Sarah Gallo
Biographic Data
| ID | 202688 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sarah Gallo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sarah |
| FAMILY NAME | Gallo |
| SIGNATURE | GALLO S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1775-6854 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“Nobody’s Telling Us the Truth—We Have to Ask Questions”: Racial Literacies with Black and Immigrant Students in Elementary School
Scholarship has demonstrated the urgency of prioritizing racial literacies in schooling that name—rather than evade—race, yet we still know little about how educators working with racially diverse students from border-crossing families incorporate purposeful racial literacies into their everyday teaching. Drawing from a year-long classroom ethnography, we spotlight the racial literacy practices of a fourth-grade African American teacher working w…
Transborder bilanguaging humor in elementary school
Cuentos (In)Creíbles: Ethnography as Faithful Witnessing for Transborder Epistemologies
Through the careful analysis of the border-crossing epistemologies that are collaboratively shared and validated by a fifth grader and ethnographer in liminal classroom spaces, we identify key methodological approaches for researchers working with border crossers to document the co-production of knowledge among researchers and participants, to engage in active reflection with trusted thought partners, and to understand the possibilities for perso…
Papeles, Sueños, y Futuros: The Altermundos Literacies of Parents of the Latine/x Diaspora
In this article we theorize the concept of altermundos literacies as they are enacted by parents in transborder families. We demonstrate how these parents, participants in an ethnographic study with mixed-status families in rural Puebla, México, write speculative narratives for their children’s futures in ways that reject mononational norms. Altermundos literacies involve the activation of subaltern knowledges across mononational systems and comp…
Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility
Drawing from an ethnography with mixed-status families residing in Mexico, we examine what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people's innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible mononational institutions divided by borders. Through close attention to the literacy practices families engaged in as they applied for their children's U.S. passports from Mexico, we demonstrate how thes…
Documentation Status and Youth’s Critical Consciousness across Borders
Centering the testimonios of two sets of transborder high school seniors living and learning in Mexico and the U.S., in this article, we draw upon decolonizing approaches to theorize critical consciousness formation for and with students from families with mixed documentation status who cross physical and metaphorical borders. Data come from two larger qualitative studies on immigration and education and demonstrate how young people recognize ine…
Transborder DisCrit: Dreaming Across Disjunctures from Mexico
Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents’ hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary …
Mixed‐Status Siblings Now in Mexico: How U.S. Documentation and Transborder Experiences Shape Pathways across Borders
Drawing from an ethnographic study with mixed‐status siblings who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I argue that access to U.S. papers continues to shape young people’s educational lives beyond U.S. borders. Findings illustrate how U.S. passport privileges as well as young people’s crossing of national, institutional, and linguistic borders shape how they navigate their migration and educational experiences within and across the transna…
Transborder pedagogies of the home in contexts of forced repatriation
Drawing from an ethnographic study with families who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I explore what I call parents’ transborder pedagogies of the home, or the home-based educational practices that adults with experiences across transnational institutions draw upon to prepare their children for life and learning on both sides of the border. I argue it is important to understand parents of forced repatriation as transborder thinkers who…
I have a story for you”: Engaging with im/migrant children’s politicized funds of knowledge in qualitative research
Drawing on empirical data from two ethnographic studies on familial im/migration and education on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, in this article, we focus on critical incidents that resulted in listening realignment during data collection in which children deploy their politicized funds of knowledge (PFOK) (Gallo & Link) to shape the form and content of our research. We argue that as researchers in educational settings we must reflect on t…
“Airplanes Not Walls”: Broaching Unauthorized (Im)migration and Schooling in Mexico
Background/Context This article builds on U.S.-based research on undocumented status and schooling to examine how an elementary school teacher in Mexico successfully integrates transnational students’ experiences related to unauthorized (im)migration into the classroom. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Drawing on a politicized funds of knowledge framework, we focus on an exceptional fifth-grade teacher's curricular, pedagogical,…
Nací Allá: Meanings of US Citizenship for Young Children of Return Migrants to Mexico
