Ecologías Transfronterizas: Transfronterizx Youth Movements and the Development of Border-Crossing Repertoires

Isaac Felix

Transfronterizx high school students are U.S. citizens living in Mexican border cities who cross the México–U.S. border daily to attend school in the United States. Yet their everyday routines involve far more than physical border-crossings; they also navigate the educational, sociocultural, and civic demands of their cross-border lives. This year-long, multi-sited qualitative study investigates the expansive learning that emerges through transfronterizx students' routine movements, engagements, and practices across the everyday settings of the Tijuana–San Diego region. It asks: (1) What learning takes hold in transfronterizx youths' routine movement across the region? (1a) What everyday practices do they engage in through this movement? (1b) What resources do they draw upon, and how do they deploy these resources to navigate the complex ecologies of the border? Data collection includes focus groups, ethnographic observations, daily routine logs, surveys, and semi-structured interviews with current and former transfronterizx high school students during the 2025–2026 academic cycle. Grounded in cultural-historical approaches to learning, this study foregrounds the concept of "cross-border repertoires" to describe the sociocultural toolkits youth develop and deploy to navigate educational, social, and civic opportunity and precarity across the Tijuana-San Diego region. Situated at the intersection of the learning sciences and border studies, this research contributes timely empirical insights into the learning and expertise that unfold through youths' everyday movements, offering more expansive understandings of transfronterizx students and their communities—at a time when intensifying border enforcement and surveillance demand more robust and accurate representations of learning and possibility across borders.

About Isaac Felix

Isaac A. Félix is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a learning scientist whose research centers on cultural-historical approaches to education, learning, and culture across the México–U.S. border. Isaac's current dissertation work employs multisited qualitative methods to examine the expansive forms of learning that unfold through the everyday routines and movements of transfronterizx high school youth—U.S. citizens who live in Mexican border cities and cross the border daily to attend school in the United States—as they navigate the educational, sociopolitical, and cultural ecologies that shape their cross-border lives across the Tijuana–San Diego region. Isaac's research interests and commitments are rooted in his own transfronterizo experiences, having been born in San Diego (California), raised in Tijuana (Baja California), and crossing the border daily to attend public schools in South Bay San Diego. Prior to his doctoral studies, Isaac worked as an educator in after-school programs across Los Angeles and Sacramento, and interned at the California Department of Education. Isaac earned a bachelor's degree in Human Biology and Society and Chicana/o Studies from UCLA and a Master of Arts in Education from UC Berkeley. His work has been supported by the American Educational Research Association's Minority Dissertation Fellowship and by the Ford Foundation's Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. He is also the recipient of the 2025 J. Michael Parker Award from the Literacy Research Association, which recognizes outstanding research on adult literacy and learning.