Items related to Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating...

Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for Their Families (Articulations: Studies in Race, Immigration, and Capitalism) - Softcover

Kwon, Hyeyoung

  • 4.25 out of 5 stars
    16 ratings by Goodreads
 
9781503639461: Language Brokers: Children of Immigrants Translating Inequality and Belonging for Their Families (Articulations: Studies in Race, Immigration, and Capitalism)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1503639460 ISBN 13: 9781503639461
Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2024

Synopsis

In a nation lacking a comprehensive social safety net, people often scramble to find private solutions to structural problems. While existing scholarship primarily focuses on how adults, particularly mothers, navigate systematic gaps in social support, Language Brokers shifts our attention to bilingual children securing crucial resources for their families. Drawing upon interviews with working-class Mexican and Korean American language brokers, as well as healthcare providers, and months of participant observation in a Southern California police station, Hyeyoung Kwon reveals how children of immigrants translate more than simple verbal exchanges.

  Living at the intersection of multiple forms of inequality, these youth creatively use their in-between status to resolve structural problems to ensure their families' basic citizenship rights are upheld in interactions with teachers, social workers, landlords, doctors, and police officers. In an era of widespread racialized nativism, Language Brokers provides a critical examination of American culture, laying bare the contradictions between the ideals of equality and the exclusion of immigrants. Kwon underscores that dichotomous and racialized understandings of "deserving" and "undeserving" immigrants―which are embedded in everyday interactions and institutional practices―inform the routine ways in which immigrant youth attempt to cultivate belonging for their families.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Hyeyoung Kwon is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
Stanford University Press
Publication date
2024
Language
English
ISBN 10 
1503639460
ISBN 13 
9781503639461
Binding
Paperback
Edition number
1
Number of pages
256
Rating
  • 4.25 out of 5 stars
    16 ratings by Goodreads