Seven Mexican immigrant students in the American Southwest told in their voices their perspectives of identity issues in U.S. schools. These students perceive the culture of U.S. secondary schools as coercive and antagonistic toward them based on cultural assimilation and unacceptable pressures to become American. Participants in this study consistently spoke of the frequent denouncing of their identity as Mexican and how they were persistently told what it means to be Mexican in the U.S. Also participants voiced concerns about the suggestions by teachers that they would be Abetter off@ if they would just assimilate to the American way and denounce their identity as Mexican.

The voices from these students challenge the conservative agendas in U.S. schools to include them as part of the mosaic of American society because of their cultural differences and identity. They believe that the diversity of the U.S. and of course its capitalistic model of opportunities are what makes the U.S. so unique. However, preconceived notions of what U.S. nationalism will always be part of the catalyst for cultural oppression of Aothers@ in U.S. schools until we understand the grounded beliefs that perpetuate this form of cultural elitism. Nationalism in the U.S. or any other nation is a deep-rooted philosophical phenomenon built from truths within the beliefs of social Darwinism. We look at the histories of identity within modern and philosophical thought and relate experiences from seven Mexican immigrant students to the prevailing ethnocentrism of today=s schools in the U.S.

Immigrant students are often subjected to schools and personnel that are indifferent or non-caring of their needs Villarreal (1994). Practices by school personnel operating from conservative and nativistic agendas strengthen discrimination and injustices targeted at the immigrant student. This practice perpetuates the subaltern positions in schools where immigrant students often exist. Often times this very practice leads to questions of identity among the individual such as, AWho am I? Why am I here?@ or Where do I belong?@

Mexican Immigrant Students Voices About Being the Aother@

Participants in this study voiced concerns about being seen as different and less than normal in U.S. schools and society. Their definition of Anormal@ in this context refers to white and/or English-speaking. Being seen as different and less than normal brought with it stereotyping of the participants by the Anormal@ population. With the stereotyping also came generalizations of all Mexicans as being the same developing from specific acts by a few Mexicans and perceived as unacceptable from the dominant culture.

There were several comments mentioned about being treated different than white English-speaking students by teachers and peers in and out of classrooms. This treatment was perceived as both intentional and unintentional by the participants. From this was a strong emphasis on their identity and the importance of knowing ones cultural heritage and ethnic identity to deal with society=s constant pressures against being different.

Overall, the participants in this study shared their concerns about what it means to be a Mexican immigrant student in a U.S. school context and the politics that prevail as scary, misunderstood, difficult, sad, isolating, lonely, unfair, and uncomfortable. According to Julietta, Athis is just the way it is for Mexicans here.@ That statement was common to all of the participants when discussing the politics of difference implying a feeling of vulnerability and a need to understand their place in U.S. society.

Purposeful sampling is used in this study to provide information-rich data (Patton, 1990) and increase the range of data while maximizing the researcher=s ability to identify specific constructs such as identity along with societal marginalization that take adequate account of contextual conditions and cultural norms.

This project was done in a Southwestern U.S. city, with a population of approximately 60,000 according to the local Chamber of Commerce (1995). The local school district=s student population is 22,169 as of Oct. 1996, according to their Department of Human Resources (1996). As of Nov. 1996, there were 2,275 students labeled LEP and/or enrolled in a Bilingual/ESL program (LCPS, 1996).

The in-depth interviewing method used in this study is Seidman=s (1991) phenomenological approach which consists of three ninety-minute interviews over a three week period for each participant. According to Seidman (1991) Aat the heart of interviewing research is an interest in other individuals= stories because they are of worth@. Interviewing is a powerful way to gain insight into educational issues through understanding the experience of the individuals whose lives constitute education (Seidman, 1991).

Open-ended questions in the form of interviews with a purpose were used to build upon and explore the participants= responses allowing them to reconstruct their meaning-making experiences within the focus of the project. Each ninety-minute interview was led by one question to allow emerging issues to surface. Each interview was tape-recorded using an electric portable cassette recorder.

