Juan Sánchez García

Transnational Students’ Perspectives on Schooling in the United States and Mexico: The Salience of School Experience and Country of Birth

As schooling becomes an increasingly common institutional presence across the world and as decided majorities of children now attend at least some version of primary school, it is hardly surprising that childhood gets increasingly constructed as a time of dependence, need, and preparation. As this volume’s introduction notes, vulnerability is a common fourth thread of this predominant conceptualization of children. Yet, as the introduction also hints, these conceptualizations suffer in at least two ways: whether optimistic or pessimistic, they tend to homogenize a broad and heterogeneous portion of the lifespan and they direct us away from attention to children’s agency. Instead, adult attention focuses on what children need, what should be done to them or for them, but much less common is the consideration of children’s views of the world they are traversing and their actions and intentions in that traversing.

From Nuevo León to the USA and Back Again: Transnational Students in Mexico

ABSTRACT The movement of Mexicans to the United States is both longstanding and long studied and from that study we know that for many newcomers the attachment to the receiving community is fraught and tentative. The experience of immigrant children in U.S. schools is also relatively well studied and reveals challenges of intercultural communication as well as concurrent and contradictory features of welcome and unwelcome. What is less well known, in the study of migration generally and of transnational students in particular, is how students moving in a less common direction — from the U.S. to Mexico — experience that movement. Based on visits to 173 randomly selected classrooms in the state of Nuevo León Mexico, this study shares survey and interview data from 208 of the 242 students encountered who had previous experience attending school in the United States.

Identifying the Anthropological in a Mixed-Methods Study of Transnational Students in Mexican Schools

Identifying surveying as more commonly sociological and semistructured interviewing as more commonly anthropological, which describes disciplinary histories more than any fixed formulas, we juxtapose transnational students’ survey answers collected in Mexican schools with their answers to interviewers several months later. From this, we consider what can be learned about research methodology and transnational student cosmology when different methods yield discrepant answers. Without claiming superiority for either mechanism, we find their combination illuminating, and it substantiates the claim that anthropological inquiry can add crucial value to mixed-methods, interdisciplinary inquiry.