A DREAM Deferred: Undocumented, High-Achieving Latina/o and Chicana/o Science Trajectories

This study explores the lived realities of eight high-achieving undocumented Latina/o students in honors, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate science courses in a Southern, high-poverty Title 1 high school through critical narrative analysis of their testimonios/counterstories. These students’ own voices, struggles, and successes illustrate their crossing of cultural borderlands (Anzaldua, 2007) and uncover dialectics between agency and the structures that shape schooling, school science, racial/ethnic identities, and political realities that prohibit them from leading a fully functioning life in the U.S., due to their undocumented status. Qualitative critical ethnographic methods (Madison, 2005) through participant observation (Spradley, 1980) and narrative analysis with member checking (Clandenin, 2006) work to highlight each student’s voice and identity construction, as does individual testimonio and focus group interviews, and observation and dialogue during school science, after-school STEM club, and other science-related activities. The realities that emerge in this study tell of high achieving students with strong science identities, brilliant on science content knowledge measures as well as doing science in reform-based and informal science settings. Each student professes agentic desire to follow a science trajectory, but is painfully aware of the oppressive barriers to equal access to college, jobs, etc., despite having been brought to the U.S. as small children, sometimes infants, without their consent. Students persevere in spite of, perhaps because of, the additional obstacles they face, to “prove” their worth and rise above low expectations of students of their ethnicity and undocumented status, and hold onto hope for legislation such as the DREAM Act.