For Me, Us, and Them: Immigrant Families Pursuing Higher Education in Southern California

Educational opportunity is often presented as a central motivation for migration. Despite the challenges they face, immigrant families express high future ambitions, as evidenced by the increasing number of immigrant and first generation students enrolling in higher education. Research has recently begun to explore these students' experiences in college; however, less is known about how immigrant families collectively navigate the high-school-to-postsecondary transition. This dissertation draws on two years of ethnographic research conducted in southern California to investigate how family migration shapes academic and professional trajectories after high school, treating the pursuit of higher learning as a shared endeavor. In my research, I focus on understanding how migration experiences (whether their own or those of family members) impact students' goals and transition experiences; in addition, I investigate how family members get involved in one another's educational pursuits while responding to the constraints posed by the United States' punitive immigration policies. Though there is substantial research documenting immigrant families' experiences in K-12 schools, most studies of higher education focus on students as individual learners. By prioritizing the experiences of extended kin-networks, I counter this individualistic focus, showing how academic outcomes for college-goers are impacted not only by the policies that affect their access to education, but also by those that shape the experiences of their loved ones, including caregivers and younger relatives. My research thus shows how families collectively engage in the pursuit of educational opportunity across national and institutional borders.