Written by Professor Pedro Nava
February 28, 2024
I was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley town of Planada, 10 miles southeast of Merced, California. Growing up, my father and mother worked as farm laborers, and my interest as an academic in studying immigrant communities emerged from my lived experience. As a child of migrant farmworkers, I spent six months of the year in the United States, living in migrant labor camps, typically open from the beginning of April to the end of October. From November to March, we would return to Mexico and spend six months of the year there. My experiences early on were colored by the reality of attending school in a bilingual/bicultural and bi-national context. My father attended school until the 2nd grade in Mexico, whereas my mother attended school until the 11th grade but returned years later to obtain her GED. This allowed her to leave agricultural work and become an instructional assistant at the local elementary school.
"Immigrant communities are essential when I think about the entrepreneurial mindset."
Immigrant communities are essential when I think about the entrepreneurial mindset. As a young child, it meant our parents would take us to work on weekends when no childcare was available. We would go at times and try to help them, and it was early exposure for me to experience low-paid, backbreaking farm work. Like other immigrants, my father embodied the entrepreneurial mindset when, as a five-year-old, he was already working alongside his father as a subsistence farmer in Mexico. He only had a chance to attend school during the rainy season. My father took me as a 14-year-old the summer of my first year in high school to work on my account, picking bell peppers with some days reaching 100 degrees. This experience taught me to appreciate having the privilege of attending school to attain a formal education. A big part of my motivation for studying in school was hating agricultural work and trying to escape labor exploitation.
While pursuing my PhD, a part of my dissertation research looked at migrant farm worker families and their roles in engaging in their children's educational processes. For immigrant families who are marginalized and often come from poor rural communities in their country of origin, the decision to immigrate is a considerable risk in and of itself. In my research, I found families saw migration as a possibility of positioning themselves in a way that created opportunities for their children to have a chance at fulfilling educational and occupational aspirations. They began to see possibilities for their children to complete K-12 education and access higher education, but often undertaking huge risks, especially when trying to do so as undocumented immigrants.
My research collaborators shared their experiences with poverty in Mexico before US migration that pushed them out of school and prevented them from fulfilling their educational aspirations. Familial tragedies like a father unexpectedly passing away led one of my research collaborators to become an entrepreneur as young as six years old, selling eggs and milk in the town marketplace as a way to try to make ends meet supporting their family. For another research collaborator at 16, her father wanted her to continue to go to school and finish high school when he unexpectedly broke a leg and was unable to work. My research collaborator knew the financial risk to her family, and she told me, “Either I was going to go to school, or my family was going to eat. I decided that my family eating at that time was more important.”
After immigrating to the United States as an undocumented immigrant, she continued her education at an adult school, earning her GED because she wanted to show her daughters that if she could get her high school diploma “without papers,” there should not be anything stopping her daughters from also succeeding in school. In my work, I refer to this process as apoyo, a form of culturally specific support these Mexican immigrant families provide for their children. Families in my research study model sacrifice and take risks to support their children, putting their own needs and desires aside for the benefit of the family unit.
When I work with aspiring educational leaders, and they learn about family engagement in schools, I teach my students all the manifold ways immigrant families already support their children’s education and aspirations. Rather than asking why they sometimes do not see immigrant families physically present in schools, I challenge them to think about ways these families are already providing apoyo, and instead ask them to meet families where they are at and seek to build relational educational engagement approaches. My work has revealed that migrant families already exercise a great degree of flexibility and risk-taking, especially in the support of their children in the field of education.
Dr Pedro Nava has a bachelor's degree from CSU Fresno (1996) and received a Masters degree in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard University (2003). In 2012, Dr. Nava completed his doctoral studies at the University of California Los Angeles Graduate School of Education in Urban Schooling. The focus of his research and teaching are in urban and rural schooling inequality, critical pedagogy and critical race theory, immigration and education, family-school-community engagement, and participatory action research.