On the land of five federally recognized tribes, the Indigenous people who have called this place home since time immemorial, the presence of Mexican migrant communities in Idaho is deeply intertwined with colonization, land dispossession, mestizaje and the broader histories of colonization in Latin America (Blackwell et al., 2017; Powell & Carrillo, 2019).
The researcher employs Chicana feminist epistemologies (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and decoloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) to understand how two high school students, characterized as newcomers, experienced the first months of schooling after migration to rural Idaho. Documenting the experiences of these students through Maldonado Torres's lens of decolonial epistemologies uncovers how the legacies of coloniality persist in the everyday experiences of Mexican migrants in Idaho.
In this article, the experiences of these students, documented through a cultural, historical approach (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003), contribute to the broader history of the migration of Mexican people to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, connecting it to current social issues. This documentation and analysis bring forward knowledge and perspectives often overlooked when documenting the history of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest.
This study uncovers the metaphysical catastrophe, as described by Maldonado-Torres (2016) where research reproduces the dehumanization of Mexican migrants through a central focus on labor and economics. Instead, this research focuses on the cultural and linguistic repertoires possessed by Mexican migrant youth in the US Schools in the historical context of Mexican migrants in Idaho.
On the land of five federally recognized tribes, the Indigenous people who have called this place home since time immemorial, the presence of Mexican migrant communities in Idaho is deeply intertwined with colonization, land dispossession, mestizaje and the broader histories of colonization in Latin America (Blackwell, Lopez, & Urrieta, 2017; Powell & Carrillo, 2019). In this article, I employ Chicana feminist epistemologies (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and decoloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) to understand how two high school students, characterized as newcomers, experienced the first months of schooling after migration to rural Idaho. Documenting the experiences of these students through Maldonado Torres's lens of decolonial epistemologies uncovers how the legacies of coloniality persist in the everyday experiences of Mexican migrants in Idaho.
The experiences of these students, documented through a cultural, historical approach (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003), contribute to the broader history of the migration of Mexican people to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, connecting it to current social issues. This documentation and analysis bring forward knowledge and perspectives often overlooked when documenting and understanding the history of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. This study uncovers the metaphysical catastrophe, as described by Maldonado-Torres (2016) where research reproduces the dehumanization of Mexican migrants through a central focus on labor and economics. Instead, this research focuses on the cultural and linguistic repertoires possessed by Mexican migrant youth in the US Schools in the historical context of Mexican migrants in Idaho.
Arzubiaga, Noguerón, and Sullivan (2009) denotes the differences in the terminology immigrant, migrant and refugee in the context of Mexican migrants. The distinctions between the terms carry social and legal implications while not mutually exclusive or permanent. In this article, I utilize migrants to implicate the history of migration to the region, the fluidity of migrant identities and the movement of Mexican communities to the study site. Further, rather than using Hispanic or Latino/x/e, I write in the context of Idaho's history of Mexican community migration to highlight the presence of Mexican migrants from the early stages of colonization and settlement of the state to now. This article discusses complex social, economic and political issues that the categorizations of Hispanic or Latino/x/e dilute, misrepresents or erase.
In the context of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, deficit views of linguistic and cultural repertoires were used at every stage of colonization of the land and Indigenous people, practices that had been successful on the east and south sides of the continent centuries before. Deficit ideologies of language and culture profoundly influenced every interaction between Indigenous people and colonists, settlers, immigrants and migrants. Treaties grounded in assumptions of European superiority and Indigenous deficiency were then “negotiated” in English. These assumptions remain entrenched in today's governmental policies and procedures and continue to impact nondominant persons, including Mexican migrants.
In Mexico, Spanish colonization impacted the migration patterns of Mexicans by disrupting the processes of food production and cultural sustainability, creating economic disparities. Maldonado-Torres (2016) describes the multiple layers of colonization experienced in Mexico, which impacted the racialization of specific communities within Mexico and then impacted migration to the United States. Through a lens of coloniality, we see the presence of Mexican migrants at every stage of the colonization process of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. For example, in the mid-1800s, Mexican mule packing practices and the involvement of Mexican muleteers were employed in the United States Army's military campaign against Indigenous tribes of the land (Delgado, 2010). Mexican migrants worked as mule packers, ranchers, cowboys, miners, laborers and soldiers (Jones, 2014). Then, in the early 1900s, Mexican migrants were recruited to work in the sugar and railroad companies.
