Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Children

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book is the product of years of collaboration and support. When Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way, Diane Hughes, and I were funded by the National Science Foundation to start two longitudinal studies of child and youth development in New York City, we envisioned research on how culture and context intersect to influence unfolding lives. As principal investigators of the Center for Research on Culture, Development , and Education at New York University, we were developmental and community psychologists interested in the contexts of home, child care, school, peers, and parental work as they intertwine in the development of children. I did not foresee that the cornerstone of the study—the intensive qualitative study of families’ lives that represented the first years of our center’s work—would ultimately result in a book on documentation status and its effects on children’s learning. I am grateful to the National Science Foundation for providing core funding for this set of studies and am most thankful to Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, my principal collaborator on the birth cohort study that provides all of the data for this book. Ronit Kahana-Kalman, a crucial collaborator on our birth cohort study, directed the survey and child data collection and provided excellent scientific input into all aspects of the study. Work on this book was also supported by generous grants from the William T. Grant Foundation, through a Scholars fellowship and a supplemental grant. That foundation , through the vision and leadership of Robert Granger, Edward Seidman , and Vivian Tseng, has informed the work presented here in innumerable ways. My main intellectual and motivational support for the writing of this book was Niobe Way, a fellow principal investigator of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education. Our many conversations in downtown Manhattan about every aspect of the books we were working on stretched my thinking, challenged me to communicate the stories of the families in this study, and kept me motivated to complete the book. In addition, David L. Eng provided constant support and encouragement as well as vital critical analysis for many parts of the book. This project was my first experience in collecting longitudinal ethnographic data. I am indebted to two friends and mentors in ethnography and mixed qualitative-quantitative work: Thomas S. Weisner and Ajay Chaudry. Weisner has contributed unfailingly supportive guidance and wisdom to my qualitative and mixed-methods work since 2001 and, like acknowledgments x many superlative mentors, became a collaborator. (We co-edited a 2006 Russell Sage Foundation book based on the New Hope Ethnographic Study and experimental demonstration, a model in many ways for the mixed qualitative-quantitative approach that Tamis-LeMonda and I took for the birth cohort study.) Chaudry and I co-led the first qualitative study of the Center for Research on Culture, Development, and Education until he left to direct early childhood policy for New York City. As a researcher interested in many of the same policy, employment, and immigration issues that I was, but with a much deeper understanding of ethnography, Chaudry was both a colleague and a mentor for all of the qualitative work presented here. As the supervisor to my own fieldwork for the study, he provided additional guidance for my field notes and interviewing. For the center’s qualitative studies, field-workers spent hours interviewing and hanging out with families across the city of New York. Their incredible dedication to the task of recording the daily struggles and triumphs presented in this volume was motivated not only by the desire to learn about and master the research process but also by love and respect for the families they visited. I owe an incalculable debt to Renelinda Arana, Bronwyn Becker, Monica Brannon, Margaret Caspe, Ajay Chaudry, Francisco Gaytan, Erin Godfrey, Carolin Hagelskamp, Yanli Liang, Gigliana Melzi, Boon Ngeo, Ximena Portilla, Maria Ramos Olazagasti, Maria Reyes Lopez, Ann C. Rivera, Eva Ruiz, Jing Sun, Kimberly Torres, Nia Ebon West-Bey, and Qing Xue. The supervisors of the qualitative studies, who provided painstaking and creative mentorship and leadership, were Ajay Chaudry, Francisco Gaytan, Karen McFadden, Gigliana Melzi, Ann C. Rivera, Kimberly Torres, Niobe Way, and Qing Xue. Maria Clara Barata and Madeleine Currie, doctoral students at Harvard, ably directed the transcription and coding of all of the qualitative data. This book was born during a year of qualitative analysis conducted away from the pressures of academia. The Russell Sage Foundation provided a fellowship during the 2008 to 2009 academic year, and I am...