“Los Dos Son Mi Idioma”: Translanguaging, Identity, and Social Relationships among Bilingual Youth

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes language practices that 5th grade students in a two-way bilingual education (TWBE) program used to position themselves relative to peers and to transcendent scripts (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995; Reyes, 2006) about ethnicity and ability (academic and linguistic) that attach themselves to students through their various classifications (McDermott, Golden, & Varenne, 2006). The study relies on analysis of data collected through ethnographic observation as well as transcribed recordings of student interactions and semi-structured interviews to show how students reject, take up, or impose stereotypes connected to identity dimensions. I rely on an analytical framework of translanguaging (García, 2009) to show how students leverage their multilingual and multimodal communicative competencies to forge alliances, tell stories, and reject stereotypes. This work adds to an emerging literature on translanguaging that thus far has largely focused on classroom learning and academic tasks.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• bilingualism
• identity
• translanguaging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of individuals and locations are pseudonyms.

2. The term “native speaker” is problematic for its linking of language and national identity and its implication of a paradigm for proficiency normed to monolingual speakers (Cook, 1997, 1999). Nevertheless, I use the term as it was common for both official and informal purposes at Rivera to classify and group students.

3. Various other terms capture similar concepts, including hybrid language practices, code switching, polylingual languaging, and codemeshing. For a review of these terms and how they differ from translanguaging, see Garcia and Wei (2014).

4. Although translanguaging frameworks echo earlier research on code switching in their efforts to de-stigmatize bilingual language practices and recognize the socially-situated nature of linguistic norms, many scholars of translanguaging reject the term code switching because of its conceptual endorsement, implicit or explicit, that bilingual repertoires are comprised by two separate linguistic systems (see Otheguy, García, and Reid (2015) and see MacSwan (2017) for a perspective that attempts to reconcile bounded languages with translanguaging perspectives).

5. This is possible since the class had critiqued immigration policies in Arizona that prompted outcry about racial profiling.

6. El gran clásico is whenever América and Chivas, among the most popular teams in Mexico, play against one another.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stanford University Vice Provost for Graduate Education [DARE Fellowship & Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunities Grant].