Maldonado-Torres (2016) described coloniality, stating, “The colonized are meant to be bodies without land, people without resources, and subjects without the capacity for autonomy and self-determination whose constant desire is to be other than themselves” (17). To understand the historical migration trends to rural Idaho, we must analyze trends on a historical scale, and the effects are intersectional layers of oppression for the colonized. In Mexico, the industrial transition from 1876 to 1910, privatization, enclosures and land consolidation resulted in 95% of households in rural areas becoming “landless.” (Massey, Durand, & Malone, 2002). People living in rural areas worked as sharecroppers or migrated to urban areas to work. Political and economic instability characterized the revolutionary decade from 1910 to 1920, leading to high migration rates to the United States. Massey et al. (2002) describe how private employers and the federal government, in partnership with private firms, undertook direct purposeful recruitment that catapulted Mexican migration to the US beyond initial migration during the revolutionary decade.
In 1917, during World War I, the United States established the first Guest worker program through a unilateral partnership with Mexico that would allow Mexican nationals to fill temporary jobs. Often referred to as the “first Bracero Program,” the program brought an estimated 80,000 Mexican migrant workers to the US (Castillo, Simnitt, Astill, & Minor, 2021). In another part of the country, workers participating in the program came to Idaho to work directly in seasonal agricultural jobs. Godfrey (2020) describes how, in the late 1910s, after being recruited to work at the Utah-Idaho Sugar company, which was run by high officials of the Church of Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mexican migrant workers in rural Idaho experienced racism and inadequate living conditions in southern Idaho. An investigation by the US Bureau of Immigration, the US Department of Labor and Idaho's Labor Commission ultimately exonerated the corporation. The Mexican migrant workers and families were threatened with deportation and blamed for exaggeration and ungratefulness. Significantly, today, the Southwest region of the state, including Blackfoot, Idaho, where the investigation took place, continues to be where the majority of Hispanics, mostly of Mexican heritage, reside today (Moore et al., 2024).
In 1942, a binational agreement between the United States and Mexico authorized Mexican migrants to come to the United States and work in agriculture, known as the Bracero Program. Historian Gamboa (1987), renowned for his expertise in the history of the Pacific Northwest and Mexican migrants, describes how Mexican migrant workers in the Pacific Northwest faced poor working and living conditions and low wages, and protests meant farmers searched for other sources of cheap labor. Patterns of migration of Mexican and Mexican American migrants to the Pacific Northwest and Idaho changed in 1947 after the new legislative authorization for the bracero program added stipulations for employers, including the requirement to pay for transportation from Mexico. Gamboa (1987) describes how employers shifted their strategy in recruiting Mexican American migrants from other areas of the country. After employing 4 million to 5 million Mexican agricultural workers, increased mechanization and opposition from labor advocacy and social welfare groups led to an official end of the Bracero Program in 1964 (Castillo et al., 2021).
The H-2A Visa Program, one of several non-immigrant temporary guest worker Visa categories, was created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This act created a separate category designated for temporary “unskilled” agricultural workers, allowing employers to petition noncitizens to enter the United States and perform seasonal or temporary agricultural labor lasting less than a year (Goldman, 2023). In the past decade, there has been an increase in the use of the H-2A visa program, with areas, including Idaho, with high labor requirements and seasonal cycles experiencing the most growth (Castillo et al., 2021). In 2023, about 700 employers utilized the program, and 8,050 H2-A visas were approved for workers to come to the state (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2024). The current migration patterns, analyzed through an Idaho history lens, bring attention to the interconnection of communities across borders and time.