In this essay, Joanna Dreby, Sarah Gallo, Florencia Silveira, and Melissa Adams-Corral use a transnational frame to explore the meanings of US citizenship for binational children and its importance to experiences of belonging. Drawing on interviews with children ages six to fourteen living with their Mexican-born parents in rural Puebla, their analysis shows that children view US citizenship as signaling their social location in a historically ba…
Immigration policy as family language policy: Mexican immigrant children and families in search of biliteracy
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: In this article we draw upon the ethnography of language planning and policy (LPP) to examine the complexities of how young Latino children with a recently deported parent engage with family language policies within their routine interactions. We explore the following questions. (1) How do US elementary school-aged children engage with, resist, and refashion family language and literacy policies alo…
The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds …
Un trago dulce pero adentro con sabor amargo (A Bittersweet Swallow): Constructing Counterspaces to Explore Undocumented Status Across Academic, Family, and Community Spaces
In this article a group of seven Latina/o immigrants, parents, advocates, and ethnographers draw on critical race theory to explore what it means to co-present on, and engage in, difficult conversations about immigration and documentation status. We theorize how, through critical collaboration motivated by our joint presentation, we co-constructed counterspaces in which, while interrogating what we tend to count as knowledge and expertise in educ…
Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices in a New Latino Diaspora Community
Drawing primarily on interview data from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora community, we explore how their teachers understood and responded to increasing deportation-based immigration practices affecting children's lives. We illustrate how teachers fell along a continuum regarding their desire and success in pushing beyond their comfort zones to create spaces in which they learn…
Humor in Father-Daughter Immigration Narratives of Resistance
This article draws from an ethnography on Mexican immigrant fathers and their children to examine humor in immigration narratives as acts of resistance. The analysis focuses on the devices employed by a father and daughter during their everyday talk and co-narration of an incident with police officers. Findings illustrate how the form and content of fathers' pedagogies of the home, including the strategic use of humor, prepare children to combat …
“Diles la verdad”: Deportation Policies, Politicized Funds of Knowledge, and Schooling in Middle Childhood
In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and perspectives of one student, his teachers, and his parents to explore how his father's detainment and po…
Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling
This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nati…
Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School
Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and des…
The Effects of Gendered Immigration Enforcement on Middle Childhood and Schooling
Drawing from an ethnographic study on Mexican immigrant fathers and their second-grade children, this article examines the masked realities behind current immigration policies that equate “illegal” with “Mexican immigrant” and how the enforcement of these policies, which overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men, affect immigrant children and their elementary schooling. I empirically illustrate how this oversimplified criminalization of Mexican…
Sobresalir: Latino Parent Perspectives on New Latino Diaspora Schools
Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for use in teacher professional development, which counters these discourses. In the film, Mexican immigr…
Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices in a New Latino Diaspora Community
Drawing primarily on interview data from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora community, we explore how their teachers understood and responded to increasing deportation-based immigration practices affecting children's lives. We illustrate how teachers fell along a continuum regarding their desire and success in pushing beyond their comfort zones to create spaces in which they learn…
Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School
Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and des…
The Effects of Gendered Immigration Enforcement on Middle Childhood and Schooling
Drawing from an ethnographic study on Mexican immigrant fathers and their second-grade children, this article examines the masked realities behind current immigration policies that equate “illegal” with “Mexican immigrant” and how the enforcement of these policies, which overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men, affect immigrant children and their elementary schooling. I empirically illustrate how this oversimplified criminalization of Mexican…
Mixed‐Status Siblings Now in Mexico: How U.S. Documentation and Transborder Experiences Shape Pathways across Borders
Drawing from an ethnographic study with mixed‐status siblings who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I argue that access to U.S. papers continues to shape young people’s educational lives beyond U.S. borders. Findings illustrate how U.S. passport privileges as well as young people’s crossing of national, institutional, and linguistic borders shape how they navigate their migration and educational experiences within and across the transna…
I have a story for you”: Engaging with im/migrant children’s politicized funds of knowledge in qualitative research
