ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 documents both the concrete and affective investment of the respondents’ immediate family members in facilitating their successful school trajectories. It shows that in contrast with the assimilationist discourse prevalent in France which minimizes the role of immigrant families in facilitating educational attainment and mobility among their offspring, as the narratives reveal, parents and older siblings have deployed a range of strategies to help the respondents ‘make it’. The chapter closely documents these distinct strategies before moving on to an in-depth exploration of the symbolic significance the respondents attribute to their upward educational trajectories. Among children of working-class North African immigrants, educational attainment reconciles personal achievement with collective advancement. It is viewed as a powerful way of ‘giving back’ to hard-working, first-generation immigrant parents whose own dreams of mobility often had to be relinquished. Mobility therefore gives meaning to the broader project of migration. As many of the interviewees further reveal, mobility places them in a strategic position of liminality through which they may help other youths of racialized, socially disadvantaged backgrounds to ‘make it’. Therefore, the chapter points to the ways in which migrant ancestry and race shape the symbolic and social significance class ‘transfuges’ attribute to their trajectories.