According to Maldonado-Torres (2016), coloniality is a persistent condition that goes beyond time and space in its justification of violence and exploitation, creating a line between who is human and who is non-human. Beyond authority, sexuality, knowledge and the economy, coloniality profoundly marks being and identity. Compared to the circumstances faced by temporary agricultural workers in the late 1910s, several cases demonstrate injustices and instances of exploitation faced by Mexican migrant workers in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. For example, Goldman (2023) writes, “Crimmigration theory posits that people with more precarious immigration status will always exist in a more criminalized space susceptible to those spaces” (p. 400). In effect, temporary guest workers are considered uniquely vulnerable to criminalization compared to other workers working the same type of job but with a more stable immigration status. The author describes how the program attracts workers in desperate situations who are uniquely vulnerable to employer abuse. Goldman (2023) uses a case in Idaho from June 2022, in which the Ninth Circuit Court found that an Idaho dairy company exploited six Mexican grant workers by abusing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Professional (TN) visa permitting process. The company engaged in “bait and switch” tactics where they hired professionally trained veterinarians or animal scientists to do menial physical labor and threatened deportation. In a different case, a major onion processing plant in the US, located in Idaho, paid $268,417 “in back wages and liquidated damages for 76 workers after finding the employer housed them in substandard conditions and wrongly exempted many of them from overtime in violation of federal regulations” (U.S. Department of Labor, 2024). According to the News Release from the U.S. Department of Labor, the investigation also revealed that the employees were working for a processing plant that was not included in the program application. In addition, the company failed to reimburse workers for transportation costs, did not provide safe transportation to and from the worksite and housed workers in unsafe conditions with overflowing trash, mold and nonworking smoke detectors. Through a lens of coloniality, the imperial attitude (Maldonado-Torres, 2013) and the racialization of Mexican migrants mark them as dispensable.
Maldonado-Torres (2016) writes, “The coloniality of power, knowledge, and being also refers to how time, space, culture, structure, method and conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity transform through metaphysical catastrophe” (p. 20). Beyond a historical event, the coloniality of power, knowledge and being continues to shape migration across physical and metaphorical borders. In the eighteenth century, Spain benefited from a free labor force. Today, within the broader U.S. context, Idaho profits from a labor force of cheap labor that is exploited and treated as dispensable. Mexican migrants, who power critical economic sectors for Idaho, including agriculture, services and construction, face intersectional oppressions manifested through social, health and environmental inequities. For example, through a qualitative digital storytelling project, Hyland et al. (2024a, b) document how farmworkers in Idaho, the majority of which are Latinx and Mexican heritage, experience climate change through exposure to heat, wildfire smoke and climate disasters while experiencing psychosocial stressors, including discrimination, lack of access to healthcare and fear of deportation. In another study, Hyland et al. (2024b) examined Latinx farmworkers’ pesticide exposure through urinary pesticide biomarker concentrations in southern Idaho, with a majority of participants (89%) identifying as Mexican and 95% were born in Mexico. The authors discussed the gender dynamics that lead to women having higher exposure to pesticides through Labor activities such as weeding and thinning crops being poisoned from arial pesticide spraying and possible issues with accessing adequately fitted personal protective equipment.
In 2024, the Idaho Dairymen's Association, Idaho Farm Bureau Federation and the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry commissioned a report from the University of Idaho's McClure Center for Policy and Research to understand the role of unauthorized immigrants in Idaho's economy. According to the report, 78% of Idaho’s unauthorized immigrant population is from Mexico, with 86% being part of the workforce and a significant majority having been in Idaho for six or more years (Bageant, Callahan, & Himes, 2024). The authors further described that from 2014, at least half of unauthorized immigrants had been in Idaho for more than 16 years, the nation's most extended stay compared to other areas across the United States. Significantly, between 2005 and 2021, the number of unauthorized immigrants in Idaho was stable at approximately 35,000.
It is in this context of coloniality of being, power and knowledge (Maldonado-Torres, 2016), that Mexican migrants live in Idaho. As a colonial enterprise, schools push white supremacist ideologies and Christian tenets of salvation as part of a moral project in occupied lands (Urrieta, 2004). Mexican students, their families and communities face inequitable educational systems. Hispanic/Latine people make up 13% of the state's population, with more than 80% being of Mexican descent, compared to the 60% national average. In Idaho schools, 19% of K-12 enrollment are Hispanic/Latino students (Moore et al., 2024). For example, a 2023 report from the American Civil Rights Union of Idaho documented the ways Latinx students in Idaho schools are disproportionately impacted by dress code policies, policing and other forms of exclusion and discrimination (Rodarte, 2023). Other research demonstrates systemic inequity, including practices of overt and covert silencing of students, lack of cultural responsiveness in schooling practices and other systemic inequities impacting schooling success (Hondo, Gardiner, & Sapien, 2008; Call-Cummings, 2017; Gallegos Buitron & Antony-Stevens, n.d., forthcoming).
