To Migrate Is to Care

Often, the rhetoric about immigrants is that they're here to take something from the United States, things like jobs and public resources. But after spending three years following families that migrated to Massachusetts from four Latin American countries, Associate Professor Gabrielle Oliveira feels strongly that the story is more complicated than that. Migrant parents, she found, are actually here to give something: namely, a better education to their children.

“To migrate is to care,” she writes in Now We Are Here, her forthcoming book from Stanford University Press. “I argue that the idea of providing a better life through educational opportunities is migrant parents’ currency of love for their children: to guarantee an education in the U.S. justifies the sacrifices of the immigrant journey, and most importantly, shows care.”

Oliveira came to this conclusion after following 16 Latin American families who were either detained or separated at the border during 2018–19 and eventually settled in Massachusetts. She followed them from 2018 through 2021, and, at times, was “put into the role of a researcher, a babysitter, a tutor, a social worker, a mother’s helper, a friend who stopped by to chat, and someone with resources that could support families’ varied needs,” she writes.

Interviews with families were done formally and informally while parents were cooking, helping with homework, or taking walks. She went with families to parks and church services, doctor’s visits and grocery stores. She interviewed teachers and observed the children while they were in class and eating lunch in the cafeteria. She held babies, colored with kids, and helped around the house. She also participated in meetings at parent-teacher conferences and with lawyers, and as an immigrant herself from São Paulo, Brazil, she often translated for the families. At all times, she carried a notebook and two recording devices. 

“It was important that I could be in spaces with families in order to understand how they moved from one place to another and what spending time together looked like,” she says. “I think one of the things that has always motivated me to do this work as an ethnographer, rather as anthropologist, is to have this close look into people's realities and not make people into heroes or villains,” she says. “We all deserve just to be able to live our lives as normal, ordinary, with dignity and purpose. But in many ways, for immigrants, especially in the United States, we see that division.  Immigrants are either valedictorians, people that are coming here to revolutionize things, or they’re the villains that are going to take things. For me, it was really important to have this view into how they’re thinking about family and the best possible future they can give their kids and asking, where can we thrive?”

Ultimately, what she found is that the promise of education — despite any fear or uncertainty families faced getting to the United States or instability or guilt they struggled with once settled here — was always what anchored their decision-making. “Thus, the idea of education as currency of love, as a way that love can be exchanged between parents and children, emerges,” she says, and represents “a safe and constant environment where opportunity lives.”

For the 16 families she studied — seven from Guatemala, five from Brazil, and two each from El Salvador and Honduras — that strong belief in a better education came from a mix of sources, Oliveira says, including the long-held perception that America is the land of opportunity and from friends and relatives who already migrated to the United States.

“We think about Brazilians coming to Massachusetts since World War II, for example,” she says, “understanding that if you come here, there are jobs and this is a country where if you work hard, you’re going to be able to make a life for yourself. That’s in direct contrast with where a lot of these folks are coming from, which is corrupted governments that you can’t trust or a lack of safety. It doesn't mean that when immigrants arrive in the United States, they’re going to live a perfect life that doesn’t have poverty or violence. That’s not always the story, but there is the story of success, the story of making it. The American dream, which is very much alive regardless of what happens domestically here.”

It’s also embedded in the culture. “The way that a lot of Latin American folks understand education is that it’s something larger than academic performance — it’s the only thing that people can’t take from you.” 

Oliveira’s book is structured chronologically, starting with parents’ decisions to migrate, followed by accounts from the children on why they think they moved and their experiences in the classroom, plus how “constrained care” from teachers sometimes limits the support migrant children receive in U.S. schools. Another chapter looks at the impact the pandemic had on families, particularly with learning and schooling. The last chapter focuses on what families felt they lost and found by migrating and how instability was a constant, from being detained at the border to housing issues to interrupted schooling.

“That was one of the reasons why I fought so hard for the title of this book,” Oliveira says. “Now we are here is precisely how these families worked through the trauma. Present thinking is we’ve been through so much, so many things have happened, and it’s okay to think about the past for a minute, and it's okay to tell the stories about what brought us here, but now we're here in the sense that this is our chance to move forward and be future thinking.”

It’s those stories that ultimately matter, Oliveira says, not only for the families who trusted her for three years (and with whom she still connects today), but for anyone trying to better understand why people migrate. 

“That’s always how I presented the work to the families,” she says. “Telling them that if more people know how you go about your life and the things that matter for you, I really believe that we can not only change and provide insights for policymaking in immigration and in education, but we also have a real opportunity to bring people into the conversation that otherwise may not have been. Instead of thinking about immigrants as taking things and not being people that are ever going to be worthy of being amongst us, we need to tell those stories that stress people’s humanity. I think as a parent, if I were in that position, would I have not done that? Try to provide the best life for my kids? Absolutely.”