Knowing silence: how children talk about immigration status in school

Mangual Figueroa’s Knowing Silence is a sobering book in an era of hostility and heightened inflammatory political rhetoric against immigrant communities. As the prevalence of dangerous political speech rises, it also spreads across various sectors of public life, including public education. In this context, Knowing Silence is a powerful book because it shows how the impact of immigration policy and discourse is anything but esoteric or neutral, and effects immigrant communities deeply, including with tremendous impact among its young. Mangual Figueroa’s investigation on what students in “middle childhood” (ages 6–12) know about immigration, and how they discuss it among themselves...