Between Words, Between Worlds: Linguistic and Contextual Disruptions in the Transition from English to Spanish Literacy among Children Moving from the U.S. to Mexico

By VÍCTOR ZÚÑIGA

ALTHOUGH THE ARE OFTEN INVISIBLE, children are international migrants crossing borders, generally as members of families. This article addresses one of the foremost questions in education and learning against the backdrop of large-scale international migration, in which children are active participants. In a reversal of migration patterns, individuals are moving with increasing frequency from countries historically hosting immigrants, such as the United States, to those traditionally seen as countries of emigration, such as Mexico. This phenomenon epitomizes the Era of Expulsion and Restriction in international migration, where children play a significant role, even those born in the destination countries.  

In the case of children moving from the United States to Mexico, three types of migrants can be distinguished: (a) U.S.-born children who arrive in Mexico without prior school experience in U.S. schools; (b) U.S.-born children who arrive in Mexico with prior school experience in U.S. schools; and (c) children who were born in Mexico, migrated to the United States, and then returned while still of school age. All of them, in my more than two decades of research on this issue, had enrolled in U.S. schools.   

This article focuses on the literacy transitions of children moving from the United States to Mexico. These transitions involve a shift from English to Spanish, encompassing both oral and written languages. However, the term “transition” here serves as a euphemism, as researchers involved in this project have discovered through previous studies that these students encounter profound ruptures instead.¹ Based on fieldwork conducted across various state school systems in Mexico, researchers concluded that language barriers, misunderstandings, humiliations, and similar disruptions often lead to temporary or permanent interruptions in the students’ school trajectories.  

Our research allows us to identify three common contexts in the lives of children moving from the United States to Mexico (UStoMxCh), where literacy transitions can be hazardous for such students:   

1. In U.S. schools: Losing proficiency in their heritage language; diminishing Spanish fluency, with limited opportunities to learn or practice Spanish. Avoidance of using Spanish in school settings. 
2. In Mexican schools: Losing their English language acquisition and interrupting the learning process of English; lack of support for transitioning into Mexican schools and little recognition of English language skills. 
3. In both systems: Incomplete acknowledgment of children’s circumstances, affiliations, and transnational experiences; encountering linguistic barriers when moving between two school systems. 

Context: The Great Expulsion—Reversing Migration Trends from the United States to Mexico  

The contemporary migration era between Mexico and the United States is often referred to as the Great Expulsion.² In a reversal of historical movements, the current trend sees a greater number of migrants returning to Mexico (or moving there for the first time) from the United States than the number of emigrants from Mexico to the United States. Since the onset of the Great Expulsion, hundreds of thousands have arrived or returned to Mexico. Notably, children and adolescents make up nearly 30 percent of this demographic.  

How many minors have left the United States and are now in Mexico? Using estimates drawn from the 2010 Mexican census and the 2015 intercensal survey, demographers have shown that between 2000 and 2015, the number of UStoMxCh more than doubled. By 2015, more than 500,000 U.S.-born children were living in Mexico. If we also include children born in Mexico who migrated to the U.S. and then returned, the total estimate exceeds 600,000 UStoMxCh living in Mexico by 2015, the majority of whom attended Mexican schools. Mexico’s Population Census of 2020 found more than 500,000 U.S.-born children (ages 0–17) living in Mexico. In this figure are absent the children of type (c)—Mexican-born children who migrated to U.S. and later returned to Mexico—because the Mexican Bureau of Census does not capture children who return to Mexico.  

Singular Transitions/Ruptures: Our Contribution to the Field  

The literacy trajectories of UStoMxCh differ significantly from those of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students in U.S. schools. While there is growing interest among U.S. educators in trans-languaging,³ typically in the case of ESL students in the United States, the distinction between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) is clear. However, this is not the case for UStoMxCh. They undergo intricate processes that involve transitioning from oral L1 (oral Spanish from their home environment) to written L2 (written English in their school environment) when they begin the literacy acquisition process in the United States. Subsequently, upon moving to Mexico and enrolling in school there, they transition from written L1 (written English) to written L2 (written Spanish), while simultaneously shifting from oral L2 (oral English) to oral L1 (oral Spanish). What further complicates matters for UStoMxCh is that at certain stages of the process, it is unclear which language is considered the first and which the second. In the U.S. context, written English serves as the L1 (written), while spoken English functions as the L2 (oral). However, in the Mexican context, this sequence changes as Spanish becomes the target language for speaking, reading, and writing.  

These alternating dynamics differ also in terms of the school reception context. In U.S. schools, students who are identified as English learners (ESL students) often cannot attend regular mainstream classes; teachers recognize them easily because they do not fully understand English. The main formal goal of their schooling quickly becomes transforming them into fully competent English speakers in the shortest time possible.   

Usually, in U.S. schools, the teachers who work with ESL students have special training and institutional certification. In contrast, Mexican schools have no labels to classify “SSL students” (Spanish as a second language), and “SSL students” attend regular classes even if they have not reached a sufficient level of reading and writing Spanish to be integrated into regular classes. Teachers are often confused because they believe that if UStoMxCh speak Spanish, then they automatically read and write it. And, importantly, there are no clear pedagogical goals nor pedagogies for such transnational students.  

Oral and Written Language  

Researchers in bilingual education policy indirectly draw attention to an issue often overlooked in Mexican and U.S. schools: the relationship between oral and written language. Teachers in Mexico frequently assume that written language is merely the graphic representation of oral language—a seemingly straightforward connection between phonemes and graphemes.  