Comparing the experiences of Mexican migrants in the early 20th century to today, Mexican migrants continue to face discrimination in places of social, public and labor activities. For example, there are frequent social media posts garnering thousands of likes and comments claiming “illegal alien invasion,” showing groups of brown-skinned men around public areas. Commenters in support claim seeing similar groups across southwest Idaho. In contrast, others call out Idaho agriculture’s reliance on H2A workers and the seasonal cycle of H2-A workers coming to Idaho, which are most likely the groups of men captured in the posts. In early 2024, the Governor of Idaho, Brad Little, issued a proclamation calling January “Idaho Stands with Texas in Securing the Nation's Border Month.” With the proclamation, Idaho State Police Troopers were deployed to the Texas-Mexico border, although troopers had also been deployed in May 2023. Narratives of migration and immigration in Idaho are not occurring in isolation. Beltrán (2020) describes how calls for building a border are part of a more significant populist trend that includes building walls, surveilling technologies, militarizing campaigns and attacking media and civil liberties. In this context, the ethics of liberation acknowledge the historical and ongoing injustices Mexican migrants face in Idaho.
Conceptual framework
Delgado Bernal (1998) describes cultural intuition as “a complex process that is experimental, intuitive, historical, personal, collective, and dynamic” developed and nurtured from four sources. According to Delgado Bernal (1998), ancestral wisdom, collective experiences and community memory shape personal experiences. Three other factors shape cultural intuition, including existing literature, professional experiences and the analytical research process. Existing literature shapes how data analysis and interpretation are approached. Professional experiences shape the insight into a specific research topic. An interactive data analysis process with Chicana participants shapes the analytical research process.
In this study, I enact Chicana Feminist Epistemologies through relationship in migration networks to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. This study draws on data collected during my dissertation study, which examined the experiences of Mexican im/migrant migrant students and families in K-20 school systems in Idaho. I draw from a legacy of Black, Indigenous and Scholars of Color who actively negotiate their roles as “insider-outsiders” and are actively engaged in the cultural and political movements within their communities while enacting critical reflexivity in each stage of the research processes (Chávez & Pérez, 2022). I was trained as an interdisciplinary researcher to engage in research with the pursuit of social justice. This research is “explicitly political with an emergency to document analyze and apply findings that will address the practices and policies and racism and whiteness and schooling other institutions of education” (Villenas, 2019, p. 70).
At the time of data collection, I was employed at the Rural School District, supporting students and families enrolled in a program for migrant students and families. The participants for this study were recruited through purposeful sampling (Patton, 2014), as they have expert knowledge related to how newcomer Mexican migrant students, part of extended networks of migration, experience rural Idaho schools upon enrollment. I engaged participants months before data collection started, Participants gave permission when asked, and their legal guardians provided guardian consent. All data procedures for this study were approved by the University of Idaho's Institutional Review Board. Being in a relationship with the students and their families for years influenced the stories and details participants shared in the research and the dimensions visible to the researcher while holding the researcher accountable for dutifully reporting the findings (Anthony-Stevens and Stevens, 2020). For example, as a high school student, I had interpreted during parent-teacher conferences and worked as an afterschool program staff.
A primary data source for this study was platicas, or daily small talk that took place outside of the research process but was critical in informing findings (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). Platicas are sources of knowledge and intellectual theorizing that are highly relevant to the research process and occur before, during and after the data collection window. For example, being in relation with the participant's family over decades meant the participants or their family members shared stories and happenings relevant to the research during everyday interactions that were not necessarily confined to the time of data collection. Writing analytical memos while analyzing the interviews was an act of reflexivity where the researcher connected the platicas and their deep roots in oral cultures and struggles for human rights (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012) to the research “data,” which included an hour-long recorded interview with participants using open-ended questions. Additionally, I collected field notes from the study site.
Setting: rural town, Idaho
Rural Town, Idaho, is located in southern Idaho, with a population of approximately 2000. As outlined previously, south Idaho has a deep history of recruiting and employing Mexican migrants to work in agriculture, spanning a century. According to the 2022 U.S. Census [1], approximately 30% of Rural Town's population identifies as Hispanic or Latinx, with more than 95% identifying as Mexican. Seasonal agricultural cycles influence the demographics of Rural Town, with a high number of H-2A visas being approved for agricultural businesses in the area. One school district serves all of Rural Town, with one elementary, one middle and one high school. The student population at Rural School District broadly mirrors the town's population as a whole. For example, Hispanic or Latino students make up 30% [2] of the student population at the Rural School District. Students enrolled in the English Learner Program and the Migrant Education Program make up approximately 10% of the student population.
