Brokering literacies: An ethnographic study of languages and literacies in Mexican immigrant families
Item
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Title
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Brokering literacies: An ethnographic study of languages and literacies in Mexican immigrant families
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:7aab1828a78d:11273
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identifier
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11684
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Creator
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Alvarez, Steven,
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Contributor
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Ira Shor
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Rhetoric | Language | English as a second language | Hispanic American studies | community | ethnography | immigration | literacy | mentorship | translation
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Abstract
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This dissertation studies how English language acquisition and literacy transformed family relations and structured educational ambitions within a specific Spanish-dominant urban immigrant community. Ten first-generation Mexican-origin immigrant families living in New York City were the focus, all members of a small, under-funded, self-sustained educational mentoring program, whose core of eleven dedicated volunteers were also participants in this qualitative study. The grassroots organization offered free after-school tutoring services while also promoting active family involvement in schooling and positive views toward ethnic and linguistic identities. The organization also helped to mediate and bridge the linguistic miscommunications between schools and language minority parents. In addition, the program cultivated a sense of community and academic participation closely allied to ethnic identity, encouraging a sense of value for bilingualism as a political tool for---and the everyday reality of---immigrant children. Finally, the program also sponsored and reinforced the notion of standard English acquisition as valuable for academic success, while offering a space where standard and nonstandard languages and literacies freely mixed and where bilingual exchanges between individuals openly nurtured, critiqued, and, ultimately, defended the distinctive, monolingual spoken and written standard English language of schooling.;Through ethnographic observation and analysis of oral and written language at the program's center, the study examines the rhetoric of "brokered" social relations in the bilingual exchanges among the organization's volunteer staff of college and high school student mentors and its numerous youth and adult members, paying particular attention to documenting the various linguistic skills developed by bilingual youth, mentors, and parents. I argue that the notions of culturally valuable literacy skills of translation and language brokering, undervalued and existing outside the dominant models of school culture and literacy practices, were actively utilized at the center. Day-to-day translations between languages for the children participants at this mentoring program meant involving and engaging monolingual family members in their schooling lives, which were largely conducted in a second language. This collaboration in immigrant families, though, produced conflicts from linguistic inequalities which re-distributed authority in family linguistic exchanges. The program's mentors mediated such shared power contexts, allowing language minority parents access to collaboration in their children's educations in English, while also encouraging language brokering skills among young bilinguals.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
