Language Brokering Over Time: A Study of Citizenship Becoming Through a Transliteracies Framework

ABSTRACT

This paper integrates theories and research from the fields of transliteracies and language brokering to understand the language and literacy experiences of bilingual youth who grew up in Mexican immigrant families. Analyzing data from three interrelated studies that used ethnographic research methods to understand the language brokering of Mexican-American immigrant youth in Chicago from 2000–2010, we asked: How do language brokers negotiate diverse meanings of citizenship in their transnational contexts? How do their transliteracy experiences shape their “citizenship becoming” over time? Findings show how bilingual Mexican-American youth employed their transliteracies and translocal expertise for civic justice, as they increasingly helped family and other transnational community members gain equitable access to goods and just services through their language brokering practices. At the same time, in a period of increasing anti-immigrant discourses and policies, they also experienced personal challenges and developed a deep recognition of hard borders facing their racialized communities. The discussion considers implications of this work for disrupting traditional perspectives about citizenship and employing a stronger notion of politicized funds of knowledge in K-12 classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship becoming
• language brokering
• Mexican-American youth
• politicized funds of knowledge
• transliteracies

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank all the participants and our good friends involved in this project, including our guide and amiga, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, and the very thoughtful editors and blind peer reviewers of this issue: muchísmas gracias. We also appreciate the support received from the Stanford Center on Adolescence for the third phase of this study, via the Youth Purpose Research Award (2009-2010).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We refer to youth in this study interchangeably as “transnational,” “bilingual,” and “language brokers.” None of these terms is sufficient, but with each, we aim to call attention to aspects of the youths’ lives in non-deficit ways. For instance, with transnational, we highlight their family’s migration experiences and connections to people both within and outside of the United States; using “bilingual,” we underscore their linguistic assets; and with “language brokers,” we refer to the extensive academic literature that highlights youths’ linguistic and cultural capacities (Orellana, 2009). When using racial/ethnic terms, we privileged the term from each publication/socio-historical context, in an attempt to acknowledge participants’ own choices and/or to signify the labels used by others.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Stanford Center on Adolescence [2009-2010].

Notes on contributors

Lisa M. Dorner

Lisa M. Dorner, Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and Director of the Cambio Center at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her research centers on the politics and planning of bilingual education, educational policy enactment, and immigrant childhoods, especially around family-school engagement and language brokering. She remains inspired by the many language brokers she has met over the years, including her own grandparents. Read more at lisamdorner.com.

Sujin Kim

Sujin Kim, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse and Exceptional Learners Program at George Mason University. Her research and teaching areas include culturally and linguistically diverse students’ academic achievement and identity development, translanguaging and transmodalising pedagogy, content and language integrated instruction, and critical discourse analysis.