Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces

Language, Learning, and Love

Marjorie Faulstich Orellana

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138804944
• eBook ISBN: 9781317618676
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Grounded in both theory and practice, with implications for both, this book is about children's perspectives on the borders that society erects, and their actual, symbolic, ideational and metaphorical movement across those borders. Based on extensive ethnographic data on children of immigrants (mostly from Mexico, Central America and the Philippines) as they interact with undergraduate students from diverse linguistic, cultural and racial/ethnic backgrounds in the context of an urban play-based after-school program, it probes how children navigate a multilingual space that involves playing with language and literacy in a variety of forms.

Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces speaks to critical social issues and debates about education, immigration, multilingualism and multiculturalism in an historical moment in which borders are being built up, torn down, debated and recreated, in both real and symbolic terms; raises questions about the values that drive educational practice and decision-making; and suggests alternatives to the status quo. At its heart, it is a book about how love can serve as a driving force to connect people with each other across all kinds of borders, and to motivate children to engage powerfully with learning and life.

1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

DOI: 10.4324/9781315752617-1

Q: What do you want to learn at B-Club this year?

Of life everything I do not know (Bo)

Quiero aprender todo (I want to learn everything) (Cici)

About people (Dolphin)

Whatever! (Fina)

How to have more fun! (Cassie)

This book is centered on the experiences of the children like Bo, Cici, Dolphin, Fina, and Cassie¹—club names that also serve as pseudonyms—as they played and learned with undergraduate students from diverse linguistic, cultural, racial/ethnic, and immigration backgrounds in an after-school program at a school in central Los Angeles, which we call B-Club. The school is almost literally under the shadow of the Hollywood sign, nestled in the heart of one of the great centers of globalization on this planet in the twenty-first century. I first lived and worked in this community as a teacher and activist from 1983 to 1993, just after graduating from college, at age 23.

This area in the heart of Los Angeles, and B-Club, hold very special places in my heart. I hope to share some of that love with readers of this book, along with things I have learned from my work as a teacher, researcher, and community activist over the last 30 years. I will detail my work with teams of students to create the unique space of B-Club, a place where learning happens through play. I will explore how we engaged with language, literacy, and learning in a variety of ways in this space: animating hearts and minds, imagining possibilities, and finding our connections to the local community and to the world.

You will meet club participants such as Cutie Pie (a very appropriate club name for this engaging young girl), the child of immigrants from Guatemala and Honduras. When I asked Cutie Pie how she would like to be represented in this book, she said: “Curious. I like to know about people’s names. I like B-Club, my friends, my family. I like to sing, dance, play guitar with my dad, play, hang out with my friends and eat ice cream.” You will also meet Fina, a tall, generous, fun, sassy fifth-grader with soft hair, as she described herself,² whose father lives in Qatar and whose mother immigrated to the US from the Philippines. I will describe how I watched Fina read with grace and ease a text that was written in English, Spanish, Tagalog, and Korean. Readers will also see Kibu’s linguistic dexterity, including in his variable spellings of his club name: as Quiboo, Kibu, or Quibú, as he played with variations on letter-sound correspondences in English and Spanish to invoke the sounds made by a bird in his native El Salvador.

This book explores how Cutie Pie, Fina, Kibu, and other club participants navigated our multicultural space that involved playing with language and literacy in a variety of forms. I look at how they engaged with language, learning, and life. Throughout, I consider how children and young adults’ ideas about the world fit with, or disrupted, the borders and boxes of the adult-defined world they were growing into. What can we learn by listening to kids?

Borders and Movement

These questions center on movement across borders that society constructs and works hard to enforce: between countries, languages, institutions, groups, genres, and ideas. These are just some of the many ways that humans have created to control the messiness of life and to avoid the discomfort of ambiguity. They involve concerted efforts to keep people, ideas, and things “in their place.” Walls are erected along national borders. Identities get locked into boxes. Children are dichotomized from adults, schools from homes, researchers from teachers, theory from practice, our minds from our bodies.

Borders are certainly real. They are encoded in laws, constructed with walls and fences, and sometimes enforced with life-threatening brutality. They are also ideological: social constructions that appear far more real than they could ever actually be. They are used to decide what belongs together and to proscribe what should be kept apart. We participate in their construction and enforcement even when we do not know that we are doing so, understand why, or realize their full effects.

Sometimes borders serve useful purposes. They may provide safety from real or imagined dangers. They proffer the promise of a sense of belonging: we know where to place ourselves and others, and how things can or do or should fit together. Solidity is forged. Messiness becomes ordered. The wild becomes tamed. Some might argue that this is the core of “civilization,” the heart of “domestication”: keeping things in their homes, and enforcing discipline, order, and control.

But as Gloria Anzaldúa³ so beautifully expressed, both geographic and intellectual borders are also the source of tremendous pain. Borders draw lines between people, and both between and within us, limiting all of us from achieving our full humanity. They divide nations, ethnicities, social groups, disciplines, and ideas. Though they can never contain all movement, they constrain it, often at great cost to human spirits, bodies, and minds, as well as to our world. They can close off our hearts, and keep us from connecting with others.

