Latin Americans in a Canadian Primary School: Perspectives of Parents, Teachers and Children on Cultural Identity and Academic Achievement‪.‬

Funding for the project described has been generously provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors wish to thank the school principal, teachers, and all the families for their participation in the study. This paper has benefited from the helpful comments of our colleagues: Harold White, Gonzalo Martinez, Patricia Corson, David Corson, Guida Man, John Lord, Veronica Pacini, Denese Coulbeck, Janet Gonzalez-Mena and three anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Fernando Mata, research officer of the Multiculturalism Program -- Canadian Heritage for support with census tables. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the first author, Dr. Judith Bernhard at Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto, Ontario. Newcomers of ever increasing diversity, if not themselves of high socio-economic status, are seen by many Canadians as struggling -- with some success -- to ensure a brighter future for their children. Yet some minority immigrant children do not eagerly scramble for better lives; for some immigrant groups and cohorts, high-school performance proves elusive, and the educational system in fact seems consistently to undermine motivation. As Monica, a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl in our study said,