Leticia Villarreal Sosa, Benjamin Roth, and Sophia Rodriguez Anti-immigrant rhetoric increasingly depicts immigrants as undeserving, but schools are social institutions where these perceptions can be challenged and, ideally, where inequities confronting immigrant students can be ameliorated. Existing research suggests that teachers and administrators are central to this task, but it also raises questions about the role of other personnel in immigrant-serving schools. Drawing on the concept of nepantlera, this study examines how school social workers (SSWs) pursue equity for immigrant students by challenging intersecting power structures. The authors present preliminary findings that attest to the importance of nepantleras for SSWs and the importance of SSWs for immigrant-serving schools. KEY WORDS: immigrant students; intersectionality; nepantleras; school social work D rawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of “borderlands,” we examine how one group of school-based actors— school social workers (SSWs)—advance equity for immigrant students through disrupting and, at times, subverting systems of power. The borderlands framework accounts for how various social, historical, and political contexts constitute individuals as “other” and shape social conditions for those groups (Anzaldúa, 1987; Hurtado & Cervantez, 2009; Olmedo, 2009). As a Chicana lesbian feminist, Anzaldúa’s critical approach to intersectionality suggests that SSWs can challenge intersecting systems of power to work for justice. Data from our study provide evidence to support this: SSWs often operate as change agents who use various strategies to reform schools and support immigrant youths. However, instead of challenging power structures directly, SSWs more often equip immigrant youths with strategies for how to navigate systems within and outside of schools. Our findings underscore the potential that SSWs have to make a larger impact in immigrantserving schools, as well as the circumstances that can limit their ability to do so. Building on other scholars (Villarreal Sosa, 2019), we argue that a nepantlera framework can reorient SSWs to their work with immigrant students and the intersecting systems of power that affect their everyday lives. This article aims to provide further empirical validation of the nepantlera framework within the doi: 10.1093/swr/svab011 C 2021 National Association of Social Workers V field of school social work as well as additional conceptual insights to advance it. BACKGROUND There are over 18 million children in the United States with at least one immigrant parent (Migration Policy Institute, 2017). Just as immigrant children come from diverse backgrounds, not all of them face the same barriers to equity in the schools they attend. Among the most vulnerable are those from low-income families, recent arrivals, English language learners, and children who are unauthorized or from mixed-status families (Gurrola, Ayón, & Moya Salas, 2016; Yoshikawa, 2011). For those who have experienced migration themselves, the trauma of border crossings and fear of deportation are linked with mental health concerns such as depressive symptoms and anxiety (Cavazos-Rehg, Zayas, & Spitznagel, 2007; Potochnick & Perreira, 2010). Immigrant children also encounter discrimination based on race and legal status (Rumbaut, 2008), fear and uncertainty because of escalating immigration enforcement and restrictive antiimmigrant policies (Grace, Bais, & Roth, 2018), and a prevailing threat narrative fueled by antiimmigrant rhetoric (Chavez, 2013). The adverse effects of this climate have led to increased rates of depression, anxiety, and traumatic stress among immigrant children, which negatively affect their school performance, attendance, concentration, 1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 Crossing Borders: Exploring the Role of School Social Workers in Immigrant-Serving Schools Conceptual Framework Anzaldúa’s (2009) concept of “borderlands” offers a framework for understanding the role of SSWs in immigrant-serving schools. For Anzaldúa, the borderlands represent an open wound grounded in a history of conquest (Anzaldúa, 1987; Hurtado & Cervantez, 2009). Anzaldúa understood the subordination of Chicanas as a result of multiple systems of oppression that included gender, race, ethnicity, class, language, and sexuality (Hurtado & Cervantez, 2009). Therefore, Anzaldúa advocated for the need to create new theories that would account for those experiences. As Anzaldúa (1990) stated: “Necesitamos teorı́as that will rewrite history using race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries—new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods” (p. xxv). Grounded in the lived 2 experiences of Chicanas, borderlands represent “theory in the flesh” that allows for survival and hope (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981). While painful, the borderlands also have the potential to be a transformational space (Keating, 2009). In the context of schools, the borderlands framework suggests that individuals who promote access and equity for immigrant students are nepantleras (Koshy, 2006; Villarreal Sosa, 2019). Nepantla is a Nahuatl word referring to a liminal space where one experiences displacement. A nepantlera is “born from nepantla” and positioned in a liminal space where “individual and collective selfdefinitions and belief systems are destabilized” by the questioning of one’s worldview (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. xxxv). Becoming a nepantlera, therefore, involves “shifts [in] consciousness and, thus, opportunities for change” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. xxxv). Nepantla offers the