Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines migrant families’ strategies to navigate multiple barriers to equality in order to realize the project of social mobility and how attentiveness to educational success creates intimate and intergenerational relationship problems within migrant families.

Paper Abstract:

Educational achievement has become central to migrant families and their imaginaries of social mobility. However, migrant children often fail to meet their families' expectations when experiencing hostile educational environments. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with children, youth and their families in situations of precariousness in central Catalonia, this paper takes an intersectional approach to examining the diverse strategies that families devise for navigating multiple barriers to equality, labor market inclusion, and educational success in order to realize the project of “moving up”. In the social imagination, integration, which denies the epistemic diversity of the world, is presented as a protection against discrimination and a guarantee of social mobility. However, intergenerational projects of social mobility through migration are shaped by the contradictions between states’ migratory policies and inclusion policies and practices at the local level. The Catalan ideology of integration through language, as an unproblematic and unidirectional process, which shapes the incorporation of migrant students into the educational system, can hardly be considered intercultural. In the absence of epistemological dialogue in contact zones such as the school, epistemic hierarchies and abyssal lines are reproduced. Consequently, students who live in situations of poverty, who have had schooling trajectories interrupted or altered by migration or who do not speak the language of schooling are at risk of school failure. The paper analyzes how attentiveness to educational success and the possibility of labor market incorporation in challenging conditions of racialization and ethnolinguistic hierarchies create intimate and intergenerational relationship problems within migrant families.