Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-Going Literacy (review)

Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-going Literacy examines the nuanced nature of Mexican migrant students coming to know what it means to go to college (p. 1). As a critical ethnography, Fracturing Opportunity acknowledges the laden power structures in ethnographic research.

Gildersleeve approaches college-going as a learned behavior. He indicates that at least two tools mediate migrant students’ college-going: “(im)migration” and confianza (p. 190). Although (im)migration is unique to migrant students, confianza and the insights regarding migrant students in Fracturing Opportunity can positively impact other underrepresented and marginalized students’ college-going literacy.

The book’s eight chapters share the college-going experiences of 12 migrant students who participated in the 2005 Migrant Students Leadership Institute (MSLI) at UCLA. MSLI brought together 99 migrant student participants in an effort to increase their social consciousness and academic awareness. The program’s approach served as counter-discourse to achievement ideology, recognizing that migrant students encounter additional obstacles when trying to access higher education.

The study asked: “How do migrant students come to know college access? How do migrant students engage in college choice processes? In what ways are migrant students constitutes as subjects in college-going?” (p. 183).

Chapter 1 addresses the author’s clearly stated goal of fracturing the master narrative about migrant students. Exposing the machinations of the master narrative reveals the elements that disrupt the college-going journeys of migrant students. In this chapter, Gildersleeve also discusses his position as the researcher. As the ethnographer, he “participate[s] in the project as learner and co-conspirator” instead of “knower or truth-teller” (p. 16). The cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework employed for the study “asserts that college choice processes can be understood as socially acquired, culturally mediated, and historically bound instantiations of learning” (p. 37). The deliberate approach to this critical ethnography successfully allows the space for participants’ voices and the opportunity to share robust, in-depth insights on college-going.

Chapter 2 begins with a breakdown of previous models and frameworks on higher education and college choice, discussing theories and methodologies that undergird the author’s approach to college-going. Gildersleeve posits that college choice is “a learned social practice” (p. 33) and introduces the term “college-going literacy” to communicate that idea. To conduct fieldwork, Gildersleeve had conversations with students in their homes, coffee shops, bowling alleys, and other venues. He focused on cultivating relationships with participants and communicated with them via email, social networking, and voice mails or texts. In some ways, Chapter 2 shows how participants co-construct the knowledge in this study. For example, Gildersleeve states, “We talked about our experiences in our schools and in our families” (p. 52), an act showing that the researcher receives information about students’ lives and also shares information about his own life. He also does away with verification practices such as member checks and triangulation, arguing that these acts would only serve to stifle participants’ voices by assuming that their realities must be checked against a larger, inherently accurate reality. He invokes Friere and opts for “working against ‘false generosity’ and toward ‘true generosity’ in the struggle for humanizing education” (p. 55).

Chapter 3 introduces the 12 participants: Armando, Nené, Eduardo, Antonio, Carlitos, Yaneth, Alex, Cristina, Butterfly, Lorena, Jesus, and Renaldo. Gildersleeve describes the students’ neighborhoods, families, aspirations, talents, and other details to familiarize readers with the students’ stories. He also uses that information, particularly students’ descriptions of their own experiences with life and education, to outline some of the internal and external forces that the participants face.

These data reveal how students are racialized and where that racialization occurs. The author delicately intertwines established theories about identity, race, and class with the students’ insights, placing their contributions as marginalized students alongside the dominant discourse about higher education.

Chapter 4 discusses the implicit and explicit rules of college-going and how this “normative” experience is disrupted...