potential for transformation and the ability to see things from multiple perspectives, bridging differences grounded in relational ethics and reflective consciousness (Elenes, 2013; Keating, 2015). While risky and uncomfortable, the ambiguity of being “between worlds” provides a vantage point for nepantleras to see new possibilities for connection and healing. They are cultural workers, border crossers, threshold people. Anzaldúa’s writings on nepantla also point to the possibility for resistance and transformation— agentive expressions that we argue are integral to the social work profession’s value of social justice. Similar to other writings on intersectionality (Severs, Celis, & Erzeel, 2016), Anzaldúa’s work deconstructs the notion of power that is understood as the ability to enact oppression and is located in privileged social locations or institutions. Instead, power can be enacted by those in marginalized positions by rejecting definitions of reality imposed by those in privileged social locations or a larger societal narrative. Therefore, nepantlera actions are based on understandings of ways that power can be claimed within restricted spaces, such as the development of multiple forms of consciousness, creating alternative narratives, and translating knowledge from one site of struggle to another (Blackwell, 2010). Borderlands and Critical Pedagogy Borderlands theory and the concept of nepantlera have influenced the development of critical pedagogy and educational theories, offering tools to Social Work Research Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 and behavior (American Immigration Council, 2018; Ee & Gándara, 2020). At times, schools can reproduce these inequities (Ayón, 2016; Ee & Gándara, 2019), but they can also be contested spaces where these barriers to equity are challenged by teachers, guidance counselors, and other school personnel. These individuals play a key role in identifying and confronting barriers to equity (Weis & Fine, 2001), guiding students through this racialized and painful reality to a place of transformation and healing (AguilarValdez et al., 2013; Villarreal Sosa, 2019). In particular, SSWs are positioned within schools to potentially improve equity for immigrant students. SSWs are trained mental health providers who deliver evidence-based services, promote a school climate conducive to learning, maximize access to school and community resources that support academic and behavioral success, and help students navigate the process of gaining access to these resources (Astor, Jacobson, Wrabel, Benbenishty, & Pineda, 2018; Frey et al., 2016; Greenberg, 2014; Stone, 2017; Teasley, Nevarez, & Frost, 2017). SSWs can also support youths individually, operating as a “really significant other” for those whose educational success is particularly vulnerable due to poverty, legal status, or national origin (Portes & Fernández-Kelly, 2008; Portes & Rumbaut, 2014; Stanton-Salazar, 2011). Yet very little research has examined the role of SSWs in immigrant-serving schools. How do SSWs confront barriers to equity for immigrant students? Testimonio is a narrative of someone’s firsthand experiences with political or other forms of oppression. As a pedagogical tool, testimonio is an example of enacting nepantla and identifying actions of a nepantlera (DeNicolo & González, 2015; Elenes, 2013; Prieto & Villenas, 2012). Through the use of testimonio in a third-grade classroom, DeNicolo and González (2015) were able to identify ways in which third-grade students described their lives in nepantla. These descriptions included connecting with each other and their shared struggle and navigating tensions between the internalization of deficit perspectives and their feelings of pride related to their bilingualism. For these students, nepantla involved challenging dominant ideologies, demonstrating agency, and redefining linguistic identities. Lizárraga and Gutiérrez (2018) also designed learning opportunities for students that leverage children’s multilingual and positionality negotiation in the classroom. These nepantla literacies engage students’ lived experiences at the boundaries of language, culture, and positionality in the process of negotiating literacy with conventional tools privileged in schools. Applying the Nepantlera Concept to School Social Work The nepantlera lens has traditionally been applied to educators and classroom settings, but it also has relevance to the field of school social work— particularly given the profession’s emphasis on social justice and the importance of critical consciousness and reflection in social work practice (Villarreal Sosa, 2019). Villarreal Sosa (2019) described how we might recognize SSWs as nepantleras. First, SSW nepantleras will have the ability to be border crossers. Border crossers are aware of the multiple forms of oppression that immigrant students encounter and navigate each day, including anti-immigrant sentiment, microaggressions, and the resulting trauma that they experience (Keating & González-López, 2011). Second, SSW nepantleras will promote social change in their schools and communities, challenging dominant paradigms that cast immigrant students as “other.” Third, SSW nepantleras will themselves experience personal transformation that includes healing, both internally and relationally. These three domains— border crossing, promoting social change, and per- SOSA, ROTH, AND RODRIGUEZ / Crossing Borders: Exploring the Role of School Social Workers in Immigrant-Serving Schools 3 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 inform social justice education and provide an alternative to Western-based frameworks (Elenes, 1997, 2013). One of those contributions was