Interview one asked the participant, Awhat led them to become a student in a U.S. school@. This question is open-ended enough for the participant to reflect on their life history and to look back at the events and experiences (Seidman, 1991) which brought them to where they are today. This interview gives the participant the opportunity to reconstruct early experiences during their school years in their home country, which led up to reasons for immigrating to the U.S.

The intentions of the second interview are directed toward the participant to take us on a detailed walk through a day (Seidman, 1991) of being an immigrant student in a U.S. school. This interview begins with asking the participant, Awhat are/were their everyday experiences as immigrant students in the U.S.@. By focusing on the actual details of what the participant does on a daily basis, the participant has the opportunity to describe step by step every issue, concern, political dynamic of identity, or process that arises each hour of the day as an immigrant student in a U.S. school.

The third interview asked the participants to reflect on the meaning of their identity and experiences (Seidman, 1991) as an immigrant student in a U.S. school. This question, Awhat does/did it mean to you to be a student in the U.S.@, addresses the intellectual and emotional connections between the participants= schooling experiences and the everydays (Seidman, 1991). It is intended to bring meaning from the participant=s identity and experiences along with their perceptions of how the pedagogical politics within our school system has affected them. The third interview in was also intended to bring meaning to the participants= experiences and histories expressed in the prior two questions. Interviews with the four high school student participants were conducted in the library at their school. Interviews for the three older participants were conducted at the university where they attend.

Interview transcriptions were read repeatedly to find common occurrences among the participants= statements. Common occurrences within the interview transcriptions were categorized as emerging themes and marked throughout the text. Prevailing themes found in each participant=s narrative were analyzed by me at the end of each profile. A critical analysis of themes within this project is provided from a critical theoretical framework to illuminate how the distribution of power, class, privilege, culture, and identity lead to inequalities among immigrant students in our public schools. This is intended to locate the context of the participants= voice as legitimate and to reflect on their stories within the politics of difference.

They don=t believe Mexicans can do anything for them except their dirty workYthey are labeling and stereotyping Mexicans into field workers, welfare checks, and food stamps people. So they=re like we don't want them here. They think we don=t have any money, well they don=t have enough brains to balance the budget and they need someone to blame. I believe that it is because they don=t see anything good letting us come in except to have someone to blame for their problems (Julietta)

Americans need to know that we are not all thieves. The Mexicans don't come to the U.S. just for the sake of coming, like for the free lunches. We come here for an opportunity, sometimes they come here because they were having problems in their own country. In my situation I came here because my parents brought me. I didn=t have a choice. I had to come with them. They are my parents. They came here because they wanted a better life for us and they thought that we could have it. (Arturo)

When I asked the participants, AGiven your experiences as a Mexican student in a U.S. school, have you ever been discriminated against by school personnel and peers? And if so, how and why do you think you were discriminated against?, they consistently replied with responses such as, Ayes, because we are looked at as lower than Americans and only as AMexicans@ (Rosa), or AOh yeah, they give you the look immediately like you are no good or that you are probably up to no good because they think they are better than you (Lupe).

Typical stereotypes of the participants by the so-called superior ethnic group were formulated from negative or unacceptable acts from a few Abad@ Mexicans and generalized toward all Mexicans. This generalization lumped the participants as being the same as all Mexicans because they were of the same ethnicity.

In high school they use to say that we were only going to school to eat lunch. I didn=t agree because I didn=t go to school just to eat lunch, I went to school for an education. Just because I was Mexican they were stereotyping me for going to school just to eat lunch when I wasn=t. So I use to let them know that I didn=t agree with that. I mean just because I was Mexican it didn=t really mean that I was like Mexican, like other Mexicans. (Laugh). Well in this situation there were some that they use to go to ask for a form to eat their lunch not to study because they didn=t put any effort in what they were doing. (Arturo)

They [whites] don't look at the good. They should look at that. I mean they are always going to look at you ugly because they haven't talked to you or they don't understand us. We are not all bad. Like if one Mexican does something bad everyone of us has to take it. Like if one Mexican kills someone then the gringos think all Mexicans are killers. Like in Mrs. A=s class if something bad happened and the gringas did it, she would blame it on us like, Ait was the Mexicans, they did it@. (Rosa)

