This article presents a close analysis of a reading group in a first-grade class of Spanish-dominant Latina/o children established through the English-only mandate of California’s Proposition 227. First, I discuss how the practice of the reading group was shaped by the intersection of socio-political and institutional discourses and practices. Next, I present findings that demonstrate that the reading group functioned in problematic ways to construct the children as individuals who were responsible for their own cognitive-academic performances; to evaluate and rank the children by these performances; and to reconstruct their bodily and linguistic habitus in the image of a disciplined literate subject.
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