the deconstruction of essentialist notions of difference, culture, and identity, and the development of educational practices that account for multiple subjectivities (Elenes, 1997). Prieto and Villenas (2012) focused on Chicana/Latina teacher educators in predominately white institutions, exploring the way in which two Latina/Chicana testimonios demonstrate the frustration, discomfort, and vision for teaching that reflects nepantla. Prieto and Villenas have developed themes of cultural dissonance experienced within institutions, particularly along intersections of positionalities such as race, class, gender, or language; consciousness with commitment; authentic caring from their testimonios as forms of enacting nepantla; and connecting their practice to theory and their theory to practice. Elenes (2013) extended the concept of conocimiento as one that occurs within nepantla when those who work with communities with different access to power and privilege confront their own privilege. Abraham (2014) identified one such moment in the classroom when she realized that one of her students—who she knew spoke English and Spanish—was from an indigenous family and communicated in two Mayan languages at home. She noted that her own way of knowing and viewing the world up until this realization had ignored the existence of indigenous languages represented in her classroom, thereby violating her students’ ways of knowing. “Nepantlera came when I realized I had done this,” she concluded. “It was not a pleasant moment, but it was a necessary one” (Abraham, 2014, p. 3). The focus of this scholarship has been to develop theory grounded in lived experience and provide a framework that grounds the teaching or learning within the historical context of communities, structural conditions, and social locations of racialized subjects (Prieto & Villenas, 2012). Conceptualizations of nepantla offer the ability to examine multiple forms of oppression and agency from multiple perspectives (Elenes, 2013). In other contexts, these nepantla strategies are examined to understand how they contribute to resistance and political or community organizing among campesinas (Blackwell, 2010) using tools such as testimonio. RESEARCH DESIGN This article draws on in-depth interviews with SSWs that we conducted as part of a larger mixed-methods study (for detailed methods, see Rodriguez, Roth, & Sosa, 2020). The goal of the interviews was to better conceptualize nepantlera in the context of school social work and to inform the development of the study’s survey instrument. We interviewed a convenience sample (n ¼ 20) of SSWs in immigrantserving schools. Respondents were all practicing SSWs from districts in numerous states, including California, New York, Maryland, Illinois, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina. Interviews were conducted in person or over the phone and varied in length from 40 to 90 minutes. They were audiorecorded and transcribed, and each interviewer memoed their observations about key themes, connections to the nepantlera concept, and insights into the SSW role in immigrant-serving schools. During monthly team meetings we discussed emerging patterns as viewed through a nepantlera epistemological lens and the opportunities and challenges it presented in our research. RESEARCHER POSITIONALITIES Leticia Villarreal Sosa: As a first-generation college-attending Xicana/Mexicana, my use of borderlands theory and nepantlera is much more than an intellectual or methodological practice. Because my own lived experience and that of my community was not reflected in the social sciences, I have always incorporated Chicana feminism, and specifically Anzaldúa’s work, as an essential part of my own academic work. As an undergraduate I was burdened with that additional duty to learn about my own historical and theoretical context outside of my coursework. Theories that reflected my own lived experience were not reflected in the curriculum, so I spent my own time reading and learning about these perspectives. This gave me a framework for understanding what I had only previously known as a visceral experience in my body. 4 Participation in this research team was difficult and required a continued reflection on what it meant to be a nepantlera. I was concerned about what I experienced initially as a lack of understanding of this holistic approach and the appropriation of Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands theory in what Anzaldúa referred to as weak efforts to claim intersectionality without truly integrating her theory (Keating, 2009). I was reminded time and again by Anzaldúa, however, that the work of a nepantlera is that of bridge building as you walk and crossing the bridge to each other and to our own self. Anzaldúa’s goal with writing Borderlands la Frontera was not just to share knowledge, but also to inspire others to produce knowledge (Keating, 2009). Benjamin Roth: Although I have been researching equity-related issues for immigrant youths for over a decade, the concept of nepantlera was new to me. I grew up as a white, heterosexual male in a predominantly white suburban community, and my upbringing did not cultivate in me a deep awareness of my own racial or cultural attributes. Learning about my own positionality within the social fields of gender, race, class, and nativity was an integral part of my graduate education in social work and, later, my practice experience as a family therapist. My experiences living in Latin America as an adult and engaging with urban Latino communities in the United States as a social work practitioner have further complicated my cultural self and shaped my research decisions, practices, and epistemologies. The