How do parents nurture their children across borders and languages? What happens to education when classrooms hold the stories of entire migrations within them? And how do we build systems that truly see the lives behind the labels?

Gabrielle Oliveira is an anthropologist and scholar of migration whose work explores how families move, adapt, and parent across borders. She is the award-winning author of Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York, a landmark ethnographic study that reveals how separation, reunification, and mobility shape childhood. Drawing on years of research in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States, Gabrielle examines the educational experiences of immigrant children and the unseen labor of caregivers navigating transnational lives. She is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she continues to connect ethnography, storytelling, and education to illuminate the human realities behind global migration.

In this episode, Gabrielle and I explore how migration is not simply the movement of people but the movement of philosophies, emotions, and entire ways of being. She reflects on how her fieldwork with immigrant families changed once she became a parent herself and how this shift deepened her understanding of both privilege and love. Together, we talk about the invisible work of parenting across distance, the resilience of families separated by borders, and how schools can learn to see immigrant children as cultural assets rather than deficits.

Our conversation ranges from the ethics of research to the power of storytelling in education. Gabrielle shares vivid examples from her ethnographic work in classrooms where young children bring memories of detention and displacement into everyday moments. We discuss how teachers can respond with empathy, how curiosity becomes a form of care, and why embracing not-knowing can be one of the most radical acts in education. This episode is a reminder that migration is not an abstract issue of policy but a deeply human process of hope, survival, and reimagining home.