The names of the undocumented students in this story have been changed for their privacy.
“My mom wanted to come,” undocumented student Coby Heart said. “[In Mexico], you have like no chances of going to college, and I guess she thought over here I could go to college and be more successful. It opens up more doors for me to go to college and get better jobs than I would have gotten in Mexico.”
Many undocumented students mentioned the lure of the “American Dream” as a major reason for moving to the United States.
“It’s where the most opportunity is,” undocumented student Isabella Smith said. “Even though the ‘American Dream’ is basically just a dream, it can happen when you put a lot of thought into it. Even though we have passed a lot of challenges, we’ll still live here.”
Some students who have lived in the U.S. for a long time expressed uncertainty as to whether living in the United States has given them a better life.
“I’m guessing my parents came just to get a better job,” undocumented student Jerry Ellis said. “I’m not sure [if it would be better to live in Mexico].”
Read an interview with an undocumented NHS grad now in college.
However, some students do miss certain things about their home country.
“The only thing I miss is my family and the food, pretty much,” Smith said. “I don’t really miss the place in par- ticular because I know there’s certainly dangers out there, like the militias going against the government; every place has that.”
Xavier Viscarra, a Bolivian student, recently came to the United States on a student visa.
Though Viscarra’s parents did not come to the United States with him, he says his father had a big impact on his decision to come.
“My dad did college in San Francisco, so he told me, ‘The United States is great, let your mind grow,’” Viscarra said. “It’s a good, good place to grow.”
Students who have grown up in the United States have trouble identifying with the roots of their country of origin. Mateo Garcia, an undocumented Northwood graduate who recently graduated from a small private univer- sity, came to the United States from Mexico when he was three years old.
“I pretty much grew up here,” Garcia said. “I’ve spent 20 years of my 23 in the U.S.; this is my home here. This is all I’ve ever known, so going back to my country, I would feel like I’m visiting instead of returning to my home. This is my home, but at the same time, I do want to go back some day.”
The biggest adjustment for most students coming into the United States, documented or undocumented, is the language difference.
“It took me a year to start getting [English],” Smith said. “I remember the first year, sixth grade, I was put into an ESL class, and the rest of my classes were in English. That was pretty hard, and after that, they changed it to a regular schedule, so that’s when I had to get it. I used to read a lot to get new vocabulary and get myself used to the English language.”
English as a Second Language (ESL) classes are important for children of all ages who move to the United States from other cultures.
ESL instructors work with classroom teachers to assist in providing different accommodations to ESL students.
“It depends on the school; there’s never enough training,” former Northwood ESL teacher Katherine Rangel said. “Each kid is really different. So much of it is case by case that it’s hard to know really what the right training is every year. The ESL teacher at each school has to know their students and know their faculty to walk that line.”
Science teacher Victoria Raymond has taught biology, physics and physi- cal science at both Jordan-Matthews and Northwood. She says that the science curriculum may be easier to teach to ESL students than other subjects.
“Because of what we teach, being hands on was absolutely essential,” Raymond said. “If I’m trying to show how things move or push or pull or light up, you can see that in any language, so it really helped to be able to connect what I was trying to explain with what the students were actually doing. And that transcends all language.”
Most teachers agree that documentation status is not an issue for them. Just this year, the U.S. Department of Justice in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Education released guidelines concerning the citizenship status of a child. They state that citizenship or immigration status is irrelevant to district residency, which is the information used to place children in schools. In other words, students who are undocumented have as much a right to high school education as anyone else.
“Most of the things that would impact an undocumented student, a classroom teacher wouldn’t necessarily know about,” Spanish teacher and AVID coordinator Henry Foust said.
Many teachers said that a student’s immigration status is unimportant to them.
“It was kind of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of thing,” Raymond said. “It was never an issue in the classroom, because, who cares? I was teaching the kids. But no, I would never ask a student any of that kind of question because they would be afraid, much too afraid to answer. I would never put them on the spot.”
Phil Cox, a science teacher and recent transplant from Jordan-Matthews, agreed.
“[Legal status was never talked about] unless the student brought it up. I’m here to teach everybody, and if you walk in the door, I’m teaching you. I don’t care what your status is,” Cox said.
Yesenia Martinez, a sophomore involved in an organization called the Immigrant Youth Forum (IYF), which is dedicated to helping undocumented and documented youth in the Orange County area, thinks more attention needs to be brought to the challenges of people who are undocumented.
“I feel like there’s a lot of unfairness now,” Martinez said. “People are just unaware; they don’t realize all this stuff is happening. You see the outside, but not what’s really happening.”
Rangel said that a difference between Northwood and Jordan-Matthews, which has a 41 percent Hispanic population, is the frequency of conver- sations about documentation.
“I saw Northwood students just wanting to blend in and be a regular high school student, which is totally understandable,” Rangel said. “I think I heard more students at JM kind of openly saying their documentation status than at Northwood.”
Most teachers tend to note the similarities, rather than the differences, between undocumented students and any other high school student.