process of applying the nepantlera concept exposed my own need for greater reflexivity as a researcher. Our team’s candor—based on trust and a willingness to be vulnerable and, at times, confrontational—has been critical throughout all stages of the project, showing me that I was often too quick to borrow the concept as an analytic tool, appropriating it in ways that suited, rather than challenged, my own paradigm. Sophia Rodriguez: Although I have written about racial, ethnic, and cultural identities of immigrant children for a decade, I have always struggled to understand and articulate my own racial and ethnic positionality (Rodriguez, 2020). In part, this is due to the ways that institutional labeling—processes of racialization and othering—articulated my identity for me. I grew up with a white single mom in a low-income family in a predominantly white, affluent community. I was con- Social Work Research Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 sonal transformation and critical reflection—provide a basic framework to explore how SSWs disrupt power structures within schools. As we show later, each of these domains is best understood to be in tension with other forces or structural realities. Nepantlera SSWs must negotiate these realities in the everyday practice of working in the immigrantserving schools where they are embedded. FINDINGS SSWs’ ability to be border crossers means that they see, understand, and value the various positionalities of immigrant students (Aguilar-Valdez et al., 2013). As nepantleras, they must also grasp how immigrant students are affected by an unwelcoming receiving context and how these students experience anti-immigrant sentiment and the various cultural borders encountered in school. Nepantlera actions involve taking risks (Koshy, 2006). In the context of discussing the challenges of her job, for example, a white female SSW at a school in South Carolina said, “A student of mine just got arrested. He doesn’t have papers. Will he get deported? He was near a conflict that broke out, and he was arrested along with his friends. Does he have any rights?” Then, later in the interview, this respondent explained how she intervenes to help immigrant students who are in this position: “I have to teach the kids how to navigate the law without breaking it, and sometimes it [being a social worker] is about breaking or bending rules.” When she shared these examples, her tone and pauses suggested that she was grappling with how to best serve her students. She noted that her work had a “moral” dimension to it but that this created a tension for her because, while she certainly did not want to lose her job, she felt that her duty was to serve kids. An arguably less transformative approach to operating as a border crosser—and more common in our sample of SSWs—is to shield immigrant students from hostile systems by helping them negotiate complex social and bureaucratic environments. Rather than break the rules, here SSWs offer students navigational guidance. Navigational guidance does not directly challenge the power structures that target immigrant youths, and it does not put SSWs in a position where they might lose their jobs. When asked how she would describe her role, a Latina SSW in South Carolina responded that she views herself as “the liaison between the school and [immigrant] families.” This means knowing and understanding aspects of her students’ experience that may otherwise go overlooked so that she can help them negotiate unwelcoming systems. For example, she began to see how high school students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in her district were struggling with the transition to college due to a state law that disqualifies them from in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. In response, she developed a comprehensive college resource guide for students that includes information for them and their families about how to apply, considerations when choosing a school, and how to pay for tuition. For a white female SSW in Texas, helping immigrant students negotiate the hyper-surveilled community in and around the school meant providing them with guidance about their appearance, to avoid being mislabeled as a gang member by local police or the judge in immigration court. Knowing that these authorities are prone to make an initial assessment based on how a young person presents themselves, the SSW stocks a closet in her office with business-casual attire and coaches her students on how to speak and behave while in their neighborhood and while addressing a judge in court. In effect, her guidance is helping them alter the presentation of their public selves as a protective strategy—what Garcı́a (2014) called “passing as American”—to avoid discriminatory treatment by authorities in hostile environments. She also gives her immigrant students wallet-sized cards with her contact information in the event they are detained by the police. She knows that the students are unlikely to provide law enforcement with their parents’ contact information for fear that their loved ones might be caught up in the immigration SOSA, ROTH, AND RODRIGUEZ / Crossing Borders: Exploring the Role of School Social Workers in Immigrant-Serving Schools 5 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 fronted by racial ascription when I attended college as a first-generation student. My father was a Cuban immigrant who came to the United States in his late 20s but died when I was only three years old. So, while I am a child of an immigrant and a mixed-race Latina, my social class status often felt the most salient; thus, I struggled to answer “Who are you?” or “What are you?” This provides (what feels like) superficial context for why I struggle with and lean into Anzaldúa’s nepantlera concept—the tensions, pain, and interplay of institutional or structural ascription and personal or self-articulation that accompany intersectional positionalities are both uncomfortable and hopeful. Even within the context of our open-minded and thoughtful research team, I continue to struggle through my own understanding of racial and ethnic social location and class-based identity and how to locate myself in the work I do with immigrant communities as a citizen and researcher. 