The legacies of Coloniality impacting youth in a school in rural Idaho: Carlos’ and Thelma’s experience
Thelma and Carlos’ trajectory to Rural Town sheds light on broader economic and social factors impacting migration during their lifetimes. As young children, both had lived in the United States with their parents and siblings. Carlos had lived in the east of the country, and Selma had lived in the west. From a historical lens, the communities their families were a part of in the East and West of the country have contextual histories of Mexican migrants and bear with their colonial legacies of their own (Blackwell et al., 2017).
Thelma and Carlos enrolled at Rural High School in the fall of 2022, within a week of each other. Thelma attended registration with her aunt, who was her legal guardian. Thelma's relatives were also in the school district, with a cousin in elementary, middle and high school. Thelma and Carlos spoke Spanish and spoke little English. Working in the Federal Programs Office, I was routinely asked to interpret during parent interactions throughout the school district. So, at the time of registration for Carlos and Thelma, I was called to interpret the conversations between the student, the legal guardian, the school counselor and the staff. Thelma and Carlos were not the first newcomer students in the district, so there was a process for enrolling them, and school administrators knew broadly how to interpret the documentation. Also, I had worked with Carlos' and Thelma's legal guardians and relatives in various capacities over many years. Years prior, I had been the after-school program teacher for Thelma’s cousin, who was also enrolled at a rural high school, and worked with Carlos' cousin as an after-school program aide.
Thelma and Carlos’ family were return migrants to Mexico. They had lived in the United States for an extended time and returned to Mexico with their parents and siblings. Both families had returned to Mexico in the mid or late-2010s when Thelma and Carlos were young children. Evidence wasn't gathered about why the families returned to Mexico during that period. However, from 2005–2010, the economic crisis in the United States, with the growing militarization of the US-Mexican border and the anti-immigrant policies in the United States, impacted higher rates of return migration to Mexico (Zamora & Castro, 2015).
The families had extended networks in Idaho who themselves had a history in the region, as demonstrated by their migration back to Idaho and the support networks each student had. For example, Carlos returned with his aunt, who was an extended relative of the family. Carlos's aunt frequently visited Mexico and supported a nephew in enrolling in a rural Idaho school years before Carlos migrated to a rural town. Significantly, the relative had excelled at school and attended an Idaho higher education institution. However, unlike the nephew, who was enrolled in an urban school in Nayarit, Carlos was enrolled in a Telesecundaria in rural Nayarit. Through Telesecundaria, teachers and students in rural areas access the current curriculum and work with a grade level through recorded programming transmitted through satellite or the Internet (Relaciones Publicas, 2020). Significantly, he experienced the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in rural Nayarit, which resulted in school closures.
Although there is an overall higher rate of urban migration because four-fifths of Mexicans live in urban areas, research shows that rural areas have higher rates of migration than a random distribution would predict (Terán, Giorguli, & Sánchez, 2015; Hamann & Zúñiga, 2021). This is due to the history of international migration in rural Mexico compared to more urban and economically prosperous areas. The result is that youth migrating from rural areas of Mexico face unique challenges when they migrate to and enroll in US schools. For example, at Rural High School, Carlos was unable to enroll in the grade corresponding to his age, as his schooling in rural Mexico had not resulted in the academic competencies he needed to perform at grade level in the curriculum. School administrators were thoughtful in considering alternatives to keep him engaged in the school curriculum. For example, Carlos was enrolled in an online course through the Idaho Digital Learning Alliance [3] (IDLA) for an elementary-level math course. Carlos had difficulty accessing the online curriculum as he did not have the necessary computer skills to access the course modules and complete the engagement activities. After the first couple weeks, the online course instructor expressed concerns over potential parent concerns about the interaction between high school-level youth and elementary-level children. The instructor recommended that Carlos be unenrolled in the course. With limited access to grade-level courses or the academic capacity to access grade-level content, Carlos had a limited chance of graduating from Rural School.
