Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados by Chad Richardson

Author:Chad Richardson [Richardson, Chad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.6. Having to decide whether to stay in school or drop out is often an unwelcomed choice. Drawing by Noel Palmenez.

Traditionally, migrant children have had one of the highest dropout rates of any group in the nation. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more at-risk group of US students. In a 1998 newsletter of the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assuring educational opportunity for every child, Abelardo Villarreal and Anita Tijerina Revilla report, “Migrant students are perhaps the most disenfranchised group of students in our schooling system. . . . [They] pose challenges that our educational system is minimally prepared to address.”44

Structural and Cultural Bias: Migrant Education as a Minefield

Eli’s case helps illustrate the risks they face. He said,

I started working in the fields when I was twelve. Then my siblings joined when my dad became sick. We did not have any kind of health insurance, so we did all we could to bring home money for his medicine and the other things we needed. I would attend school all day. Then after school, instead of hanging out with friends or doing homework, I would go work in the fields with the rest of my family. I tried doing my homework when I got home from the fields, but I would fall asleep on my books. My teacher would scold me in front of the class, and my classmates would call me names. But I stuck with it until I was seventeen. Then my dad passed away. I had to drop out of school to work full-time in the fields because we did not have any money. We could not afford even a funeral. I wish I could have finished high school, but at the time, my family needed me. I had no other choice. I had to be a provider, and I also wanted my father to be proud of me.

Eli’s problems occurred not only up north where he attended school as a migrant in late spring and early fall but in the Valley where his family worked in local fields after school and on weekends. As we examine the difficulties migrant students like Eli have faced over the past seventy years, some people might advocate that schools need to level the playing field. Perhaps a better analogy would be to clear the minefield. While all children face some obstacles as they get an education, migrant children face a far greater number of hidden mines—unforeseen risks. Eli’s case reveals the risks of exhaustion from work but also of teachers misinterpreting this as a lack of effort, classmates heaping scorn on him for being a “dummy,” and his family’s need for him to work more. To that is added the poverty migrant families face, their greater health risks, and their general lack of medical insurance, all of which likely contributed to the death of his father.45 We classify the “mines” that generally are not intentionally set to harm migrants as forms of cultural and structural bias.

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