Immigrant Youth as Linguistic and Cultural Brokers in Parent-School Interactions

Este texto se presentó como comunicación al II Congreso Internacional de Etnografía y Educación: Migraciones y Ciudadanías. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 5-8 Septiembre 2008.In this paper I examine the transcultural negotiations that the children of immigrants from Mexico to the United States engage in when they serve as "language brokers" (Tse, 1996), "family interpreters"(Valdés, 2003), or "para-phrasers" (Orellana, Reynolds, Dorner and Meza, 2003) between their families and the English-speaking world. Translation events represent a kind of "contact zone" (Pratt, 1991), a meeting ground between people from different cultural and linguistic perspectives. Within these contact zones, youth position themselves in particular ways vis a vis their different audiences, even as they are positioned and repositioned by others. This involves a process that Guerra (in press) calls "transcultural repositioning."The transcultural repositioning that happens in translation events is shaped in particular by immigrant youths? paradoxical positionalities within relationships of power. On the one hand, as children (and as the children of immigrants in particular), youth translators constitute subaltern others (Spivak, 1988) who are not authorized to speak as adult, English-speaking citizens are, but at the same time they must speak if their parents? voices are to be heard. Their positions are complicated by the fact that they may speak for interlocutors who hold very different beliefs about what children should do, what they need, how they should be have, and how adults should interact with them. They may also be evaluated by these adults by very different criteria. Immigrant youth translators? positions are further paradoxical in that they give voice to subaltern others whose words and ideas are often not represented in public spaces; but they simultaneously take up the voices of authority figures and institutional representatives as they speak to their families. Davidson (2000) notes how hospital interpreters become complicit in power relations, inadvertently acting as sociolinguistic gatekeepers for the medical establishment. Youth translators? work is not just one of service to their families, but of surveillance of them, and thus, of themselves (Wadensjö, 1995). Urciouli (1998) writes: "When people migrate, become political minorities, or become colonized, they find their lives structured in ways that force them to work across languages and place on them the burden of understanding and responding correctly." And the children of immigrants may especially shoulder this burden for their families. But understanding and responding "correctly" is particularly problematic given their positions as children of immigrants, in a place and time where there is great ambivalence about immigrants in general and about Mexican immigrants in particular (Santa Ana, 1999; 2002). Speaking English is essential for being seen as "American," but it is not enough - who one is seen to be while speaking also matters. Translation encounters, which mark families as immigrants, may serve to heighten racializing discourses (Urciouli, 1998), placing youth translators in the paradoxical position of being needed for their English skills but not being seen as "American.