Drawing on empirical data from two ethnographic studies on familial im/migration and education on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, in this article, we focus on critical incidents that resulted in listening realignment during data collection in which children deploy their politicized funds of knowledge (PFOK) (Gallo & Link) to shape the form and content of our research. We argue that as researchers in educational settings we must reflect on t…
Humor in Father-Daughter Immigration Narratives of Resistance
This article draws from an ethnography on Mexican immigrant fathers and their children to examine humor in immigration narratives as acts of resistance. The analysis focuses on the devices employed by a father and daughter during their everyday talk and co-narration of an incident with police officers. Findings illustrate how the form and content of fathers' pedagogies of the home, including the strategic use of humor, prepare children to combat …
Sobresalir: Latino Parent Perspectives on New Latino Diaspora Schools
Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for use in teacher professional development, which counters these discourses. In the film, Mexican immigr…
Transborder bilanguaging humor in elementary school
Papeles, Sueños, y Futuros: The Altermundos Literacies of Parents of the Latine/x Diaspora
In this article we theorize the concept of altermundos literacies as they are enacted by parents in transborder families. We demonstrate how these parents, participants in an ethnographic study with mixed-status families in rural Puebla, México, write speculative narratives for their children’s futures in ways that reject mononational norms. Altermundos literacies involve the activation of subaltern knowledges across mononational systems and comp…
The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds …
Sobresalir: Latino Parent Perspectives on New Latino Diaspora Schools
Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for use in teacher professional development, which counters these discourses. In the film, Mexican immigr…
Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling
This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nati…
Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School
Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and des…
The Effects of Gendered Immigration Enforcement on Middle Childhood and Schooling
Drawing from an ethnographic study on Mexican immigrant fathers and their second-grade children, this article examines the masked realities behind current immigration policies that equate “illegal” with “Mexican immigrant” and how the enforcement of these policies, which overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men, affect immigrant children and their elementary schooling. I empirically illustrate how this oversimplified criminalization of Mexican…
“Diles la verdad”: Deportation Policies, Politicized Funds of Knowledge, and Schooling in Middle Childhood
In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teachers, and families in a Pennsylvania town navigate learning within a context of unprecedented deportations. Gallo and Link focus on the experiences and perspectives of one student, his teachers, and his parents to explore how his father's detainment and po…
Un trago dulce pero adentro con sabor amargo (A Bittersweet Swallow): Constructing Counterspaces to Explore Undocumented Status Across Academic, Family, and Community Spaces
In this article a group of seven Latina/o immigrants, parents, advocates, and ethnographers draw on critical race theory to explore what it means to co-present on, and engage in, difficult conversations about immigration and documentation status. We theorize how, through critical collaboration motivated by our joint presentation, we co-constructed counterspaces in which, while interrogating what we tend to count as knowledge and expertise in educ…
Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices in a New Latino Diaspora Community
Drawing primarily on interview data from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora community, we explore how their teachers understood and responded to increasing deportation-based immigration practices affecting children's lives. We illustrate how teachers fell along a continuum regarding their desire and success in pushing beyond their comfort zones to create spaces in which they learn…
Humor in Father-Daughter Immigration Narratives of Resistance
This article draws from an ethnography on Mexican immigrant fathers and their children to examine humor in immigration narratives as acts of resistance. The analysis focuses on the devices employed by a father and daughter during their everyday talk and co-narration of an incident with police officers. Findings illustrate how the form and content of fathers' pedagogies of the home, including the strategic use of humor, prepare children to combat …
The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds …
Immigration policy as family language policy: Mexican immigrant children and families in search of biliteracy
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: In this article we draw upon the ethnography of language planning and policy (LPP) to examine the complexities of how young Latino children with a recently deported parent engage with family language policies within their routine interactions. We explore the following questions. (1) How do US elementary school-aged children engage with, resist, and refashion family language and literacy policies alo…
“Airplanes Not Walls”: Broaching Unauthorized (Im)migration and Schooling in Mexico