Still, borders can be crossed, and do get crossed all the time. Despite concerted efforts to “keep things in their place,” there is an incessant flow and circulation of things, people, practices, and ideas across these constructed boundaries. As I examine movement across cultural, geographical, and linguistic lines, I use the “trans-” prefixed words that have become popular in this era of globalization: translanguaging, transnationalism, translation, transculturation. “Trans” puts the emphasis on movement, forcing us to consider what happens in the crossing. What is gained, and what is lost? What prices are exacted? What competencies are cultivated? What feelings are evoked, as people cross in different ways?

Crossing linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical borders can be painful, especially when institutions, groups, and individuals assert their power as border patrol agents. But as I will show in this book, it can also be fun. At B-Club, we play with linguistic and cultural border crossings, in safe zones where no one is surveilling our movement. We learn from those crossings about possibilities for a world without the kinds of borders that inflict great pain. In this book I share some of what I have learned from the many crossings and re-crossings that I witnessed and participated in as I worked in this community across a span of 30 years, and especially between 2010 and 2014 at B-Club.

Ethnographic Stance

My approach is driven by an ethnographic stance, which calls for crossing cultural borders in order to see from “emic” or insider perspectives, as best we can. It is grounded in ethnographic data: hundreds of pages of fieldnotes, transcripts of audio and videotaped interactions, kids’ writing and drawings, and more. This book is not “just” an ethnography of children’s experiences in the program, however. It combines my reflections on the processes of working with a team to design the program, guiding undergraduates as they worked in it, analyzing their learning experiences therein, contemplating my own, and continually asking how different participants (kids, young adult undergraduates, adult researchers) saw and understood their social worlds. I also draw on my history of working with children in homes, classrooms, and after-school programs in this community since 1983, using this as backdrop and foil for my understandings of the contemporary context, and for the lessons I draw about teaching, learning, language, literacy, and love. This is a form of border crossing: striving to step out of our own perspectives in order to see more expansively, and to understand social processes in more nuanced and complex ways.

And why does this matter? Listening to youth perspectives is important not just to teach kids, socialize them, or prepare them for the future—though it may inform all those goals. It is also important to learn from young people, about what’s possible, and how we might learn to see differently. This can help us all to imagine a different world. What kind of world might kids create, if we supported their visions, rather than trained them in ours? And what kind of world might we imagine together, if we put love at the center, as we try to do at B-Club: a love that connects us to others and to the larger world around us?

In covering these wide-ranging issues, I claim some academic freedom and assume some risks. Some readers might prefer that I stay safely on one side or another of the spatial, temporal, disciplinary, and rhetorical borders that I weave across. But my aim is to keep both my mind and heart as open as possible, in order to see in new ways. This propels me to cross between disciplines, genres, and styles of writing that are usually held firmly apart.

Transnationalism and Globalization: Views from Above and Below

Border crossing always involves risks. Indeed, many B-Club kids’ family members faced unspeakable challenges in crossing borders into the United States. They too were driven by love: their love for their children, and their hopes for their children’s futures. The very real geopolitical borders that B-Club families have crossed loom large in the background of the story I will tell in these pages, even if they sometimes fade from view amidst the fun that we had at B-Club.

Across disciplines—in sociology, history, political science, and anthropology— there is an abundance of research and theorizing on migration. There are studies of the political economy: the push and pull of migration forces, the effects that adult migrants have on both their local and sending economies, the political ties they keep or break or make in their new land. Scholars debate how real “transnationalism” is, and how long immigrants are able to sustain transnational ties.⁴ Whether or not nation states retain their omnipotence, it is hardly questioned that mobility is a key feature of contemporary life.⁵ World populations are on the move. People are resettling and creating new forms of what Steve Vertovec terms “super-diversity”: mixtures of “newer, smaller, transient, more socially stratified, less organized and more legally differentiated immigrant groups.”⁶ Even in communities like the one that surrounds B-Club, where most new immigrants may be seen as “Latino” or “Korean,” families vary in their national origins, religious, regional, and local affiliations, legal status, and linguistic and cultural practices. These new migrants join an already complex cultural/linguistic/racial-ethnic landscape, which results in complex negotiations around language, culture, and identity. The movement of people around the globe is reshaping social, cultural, and linguistic processes in profound and pervasive ways.

Yet in all of this theorizing, children are mostly absent. Many adults seem perplexed by—and worried about—this “new” diversity. They find linguistic and cultural “crossings” either problematic, or fascinating. Either reaction presumes t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Blurring Borders at B-Club: Research, Theory, Practice
• 3 Seeing with Our Hearts
• 4 A Pedagogy of Heart and Mind
• 5 Shining Lights in a Globalized World
• 6 Faces of Globalization: The Community Context
• 7 Learning and Love
• 8 Transculturation
• 9 Translanguaging
• 10 Transliteracies
• 11 Policy, Practice, and Possibilities: Imagining Teaching and Learning for a New World
• Appendix: B-Club Kids’ Survey Responses 2012–13
• Index