also under threat.

These findings speak to the limits of these sorts of policy reforms and also point to the necessity of understanding the experiences of undocumented students in a more nuanced way. Although we have taken some affirmative steps in the process of greater educational access for undocumented students, there is still much more that remains to be done. District leadership must prioritize preparing teachers to meet the unique needs of undocumented students in the K-12 system, including equipping them with current information about legislation that may be able to benefit them. Similarly, community college administrators must ensure that their open door policies extend to undocumented students not simply on paper, but in practice. This will require not only rigorous training of frontline staff who interface with prospective students, particularly in the admissions and financial aid offices, but also concerted efforts to shift campus culture through programming designed to reach undocumented students, public statements of solidarity which affirm the right of undocumented students to study by college leaders, and increased financial supports for undocumented students in poverty.

Beyond these specific steps that teachers, staff members, and administrators can take to truly increase educational access for undocumented students, these findings also point to a broader set of considerations those concerned about the academic success and academic trajectories of all undocumented students must be attentive to. First, we need to consider the ways in which policy aimed solely at educational access does not do enough to meet the needs of students who are contending with deep, intergenerational and familial poverty. Second, we must consider how policy efforts are constrained by the political–economic context of poverty and low-wage immigrant labor in the state. Third, we must grapple with the distance between paving the way for undocumented students to enroll in state colleges and universities and what it will actually take for them to be welcomed in these institutions. Still, despite the profound barriers that stand in their way, these young people are marching on, determined to earn their degrees and to fulfill the promise their parents had for them when they migrated here. Their resolute determination suggests that there is hope, there is resistance, and there are students who are finding their way in a system that is not set up to foster their success.