G. Sue Kasun

“We Are Not Terrorists,” but More Likely Transnationals: Reframing Understandings About Immigrants in Light of the Boston Marathon Bombings

The Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013 created a new kind of discomfort in the United States about “self-radicalized” terrorists, particularly related to Muslim immigrants. The two suspected bombers, brothers with Chechen backgrounds, had attended U.S. public schools. News media portrayed the brothers as “immigrants” and often showed them as having a struggle between their Chechen and U.S. identities. This article proposes that educators consider reframing the talk and discourses about immigrants and immigration toward a more complex understanding of transnationalism. The author demonstrates her work as a former English language learner teacher and her current research in the area of transnationalism to argue for educators to teach meaningfully about this concept. The goal, the author argues, is to help create a deeper understanding of newer arrivals to the United States so that the more newly arrived have greater choices about who they become and the identities they perform.

Transnational Mexican-Origin Families' Ways of Knowing: A Framework Toward Bridging Understandings in U.S. Schools

Abstract Transnational students and families are those who cross real and metaphoric borders, spanning countries, to engage family and community in meaningful ways. Based on a three-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, I show the distinct ways of knowing of four Mexican-origin, working class families and how the U.S. schools where the children from these families study hardly recognize these ways of knowing. The families’ ways of knowing can be characterized as a form of what Gloria Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, or knowing, under three interweaving categories: Nepantlera or in-between, bridge-building knowing; sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing; and chained knowing, in which families are chained in their knowing to the realities of the U.S./Mexican border and their extended communities and families who also are impacted by the border. The article shows that schools recognize neither transnational practices, such as return trips to Mexico, nor transnational ways of knowing. Educators may strengthen their own ways of knowing and create a more equitable pedagogy for all students if they learn to help co-construct the bridges families such as the ones in this study have already begun to build.