Border Crossings: Exploring the U.S.-México Borderlands

Border crossings: Exploring the U.S.- Mexico Border migratory experience

Cruzando Fronteras: Una exploración de la experiencia migratoria entre México y EE.UU.


Author: Talía González

Bio: Talía González teaches middle school Spanish in New York City, although she has taught every grade between kindergarten and 8th grade. She has led workshops on language teaching, social justice education and curriculum development at national and local conferences. She has published in the National Network for Early Language Learning and is a part-time graduate student. Outside of school Talía is an avid Flamenco dancer, reader, cook and knitter—and integrates these into her teaching whenever possible! Her curriculum focuses on the experiences of Latinos in the U.S. Talía can be reached at talia@post.harvard.edu or @taliagonzalez2

Subject Areas: Spanish language arts/Humanities

Keywords: border, borderlands, frontera, migration, immigration, migración, inmigración, crossing, cruce, resistance, resistencia, desierto, desert

Grade Levels: 8th grade (in a FLES program) or a High School Spanish 1 or 2 class, depending on the time of year and level of students.

Time Required: This unit could last approximately 6-8 lessons depending on length of classes and level of students


Instructional Objectives and Student Learning:

Goals:

  • Gain a better understanding of what the desert experience.
  • Use active listening strategies, oral comprehension strategies and previous knowledge to comprehend and discuss oral histories of borderland natives.
  • Connect and compare their setting (urban environment) to the desert.
  • Connect and compare different sorts of migratory experience
  • Discuss the experience of undocumented minors crossing the U.S.-México border.
  • Read and analyze texts around the border experience.
  • Discuss how the border(land) experience can affect one’s identity.
  • Review interrogatives through reading and answering complex questions.
  • Review and apply the simple past in Spanish (both preterite and imperfect) through reading and writing activities.
  • Review and comprehend positive informal commands with and without object pronouns.
  • In addition, this unit connects to the ACTFL standards of communications, cultures, connections, comparisons, communities.

Guiding Questions:

  • ¿What is the desert like? ¿What does it look like, smell like, feel like, sound like?
  • ¿Who crosses the desert? ¿Why might people cross the desert?
  • ¿What are the stories of people who live in the borderlands?
  • ¿What happens when children cross the U.S.-México frontera unaccompanied?

Big ideas: Resistence, crossing, change


Materials used in lesson


Introduction

The México-U.S. border has long been a space of contradictions and transformation. This is evidenced by the fact that, through political and economic maneuvering of the U.S., the border has shifted over the years to “cross over” thousands of people who shifted from living in Mexico to the U.S. without their consent, leading to conflicting narratives of belonging and statehood. Additionally, the current anti-immigrant sentiment espoused by some in the U.S. fails to take into consideration the fact that many of those who cross, or attempt to cross the border into the U.S., are doing so because of economic realities created by U.S. economic and foreign policies. As stated by Dr. Mgai “We resist examining the role that American world power has played in the global structures of migration. We like to believe that our immigration policy is generous, but we also resent the demands made upon us by others and we think we owe outsiders nothing” (Ngai, 2014, p. 11). The border, and the borderlands that surround it, make up an integral piece of the social, historical and economic fabric/experience/realities/ of the United States.

While many students have an understanding of what Anzaldúa describes as a conceptual borderland (1999), either through family stories or lived experience, the U.S.-México borderland is like no other. Students who are not exposed to the area have little understanding of the physical spaces encompassing this space, the experience of crossing this border, or the narratives of the inhabitants of this borderland. The unit that follows will give students a snapshot of the borderland experience.

Pre-work

This unit can be done on its own or within a larger unit of study. In my 8th grade classroom this would be done in the fall as part of a larger unit entitled El sueño americano, ¿realidad o fantasía? Students will have already explored a general timeline of immigration to the U.S. (see the NYT map under supplementary resources), discussed reasons why people chose, or are forced to, migrate, analyzed the challenges and benefits to migration, explored the challenges of belonging (documentation) within a nation-state, and discussed the public use of language around belonging and the state.