Background/Context This article builds on U.S.-based research on undocumented status and schooling to examine how an elementary school teacher in Mexico successfully integrates transnational students’ experiences related to unauthorized (im)migration into the classroom. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Drawing on a politicized funds of knowledge framework, we focus on an exceptional fifth-grade teacher's curricular, pedagogical,…
Nací Allá: Meanings of US Citizenship for Young Children of Return Migrants to Mexico
In this essay, Joanna Dreby, Sarah Gallo, Florencia Silveira, and Melissa Adams-Corral use a transnational frame to explore the meanings of US citizenship for binational children and its importance to experiences of belonging. Drawing on interviews with children ages six to fourteen living with their Mexican-born parents in rural Puebla, their analysis shows that children view US citizenship as signaling their social location in a historically ba…
Transborder pedagogies of the home in contexts of forced repatriation
Drawing from an ethnographic study with families who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I explore what I call parents’ transborder pedagogies of the home, or the home-based educational practices that adults with experiences across transnational institutions draw upon to prepare their children for life and learning on both sides of the border. I argue it is important to understand parents of forced repatriation as transborder thinkers who…
I have a story for you”: Engaging with im/migrant children’s politicized funds of knowledge in qualitative research
Drawing on empirical data from two ethnographic studies on familial im/migration and education on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border, in this article, we focus on critical incidents that resulted in listening realignment during data collection in which children deploy their politicized funds of knowledge (PFOK) (Gallo & Link) to shape the form and content of our research. We argue that as researchers in educational settings we must reflect on t…
Transborder DisCrit: Dreaming Across Disjunctures from Mexico
Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents’ hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary …
Mixed‐Status Siblings Now in Mexico: How U.S. Documentation and Transborder Experiences Shape Pathways across Borders
Drawing from an ethnographic study with mixed‐status siblings who relocated from the United States to Mexico, I argue that access to U.S. papers continues to shape young people’s educational lives beyond U.S. borders. Findings illustrate how U.S. passport privileges as well as young people’s crossing of national, institutional, and linguistic borders shape how they navigate their migration and educational experiences within and across the transna…
Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility
Drawing from an ethnography with mixed-status families residing in Mexico, we examine what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people's innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible mononational institutions divided by borders. Through close attention to the literacy practices families engaged in as they applied for their children's U.S. passports from Mexico, we demonstrate how thes…
Documentation Status and Youth’s Critical Consciousness across Borders
Centering the testimonios of two sets of transborder high school seniors living and learning in Mexico and the U.S., in this article, we draw upon decolonizing approaches to theorize critical consciousness formation for and with students from families with mixed documentation status who cross physical and metaphorical borders. Data come from two larger qualitative studies on immigration and education and demonstrate how young people recognize ine…
Papeles, Sueños, y Futuros: The Altermundos Literacies of Parents of the Latine/x Diaspora
In this article we theorize the concept of altermundos literacies as they are enacted by parents in transborder families. We demonstrate how these parents, participants in an ethnographic study with mixed-status families in rural Puebla, México, write speculative narratives for their children’s futures in ways that reject mononational norms. Altermundos literacies involve the activation of subaltern knowledges across mononational systems and comp…
“Nobody’s Telling Us the Truth—We Have to Ask Questions”: Racial Literacies with Black and Immigrant Students in Elementary School
Scholarship has demonstrated the urgency of prioritizing racial literacies in schooling that name—rather than evade—race, yet we still know little about how educators working with racially diverse students from border-crossing families incorporate purposeful racial literacies into their everyday teaching. Drawing from a year-long classroom ethnography, we spotlight the racial literacy practices of a fourth-grade African American teacher working w…
Transborder bilanguaging humor in elementary school
Cuentos (In)Creíbles: Ethnography as Faithful Witnessing for Transborder Epistemologies
Through the careful analysis of the border-crossing epistemologies that are collaboratively shared and validated by a fifth grader and ethnographer in liminal classroom spaces, we identify key methodological approaches for researchers working with border crossers to document the co-production of knowledge among researchers and participants, to engage in active reflection with trusted thought partners, and to understand the possibilities for perso…
Sociology (19 works) · Ethnography (16 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Immigration (12 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Critical Race Theory in Education (11 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (11 works) · Gender Studies (9 works)