The Story Circle Project: Latinx Women in Queens

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Participant Organizations:

Equity for Children focuses on “translating” academic knowledge into useful tools for all those who work in the defense and promotion of child and adolescent rights. They aim to promote innovative political actions and to build effective solutions that guarantee the well-being and the rights of children and their families.

Researchers: Alberto Minujin, Gabriel Crespo, Ximena Gonzalez

 

Voces Latinas was founded in 2003 with the mission to reduce the rate of HIV transmission and violence among immigrants by empowering, educating, and providing leadership and advocacy trainings that enable Latinos to have a voice and to make healthier decisions for themselves and their families. The participants in the project are clients of Voces Latinas.

Researchers: Nathaly Rubio-Torio, Lissette Marrero, Tania Batres

 

StoryCenter promotes healing, growth, and social change by creating spaces for listening to and sharing stories. They believe that storytelling inspires connection and action, and are committed to helping people from all walks of life use the power of their own voices and experiences to build a just and healthy world.

Researchers: Allison Myers, Andrea Spagat

 

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References:

Gubrium, A., Fiddian-Green, A., Lowe, S., DiFulvio, G., and Peterson, J., “Digital Storytelling as Critical Narrative Intervention with Adolescent Women of Puerto Rican Descent,” Critical Public Health, 29, no. 3 (2019): 290–301, https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2018.1451622

Lambert, J. “Where It All Started: The Center for Digital Storytelling in California,” in Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World, eds. J. Hartley and K. McWilliam (Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 79–90.

Mignolo, W. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

Ngũgĩ, w. T. , Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

Kangaslampi, Samuli, Peltonen, Kirsi, and Hall, Jonathan, “Posttraumatic Growth and Posttraumatic Stress—a Network Analysis Among Syrian and Iraqi Refugees,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 13, no. 2, 2022: 2117902. DOI: 10.1080/20008066.2022.211790. To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2022.2117902

Solórzano, D. G., and Yosso, T. J. “Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1, 2002: 23­–44.

Tehranineshat, Banafsheh, and Torabizadeh, Camellia, “Posttraumatic Growth: An Analysis of the Concept Based on Rodgers’ Concept Development,” Journal of Religion and Health 60, 2021: 2728–2744. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-020-01144-y

Zoellner, Tanja, and Maercker, Andreas, “Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Psychology—A Critical Review and Introduction of a Two Component Model,” Clinical Psychology Review 26, no.5 (2006): 626–653.

From Sanctuary to Scary Place for Latinx Migrants and Their Children: Can Access to Education Still Be a Motor for Change in New York City?

Alberto Minujin 

I was an immigrant myself many years ago. So for me, watching the situation of today’s migrants is especially painful. My experience and my work as director of Equity for Children, and as a professor at The New School teaching many first-generation students, enable me to see the contributions that our city’s diversity adds to our community and to our country.

Equity for Children has its eye on social development and change insofar as it relates to children and their families. Created at The New School in 2005, our organization conducts research, provides advocacy and education, and collaborates with an extensive network of organizations working on behalf of child rights and reducing multidimensional poverty and inequality.

Between October 2024 and March 2025, we conducted a study with The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs to explore the challenges faced by New York City’s new migrants when facilitating their children’s education.

We wanted to understand how multiple discriminations and traumas create overlapping social and cultural inequalities that hinder each child’s agency and, in fact, harm their development. In order to shine a light on the difficulties experienced by parents and caretakers who want to access and remain in school upon arrival in New York, we used the concept and lens of intersectionality (Fraser N. and Naples, 2004; Ferre, 2008, Yuval-Davis, 2011).

The project continues a study on Latinx women in Queens presented in Room: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action 10.23. In each case, the underlying objective is giving voice to families and children experiencing poverty and discrimination.

New York City is moving from being one of the country’s so-called ‘sanctuary” cities, with protection and services for migrants, toward one with increasingly limited services and protection. We began the study with a sense of optimism, hoping that we would demonstrate that children can be a key motor for integration and social change. We believed that schools can and should be a key tool for social inclusion, potentially offering a place to detect traumas and to promote healing. I imagine the migrants came here with the same sense of optimism.

Today, as I reflect on their voices and review the study’s recommendations about actions that can be taken, I feel a deep frustration in the face of the new reality for these families the Damocles’ Sword of deportation hanging over them. When the fieldwork was underway, the fear of deportation was not articulated. As the study commenced, being an asylum seeker still provided protection. Now it does not.

However, even before the threats to protected status began to accelerate this year, at least one mother was reluctant to linger at her child’s school to meet with us. The threat of deportation permeated every aspect of her life and while the impact on her and others’ children may be difficult to measure, it is all too easy to imagine.

The Latinx families and children in this study faced complex challenges before and after settling in New York City. Many families migrate due to economic and political instability, enduring traumatic journeys and systemic mistreatment before and during the voyage. Women often lead these families, who suffer significant discrimination, instability, and insecurity.

What we intended to do, as John Berger (Steps to a Small Theory of Visibility, Penguin Co., 2020) put it, is to move in close to the families and then to step out, to bring something out that gives voice to what is inside. This framework is even more critical now.

