Immigration and Migration and the Making of a Modern American City

Rationale

Last year, my entire Kindergarten class represented a range of Hispanic culture, including Californios, Mexicans, Chicanos, and Mexicanos. Two months before the end of the school year, we had an immigrant from Vietnam join us who had very little experience with the English language. He was a very enthusiastic and boisterous boy who spoke out in his language of Vietnamese. Unfortunately, no one in our class nor I understood his words and relied on gestures, facial expressions, and body language. The reaction some students had to his words was giggles and laughter at the unfamiliar sounds and intonations of his language. I immediately directed the class in a mini lesson about our differences, similarities, and friendship. We shared some Spanish words, and I shared some Japanese words, and we all enjoyed learning something new together in English – including our new friend. From then on until the end of the school year, we sought to understand and learn a little more every day about our Vietnamese friend. This was a great reminder that there are many different cultures in our own school, neighborhood, and community. But as a teacher, I continued to work through how do we understand what makes us different and how can we better interact with one another bypassing those immediate unkind reactions in a diverse environment.

Mount Pleasant Elementary STEAM Academy is part of a small and diverse ethnic community in the eastern foothills of San Jose, California. It currently serves 362 students, Kindergarten through 5th grade, in general education with a new focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). The school population is categorized primarily as Hispanic with few students of Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, and Japanese descent. Approximately 82% of our students are Hispanic, 9% are Asian, and 9% are Caucasian. ³ The school community is rich with the cultures of our student body and staff, and we have been marketing and recruiting this year to keep our enrollment up. Keeping the daily difficulties and tensions inherent in our community in mind, one of the strategies of outreach includes partnering with community counseling agencies presenting summer programs and promoting our school.

A layer of difficulty is added perhaps because kindergarten is not mandatory in California. For our school, this impact of low enrollment means less income, fewer classroom teachers, and more students packed into a fewer number of classes available. In this environment, the diversity of students as mentioned before allows for a wealth of cultural capital being brought into the classroom, and presents the need for more dynamically engaging learning opportunities. Along with a larger group of individuals converging into each class, comes a need for appropriate social interactions skills such as conflict/resolution to encourage tolerance and respect of our differences. A curriculum unit on immigration and migration in early childhood education can indeed be a vehicle in building these key character traits with the hopes of also nurturing compassion within these young ones. Participating in personal and family history activities to learn about immigration and sharing our stories with one another provides meaningful connections, skills, and strategies that broaden the lens of how students see and interact in their community and the world.

For most of my upcoming first grade students, this is their second year of experience with academic language, skills development, and being in a structured environment for learning. For a few, it may be their first. Some of these students are English Language Learners from my SEI kindergarten class from last year who are learning the English language. The majority of my students will be Hispanic, and few will be Asian. Even within these two groups, there are differences categorizing their history. Mainly, the Hispanic categories are Mexican-Americans (born or long established in U.S.) and Mexicanos (recent immigrants from Mexico). In an informal session with our principal, Dr. Jose Gonzalez, I learned that subgroups of our Mexican-Americans students are the following: Californios, Mexicans, and Chicanos. The different groups within Mexicanos or recent immigrants can be distinguished by rich or poor, Spanish or Indian, Northern, Central, or Southern. ⁴ This information is also documented in Stephen Pitti's book, The Devil in Silicon Valley (2003). ⁵ The Asian students representing the Vietnamese culture descend from mainly three different groups of refugees and immigrants: the first wave of refugee resettlement fled to the U.S. following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the second wave of Vietnamese refugees referred to as "boat people" fled to the U.S. beginning as early as 1978, and Amerasian immigrants who arrived beginning in 1982 with the Amerasian Act. All migrants and immigrants have very different stories of how they were received in our city and how they have added to the cultural wealth of San Jose, California.

Not all, but many students at our school come from difficult family situations. However, students bring with them what Tara J. Yosso (2005) calls cultural capital. She breaks it down into these types of cultural wealth, "… aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital." ⁶ A typical trap we fall into as educators, of which I am guilty of as well, is looking at our students and families with the lens of deficit thinking that focuses on cultural poverty disadvantages rather than the wealth students bring to our school and community. I am inspired by Yosso's (2005) explanation of aspirations capital as well as by the families in our community who display this positive strength.

For example, as noted above, aspirational capital is the ability to hold onto hope in the face of structured inequality and often without the means to make such dreams a reality. Yet, aspirations are developed within social and familial contexts, often through linguistic storytelling and advice (consejos) that offer specific navigational goals to challenge (resist) oppressive conditions. Therefore, aspirational capital overlaps with each of the other forms of capital, social, familial, navigational, linguistic and resistant. ⁷

Even though our East San Jose students represent only a portion of cultural diversity of the population within the city of San Jose, they bring their valuable cultural wealth to our school. With this in mind, it is a reality that families in our local neighborhood have had to struggle with stressors and tension in our community that have been alive and well for immigrants and migrants throughout the history of San Jose de Guadalupe, "the first pueblo (Spanish civilian town) in Alta California…," established in 1777. ⁸ History is change over time, and throughout our local history we can still connect personally with those who came before in all the various challenging interactions that occur in being a part of a diverse community then and now.

Some of my first grade students do, unfortunately, have to deal with hardships in their young lives. For example, their family may be dealing with such stressors as crowded living spaces, financial difficulties, gang affiliations, drugs, abuse, and relatives in jail. They may also be isolated without kinship, surviving in a new country. Their family's socioeconomic well being often takes precedence over education. The difficulties are nothing new, as I have learned in my seminar research of the tensions and struggles of natives, immigrants, and oppression since the early beginning of this area in which we live now known as San Jose, California. As Stephen Pitti writes, "The Ohlone had inhabited the area for at least six thousand years prior to Spanish explorations, existing amidst an atmosphere of political rivalries and occasional violence…" ⁹ There has always been struggle over resources and labor as natural human migration and immigration occurs over time. People naturally look for ways to better their lives, including moving to where there are opportunities to do so. The tensions over this land between natives of various tribes like the Ohlone and Mexicans who migrated from the south to Alta California, for example, were mixed with religious conflicts because of the "Franciscan strong-arm tactics" of the mission's friars to join their communities. ¹⁰ The Americans who came to conquer the West, and civilize with their efficiency and industry then oppressed the Mexicans and natives. People continued arriving and taking over the land as their own without much care of displacing or disenfranchising those who had settled before. After the U.S./Mexico war ended, "Many migrants assumed that local lands were there for the taking, and squatters commonly expressed little compunction about stealing Californio properties." ¹¹

Of course there were uprisings and protests scattered throughout San Jose's long history, again showing the tension in this area as nothing new. Labor unions were formed through the years to stand up against unfair labor practices and laws in agriculture, railroad work, and mining. Struggles can be found throughout time since San Jose was established in the eighteenth century to the present day. In the late 1960s, for instance, farm workers joined to boycott grape growers until they improved labor conditions. The leader they followed to inspire nonviolent protests and marches for dignity, equality, and justice is now honored in East San Jose with the Cesar E. Chavez Memorial Walkway. ¹² There are many great and inspirational Hispanic role models who have made a difference in San Jose adding so much to the cultural wealth of this community. This history is of great importance for me to better understand my students, not only their cultural and immigration history but also how they contribute to our community so that I can better teach them and guide them in making meaningful connections with their own family history and plant seeds of hope and inspiration for their own future legacy.