From Nuevo León to the USA and Back Again: Transnational Students in Mexico

The movement of Mexicans to the United States is both longstanding and long studied and from that study we know that for many newcomers the attachment to the receiving community is fraught and tentative. The experience of immigrant children in U.S. schools is also relatively well studied and reveals challenges of intercultural communication as well as concurrent and contradictory features of welcome and unwelcome. What is less well known, in the study of migration generally and of transnational students in particular, is how students moving in a less common direction — from the U.S. to Mexico — experience that movement. Based on visits to 173 randomly selected classrooms in the state of Nuevo León Mexico, this study shares survey and interview data from 208 of the 242 students encountered who had previous experience attending school in the United States.