In defining subtractive schooling, called into question how schools create social, linguistic and cultural divisions among students and staff that result in unproductive learning environments. Valenzuela (1999) describes deficit-based schooling practices that fail to recognize or ignore students' cultural and linguistic identities, repertoires and practices and instead push students to conform to the dominant culture and language of the school. Additionally, students are “stirred” to pursue Career Technical Education or alternative ways of schooling. When a local community college recruiter invited Carlos and Thelma to enroll in the GED program, students and their families declined the opportunity, stating that immersion in the English language and access to the curriculum was important to them. The families had perceptions about the Rural School District and the opportunities Carlos and Thelma would have access to that influenced this decision. Carlos' and Thelma's caregivers had positive experiences with Rural High School, where they had supported loved ones in graduating from Rural High School after four years and then enrolling and graduating from a higher education institution in Idaho. This was the case for Carlos' caregiver, his aunt, who had supported a younger nephew who was a newcomer and her daughter six years before, and Thelma's aunt, who supported her oldest son.
Employing Valenzuela's (1999) lens of subtractive schooling, the practices at Rural School District failed to recognize Carlos' and Thelma's ways of knowing. Urrieta (2013) describes how saberes (knowings) are smartness “developed in relation with familia (family) and community life that originate in the pueblo (town and people) as a place of origin, and that span the geophysical and geo-political spaces of migration and experiences related to crossing state and international borders” (p. 2). Subtractive schooling practices and failure to recognize saberes are colonial legacies (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) where assimilation is prioritized, and Mexican migrant students enter spaces of historical power imbalances.
The recorded interview and platicas with Carlos highlighted Carlos’ saberes, developed in rural Nayarit, the rancho where the family lived. In contrast, in the rural school district, Carlos lacked the competencies to be engaged in schooling, including using the English language, basic computer skills and grade-level math skills. Through a lens of coloniality, the migration, with its transformation of space, time and culture, created dehumanizing conditions at Rural High School where his peers and teachers perceived Carlos's way of being and knowing as inferior. Schooling practices failed to recognize Carlos's unique linguistic and cultural repertoires (Gutiérrez and Rogoff, 2003; Gallegos Buitron, 2024).
While Thelma had lived in urban Zacatecas, both Carlos’ and Thelma's transnational experience and the practice developed in relation to family and community life contributed to the saberes possessed and those that were emerging. In moving to the US and rural Idaho, Carlos' and Thelma's connections with family, friends and community were disrupted geographically and physically. In Rural High School, the students entered a white stream curriculum and processes (Urrieta, 2004) where their culture and languages were stigmatized as deficient and counterproductive to assimilation, which is considered the process of success (Urrieta, 2004; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).
When asked about his expectations for Rural Town Idaho, Carlos stated the following,
A mí cuando me dijeron que iba a ser un rancho, pensé que un rancho como allá en México, es como un rancho, no parece rancho, (Carlos, Interview, April 2022).
When they told me that it would be a ranch, I thought that a ranch [countryside] like there in Mexico is like a ranch, it [Rural Town] doesn't look like a ranch (Carlos, Interview, April 2022).
While short, Carlos's statement on his imagination of how a Rural Town would be deserves more attention in the context of the colonial legacies of rural Idaho and rural Nayarit. Carlos description of his home in rural Nayarit, in the quote and in platicas, further conjures the Indigenous Heritage Pueblo “who may, or may no longer collectively self-identify as Indigenous” (Urrieta, 2013, p. 320) but were historically considered so. Writing about Indigenous heritage communities, Urrieta (2013) defines a pueblo as a town, community and people. The economic activities in Carlos' and his family's home in the rancho in rural Nayarit were centered mainly on agriculture and animal husbandry, similar to the economic activities described in the heritage community of Michoacán described by Urrieta (2013). For example, Carlos described how he, his siblings and his parents worked in planting and harvesting seasonal crops, where watermelon was part of an expanding export market.
Imperialistic practices that dislocate and dispossess Indigenous peoples and Indigenous-heritage people of their land have deep historical ties and are alive in Mexico and Latin America today (Blackwell et al., 2017). Connecting the histories of migration, it is from Nayarit and the port of San Blas that Mexicans, aboard Spanish vessels, traveled to the Pacific coast, which became Oregon, in the 1770s. For example, in 1774, Juan Perez sailed the Pacific Northwest, surveying the coast of what is today California, Oregon, Washington, Canada and Alaska with a crew made up of Mexicans on Spanish vessels. Santiago was built at the port of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, the homeplace of Carlos. While we would seek detailed and specific evidence of the connection between San Blas, Nayarit, the area Carlos' family is from, the Pacific coast and Idaho over the hundreds of years under study, what we know is that people live in complicated networks of communication and movement. The continuity of relationships within communities across borders, such as Thelma and Carlos migrating and living with their extended families, serves to facilitate successful adaptation to their new environment (Urrieta, 2013).
