Brown Bag Seminar: Displacement, Disruption, and Schooling: Education and Armed Conflict on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Within the last several years the violent wars taking place between drug cartels in Mexico have had an especially serious impact on the cities that are located on the U.S.-Mexico border. On the Mexican side of the drug cartel war zone, residents have witnessed gang executions, random shootings of by-standers, beheadings, extortions, and kidnappings. Thousands of business have shut down, families have pulled their children out of schools, and many have fled their cities and relocated to other areas of the country or moved across the border to the United States. American cities, on the other hand (even those located at some distance from the border like San Antonio, Texas), have experienced an unexpected influx of both ordinary and affluent Mexican émigrés and their children (Davila, 2010) who are then enrolled in both private and public American schools.

This presentation draws from the literature on globalization and world society with its emphasis on human rights and world-cultural principles including the protection of children, the status of refugees and displaced persons, and the phenomenon of forced migration to examine the challenges of providing access to education to Mexican children who are fleeing drug cartel violence in one city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Professor Valdes will report on work in progress that attempts to examine:
• the impact on U.S. schools of an influx of such refugee children on both teaching and learning
• the dilemmas faced by educators and school administrators as they attempt to comply with existing policies in the face of an increasing population of English language learners.

Guadalupe Valdes is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education. Professor Valdes' research explores many of the issues of bilingualism relevant to teachers in training, including methods of instruction, typologies, measurement of progress, and the role of education in national policies on immigration. Specifically, she studies the sociolinguistic processes of linguistic acquisition by learners in different circumstances--those who set out to learn a second language in a formal school setting (elective bilingualism) and those who must learn two languages in order to adapt to immediate family-based or work-based communicative needs within an immigrant community (circumstantial bilingualism). Her research in these areas has made her one of the most eminent experts on Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States.