Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools

Made in America is a riveting, firsthand portrait of life at Madison High, a prototypical public high school. Laurie Olsen spent two-and-a-half years in the Madison High community attending classes and interviewing teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Through their stories, we discover the contemporary version of the Americanization of immigrants — a complex process that ultimately requires them to give up their national identities and mother tongues to be accepted in an academic and social world that then, ironically, denies them full participation. Olsen portrays immigrant students as they are “made in America” and begin to see that to become American is to take their place on the “racial map” of our nation.