Within Indigenous Heritage Pueblos, familia and comunidad-based saberes are the complex knowings” and understandings, encompassing social, natural and spiritual well-being, inextricably linked to sustained and complex relational and reciprocal relationships with family and community (Urrieta, 2013). Saberes acknowledges the out-of-school context in which learning happens in relation to people and places. Through recorded interviews and platicas, Carlos described a relationship with the classroom teacher going beyond classroom activities (Gallegos Buitron, 2024). Carlos compared his experience with his teacher in Mexico to his experience with teachers in Rural High School, noting that the teachers at Rural High School didn't interact with him much. In Mexico, he was engaged in platicas with his teachers and peers, spending time together on weekends and enjoying activities such as grilling meat by the river. Carlos faced a different reality after migrating to Rural Town.
While Carlos did not elaborate on the distinctions between rural Nayarit and rural Idaho, Thelma’s statement sheds further light.
Si, no para mí. Mi tía, como conoció donde yo vivía. Mi tía sí me dijo que no iba a estar muy grande. Entonces, cuando vine, y yo no sabía qué esperar porque ya había ido a California. Pero no sabia. Pero mi tía ya me había dicho que no era muy grande. Entonces, cuando vine… Yo por como mi tía me dijo, pensé que iba a haber muchos latinos aquí. O sea, muchas personas, muchos. Entonces bueno, donde yo vivo, en el área que yo vivo, se viven muchas familias latinas, pero no en la escuela y son pocos. Bueno, no conozco demasiados (Thelma, Interview, April 2022).
Yes, not to me. My aunt, as she knew where I lived. My aunt did tell me that it wasn't going to be very big. So, when I came, I didn't know what to expect because I had already gone to California. But I didn't know, but my aunt had already told me that it wasn't very big. So, when I came because of what my aunt told me, I thought that there were going to be many Latinos here, that is, many people, many. So, well, where I live, in the area where I live, there are many Latino families, but not in school and they are few. Well, I don't know too many of them (Thelma, Interview, April 2022).
Thelma brings a unique cultural and linguistic repertoire different from Carlos from the context of urban Zacatecas, Mexico. The context, across the border of Mexico and the United States, matters for each student. Carlos and Thelma bring knowledge developed in connection to their cultural surroundings from rural Nayarit and urban Zacatecas, as well as knowledge that is part of the extended network of families participating in migration networks. According to Maldonado-Torres (2016), metaphysical catastrophes are “zones of being human and zones of not being human or not being human enough” (p. 13). Recognizing and drawing from the unique linguistic and cultural repertoire utilized by students and families in this context (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) affirms the humanity and “broad range of potentials and possibilities” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) for all students. However, the youth faced a whitestream culture, pedagogy and curriculum (Urrieta, 2004), a byproduct of coloniality where their way of being and knowing is seen as inferior and the aim of schooling is erasure through assimilation.
Given the history of temporary migrant labor through the Bracero Program and the H-2A program, it is common for migrant workers to have relatives who have lived in the area for decades, an area with a century-long history of Mexican migrant worker migration. For example, while Carlos lived with his extended family in Rural Town, his relatives participated in the H-2A program. For Mexican migrants in rural and urban areas, staying in Mexico or moving to the U.S. is more complex than individual decisions. Instead, migration decisions are deeply embedded within systems of power, inequity and exploitation through the continual process of coloniality; staying in Mexico, Mexican communities face displacement, intergenerational poverty and violence. In the U.S., Mexican migrants face coloniality through racialization and structural inequities mirrored in schools. The legacies of coloniality and persistent settler colonialism, where the labor exploitation of Mexican migrants has powered Idaho's economic growth. Within the historical context of the early twentieth century and the Bracero program and the H-2A program, a clear colonial relationship exists between the U.S. and Mexico. As a manifestation of coloniality, the policies, recruitment and exploitation of Mexican labor by the US created an economic dependency, where Mexico is economically dependent on remittances and cheap labor contracts. Mexican migrant youth enter schools embedded within this system of exploitation, which mirrors dehumanizing practices where the schools works to erase and ignore the youth's linguistic and cultural repertoires. This article encourages critical reflection to understand how mobility and migration contribute to settler colonial projects of elimination that expand beyond physical and metaphorical borders (Blackwell et al., 2017).
