The introduction chapter centers the narratives of immigrant children as remembered and interpreted by their mothers, offering a critical entry point into the ways schools in Canada structure who belongs and who is pushed to the margins. Through mothers’ reflections, the schooling experiences of children from Afro-Caribbean, Ghanaian, Indian, Chinese, and Afghan communities reveal intimate confrontations with racialization, linguistic policing, cultural erasure, and systemic exclusion. With projections that by 2036 nearly half of Canada’s population will be immigrants or their children, it becomes urgent to examine how educational institutions normalize exclusion and maintain hegemonic power structures. Within this context, schools emerge as paradoxical spaces that perform symbolic acts of multiculturalism while reinforcing colonial logics privileging racial dominance, linguistic conformity, and Eurocentric values. This chapter, then, opens the analytical space necessary for the book’s deeper work. Across seven chapters, it moves between conceptual framing and intimate storytelling, mapping the multiple ways children and their mothers confront, resist, and reimagine what it means to be present in systems not built for them. In doing so, the introduction frames the book as both a methodological intervention and a political stance, where listening and documenting becomes a way to unsettle what has been normalized and to confront the epistemic frameworks through which immigrant children are made knowable, governable, and sacrificed to assimilation.