Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- SECTION ONE TENETS OF ACTIVITY THEORY
- SECTION TWO IDENTITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION
- Introduction to Section Two: Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion
- 9 Identity Shifts in Informal Learning Trajectories
- 10 No Human Being Is Illegal: Counteridentities in a Community of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants and Children
- 11 Cultural Identity and Emigration: A Study of the Construction of Discourse about Identity from Historical-Cultural Psychology
- 12 Diversity in the Construction of Modes of Collaboration in Multiethnic Classrooms: Continuity and Discontinuity of Cultural Scripts
- 13 “Discourse” in Cultural-Historical Perspective: Critical Discourse Analysis, CHAT, and the Study of Social Change
- 14 Reason and Dialogue in Education
- SECTION THREE DYNAMICS OF ACTIVITY AND THE VARIATIONS OF LEARNING
- Index
- References
10 - No Human Being Is Illegal: Counteridentities in a Community of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants and Children
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- SECTION ONE TENETS OF ACTIVITY THEORY
- SECTION TWO IDENTITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION
- Introduction to Section Two: Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion
- 9 Identity Shifts in Informal Learning Trajectories
- 10 No Human Being Is Illegal: Counteridentities in a Community of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants and Children
- 11 Cultural Identity and Emigration: A Study of the Construction of Discourse about Identity from Historical-Cultural Psychology
- 12 Diversity in the Construction of Modes of Collaboration in Multiethnic Classrooms: Continuity and Discontinuity of Cultural Scripts
- 13 “Discourse” in Cultural-Historical Perspective: Critical Discourse Analysis, CHAT, and the Study of Social Change
- 14 Reason and Dialogue in Education
- SECTION THREE DYNAMICS OF ACTIVITY AND THE VARIATIONS OF LEARNING
- Index
- References
Summary
Mexico's close proximity to the United States has historically been a source of both tension and political and economic resourcefulness. While the study of globalization and economic expansion has been an important component of immigration and politics between both countries (Suarez-Orozco, 1998), little attention has been paid to the concurrent personal life and changes in immigrants themselves. This chapter attempts to illustrate how Mexican immigrants and their children in New York undergo psychological transformations in the context of their institutional and personal histories and actions. Using Vygotskian sociohistorical theory, I investigate how Mexican immigrants create tools to appropriate and transform their surrounding social context as they concurrently define and transform themselves. This chapter specifically illustrates how “undocumented” Mexican immigrants and children develop their own identities through interactions with the challenges and pressures of society. My purpose is also to understand the psychological functions of identity in material ways: how undocumented Mexican immigrants identify themselves and what this allows them to do, think, and know at particular times and places. In this sense, identity is used as an overarching cultural frame for knowledge, thought, and action, rather than as one component of human development.
MEXICANS IN NEW YORK
By focusing on the dialectical tension between individuals and society, this chapter considers the emergence of illegality as one possible historically situated identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Transformation of LearningAdvances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, pp. 182 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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