May 2008 • Anthropology News

19

i n f o c u s

Edmund T Hamann u nEbraska, LincoLn

VicTor Zúñiga u monTErrEy

Interviewer (in Spanish): What has been your experience as a student in US schools? What did schools there seem like?

José (a student, also in Spanish): Over there things are better, like the buildings, they are bigger and more spacious. They have a library—here it is a small room that isn’t usable…They have a computer laboratory. Here they don’t let us use them. The bathrooms there are cleaner. Here no. There, there is toilet paper and soap and here in Mexico there is neither. The rooms there have air-conditioning, but here no. It is to say, more than anything, that the buildings there are better. But I think the level of academics is better here in México.

Each month hundreds of students go missing from US schools. Not to worry, we found them. They were in Mexico. More specifically they were enrolled in 1st through 9th grades of the randomly selected classrooms we visited in the states of Nuevo León and Zacatecas. In 2004 we visited classrooms in 173 primarias and secundarias (elemen-tary and middle schools) in Nuevo León. In 2005 we visited classrooms in 204 schools in Zacatecas. From the 242 transnationals we found in Nuevo León, we estimate that at the end of 2004 there were between 9,371 and 10,357 students enrolled in schools in the state of Nuevo León who had previously attended school in the United States. From the 270 transnational students we found in Zacatecas in 2005, we esti-mate that there were between 7,310 and 8,401 students in primarias and secundarias there who had previ-ously attended school in the US.

We say the transnational students we met in the two states were “missing” from the United States because schooling in the US is largely not designed to expect that some enrollees will continue their grade-school education in Mexico. It also appears that the schooling they typically encoun-tered in Mexico was not designed to acknowledge or build on any inter-

national school and out-of-school life experiences. Indeed, most teachers and school administrators we met were unaware that there were students with US school expe-rience in their student body. That does not mean that their schooling in the United States or Mexico was irrelevant, or weak or not engaging, but in both countries it did seem that transnational students encoun-tered school experiences that were neither fully responsive to who they were (as transnationals) or who they could become (bicultural, bilingual binationals).

None of the students we encoun-tered were obviously unhealthy or uncared for, but that does not mean that there were no academic vulner-abilities or missed opportunities among this population. The truth is that little is known about trans-national students in Mexico. How many are there? How are they faring? Is their transnationalism explic-itly attended to? Are they likely to be transnationally mobile again in the future? Does their transnational status matter? What is it like to negotiate two schools systems? Our study offers a first sustained attempt at answering these questions based on our encounters with 512 transna-tional students and 24,000 of their classmates.

Primary findingsOur first finding is that the number of transnational students in Mexican schools seems to be large enough that it is important to know much more about them. With 2.4% of Zacatecas students having trans-national experience and 1.7% of Nuevo León’s having similar expe-rience, it does not seem too intrepid to estimate a 2% national average for transnational experience among students in Mexico’s primarias and secundarias. Historically and currently Zacatecas has a higher than Mexican average participa-tion rate in international migra-tion and Nuevo León’s rate is lower than the national average. If 2% of Mexico’s total enrollment at these grade levels has transnational expe-rience, then Mexican schools enroll more than 420,000 students of this profile. Tens of thousands more transnational students are likely

attending preparatoria (grades 10–12; also known as educación média superior), but with Mexican law not requiring enrollment at those grade levels and with national enroll-ment in educación media superior at 53.5% of the age-eligible popu-lation in 2003–04 (Secretaría de Educación Pública 2004), we did not include that level in our study.

Our second finding is that a number of US citizens are attending Mexican schools, although we have found little direct acknowledge-ment of that fact in the US or Mexico. Looking only at students in grades 4–9 who reliably could answer written questionnaires, 113 of the transnational students we found had been born in the United States, which means they were US citizens (though likely Mexican citi-zens too by virtue of their parents’ birthplace). These same surveys also identified 120 other students who had been born in the United States, but never attended school there. Likely some other students in our survey were also US citizens (by virtue of being born to a US-born mother, for example). However, even if we count only the US-born as US citizens and leave out the youngest three grades, we found 233 US citizens (1.3% of our 4th–9th grade sub-sample) attending school

in Zacatecas and Neuvo León. If even 1% of students enrolled in Mexican schools were born in the United States and those were the only Mexican students with US citi-zenship, then currently there are 220,000 US citizens attending prima-rias and secundarias in Mexico.

Our third finding is that our etic “transnational student” category is only an etic category; transna-tionality was not a self-referential quality used by any student we met. However, we did find transnational students who identified bination-ally and students who self-identi-fied as “American.” Of the trans-national students who had been in the US for one to three years, 18% identified as “Mexican-American,” as did 34% of those with four or more years in the US. Additionally, 13% percent of the students with one to three years of US experience identified as “American,” as did

31% of those who had been to the US for four or more.

Although in interviews we were told occasional tales of negative treat-ment in US schools (eg, not being allowed to speak in Spanish even on the playground) and a few offered highly personalized reasons for disliking the US (eg, a girl who said she hated her father, that her father was in the US and thus she hated the US), the substantial majority of our sample reported quite favorably about their US school experiences. Of students with US school experi-ence in a state other than Texas or California, 90% indicated a desire to continue their studies in the United States. Similarly, 82% with California experience also indicated a desire to return to school in the US, but only 56% with experience in Texas indi-cated this.

Obviously, there is much more to our datasets than has been shared here, but even from our brief portrayal, we hope it is clear that some of the oldest conceits of schooling—that public education is a vehicle for building national loyalty, competence and identity—can be circumstantially incomplete. There are students in Mexico who have already experienced transna-tional school trajectories and who, as adults, may well negotiate legally binational lives.

Edmund “Ted” Hamann is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is author of The Educational Welcome of Latinos in the New South (2003) and a contrib-utor to the forthcoming Handbook of Latinos and Education.

Víctor Zúñiga is director of the División de Educación y Humanidades at the Universidad de Monterrey. He is coeditor of New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States (2005).

This paper details a study titled “Migración Internacional, Trayec-torias Escolares y Pobreza” (Inter-national Migration: School Trajec-tories and Poverty), funded by CONACYT (the National Sciences and Technology Council of Mexico) and completed through the Universidad de Monterrey.

Transnational Students in Mexican Schools

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