Probably they talk more about Mexican immigrants because they do stuff that makes it look bad. They do, I know they do a lot of stuff that make us look bad and that affects all the Mexicans not just him. All the Mexicans if they do something bad it makes us all Mexicans, immigrant Mexicans look bad. So that is probably why there is more in the news than the others. Yeah, because they are talking about more Mexicans than whatever. It doesn=t make me mad. I am proud to be a Mexican. If they say something about a Mexican, let them talk, maybe they don't understand us very well. (Andrés)

When asked what their interpretation of the term Mexican meant to them, the participants held strong emotional ties to their ethnicity and identity. They couldn=t put into words their feelings about the negative connotations that are connected to the meaning of the label Mexican in American terms. In the U.S. the label Mexican is a term often used as derogatory toward people of Mexican descent. It has the connotations of meaning lazy, dirty, thieves, poor, and generally not as good as Americans (Macedo, 1994; Viarreal, 1994).

I guess it=s our society at least at [my high school] being Mexican was equated with being no good. I might be wrong but that was my impression. Like my older sister, people didn=t have to look at her like Mexican because she never really said her name anywhere and we are not dark Mexicans. We are light skinned but many of the people on our bus were Cholos, ugly people and they were very rowdy. They were the ones that gave us a bad name you know. So we were treated just like one of them, like one of the Cholo Mexicans. Because they would like fight, and have like tattoos all over. They were real loud and being the profile of the ugly Cholo Mexican. Everybody equated us with them as the same. (Lupe)

Some gringos think that you are going to take their jobs away. That is why they don't want Mexicans here. They are saying on the news that they don't want Mexicans in the schools here. There are lots of Mexicans here, but if we get out who is going to work in the fields? I don't think the gringos (laugh) are going to. The gringas call us lazy. They are lazy [be]cause they don=t have to work. I mean if they would have to work, they would go out in the fields and work like Mexicans doY But they don't work in the onions and chili fields or nothing and the Mexicans do. I have. (Rosa)

We are treated different. They [white people] tell us stuff and we just are like nothing. We can=t tell them nothing because we don't know bad stuff about them. I don't know how to say it. I mean they should treat us the same like.... humans (having trouble putting it into words) like them. I mean we are all humans, they shouldn=t tell us bad stuff just because we are Mexicans. We can=t speak their language perfect, but we can learn it. It=s (heavy sigh) because we don't speak their language and we were not born here, because we don't have papers. (Rosa)

Not dealing with students= misunderstandings about differences of ethnicity, skin color, and language is for some teachers the best method of not bringing unneeded attention to the problem of discrimination in schools. Not acting on the problems of discrimination in schools only perpetuates the accepted degrees of discrimination that happen daily and are over looked as part of how schools and students operate. Giroux (1997) states that this is a mechanism of social control that characterizes schools as institutions of neutrality. Teachers must offer space for students to transform their relationships and understand differences critically rather than simply further legitimating accepted acts of violence within differences and superior cultures (Macedo, 1994).

The participants have felt the pain of being the other and stereotyped as the derogatory American interpretation of AMexican@ in their schools. They see the term AMexican@ as something to be proud of in that it gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of identity. But they have also constructed a sense of their identity and status in the U.S. as AMexicans@ which makes clear their understandings of why Americans treat them and Mexican immigrants in general, different than other immigrants in the U.S.

There are immigrants from all over the world but they are not treated the same as the ones from the South. They are not treated the same as the ones from Mexico, El Salvador, whateverYIf you come from Germany, you are great stuff. I can feel it. I can feel if you come from one of these higher countries, I don=t know how you call them, you=re going to probably be able to get a citizenship quick. You=ll be treated differently. They don=t see anything good from immigrants from the South. Because I=ve seen a lot of Chinese people even in the physics department, the math department, in the high tech, high math, high education department - they are treated like all right. (Julietta)

There was mention by the participants that U.S. citizens or whites, have little or no identity other than being part of the dominant group. The participants believed that the majority of white people do not know who they really are and that is why they define themselves as the dominant. The definition of being the dominant, referring to whites, was not so much through their words but their actions according to the participants. These actions of dominance according to the participants is why white people in the U.S. treat the Aother@ bad, in this case Mexican immigrant students, because if they didn=t whites would not look as powerful as they do making the Mexicans appear less.

