Finding The Feet: Connecting Immigrant Children With Their Lineage

Much of the work I do with elementary school children who are immigrants to the US is an attempt to help them reconnect with their lineage, healing the internal split between them and their ancestral culture, in order to forge a positive bi-cultural identity.

In doing this I am drawing not only on theoretical work, such as Tobie Nathan's ethnopsychiatry or the writings of Gloria Anzaldua on bilinguality/biculturality. But also, and more profoundly, on my own experience as a multiply-dislocated and bilingual child--experience which informs the field of the therapy, as well as the narrative of my life.

While I lived in France, as a bilingual adult, I had several experiences where a bilingual child between the ages of about five and nine, whose parents were both monolingual, would be introduced to me in either French or English. The child would politely ignore me, as children do grown ups, until at some point I spoke equally fluently in the other language. Suddenly the child would become very animated, want to talk to me, and in some cases literally follow me around for the rest of the day. After this happened a few times, I realised these children were the only bilingual people in their family. Bilingual-bicultural children need bilingual-bicultural role models so they can integrate the dual self into a unified bilingual-bicultural identity.

Children of immigrants are not only living between and across two cultures, but are also coping, to a greater or lesser extent, with the trauma of dislocation. Working with this trauma takes many forms. Usually I begin by simply opening a space to talk about where their grandparents are, how their parents came to this country, and the fact that they themselves have two cultures and languages inside them--framing all of this in an unambiguously positive light. For example, talking about how brave their parents were to walk all that way.

Case example
For a while I was seeing a five year old girl from El Salvador*, who was referred following a series of tantrums during which she threatened to call the police, so they would take her away from her home.

In our first session the client drew her family in the US, with great care, and with a lot of very carefully shaded colours. The people were perfectly drawn, with smiling faces, but they had no feet. Their unfinished legs hovered above the carefully drawn green line of the ground.

I asked where her grandparents were, and she said, "El Salvador". I acknowledged that El Salvador was far away, and asked if they were here in her heart, and she said yes. So I suggested she might want to add them to the picture too. She drew them in the top right hand corner, and I was astonished to see that they had feet, connecting directly to a new green grounding line.

The contrast between the US family, who were 'ungrounded', and the family members in El Salvador, who had a connection, quite literally, with the land, was striking. I felt that this marked a dislocation-related trauma, and that this was probably linked to the theme of being taken away, as evidenced in the child's threats to her parents. In control mastery terms, this child was trying to control who would be taken away and when.

In subsequent sessions of undirected play the client chose to draw her grandmother's house in El Salvador, and then to make a meal of tortillas out of Play Doh. "My mom taught me to make tortillas", she told me. "And her mom taught her."

I repeated this. "Your grandma taught your mom, and then your mom taught you." And then added that when she had a little girl, she could teach her too, and then her daughter could teach her daughter--marking the thread of her lineage and the possibility of its continuation in this new country.

Whatever the client chose to draw, we would label, and whenever we labelled anything, I would do the writing in both English and Spanish, always asking the client what the Spanish word was. For example, we wrote 'Grandma" and then we wrote "Abuelita". Every time I did this the client seemed surprised and delighted. My Spanish is rudimentary, but this was less important than my openness (particularly as a representative of the host culture) to the fact that there were two languages in our shared field, and that their worldviews are equally true and valid.

Conclusion
This work was all about creating feet--establishing a connection backwards to the land that had been lost, which in turn would enable a more grounded existence per se.

It's noteworthy that the immigration trauma was announced and investigated within the child's own self-directed play, and that she used the play to re-connect to her lineage and integrate the split within her internalised family.

Six weeks after the start of therapy, the teacher reported that the child's family had called to tell her the child's tantrums had stopped.

*Details have been changed to protect the client's confidentiality.