Filtering by
- All Subjects: Immigrants
- All Subjects: English language
- Creators: Castillo, Jason
- Creators: Mccarty, Teresa L.
Standing our sacred ground: one school community's struggle to negotiate restrictive language policy
The purpose of this paper was to examine the impact of perceived discrimination among Latino immigrants in the context of recent immigration policies and immigration enforcement strategies. Data for this study were drawn from a pilot study (n=213) of adult Latino immigrants living in Arizona during the summer of 2014. The results of multivariate OLS linear regressions indicated greater perceived discrimination was significantly related to reporting:
1. Avoidance of immigration officials.
2. Family has suffered.
3. Friends have suffered.
In addition, greater perceived discrimination was significantly related to lower confidence in a better future for the individual, their families, their children, and the children of today.
This study examined the relationship between acculturation and Latinos’ perceptions of health care treatment quality, discrimination, and access to health information. The results of this study indicated that participants who had lower levels of acculturation perceived:
1. Greater discrimination in health care treatment.
2. A lower quality of health care treatment.
3. Less confidence filling out health related forms.
4. Greater challenges understanding written information about their medical conditions.
Participants who identified as immigrants also perceived that their poor quality of medical care was due to their inability to pay and to their race/ethnicity.
This study examined the relationship between the fear of deportation and perceptions of law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and the willingness to report crimes among Latinos in the US. Understanding the relationship between increased immigration enforcement and fear of deportation may promote public safety by improving the relationship between the police and Latino communities.
Multivariate ordinal logistic regression analyses of the data found that participants who had a greater fear of deportation reported:
1. Less confidence that police would not use excessive force (p<.01).
2. Less confidence that police would treat Latinos fairly (p<.05).
3. A lower likelihood of reporting crimes (p<.05).
4. Less confidence that the courts would treat Latinos fairly (p<.01).
The study investigates how youth understand and navigate the school language policy, practices and discourses that position them, and specifically seeks to learn how being identified as an “English Language Learner” interacts with youth’s construction of academic and social identities. Adopting a critical sociocultural theory of language policy (following McCarty, 2011), employing ethnographically-informed research methods, and using social-positioning as an analytic lens, I aim to learn from an emic youth perspective and to amplify their voices. Eight Somali and two Iraqi students took part in two individual in-depth interviews; five students participated in a focus group; and all engaged in numerous informal conversations during 22 researcher site visits to an ethnic community-based organization (ECBO) and a family apartment.
Narratives recounting the participants’ lived experiences in the socio-cultural context of high school provide powerful examples of youth asserting personal agency and engaging in small acts of resistance to contest disagreeable positioning. The findings thus support the conceptualization of youth as creative producers of hybridity in response to their environments. This work also confirms the perennial significance of social categories and “othering” in high school. Though the institutional structure of separate classrooms and concomitant limited access to required courses hinder the study participants’ academic progress, the youth speak positively about the comfort of comradery and friendship in the shared safe space of the separate SEI classroom. The dissertation concludes with participants’ recommendations for educators, and the people refugee youth interact with in the context of high school, to improve refugee youth’s experience.