According to Morrison (1992), race has functioned as a metaphor necessary to the Aconstruction of American-ness@ and in the creation of national identity to be American has been defined as being Awhite@ (p. 47). This definition of American implies origins from Europe are what make up Americans.

I have more things that make me be more Mexican than American even though I get an education of an American here in the U.S. I think like a Mexican. That makes me very upset for Mexican Americans to not know their history because they are forgetting their roots. They want to be more like Americans, they don=t want to dress no more like Mexicans. They don=t want to hear the music, they start hearing rock and all that stuff. So that makes me sad because in some ways they are forgetting where their blood is. (Andrés)

I don't know what an American is. So I can=t be an American. I know more of what a Mexican is that=s why I claim myself to be Mexican. I don=t claim myself to be loyal to Mexico because I don=t live over there and I am not helping my country, but I cant be an American because I don=t know what an American is. I have say American at the border but that is all politics. (Julietta)

I am not an American. I am a Mexican. I have been in here [U.S.] for nine years and that makes me a Hispanic because there is not the Mexican category on the ethnic groups. We [Mexicans] are not included in there. I mean sometimes I think that I am not Hispanic, but if I... lets put it this way. I am not Hispanic but I am going to be (laugh). When I get naturalized I am going to be a Mexican American. I won=t have a greencard anymore. I will be a Mexican American. It is all political. It doesn=t change who I am but my label. (Arturo)

Presentations of self, ranging from resistance to assimilation are linked to immigrant status in school, society, labor market opportunities, and general perceptions from the dominant groups who tend to define their value (Giroux, 1992, 1997). Because schools participate in negotiating the meanings students attach to identity, the ways teachers and peers handle their perceptions of the Aother@ has severe impacts on how immigrant students sustain their identity. The participants in this study have kept true to their meaning of being Mexican in a U.S. school context. These participants have demonstrated the critical need to consider students= voices when analyzing how schools function in shaping identity and dominance over an ever-changing student population within the politics of difference.

The problem of identity has been allocated under a set of issues that permit us a philosophical reflection about the nature of change. In other words this means the problem of identifying or re-identifying something or someone. In a modern point of view, the problem is to find a true account of the use (or uses) of several words as Adiversity,@ Achange,@ Aidentity,@ and same, as such as expressions as Adifferent,@ Alike@ and Asimilar.@

Classical views states the problem of identity as permanence gave rise to the problem of change, whereas the problem of identity as unity gave rise to the problem of universals. However, writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (early modern views) concerned themselves with five questions about identity: a) how the notion of identity originates; b) what the term identity or (Asameness@) means; c) whether it is possible for two objects to be identical in all respects and yet differ numerically (the identity of indiscernible) d) what constitutes personal identity; and e) what is meant by identical proposition.

In 1882, Ernest Renan and many subsequent scholars= called as a Adaily plebiscite@ to the state in which individual choose to affirm a Alife in common@ a members of a Agreat solid unit.@ In this form they tried to find an answer to the question; what is a nation? Nor was this affirmation determined by knowledge of a common historical past, since to get one=s history wrong A was essential in the formation of nations. Commonality of interest similarly did not serve to create a nation, since a customs union is not a country.@ A nation is, finally, a soul, a spiritual principle (Bosanquest, 1891). In 1997, Hugh Seton - Watson wrote that, AI see little point in trying to analyze nationalism itself as an ideology.@

On the other hand, nationalism identity can be regarded as rooted in fundamental and prepolitical features of personal identity. Another way of putting this is to consider whether national identities are formed in a Lockean or in a Hegelian fashion (Descartes, 1958). For example, Jonathan Ree states that Locke allocate memory as the major subject to understanding the continuity of personal identities; for national identities. Another example under same principle is to be Polish or Palestian where cannot only be a statement affiliation with a state or political movement (where not state exists), but must also be about a kind of collective remembrance of a past existence. A nation - just as much as a person - ought to be viewed as the product of the social practices which create and sustain it.@ The social practices within of a society form or create a national identity, as well as personal identity (Rescher, 1956). In this sense, Jean - Jaques Rousseau viewed the modern state as a conventional entity. For Rousseau, national identity was therefore essential for modern political life to take on a legitimate form. A nation was a Ageneral will,@ initially established by convention, but thereafter maintained by a quasi - religious conviction of the necessity of a common life.

