Gabrielle Oliveira, a Professor of Education and Brazil Studies at Harvard, knows first-hand about leaving one’s homeland in search of safety and economic and educational opportunities. She also knows how difficult migration can be, not just in terms of the journey itself, but also adjusting to a culture that is often hostile and unwelcoming to newcomers.

 Now We Are Here, the latest book by Brazil-born Oliveira, is a poignant and insightful look at the ways 16 Latin American families—30 kids and 24 parents from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—were impacted by the first Trump administration’s family separation policies. The book also interrogates how the COVID-19 shutdowns impacted their lives, forcing them into financial precarity and complicating the academic progress of children and teens. While Now We Are Here essentially skims the surface of Trump’s second term, it is a treasure trove of heart-rending tales, a brilliant, if anecdotal, account of the different ways a small group of adults and their offspring have pursued the dream of American prosperity and personal security.

The fine line between horror, hope, and fear undergirds Oliveira’s account of these asylum-seeking families, all of whom were detained at the border in 2018 and 2019. The account details what it meant for the adults and children to be separated by border patrol for periods lasting between several weeks and several months. The ensuing trauma is well captured, as is the lingering emotional damage of the separations.

This was especially visible in the public school classrooms that Oliveira visited, places where students often found themselves at odds with parental and faculty expectations.

Oliveira writes that the parents she spoke to considered education to be a catapult to success and pinned their hopes for the future on their children’s ability to get free public schooling through grade 12. Their children, however, were mixed in their assessment of educational salvation.

In fact, for many, school was a place of anomie and dissatisfaction, a place where their attempts to talk about what they’ve been through—including physically difficult travel, violent encounters with thieves, rough handling by Customs and Border Patrol agents, and separation from loved ones—were consistently discouraged by teachers who wanted to focus exclusively on the present.    

For her part, Oliveira is sympathetic to teachers, recognizing that in a class of 20 to 30 kids, an instructor is typically expected to meet defined educational metrics within a set time frame. Still, she sees “pedagogical silencing” as a grave, albeit non-malicious, error. 

“It is important to highlight that educators were not actively seeking to hurt or ignore children,” she writes. “More than anything, teachers wanted their students to feel supported in the present moment and understand that they were now safe.”  

But even if this were true, Oliveira concludes that “chronic silences or avoidance of discussing past experiences” does nothing to support families and children, and instead hinders their adjustment to new surroundings.

Perhaps this is why the school-aged children Oliveira interviewed were less starry-eyed than their parents about the benefits of both migration and American education.  “Children and youth,” she writes, “were considerably more critical of the structures that contributed to their predicament than their parents were. They looked at immigration policy, the government, and schools as institutional actors that could help or hurt them.”

She further notes that while parents were sensitive to their children’s difficulties, they tended to blame themselves, rather than overtaxed teachers or the xenophobic and racist policies of the US government, for their children’s anxieties and failures. Moreover, many expressed regret and guilt about their decision to leave their home countries. 

These differences in perspective, Oliveira concludes, are important and should be understood by teachers, school administrators, social workers, counselors, and policy makers.  

“This is the story of how the promise of a good life, anchored by the constructed idea of a good, American education, underwrites migratory decisions, trajectories, and experiences of families traveling to live in the US,” Oliviera writes in her Introduction to the book. 

But Now We Are Here covers more than this. By centering the role of public schools in all 50 states, she stresses that educators can aid or derail young immigrants as they adjust to US life and can help assuage the misgivings their caregivers feel about leaving their countries of origin and uprooting their kin. The book can also be read as a cautionary tale, since 25 percent of current public school students are the offspring of immigrants. Failure to foster a sense of belonging, Oliveira concludes, will destabilize the body politic. In the end, school policies that silence migratory students, no matter how well-intentioned, are hurtful. As Audre Lorde noted, silence protects no one.      

Now We Are Here: Family, Migration, Children’s Education, and Dreams for a Better Life

By Gabrielle Oliveira, 

Stamford University Press, 250 pages

November 4, 2025.

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