Historians of writing have delved into the relationship between oral and written language forms, highlighting significant differences. Even if children speak the societal language required by the school curriculum, they inevitably encounter the challenging and protracted journey from oral to written language. Written language represents an innovation in intellectual technology involving new physical instruments (writing systems and competencies), new means of storing information (tablets, parchments, books, dictionaries, etc.), and, most importantly, distinct ways of organizing and articulating ideas (lists, tables, formalizing arguments, mathematical notation, and so on).  

According to the teachers in Mexican schools, UStoMxCh do not seem to face a special linguistic challenge in school because, like their classmates, they speak Spanish (the dominant language at home when they were living in the United States). Consequently, their teachers often incorrectly assume that if these students speak Spanish fluently, they can also read and write in Spanish, treating the written language as a mere extension of the spoken language.  

UStoMxCh are often literate in English, depending on their level of schooling, as they have undergone the arduous journey from oral proficiency to written language. Thus, when they start classes in Mexican schools, they are not learning to speak, read, or write from scratch. Instead, they are embarking on a risky new journey in a different context, where they must communicate orally and in writing in a language in which they have not previously practiced these skills. If they receive support in leveraging their existing literacy competencies, they can become biliterate. However, without such support, experiences of reading and writing in Spanish may be perceived as cruel humiliations, as our research in several regions of Mexico unfortunately confirms.  

Some Examples of Linguistic Rupture  

Drawing from our research in the schools located in the north of Nuevo León, Mexico, among students who circulate between the schools of Minnesota and Nuevo León every school year⁴ we found the following linguistic ruptures when students were asked to write:  

• Letter-sound correspondence: The student wrote “elephant” instead of elefante, the teacher marked it as an error. The student told us: “I felt dumb.”
• The horrible h, which is a letter that lacks phonological value in the Spanish language: Every single h the students failed to spell was marked in red by the teacher as a constant reminder of the orthographic mistakes of UStoMxCh. When the student was asked to write hablar or había, she wrote “ablar” or “abía.”
• The confusing case of c, s, and z: The student wrote casa without hesitation. The problem came when she was asked to write ceniza or zapato.
• The tangled issue of phonemes represented by k, c, qu: When the student was asked to write vaquero, and she wrote “vacero.”
• The mystery of the signs above the letters (the accent marks in Spanish): The student wrote el papa platico con migo instead of El papá platicó conmigo, and exclaimed, “I never know when to write them down.” And then the difference between I talk with my dad and my dad talked with me: Platico con mi papá and Mi papá platicó conmigo illustrates a case where the accent above the letter o changes the meaning. 

A sixth-grade transnational student was asked to read a small paragraph to test word-recognition accuracy. The paragraph had 72 words. The student made 25 errors when reading. Here some examples:  

• He read de instead of se. 
• He read español instead of España. 
• He pronounced hazañas as azainas. 
• He changed descripciones to discriminaciones. 
• He converted the verb acentuaban into aceptaban.
• He read cuenta instead of cuanta. 
• He transformed the verb ganan into general. 

At the end of the reading test, the student said: “There are a lot of words I don’t understand. . . . I don’t like it [to read], because I try to read, but there are some words that I don’t understand.”  

What’s Next?   

Up to now, what we know about the linguistic transitions of transnational students in Mexican schools is:  

• Children do not receive support in the transitioning process. Instead, they experience rupture and misunderstanding.  
• Children face complex linguistic challenges alone because in Mexican schools there is no pedagogy of linguistic transitions. It does not exist for transnational students nor for students who must make the transition from other Mexican languages— Indigenous languages—to Spanish. 
• The linguistic challenges are often an important factor leading to academic failure and school dropouts. 

In order to better understand children’s linguistic transition processes, to design a strong pedagogy supporting the transition from English literacy to Spanish literacy, and promote bilingual skills in UStoMxCh, we need to do the following:  

• Identify the barriers children encounter during the first weeks after they enter Mexican schools.
• Collect better data on the linguistic difficulties transnational students face in speaking, writing, and reading Spanish.
• Study the common misunderstandings in teacher–student relations.
• Know the roles played by family members in linguistic/contextual transitions.
• Finally, we need to know about teachers’ hesitations, questions, suggestions, beliefs, and practices regarding linguistic transitions.

This information will help us be prepared by offering special training programs to pre-service teachers, and in-service professional development. ✹ 

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Víctor Zúñiga is Professor of Sociology at the School of Law, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Mexico, and Emeritus Professor of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores. He served as Tinker Visiting Professor at LLILAS during fall 2023. Professor Zúñiga is co-author of Les Sources de la Sociologie (2022).

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Notes  

1. These ruptures are also present when students arrive in U.S. schools and embark on the journey of English language acquisition. Unfortunately, it is rare for U.S. educators to acknowledge this reality. 
2. Expulsion is not synonymous with deportation. Expulsion encompasses a range of conditions, with deportation being just one of them, albeit the most visible.  
3. The best way to understand translanguaging is to contrast it with translating. “Translating . . . promotes the idea that there are clear boundaries between languages; translators are expected to provide one-to-one correspondences across the distinct language forms, for two different audiences, in what has been termed the ‘conduit metaphor’ of translation. Translanguaging, in contrast, attempts to capture the perspective of the speakers, for whom these codes are not necessarily distinct. Language forms are tools in their communicative toolkits, which they use flexibly according to need and circumstance” (Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning, and Love, New York: Routledge, 2016, p. 105). 
4. These data were collected by Catalina Panait and analyzed in her master’s degree Final Report (2011).