In present time, several philosophers who stated the importance of the social and communal basis of self - development, such as Charles Taylor, are therefore turned back to G.W.F. Hegel as to Rousseau. Because the mean practice of modern life is that of what Hegel called Arecognition.@ Taylor points is the Acollapse of social hierarchies,@ combined with a new understanding of (personal) identity as Aindividualized= and, ideally, Aauthentic@, that has generated the contemporary interest in recognition. This concern has politically showed in the idea of Aidentity politics@ of which nationalism is the prototype. So national identities are much more like political identities than personal identities in the Lockean sense. But what kind of political identities (since nations cannot simply be states, however connected they may otherwise be with states or state building)? If nations are irreducibly political in some way, they must form the precondition for political action in the traditional arena of state and interstate politics. National identity therefore came to be understood as a form of prior association necessary to provide an impetus to a formal political agreement - whether that agreement was to be thought of as a civic republic, a social contract, or a system of public law.

The potential contradiction between liberalism and nationalism concerns two things: the particularistic character of national identities and the different conceptions of the relationship between individuals and the state in liberalism and in nationalism. If the main line of development of liberalism from Mill to John Rawls is considered, two themes stand out in contradistinction to much nationalist thought: the universal character of liberal values and the primacy of individual liberty as the most important of those values. Similarly, if the ideal of the greatest possible individual liberties is accepted, how could liberal theory provide grounds for overriding that ideal on the basis of Anational interests@? So the reconciliation of national identities with liberal political principles must be seen to rest finally on a justification of the doctrine, principle, or right of national self-determination. The basic doctrine of national self-determination is that each nation ought to have their own state. Or, to put it differently, each national identity should find expression in the governmental institutions of a distinct country.

Church (1934) explained that the importance of the concept of national identity has sometimes been thought to be that it can provide an answer to the question of who is entitled to citizenship in which states - a question that some feel modern political philosophy has failed to address. National identity has become the facto basis for citizenship in the modern state that philosophers accept on the way, so to speak, to addressing their other concerns about justice, democracy, and related matters. But what is the nationalist conception of citizenship? Simply that only members of a nation those with the requisite national identity have rights to citizenship in particular nation or states. This is not to say that there are rivals to the nationalist conception of citizenship, only that they have not been widely articulated, at least until recently. Three alternative ways of thinking about citizenship have arisen. First, there is the anarchist - libertarian conception of Aopen borders=@ in which the attempt to specify limiting or exclusionary conceptions of membership is completely rejected. Second, there is the theory of what Jurguen Harbermas has called AConstitutional patriotism@ that is, the specification of citizenship on the basis of adherence to principles, rather than on the basis of the ascription of national identities. Finally, there is the idea that internal differentiation of states into subcultural groups with distinct rights but with a common citizenship allows greater scope for cultural survival and group self-determination. Two problems may arise from the application of this doctrine.

First, there is the apparent lack of arguments for holding citizens divided by cultural groups together in a common country. And second, there is the suspicion that the idea of multiculturalism when applied to citizenship will devolve into a quasi B nationalism. In other words, that is a small step from distinct rights for substantial groups to a right of self-determination for national groups. This would be a problem especially if nations were to be understood as essentially rooted in ethnic identities. So, to define citizenship we need to come back to the nature of natural identities and particularly whether nations can be Apurely@ political, or whether the very idea of the nation or state implies some pre-political, cultural, or quasi - ethnic component.

McLaren, P. (1992). Collisions with otherness: ATraveling@ theory, post-colonialism, and the politics of ethnographic practice-- the mission of the wounded ethnographer. Qualitative Studies in Education, 5 (1), p. 77-92.