Troubling Belonging: The Racialized Exclusion of Young Immigrants and Migrants of Color

Abstract

In this article, four Latina educators of Color trouble the neutrality of belonging, exploring its politics. They collectively revisit and reflect on their memories and lived experiences as immigrant children of Color and as young children of immigrants and migrants of Color in the United States. They employed pláticas as method to prompt the sharing of memories, experiences, and stories imparting personal knowledge, familial practices, and cultural histories. Through pláticas, they developed a collective understanding of their fragmented memories as situated representations of how belonging engenders othering children of immigrants and migrants of Color. As they reflected on the harm they withstood, named dehumanizing schooling experiences, and reflected on the exclusion and bordering etched in their memories, they noted how belonging had sponsored their marginalization. After audio-recording and transcribing their pláticas, they identified transcript sections associated with heightened emotional displays, shared resonance, and cultural memory. Then, they creatively recombined sections of original transcripts to reveal things about the experiences of young immigrant children of Color and of children of immigrants and migrants of Color that early childhood educators ought to know. Findings unveil the harm enacted by schooling on young immigrant children of Color and young children from immigrant and migrant families of Color in the name of belonging. Implications, offered as poetic advice, urge early childhood education policy and practice to upend the harmful pseudo-neutrality of belonging.