Holly Link

Diles la verdad: Deportation Policies, Politicized Funds of Knowledge, and Schooling in Middle Childhood.

In this article, Sarah Gallo and Holly Link draw on a five-year ethnographic study of Latina/o immigrant children and their elementary schooling to examine the complexities of how children, teacher...

Exploring the Borderlands: Elementary School Teachers’ Navigation of Immigration Practices in a New Latino Diaspora Community

ABSTRACT Drawing primarily on interview data from a 5-year ethnography on the school experiences of Mexican immigrant children in a New Latino Diaspora community, we explore how their teachers understood and responded to increasing deportation-based immigration practices affecting children’s lives. We illustrate how teachers fell along a continuum regarding their desire and success in pushing beyond their comfort zones to create spaces in which they learned from, and built on, students’ immigration experiences. We argue for teacher education that prepares educators to become border crossers who engage with aspects of difference, such as immigration status, that are rarely discussed in schools.

Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling

This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more familiar deficit accounts. Despite their differences, we argue that both settings tended toward subtractive schooling, and we offer suggestions for how educators could more effectively build upon emergent bilinguals’ language skills and practices.

Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School

Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and describe divergent ideologies of Mexican-immigrant Spanish circulating in each context. We show how monoglossic language ideologies in the 2 schools frame teenage immigrants as deficient and younger immigrant children as proficient. These ideologies influence both elementary and high school decisions about how to serve immigrant students, and they shape students’ own language practices, which have implications for their learning opportunities and future trajectories. We argue that attention to these divergent language ideologies is necessary for understanding different educational outcomes across decimal generations of immigrant students.

Scattered Challenges, Singular Solutions: The New Latino Diaspora

The surging Hispanic and Latino population across the country has brought new education challenges and opportunities to rural and small town America.

The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects

This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds high-stakes testing. We describe how practices that focus heavily on testing mold children into autonomous, rational individuals while marginalizing those who don’t fit this model. Adhering to these practices and naturalizing the Enlightenment subject limits educators’ ability to serve students who resist the normative practices of schooling.

‘gusɑme kɑ’lɑtɑ!: Faux Spanish in the New Latino Diaspora

Drawing on ethnographic research in one American elementary school, this chapter investigates how a group of young English-speaking students react to the increasing presence of Spanish in their school and community. The authors focus on how English-speaking African American students use basic Spanish words and phrases, speaking “faux Spanish,” as they imitate their Spanish-speaking peers, participate in interaction rituals, seek attention, and playfully mock their peers. The chapter describes how these instances show children making sense of difference, as they assign value and high status to language practices and social identities often marginalized in school settings. The study suggests that, regardless of the Standard English variety taught and required for academic endeavors at school, children are busy expanding their linguistic repertoires, playing with positioning and footing, and laying claim to and negotiating multiple social identities. The authors argue that attention to these processes may help educators treat them as resources for learning that can inform practice.

Un trago dulce pero adentro con sabor amargo (A Bittersweet Swallow): Constructing Counterspaces to Explore Undocumented Status Across Academic, Family, and Community Spaces

ABSTRACT In this article a group of seven Latina/o immigrants, parents, advocates, and ethnographers draw on critical race theory to explore what it means to co-present on, and engage in, difficult conversations about immigration and documentation status. We theorize how, through critical collaboration motivated by our joint presentation, we co-constructed counterspaces in which, while interrogating what we tend to count as knowledge and expertise in education research, we could address not only the difficulty of communicating with teachers about issues surrounding documentation status, but also of knowing how to approach this topic with children and with each other. We argue that these carefully crafted counterspaces created opportunities to push beyond our traditional norms, breach silences, and open up ways in which to reposition the safety of engaging in conversations regarding undocumented status with our children, communities, educators, and with each other.