Conclusion and implications
On the homelands of the Ktunaxa (Kootenai), the Qlispé (Kalispel), the Schitsu'umsh (Coeur d’Alene), the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), the Newe (Shoshone), the Bannaqwate (Bannock) and the Numa (Northern Paiute), the presence of Mexican migrant communities in Idaho is deeply intertwined with colonization, land dispossession, mestizaje and the broader histories of colonization in Latin America (Blackwell et al., 2017; Powell & Carrillo, 2019). In contrast to the early colonial process in what is now Mexico, which began in the early 16th century, the settler-colonial process took place three centuries later in Idaho. In Idaho, Zacatecas and Nayarit, the displacement of Indigenous Peoples and exploitative labor paired with efforts of conversion to Christianity and erasure of culture and language with the imposition of European language and cultural norms are commonalities.
The structural inequities in educational spaces faced by Mexican migrant youth today are a result of colonial legacies, where the successful imposition of a devalued identity ensures the continuation of the colonial process (Urrieta, 2004). Schools are nested within systems of inequity and exclusion that are a result of historical, economic, sociopolitical and moral decisions by people in power that create inequitable environments for Mexican migrant youth (Ladson-Billings, 2006). They function to maintain the privileges of the white, upper-middle class, embedding their societal norms as the standard (Urrieta, 2004). Carlos and Thelma possess and utilize a cultural and linguistic repertoire of practice developed in the context of where they've lived with their families and communities. The testimonios outlined in this study highlight the “various layers, moments, and areas involved in the production of coloniality as well as in the consistent opposition to it” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p. 2).
The process of displacement of people and appropriation of land for mining gold and silver, then agriculture for the benefit of the colonial elite persists across borders. The bodies of Mexican migrants, including youth, become part of the economy for exploitation and control. In the late nineteenth century, the United States economic expansion, at the invitation of Porfirio Diaz for the invitation of foreign investors to build railroads and purchase land, led to the displacement of people into wage labor and internal migration within Mexico as people sought work (Lytle Hernández, 2022). In Mexico, U.S. imperialism creates poverty by design. The US labor works encouraged migration and actively recruited workers from Mexico. Expansion through mining and agriculture, and the building of railroads facilitated migration to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest (Jones, 2014). Networks of migration through the geographical distance between rural Nayarit, and urban Zacatecas to Idaho occur as a result of colonial processes. Carlos and Thelma come to Rural Town through a stream of relatives who have made Idaho home for decades, with streams of migrants from other areas of Mexico who have been present and have shaped Idaho and the Pacific Northwest since its settlement. Understanding the history of Idaho uncovers the deeply rooted historical social networks that connect rural Mexican towns with agricultural-centric places in the United States.
This study builds on the work of other scholars who counter the settler colonial logic of erasure and elimination of Indigenous peoples by recognizing the context in which Mexican migrants come to Idaho within the legacies of colonization, land dispossession, mestizaje and the broader histories of colonization in Latin America (Blackwell et al., 2017). Maldonado-Torres (2016) writes, “love and rage are possible in spite of the profound wounds created by modernity/coloniality” (p. 24). In this study, Chicana Feminist Epistemologies enabled a critical examination of the colonial legacies shaping the experiences of a community in rural Idaho to counter the effects of ontological separation and metaphysical catastrophe. The outcome is the haunting of the histories of Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, where decolonization is a collective project in the making.
Notes
To protect participant anonymity, the U.S. Census data provided are based on estimates.
Data about Rural School District represents approximations to protect participant anonymity.
Idaho Digital Learning Alliance was founded in 2002 by the Idaho Legislature and is funded by annual appropriation from the Idaho State Department of Education's public school budget, course fees, professional development fees and private grants. The program offers curriculum classes, electives, careers, technical education (CTE), Dual Credit and Advanced Placement courses. For more information, see the website: idla.org