These reflections and conclusions are based on statements by caregivers whom we were able to interview: three Venezuelan mothers, one Colombian mother, one Ecuadorian mother, and one Ecuadorian father. We also interviewed three staffers from our partner organization whose access to the shelters and contact with migrant families were of tremendous help.

More than 36,000 students in temporary housing have enrolled for the first time in NYC public schools since July 2022. This influx of non-English-speaking children who come with stories of displacement and insecurity puts enormous pressure on the educational system, which can ill afford to provide bilingual teachers and other needed supports.

The families we met all shared a series of practical problems with the shelters they live in, from a lack of cooking facilities and privacy to space for the children to do their schoolwork or to rest. Often, the overall environment is unsafe.

I can only begin to imagine how this environment—even before the threat of deportation—weighs on a parent. And the logistical challenges of navigating the educational system compound the burden. How do you find the best school? Is there space? What documents are required? How do you fill out the entry forms? The language barrier further exacerbates the already complex bureaucratic tasks.

Once at a school, a new set of complications sets in. Caretakers face issues such as the distance involved in commuting, or the need to change schools because of forced shelter relocation in the face of a 60-day limit. Often, children from the same family are assigned to different schools, adding more complexity, more time, and more money to the situation. The system provides one Metrocard per year (even if lost!) with only four rides a day per family, which is often insufficient. These challenges contribute to low attendance rates. They can trigger warnings from schools about the possibility of a report to child protection agencies. For a parent struggling to do everything for their child, the lack of understanding and the inattention to context is devastating.

Children can play a key role in the family, in terms of societal inclusion and growth. Bilingual education is a major factor in promoting inclusion and integration. Frequently, though, school budgets are too limited to achieve this goal Nonetheless, as with previous generations of immigrants, the recently arrived children become interpreters and navigators for their families as they begin to grasp English. Little by little, they become potential agents of change.

As one mother said, “My son helps me with everything. He understands how the system works better than I do. He translates, explains . . . he gives me strength.” However, this advantage also comes with extra responsibility and stress for the child.

Understanding the mental health needs of these families requires us to see the contextual situation or the ecosystem of their lives. The stories disseminated by media, which focus on negative situations such as violence or robbery by small groups, create a general image that is hostile to recently arrived migrants.

Some caregivers described their children’s experiences of bullying: “My son used to get hit in pre-K. But because he didn’t react, nobody noticed. Now he’s in a school with more Latino kids, and when he defends himself, they label him a bad kid.” The media portrayal of migrants, in fact, often contributes to social exclusion and discrimination. There is no easy course of action here, either for the child or for the parent.

The migration trajectories that families faced on their journeys to the United States include separation, insecurity and violence. Each cries out for mental health support. Add to this the changes and challenges of living in shelters and the constant relocation in the face of 60-day limits, and the results are academic discontinuity, emotional distress, and difficulty maintaining stable social networks. Today, there is an additional element of fear.

Are there solutions? Consider an example of good practice from “Elena” from Venezuela: “The school is now organizing meetings for parents in vulnerable situations. They give us coffee and donuts, we talk about our problems and share resources about laws and available services. . . . The school provides the space, and that helps us build connections.”

But this is the exception and not the rule. In our current atmosphere, it is likely to become more dangerous for families to access available resources for fear of deportation. Our study participants stressed the importance of day care and after-school programs at community centers. But a lack of access to programs, school meals, reproductive health services for mothers, and legal assistance is rooted in structural barriers that are difficult to overcome. Language inaccessibility, bureaucratic complexity, limited outreach by service providers, time constraints faced by caregivers due to unstable work conditions, and relentless caregiving responsibilities themselves add to a mounting series of obstacles.

Through Equity for Children, I have seen again and again how the sense of community can serve as an important strength, and how inclusion of recently arrived migrants—through their children or networks of support providers—enriches all of us. As migrants give back to the communities they live in, we all prosper. We need to find ways to integrate these children and their families into the larger community. In doing so, we can prevent their isolation. We can support those groups that support them, ensuring that these children grow up bringing possibilities and positive changes to the extended family and to our community. For me it’s clear that we are losing an important opportunity as a society and as individuals if we don’t create avenues for inclusion.

When I first moved to New York some twenty-six years ago, I benefited from a stable job and contacts to friends of friends. And still my journey was so difficult. I thought many times that perhaps I had made a mistake coming to America. Now I imagine my arrival without the job. Without the friends and contacts. Without access to services and support. And I want to help the recently arrived, as we all should want to do, so that recent arrivals can continue to help build the United States of America as they have done for two hundred and fifty years.

While we are writing this article, we see that the intervention in New York City by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become more frequent and more aggressive. The imprisonment of migrants summoned at the federal immigration offices in Manhattan or the immigration courts, most of them without criminal charges (New York Times, August 5, 2025) is an expression of ICE’s growing power. But at the same time, we can see that civil society persists. Civil society is organizing active ways of resistance that are very much locally grounded and community-embedded.

By the time this article goes to press, the new school year will be well underway. Will migrant families be able to safely send their children to school? We already see ICE targeting interventions at some after-school activities. Will schools be able to offer support to defend the children, I wonder?

I can only hope that we remember the individuals, the families, and the children—and the dreams that led them here, the promise of America. Education has always been a door to those dreams. Let’s hope that promise is not relegated to the past, a dream of what once was.