Photo by Will Owens

Impact Award winner Margarita Machado-Casas worked with Latino immigrants to produce videos that will help educators understand and better serve immigrant populations.

Margarita Machado-Casas serves as an ambassador between two worlds

With the eighth-largest and fastest growing immigrant Latino population in the United States, North Carolina faces a number of new cultural and communication challenges. On the front lines of these challenges are educators, who often are unprepared to meet the increasing needs of newly arrived immigrant families. Conversely, families migrating to North Carolina from Mexico, Central America and South
America have had to adapt to unfamiliar educational institutions and often cannot communicate clearly about their children’s educational needs. The families, as a result, often feel alienated from their children’s schools.

Margarita Machado-Casas, a former teacher and
Nicaraguan immigrant herself, has spent the past three
years trying to bridge the gap between these two groups.
While pursuing her doctoral degree in education at
Carolina, she worked with Latino immigrant populations
and developed an orientation initiative in the Durham
Public Schools system to inform newly arrived immigrants about the American educational system. In addition, she
gathered personal narratives from recently immigrated
families as part of a broader project aimed at exploring
issues of Latino identity and the Latino immigration experience. Derived from her experience and research, Machado-Casas developed communication tools that serve as a basis for educators to understand and better serve the education needs of new immigrant populations.

Machado-Casas was recently honored for her research with an Impact Award, a privately funded prize given by the Graduate School’s Graduate Education Advancement Board to recognize graduate student research that has an impact on North Carolina. In a conversation with The Fountain’s Daniel T. Johnson, Machado-Casas discusses one aspect of her research, its applications and her goals for the future.

The Fountain: What can your experience working with Mexican and Central American immigrants teach us about populations that recently arrived in North Carolina?

Margarita Machado-Casas (MMC): First it can teach us that we need to be careful about using the word ‘Latino’ as a term to describe Mexican and Central American immigrants as Spanish-speaking only. During my work organizing parentinvolvement initiatives in public schools, I hosted and directed information sessions in Spanish to recently arrived families on issues like parents’ rights, the American educational system and language and literacy acquisition. But what I discovered from these meetings was that North Carolina also has significant Otomi, Nahuat and Quiche immigrant populations. The Otomi and Nahuat are people indigenous to central Mexico that are descendants of the Aztecs and Toltecs while the Quiche are indigenous to Guatemala. Each of these groups brings with them their own cultural expressions and languages, but they are often being labeled by schools as Latinos despite not speaking Spanish as their first acquired language.

Fountain: From an educational standpoint, why is it important to draw distinctions between these different groups?

MMC: Viewing Mexican and Central American immigrants as one group means treating all the people within that group like they speak the same language. But for the Quiche, Otomi and Nahuat immigrants, as well as other groups, school materials and communications that are translated into Spanish might not be understood the way they are intended. For example, with a phone call home about a PTA meeting, the person answering the phone may not speak English and may know Spanish only as a second language. It is unfair to expect family involvement in educational settings from these groups when they are not receiving adequate communication from the schools.

Fountain: How can this knowledge be applied to improve communication in North Carolina’s schools?

MMC: One of easiest applications is changing perceptions on appropriate communication strategies. Once we realized that alternative forms of communication were needed we began going to the families and creating ways to accomplish that. We started creating school orientation videos and a library of other videos on issues like how non-Englishspeaking parents can work with their children at home even if they don’t speak English. The videos are parent-directed projects made in the Otomi language and in Spanish — we are working on creating additional videos in other languages — allowing more families to get involved in their children’s education. We have since made the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction aware of our efforts and they are interested in working with us to make these videos available to newly arrived families as well as to the educators who work with them through conference presentations to teachers and administrators.

Fountain: How has your own background as a Nicaraguan immigrant informed your career aspirations?

MMC: When I came here from Nicaragua at the age of 14, I knew very little English because I come from an area there that is culturally considered to be Afro-Latino. Once I was in the United States I was placed in an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classroom where I was treated like I was a person who had no education. In reality, I was in the seventh or eighth grade and I had already been exposed to algebra, algebra II and pre-calculus. I became aware of the necessities and the struggles that a newly arrived student goes through, and I just remember the utter frustration of what that was like.

Fountain: What do you hope will come from your research, and what are your plans for the future?

MMC: I’m currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and am working on several articles and a book contract to write about my findings on immigrants in North Carolina. I also provide professional development and presentations to teachers and administrators in North Carolina about working with Latino immigrant families. I hope that my research will bring light to the misconceived notions of why immigrants come to the United States, and particularly North Carolina. Historically, newlyarrived populations have been viewed from a deficit perspective, meaning what they are taking away from U.S. and North Carolina citizens. From an additive perspective, immigrants add to the cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the state as well as to the economy and financial prosperity of North Carolina. I hope that my research brings light to the importance of education to immigrant families and can serve as a means to see immigrants’ families as a positive addition to the educational setting.

© 2007, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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