Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli

Author:Valeria Luiselli
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566894968
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

IV

COMMUNITY

In my first semester teaching at Hofstra University, I was assigned a class called, somewhat blandly, Advanced Conversation. The only thing I’d been told about the course was that I needed to speak Spanish with the students. The rest was up to me. Since I wasn’t sure what would get students to talk, I started talking to them, on day one, about the undocumented minors immigration crisis—the only current topic that I knew enough about, and that seemed inexhaustible and urgent enough to devote at least a few class meetings to.

During our first encounters the ten students in the class looked at me silently and with a sort of congealed bewilderment, which I usually prefer to attribute to their excess of hormones and lack of sleep rather than to their apathy or my want of better teaching skills. And I think I may have been right this time not to judge them or myself too harshly, too quickly. Midway into the semester, they started to speak up. They began asking difficult questions and started articulating sophisticated opinions. We decided to refer to the class as a “migration think tank” rather than “Spanish conversation.” As the weeks passed, one student, who at the beginning of the semester had argued that the United States had too many “internal” problems to deal with the burden of receiving more immigrants, became the most extreme supporter of the idea that the immigration of children into the United States should be conceived of not as a foreign affairs problem, but as a local concern.

Conscious of my own limitations in the subject matter, I brought in experts to talk to us: immigration lawyers, social workers, activists, and political scientists. The semester rolled on, and it seemed to me that for once, a class I was giving was not just following a syllabus but also growing quite naturally out of our group’s shared concerns and questions.

United States law guarantees free public education for all children, no matter their nationality or immigration status. Every child living in U.S. territory has this right. But not all children know this, nor do their parents necessarily know it. With the large influx of new migrant children, many schools in the country are overwhelmed, and negligent administrators simply push parents back when they call to ask about enrollment. Many school districts have reacted by creating more obstacles for newcomers. One of those districts is New York’s Nassau County, which has the fifth-largest population of migrant children in the country. It is also the district where I work. Public schools in Nassau County have denied entrance to many children based on their lack of appropriate immigration papers—something that is by all means an illegal practice. In the summer of 2015 the New York State Education Department held a compliance review and in the end determined that no public school was allowed to ask students for immigration documents of any type.

But not all schools are complying. For months now, Alina has been trying to find a different school for Manu.

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