6 that her school, health care, child welfare, and other institutional forms of support do not help immigrant children in her state of Georgia. Her role as an SSW, therefore, is to “piece together” these broken parts so she can help families “jump from one raft to another.” However, the school where she works does not fully understand her role. They see her interventions as “small” and tedious. When teachers are asked to help, they “get exasperated easily” with helping immigrant families navigate broken systems. “I’m working in the South,” she explained. I think there are a lot of teachers and administrators who don’t get it—immigration . . . I do a lot of educating my coworkers about why things might be the way they are and try to challenge their assumptions about what’s happening with a kid. Other school personnel do value her contribution, because she connects students to supports within and across systems that are unfriendly to immigrants, not because they embrace her framework toward advancing equity: [Our district] is really making an effort to train teachers in restorative justice and how to work with our population productively. But teachers don’t get into it. They have such a different training and frame of mind. My skills are very different—the things they don’t know how to do . . . So it’s pretty easy to make school people happy by just knowing how to get food, or knowing how to get a power bill paid, or how to get a coach for a kid. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Given the complexity of intersectionality (McCall, 2008) and efforts to advance intersectionality into new discursive spaces (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013; Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013), nepantlera offers an important paradigm for school social work practice. It is a useful framework for understanding the intersectionality of immigrant students’ numerous positionalities, gathering information from the relevant context, and allowing SSWs to view schools as borderlands where the social and cultural boundaries influencing Social Work Research Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 enforcement machinery. If the student contacts her first, however, she may be able to help mediate. These actions do not directly challenge the structures that police the presence of immigrants, but the SSW arguably subverts these structures by limiting their reach. As such, her actions may represent a form of resistance, even if they do nothing to directly challenge the immigrant “threat” narrative that is part of her students’ everyday experience (Blackwell, 2010; Chavez, 2013). Providing navigational forms of guidance for immigrant students can also require that SSWs negotiate the politics of advocacy within their own schools and districts. For example, when we asked her to identify the biggest challenges for immigrant students in her district, a Latina SSW described the raids that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducts in her community. After one raid, immigrant parents were afraid to pick up their children from school, so the SSW provided the students with Know Your Rights (KYR) training and a package of information for their parents. The training was impromptu and unadvertised to avoid drawing scrutiny from the district. Although she said ICE raids happen several times a year, the SSW avoids holding big community KYR sessions with immigrant families. These kinds of meetings would bring “more attention and more trouble,” so she and her colleagues do not advertise how they advocate: “We keep it to ourselves.” Similarly, the SSW from Texas explained that advocating for immigrant students has sometimes involved challenging teachers and administrators who, from her perspective, unfairly react to student misbehavior without considering the larger context. In effect, she has constructed an us/them divide, which positions her on the side of immigrant students visà-vis non-allied school personnel. Her approach to navigational guidance for immigrant students is to maintain a discreet profile to avoid stirring up controversy in a school that may not approve of her approach. Navigational—rather than transformational— strategies reflect how SSWs perceive their own position within the school hierarchy and the power they have to exercise systemic change. One respondent, a white second-generation European immigrant, stated, “I really just serve the people who aren’t able to access the system.” But she also described the system as “broken,” meaning their work in a human rights framework within the U.S. context, claiming those same rights and privileges for immigrant students. SSWs as nepantleras “see” the intersecting and oppressive power structures that affect the everyday lives of immigrant students and families and work to transform these systems. There are many ways for SSWs to be nepantleras. Being a nepantlera means resisting the dominant narrative of immigrant families as “needy” that characterizes a cultural deficit perspective. It means helping immigrant families orient themselves to a broken system of supports, piecing together programs and services—a