Under the supervision of Dr. Louise Lamphere, graduate student researcher Christina Getrich will pursue research on the question of how U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants integrate into American society. Her research will take place in San Diego, focusing on students in a competitive, after-school program that admits 45 poor students a year to prepare them for college. None of the students' parents attended college and three-fourths of them do not speak English. The goal of the research is to understand how Mexican youth enter into U.S. social, economic, and political life. Building on the theoretical notion of cultural citizenship, which recognizes that immigrants often maintain connections to the home country while simultaneously becoming part of their new country, the research will assess whether and how these ongoing connections to Mexico may be beneficial or detrimental. Preliminary research on the process of adjusting suggests that the deepened perspectives arising from bilingualism and cross-cultural awareness may actually situate Mexican second-generation youth well for success as adults in the multicultural United States of the globalized 21st century.
Getrich will use a mixed method research strategy, including participant observation, free listing techniques, a population survey, a household census, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews. Photovoice, an innovative technique through which the youth photographically document everyday life conditions in their community, will be employed to prompt critical discussion of issues that affect the youth and their families
This research is important because second-generation immigrant youth are the fastest growing segment of the population and a group that will soon be maturing into a demographically significant portion of the adult population of the United States. Dynamics both within the United States and globally make it imperative to develop a better understanding of how Mexican and other immigrant children forge pathways of social, economic, and political inclusion into U.S. society.