“They’re just high school students,” Rangel said. “Nobody in high school wants to seem different, and this is a huge difference. You just want to hide it as much as you can.”
Foust said that undocumented students may face a stigma because of the inherent prejudices of human beings, rather than any specific qualities.
“It’s part of human nature to look askance at whatever is different,” Foust said. “They may sound romantic, people go, ‘I love people from other cultures,’ but there is no doubt that a lot of people’s opinions toward anyone who’s different, in any way, will impact how they interact with people.”
Northwood ESL teacher Chris Atkins agrees.
“There’s still enough racial tensions within the United States that there’s stigma between blacks and whites, but there is now increasing stigma between Latinos and blacks and Latinos and whites, as well, as they become a third group,” Atkins said. “It’s not unusual in new immigrant groups, though it’s not as though Latino immigration is new; it’s very old. It’s been happening since the United States started. They face a stigma, and I think there’s often a case of, ‘Why don’t they just speak English?’ I wouldn’t say it’s universal and I wouldn’t say most people have it, but it certainly comes across sometimes.”
Some students argue that racial discrimination plays a large role in the prejudice undocumented students may face.
“Just being Latino in general, there’s discrimination everywhere,” Martinez said.
Rangel said that the fear of stigma also impacts the way that students who are undocumented interact with other people.
“[There is a] fear of a stigma, the fear of ‘coming out of the shadows’— an expression a lot of the undocumented community uses—who to tell, who not to tell that you’re undocumented, or you tell someone and they don’t agree with that, politically or culturally, then you’ll be shunned or turned away,” Rangel said. “So there’s just a lot of fear that really lays underneath everything else.”
The fear, not only of stigma but of legal action or at worst, deportation, can impact an undocumented student’s achievement in high school as well as their future. College choices are se- verely limited for a number of reasons.
“Their whole mindset has been to stay out of range of attention,” Foust said. “They don’t want to draw any attention because that could draw in some kind of oversight, which could result in having to deal with the legal system. There have been some stu- dents [in AVID] that we’ve really had to work with to figure out how to make it happen. And for the most part, the ones that I can remember, have always worked out, but it took effort both within the school and outside the school to make it happen.”
Garcia was very successful in high school and received a full scholarship to the small private university he attended, but he said that he went through a period of demoralization during high school after a conversation with another student.
“It’s kind of funny though, because my freshman and sophomore year, I probably got only two Bs, and then my junior year, I had another Hispanic kid say to me, ‘Man, why are you working so hard? You can’t even go to college, bro.’ And that kind of stuck with me. It took about a good
week for it to settle in,” Garcia said. “It kind of takes you down because at the end of the day, you’re just like, ‘I’m working so hard—for what? I can’t even go to school, and that was my goal.”
Cox notes that many undocumented students he has taught in the past were very ambitious.
“We had some good kids that were undocumented and in the top 10 of their class, and they were really good, strong students,” Cox said. “It wasn’t universal of undocumented students to say ‘I’m not going to go anywhere.’ You also had kids that still would bust their butts and say, ‘I’m going to go to school in Mexico,’ or ‘I’m going to go to college in Honduras or Guatemala’ or wherever they were from, and so they were still busting their butts in school.”
Still, the challenges that students who are undocumented can face are much more difficult to surmount than most other groups.
“Especially in high school, [un- documented students] worry about
the future; they want to go to college, but aren’t sure if they’re going to be able to financially,” Rangel said. “I mean, there are some scholarships that are available regardless of immigration status, but not as many. You can’t apply for FAFSA, you can’t apply for federal aid, some col- leges won’t even accept undocumented students. You have to find the right college fit, so just that uncertainty, the same uncertainties that all high schoolers face, but it’s just more, more stressful. Everybody’s hoping to get financial aid for college, but for undocumented students, there’s just so much less available.”
Students who are undocumented may struggle with motivation because of the seemingly insurmountable odds.
“You have a lot of kids who would say, ‘Why do I have to try? I’m just not gonna try, I’m undocumented, so I can’t go to college,’” Cox said. “Sometimes you get attitudes like that, and you [feel] bad for them. They were in a catch-22.”
Foust is of the opinion that changing the way people think about students who are undocumented would be a big step towards reducing disenfranchisement.
“Learning the language would be a big step, and it’s not even so much trying to accommodate the people who are immigrants, but it’s the whole mindset of understanding how big the world is, and understanding our role in involving ourselves in the rest of the world instead of always waiting for the rest of the world to accommodate themselves to us,” Foust said. “The world is bigger than Pittsboro, or even bigger than North Carolina or the whole United States. That’s a basic thing that people could do, just learning the language, learning any language.”
“We just need to treat people like they’re people,” Foust said. “The world’s not getting any bigger. The population isn’t going down, so the possibility that we’re going to be deal- ing with people from other cultures, and that those people that don’t speak the language, is just going to increase.”
– By Byron Aguilar and Frances Beroset