Research
Citizenship and Schooling
My first area of inquiry spans fifteen years of ethnographic engagement with students, families, and educators across the continental United States. I have worked alongside mixed-status communities in Northern California, Southwestern Pennsylvania, Central New Jersey, and New York City—a range of locations characterized in educational research as traditional immigration gateways as well as parts of the New Latino Diaspora. By engaging in sustained participant observation and community engagement, I explore the ways in which linguistic and cultural practices across the lifespan are shaped by state-defined categories of legal citizenship status during the course of everyday life. Through the careful audiovisual recording of face-to-face interactions in homes, schools, and in the public space, I have worked to amplify the voices of educational stakeholders living at the intersections of immigration and education policy as it shapes learning, language use, and participation.
This research—funded by a Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-2014), as well as a Rutgers Research Council Grant (2016) and the Inaugural Latino Studies Initiative Grant from Rutgers University (2018)—has focused on the ways in which discourses of citizenship circulate across home and school settings in mixed-status communities. I have published findings from this research organized around several themes including: ethnographic evidence from mixed-status homes and classrooms (Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2011; Language Policy, 2013; American Educational Research Journal, 2017); undocumented mother’s testimonio (Journal of Latinos and Education, 2015; Language & Communication, 2013); and the ethics of conducting ethnographic research in mixed-status homes (Humanizing Research, 2014 and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2016). I am currently writing a book-length ethnography drawing from ongoing research with Latinx students in New York City which will be published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Immigration and Education Policy
My second area of inquiry draws from qualitative and quantitative methodological traditions to engage in collaborative research that is both regional and nationwide. I have two ongoing projects known as PIECE and CUNY-IIE.
The PIECE study—Putting Immigration and Education into Conversation Everyday—involves data collection in six school districts across the United States to examine the ways in immigration policy has shaped educators’ practices since 2016. This project is led by Principal Investigator Rebecca Lowenhaupt at Boston College and is supported by seed funding from the W.T. Grant and Spencer Foundations (2018) as well as a Reducing Inequality Initiative Grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation (2018-2021). Our research collaborative includes myself, as well as Dafney Blanca Dabach at the University of Washington and Roberto Gonzales at Harvard University as Co-Principal Investigators. The PIECE project began with an initial collaboration with Maureen Costello from the Southern Poverty Law Center to reissue a version of the survey that led to the influential Trump Effect report in 2016. Currently, the PIECE research team is working with school leaders and educational staff in six different school districts in Texas, Washington, Illinois, Georgia, New Jersey, and Maine. In addition to documenting educators’ innovative practices in this moment, we are working to create a network among our six participating districts where meaningful—and difficult—conversations can take place about the role of schools in supporting or stifling broader movements for immigrant, language, and social justice.
CUNY-IIE—the City University of New York - Initiative on Immigration and Education—is a five-year project beginning in 2020 that focuses on learning from immigrant communities across New York State in order to develop relationships, materials, and policies that best serve immigrant communities in our region. Our work is funded by the New York State Department of Education and our leadership team includes Tatyana Kleyn (Principal Investigator, City College), Nancy Stern (co-Principal Investigator), myself (co-Principal Investigator), and Cynthia Carvajal (Project Director). Together with leaders from our state’s undocumented, refugee, and asylum-seeking communities we are building a network of advocates and allies that can work together to leverage the expertise of directly-impacted immigrants for social and educational change in New York City and State. We are currently in the initial stages of developing the work of CUNY-IIE, centered on three key areas: learn, act, advocate. Learn more at cuny-iie.org.
Teaching
K-12 Schooling
I began my career in education as a public school teacher. After graduating from college, I returned to New York City to teach English as a Second Language and Spanish as a heritage language in two New Visions Schools: first, Banana Kelly High School in the South Bronx; and subsequently, Cypress Hills Community School in East New York, Brooklyn. I also taught English as a second language to adults and children in Madrid, Spain for one year. During this period, spanning the early 2000’s, I worked alongside other public school educators in the Bronx and Brooklyn to found the New York Collective of Radical Educators. As educator-activists, we founded this grassroots organization in the wake of September 11th as we sought to articulate our teachers’ stance within the anti-war movement. NYCoRE continues to organize locally and nationally on issues of educational justice today.
Higher Education
I joined the Graduate Center faculty in fall 2019. Prior to that I was a professor in the Language Education Program at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at Rutgers University (2010-2019). There, I prepared teachers for certification in English as a Second Language and World Language as well as those seeking an endorsement in Bilingual Education in the state of New Jersey. As a member of the Ph.D. faculty at Rutgers University, I supervised doctoral students conducting ethnographic research in multilingual and mixed-status communities including Dr. Meredith McConnochie, Dr. David Greer, Dr. Sora Suh, and Dr. Sally Bonet. I collaborated with the GSE leadership, faculty, and staff to design the Urban Social Justice Teacher Education Program that began in 2017.
Joining CUNY
CUNY has been an important institution to me since I was a child. As a Puerto Rican girl growing up in Inwood, my family often crossed Fordham Road into the Bronx to attend cultural events at Hostos Community College—from the Pleneros de la 21 shows to the Muévete Boricua youth conferences. When, in fifth grade, I was selected to join Prep for Prep—a non-profit organization that believes in fostering social change by academically preparing “gifted” students of color to enter private schools—I learned that there was no amount of academic preparation that could ready me for the stark economic and racial inequalities that I would encounter at Horace Mann. During my high school years, I chose to spend my Saturday afternoons at El Centro at Hunter College, learning the Puerto Rican history I wasn’t taught in high school, enthralled by the issues of Pa’lante published by the Young Lords. When I returned to New York City after attending Brown University to teach English as a Second Language and Spanish as a heritage language in the South Bronx and East New York, the Graduate Center was a site for NYCoRE’s political organizing for educational justice in wartime. While working towards my doctorate at Berkeley, and as a junior scholar at Rutgers University, I stayed in close contact with colleagues throughout CUNY in language policy and education working in a social justice framework. Now, as a member of the Graduate Center faculty, I situate my research and teaching within the city that my family and I call home. Read more about my current work within CUNY here, here, and here.