This article explores children's perspectives regarding migration and family separation on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. 'Transnational care constellations' 1 which connect separated siblings allow children to imagine the other side of the border and to explore their thoughts and perspectives through the lenses of inequality, as well through a sense of belonging and family. This article presents ethnographic data of families that capture the dynamism of families that are both 'here and there' as children assemble their ideas and narratives of how transnational lives exist.

This paper explores how nineteen teenagers who, having been raised and educated in the United States and forced to return, adapt and participate to the Mexican school system. This work specifically analyzes their adaptation process in three Mexican public High Schools in the State of Puebla, and how they negotiate the process of participating within a Mexican school setting while negotiating their sense of belonging to the US and Mexico. In this study, we explore different ways in which return students enact their own bilingual and bicultural citizenship through their educational process in Mexico. To a greater extent, we try to convey the idea of looking at multiple forms of participating in, or outside, classrooms settings while constructing and maintaining their communicative repertoires as a way of reclaiming their citizenship in both countries, the US and Mexico.

Focusing on children’s experience-driven cosmologies revealed through interviews and survey responses, this article seeks to analyze, and interpret the way children explain their return migration from the United States to Mexico within the context of the increasing voluntary and forced returning migration of Mexicans since 2005. It uses representative samples of students (aged 9-16) enrolled in both public and private schools in several Mexican states. The data drawn from the surveys are complemented by data drawn from in-depth interviews that complicate the sociological typologies about migration, motives for migration, and returnees. The goals of this article are: (a) to illuminate and value children’s own narratives about their migration experiences and (b) to discuss the contribution of diverse and apparently contradictory micro, meso, and macro-level approaches in studying migrant children.

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for "American Mexican" students-Mexican-heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US-born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American-Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world. [belonging, transnationalism, immigration, latina/o, civic identity]

The paper has two goals. The first is to present the main quantitative findings drawn from four surveys we conducted in Nuevo León (2004, n=14,473), Zacatecas (2005, n=11,258), Puebla (2009, n=18,829) and Jalisco (2010, n=11,479) using representative samples of children aged 7 to 16. We classified children in the following categories: (a) children who are returnees (who were born in Mexico), (b) international migrant children (born in the U.S.), and (c) mononational Mexicans. Among the second group, we distinguish children who had school experiences in the U.S. and those younger transnationals who came to Mexico before enrolling in school. The second goal is consider these children’s cosmologies, revealed through interviews and survey responses, and to interpret the ways children explain their return migration from the United States to Mexico within the context of increasing voluntary and forced-return migration to Mexico. So data drawn from our mixed methods inquiry add younger voi...

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for "American Mexican" students-Mexican-heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US-born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American-Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world. [belonging, transnationalism, immigration, latina/o, civic identity]

This paper explores how nineteen teenagers who, having been raised and educated in the United States and forced to return, adapt and participate to the Mexican school system. This work specifically analyzes their adaptation process in three Mexican public High Schools in the State of Puebla, and how they negotiate the process of participating within a Mexican school setting while negotiating their sense of belonging to the US and Mexico. In this study, we explore different ways in which return students enact their own bilingual and bicultural citizenship through their educational process in Mexico. To a greater extent, we try to convey the idea of looking at multiple forms of participating in, or outside, classrooms settings while constructing and maintaining their communicative repertoires as a way of reclaiming their citizenship in both countries, the US and Mexico.