Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture

Chapter 7: Translating Childhoods

118 Chapter 7 Translating Childhoods There are many ways to understand children’s work as translators and interpreters for their families. We can focus on the burdens it sometimes places on youth and on how stress affects children’s growth and development. Turning this perspective around, we can highlight the cognitive, social, emotional, and linguistic benefits these experiences may offer to youth. We can either reject children’s involvement as a form of youth exploitation or applaud youths’ contributions to homes, schools, communities and society. We can talk about character formation, skills acquisition, and the pathways that are opened or closed through engagement in these activities, or we can view the practice as just a “normal” part of everyday life. But understanding language brokering in all its complexity involves seeing it as all of these things. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins argues that Western scientific thought emphasizes dichotomies—orienting us to see things as either good or bad, about the present or the future, focused on individuals or social processes.1 Non-Western epistemologies, such as the black feminist epistemology that Hill Collins advocates, better accommodate seeing that things like translation work as many things all at the same time. Translation Shapes Children’s Experiences of Childhood and Their Pathways to the Future Throughout this book, I have probed language brokering as an everyday set of activities, exploring how children participate in the functioning of their households, schools and communities, and in helping and caring for people. Translating Childhoods 119 In doing these things, children and families didn’t usually have an eye to the future; their attention was on accomplishing the tasks of daily life. But everyday practices certainly influence pathways of development, often in more profound ways than most people realize. This is true in immigrant households just as it is in middle-class homes. Anthropologists, sociolinguists, and sociocultural researchers have studied the discourse norms that children pick up through family dinner conversations in middle-class families, the literate skills that children acquire when parents read them bedtime stories, and cognitive and social outcomes of engagement in other everyday practices.2 These fields of study could benefit from examining a much wider range of practices than has been studied to date, contemplating everyday practices in homes that are not middle class, English-speaking, and “American,” and outcomes that include cognitive development but also social processes, intergenerational relations, and the values and beliefs that accompany them. This could include studying the development of empathy, compassion, kindness, and transcultural or intercultural skills. There may be diverse pathways to similar outcomes and valuable outcomes that are not typically identified when using a white, middleclass , achievement-focused lens. Language brokering is ubiquitous in immigrant households and communities . As a language and literacy practice, it is different from typical middleclass home activities like bedtime storybook reading, but it may be no less significant for children’s language and literacy development. Arguably, it may be more so, because brokering activities expose children to a much wider array of genres, domains, forms and ways of using language than do practices like reading stories or participating in dinnertime conversations. Children’s work as translators matters for the functioning of households; it matters for their own developmental pathways as well. Language Brokering Has Both Positive and Negative Implications for Youth Learning and Development But social practices do not have simple, clear-cut, uniquely positive or negative implications for learning and development. Children whose parents read them regular bedtime stories may learn a great deal about narrative structures, storybook genres, vocabulary, and certain kinds of subject matter. They may simultaneously learn to be more passive consumers of literacy than do children who have no parent available to read to them, but who are, instead, expected to read to their siblings, as in the case of Estela and Junior. My own parents rarely read to their eight children, undoubtedly because they were too busy working and running the household, but my siblings and I were quite motivated to read 120 translating childhoods on our own. As an adult, I read faithfully each night to my own daughter, and watched her become a reluctant independent reader, at least initially; I always wondered if this was because she learned to see reading as a social activity. Any practice can have various effects, and it is much easier to see outcomes that accord with normative...