task that no one else in the school may be willing or able to do. SSWs engaged in border-crossing behavior may put information in the hands of immigrant families so they know their rights when confronted by ICE. Finally, using this concept as researchers requires self-awareness and a critical understanding of our own positionality. While our application of nepantlera has provided new insights into the role of SSWs in immigrant-serving schools, it has also laid bare our own biases and inherent tensions as researchers. This vulnerability prompted us as a team to struggle to achieve conocimiento, or acknowledge our own privilege, and to engage in critical reflection and transparency with each other about potential or actual blind spots through the process. For example, two of our team members were looking for mere indicators of nepantlera— evidence of its expression in the social world, like the advocacy activities of SSWs—rather than a more holistic representation that would honor the legacy and richness of the concept. This process itself was Anzaldúa’s intention. One’s understanding of the concept is developed through the interaction between the reader and the text, with each person’s social location shaping the interpretation while simultaneously guarding against the appropriation of her theory through a superficial application (Keating, 2009). Nepantlera reflects a way of being and knowing. Our own research experiences have underscored that we, too, undergo a continual process of transformation as scholars and collaborators, continually becoming researchers who are aware of our positionality and that how it influences our respective epistemologies is ongoing and deserves constant attention. SOSA, ROTH, AND RODRIGUEZ / Crossing Borders: Exploring the Role of School Social Workers in Immigrant-Serving Schools 7 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/swr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/swr/svab011/6333606 by University of Maryland user on 03 August 2021 immigrant students are formed, replicated, and challenged. Becoming a nepantlera is an evolutionary process rather than an end state. While some SSWs seem to embody what Anzaldúa describes as nepantlera, many others exhibit only aspects of it—they have some qualities of being a nepantlera but are on a longer developmental trajectory of personal transformation. Villarreal Sosa (2019) suggested that nepantla leads to personal transformation by way of critical self-reflection and awareness. The notion of personal transformation suggests a developmental process, and many of our respondents explained that their views, interventions, and styles have evolved. Their work with immigrant students at the point of the interview was different than it was five or 10 years earlier. There are numerous explanations for this change, including shifts in the sociopolitical context that has transformed the experiences of immigrants themselves. With exposure to immigrant students and in response to the changing policy context, SSWs in immigrant-serving schools may be developing new and enhanced sensibilities or conocimiento that equip them to be nepantleras. Borderlands is a concept that was born from Anzaldúa’s experience of growing up along the U.S.–Mexican border as a farmworker’s daughter, living in extreme poverty (Hurtado, 2020). For Chicanas like Anzaldúa, the connection to Mexico and the border is an ancestral and political one. Borderlands theory conceptualizes oppression as intersecting systems of oppression that are fluid and nuanced, embodying different forms of resistance that are not always easy to measure or analyze (Hurtado, 2020). Thus, understanding SSWs as nepantleras requires a nuanced and contextualized perspective that considers their own path toward conocimiento as well as the possibilities for action within their own local context. Furthermore, Chicana feminists such as Anzaldúa do not situate themselves as “foreign”; rather, they ground themselves as U.S. based and therefore claim all rights and privileges associated with that social location. SSWs who act as nepantleras can be considered cultural navigators, bridge builders, and advocates (Villarreal Sosa & Martin, 2021). Anzaldúa’s notions of nepantlera actions include challenging others and social transformation (Villarreal Sosa, 2019). Articulating this nepantla framework can help develop SSWs who ground REFERENCES Abraham, S. (2014). A nepantla pedagogy: Comparing Anzaldua’s and Bakhtin’s ideas for pedagogical and social change. Critical Education, 5(5), 1–19. doi:10 .14288/ce.v5i5.183601 Aguilar-Valdez, J. R., LópezLeiva, C. 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This new knowledge addresses the persistent inequalities and restricted opportunities that immigrant students encounter when they cross borders of all types, whether in schools or outside of them. More research is needed on the role of SSWs in these contexts and the strategies they use, but the methodological challenges of gathering and interpreting such data will persist. We need to be engaged in transparent practices as researchers to better identify and address these challenges. SWR the empowerment of low-status students and youth. Youth & Society, 43, 1066–1109. doi:10.1177/ 0044118X10382877 Stone, S. (2017). Racial equity and school social work. Psychology in the Schools, 54, 1238–1244. doi:10.1002/ pits.22071 Teasley, M. L., Nevarez, L., & Frost, C. J. (2017). Bringing attention to issues related to school social work practice with immigrant children and children of undocumented parents [Editorial]. Children & Schools, 39, 195–198. doi:10.1093/cs/cdx022 Villarreal Sosa, L. 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