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50 Chapter 3 Home Work Sra. Balderas got out the insurance letter that she had carefully set aside for her daughter to look at after school. When Estela walked in the door, Sra. Balderas greeted her with: “M’ija, me ayudas con esta carta.” (My daughter, help me with this letter.] Estela set down her backpack and walked over to the couch. She peered intently at the text as her mother looked on nervously. She read aloud in English, hesitantly at first, then confidently, switching seamlessly to Spanish after short stretches to explxain the letter’s meaning to her mother: “Ok, mira. Dice: [Ok, look. It says.] ‘It is important that you give pro- pro— miss attention to, attention to this notice. Dice que, uh, le pongas atencion?” [It says that you need to pay attention?] A bit later she asked her mother if she was paying attention to her. “It’s important,” she emphasized. Junior was reading a book to his brother, a Disney story that they had received from their pediatrician (as part of a program aimed at distributing books to lowincome homes in Engleville—one of many such social service programs this town offered). The book was written in English, and Junior’s three-year-old sister spoke mostly Spanish. So Junior pointed to the pictures, read the text silently, and translated the story aloud, page by page. He was interrupted at one point by the telephone. His mother, who was preparing food in the nearby kitchen, motioned to him to answer it. Later that evening Junior’s family rented the movie Independence Day. Junior wrote in his journal: Today I translated a part that a guy said in a movie to my dad it was Independence Day a black guy told the president that he could ride the spaceship because he knows how to ride almost anything. Home Work 51 I felt kind of good because my dad was really paying attention not just watching the killing. It was five o’clock, and María was working on her homework. She had just begun middle school, and the burden of homework had increased substantively since fifth grade. Next to her, her brother worked on his homework, turning periodically to María to ask for help. On her other side, María’s mother did her own work for an ESL class she would attend the next day. María wrote a journal entry about helping her mom with that task: On Tuesday I helped my mom write a story. The story that I helped my mom was about going to a market and buying food. She got the food from papers. I helped my mom write the book. Words that she didn’t know how to spell I helped her spell. I felt happy because I like to help my mom and write stories. I had to help my mom because tomorrow she had to go to classes to learn English. When it was tomorrow and my mom went to English class at my school. My mom gave her teacher the book. She said it was a very good book. She liked it. Then it was over and we went home. Sometime between three and ten p.m. on school days, in homes all across the United States, children can be found hunched over their kitchen tables, seated in front of computer screens, spread out with papers across the floors of their bedrooms or living rooms, or otherwise absorbed in doing homework. Homework is a powerful artifact, one of the few items that regularly crosses the divide between home and school. Homework brings school into homes and shapes households rhythms. Homework is schoolwork that is done at home, an activity that imposes itself on children’s daily lives and family life, often inflexibly and inexorably. But families’ experiences with homework are little known in part because homework, like other labor performed in the domestic sphere, is an “invisible” sort of work. Like housework, it is generally unremunerated (except indirectly by teachers’ rewards, praise, or classroom grades), and it sometimes causes considerable stress and strife in homes.1 In addition to school-supplied homework, immigrant children also regularly do a different kind of home-based work. Some of this looks surprisingly like school assignments; children like Estela, Junior, and María bent over papers with furrowed brows, filling out forms, reading books, and writing stories. This kind of homework is also housework—labor done in...

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