The first author (Julia) of this chapter spent many years teaching in a large urban school district, namely Dallas, Texas, and her experiences teaching young children, expressed here through her poems and personal narratives, form the frame for this chapter. This narrative on teaching in an urban school tells one teacher’s story of teaching in the “borderlands”. We draw from the work of Gloria Anzaldua (1999) to illustrate how children in the “borderlands” inhabit contested territory, those

spaces along the US-Mexico border that once belonged to Mexico and now are considered part of the United States, that Anzaldua says will always belong to Mexicans and “Indians” yet is hotly being defended as a space explicitly not for either. The borderlands and childhoods are intimately connected as the children who inhabit these crossover spaces shape and impact each other. As Anzaldua contends, the borders are vibrant spaces of resistance and struggles for freedom from constraints of many kinds (Orozco-Mendoza, 2008). Stories from the border therefore are characterized by “contrasts and contradictions, their permissiveness and restrictions, their control and disorder, their peace and violence, their justice and injustices” (p. 1). Our hope is that the stories in this chapter can illustrate what childhood in the borderlands can be like and that these stories can aid scholars of childhood in creating discourses that are ever more inclusive and less exclusionary.