When I began the PhD program after years of working in schools, as a teacher and a consultant, I became interested in how families and educators might disrupt the school to prison pipeline. Simultaneously, I joined a research team at Making Caring Common, a project at Harvard Graduate School of Education, to explore middle-class and affluent families’ perceptions of inequality.  And now, my dissertation research takes up questions about the relationships between immigration, mothers, and schools. 

But although these interests may seem distinct, notions of belonging have been a constant through line in my work.  The school-to-prison pipeline is fundamentally about educators’ perceptions of who belongs and who doesn’t, and how these beliefs are enacted as they make decisions about how to respond to youth behavior in school.  Similarly, in my research on parents’ perceptions of socioeconomic inequality and integration, I sought to understand how middle-class and affluent parents think about the boundaries between their own wealthy communities in comparison to poor neighborhoods and schools serving poor children.

In my dissertation work, I bring belonging to the forefront, to make sense of how Latina immigrant mothers develop a sense of belonging, what role schools might play in facilitating experiences of belonging for these women, and how the politics of belonging affect all of these relationships and interactions.  My study is intended to be timely and reflective of this particular political moment, when anti-immigrant and nativist rhetoric and policies are at a historic high.  Situated in a self-proclaimed Sanctuary City, I set out to illuminate how the tensions and contradictions between a ostensibly welcoming locale and broader national discourse and policies around immigration are experienced by immigrant families. 

By adopting lenses of gender and place to explore Latina immigrant women’s feelings of belonging, and by investigating the role of schools and the current politics of immigration on these experiences of belonging, my study strives to shed new light on the social and cultural processes through which immigrant families become woven into the fabric of American life.   

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