Institutional Agents and Undocumented Youth
Undocumented students attend K-12 schools among their U.S. citizen counterparts, and their presence is often characterized by their racial hypervisibility, as racialized immigrant students, and by their legal status invisibility, as students whose legal status is often unknown to teachers, high school counselors, and even to their peers. In this line of research I examine how race manifests in the advising relationships of predominantly White high school counselors and racially/ethnically minoritized undocumented students.
Racialized Hypervisibility and Legal Status Invisibility: The Challenges of Advising Undocumented and DACA-Benefited High School Students
After collecting pilot data, I am currently in the process of securing external funding to carry out this research at the state level. I propose a multi methods study that examines the advising experiences of primarily White high school counselors in Massachusetts, as they interact with racially and/or ethnically minoritized immigrant students who are undocumented; including those who are recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
Advising Into Despair: Educational Landscape and Support for Undocumented College-Aspiring High School Students
School counselors play a key role in high school students’ ability to navigate the process of applying to college. For most high school students, relationships with their high school counselors begin long before senior year, and counselors can make a difference when it comes to students' plans after high school. Undocumented students who want to go to college, but whose postsecondary opportunities are limited due to their legal status, have limited opportunities and how high school counselors support these students is influenced by their knowledge of national, state, and local policies around undocumented and DACA students’ college access. Drawing from data collected through a web survey of high school counselors in Mecklenburg county, North Carolina (N=120, response rate 17%), and supporting this with data from interviews with undocumented and DACA former North Carolina high school students (N=20), in this paper I examine the role of high school counselors in undocumented and DACA students’ access to college. I conclude that in North Carolina high school counselors’ advising relationships with undocumented and DACA students reproduce UndocuCrit’s tenet of fear by perpetuating exclusionary immigrant “practices, policies, and rhetoric” for immigrant students, as well as UndocCrit’s tenet of differential experiences that translate to different realities as moderated by place. I propose that for high school counselors to fulfill their roles of supporting all students, including undocumented and DACA students, the work of Gloria Anzaldua in La Facultad can be useful as high school counselors understand their responsibility to look beyond the surface of "don’t ask don’t tell" institutional approaches to students’ legal status.