Language Brokers (Paperback)

Hyeyoung Kwon

ISBN 10: 1503639460 / ISBN 13: 9781503639461

Published by Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 2024

About this Item

Paperback. How successfully families in the U.S. navigate various institutional contexts frequently relies on a parent's ability to be continuously available for and capable of supporting their children. But what happens when one or both parents are immigrants who have limited English proficiency? This us the case for two-thirds of immigrant families in the U.S., and more often than not the children in these families must support their parents by acting as "language brokers," or translators, often in high-stakes situations. In Language Brokers, Hyeyoung Kwon shines a light on these lived realities for working-class Mexican- and Korean-American youth in Southern California. Focusing especially on healthcare and criminal justice contexts, Kwon shows that the work of translating is about much more than just words. These children learn early about the harsh financial realities their parents face. They are burdened with portraying their parents, not as inassimilable and undeserving free riders of social welfare, but as "normal" Americans who deserve full citizenship rights. Kwon's stirring account prove that, as long as immigrants' values and behaviors are blamed for what are actually structural problems, children of immigrants will have to perform Americanness to cultivate a sense of belonging. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781503639461

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Language Brokers (Paperback)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press, Palo Alto
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503639460
• ISBN 13: 9781503639461
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

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.

About the Author

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