Abstract
I grew up selectively translating for my parents. My father, who had only completed high school and had very limited training in English in El Salvador, migrated to Los Angeles where he worked as a busser and then as a server at a busy downtown hotel. There, he had to learn to communicate with customers to do his job well and earn better tips. He also put his English skills to use when, as union shop steward, he translated between the workers and hotel managers who exploited them. He could handle the day-to-day responsibilities in English, but asked for my help with more formal notices and paperwork.
Having arrived in the United States at age 5, my schooling in English began early and I helped to translate where needed. By the time I was in college, I only handled our family’s education-related paperwork, financial aid applications, and government agency correspondence. It was then that my dad asked me to write a letter to his employer. We worked together on the letter on behalf of him and his co-workers who were fed up with being mistreated. Surprised by the formal language and tone of the letter that represented the demands of workers who all had limited schooling and English skills, managers asked, “Did you hire a lawyer? How could you afford to hire a lawyer for this?” The fear of legal repercussions for their exploitative treatment was enough to make them accede to some of the workers’ demands. In that moment, my English writing skills felt powerful and so very useful in subverting the system. Years later, however, with new hotel owners who had less tolerance for worker requests, another one of my letters made management angry and my father and his co-workers were reprimanded for voicing their demands. Although no one blamed me for it, I felt the weight of failure.
Children’s translation work for their immigrant parents, as Hyeyoung Kwon so insightfully demonstrates in Language Brokers, is a site from which to attempt to resolve what are most often structural problems. In an unjust, White supremacist, heteropatriarchal society that devalues the lives of immigrants of color, children of immigrants will come face to face with demeaning forms of exclusion in many contexts and under many conditions. Driven to secure dignity and respect for themselves and their parents, some of those more painful interactions will mark them as they make sense of their place in their family and in US society.
Especially laudable about Kwon’s book is her ability to hold complexity at the center of her analysis. While popular takes on children’s translation work are unequivocally negative, to the point of calling for punitive measures for parents, Kwon compellingly demonstrates that children also gain notable insights and skills from doing this work. Beyond the cognitive skills that allow them to communicate fluidly in multiple languages, translation work for children of Korean and Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles requires social literacy about the role of power in US society. Children come to learn through repeated interactions with hospital staff, police officers, teachers, their parents’ employers, and other adults that power in the US is meted out by race, gender, class, immigrant legal status, and English-language fluency, on top of age.
Attuned not only to other people’s words, but also to their body language, tone, social location, and level of power over their families, children learn to simultaneously read people on multiple levels to best protect their parents’ dignity. I appreciate Kwon’s affirmative approach that names the various aspects of this complex translational work and praises the children for their skills. Following the work of Black feminist theorists like Patricia Hill Collins, she considers language brokers’ “social location at the margin of language, race and class as a special place of strength” (p. 185), because it allows them to understand inequalities in deep ways not accessible to those in the mainstream. I agree with her that those skills will prove useful to immigrant children throughout their lives. I also believe that it is very possible that without the opportunity to reflect and make sense of their experiences, such responsibility is quite taxing on children, particularly in a society that is resistant to perceiving and treating them as full human beings.
Exclusion, Kwon persuasively demonstrates, is structured through inequalities that are raced, gendered, classed, and age specific. One detail about the study participants’ unequal backgrounds that particularly caught my attention was the difference in levels of college education among their parents. While 30 percent of Korean mothers and 35 percent of Korean fathers were college graduates, only 7 percent of Mexican mothers and 9 percent of Mexican fathers graduated from college (pp. 188–189). I would have liked to see more nuanced discussion about the kind of support children receive in any language from parents who had no schooling options past elementary school in rural areas of Mexico versus those who graduated from college and lived in urban areas before migration. Even when they do not speak English, college-educated immigrants bring with them forms of cultural capital that inform what is possible for their children in the United States.
Los Angeles is a large and highly segregated city, as Kwon notes. In all likelihood, immigrants are interacting with other immigrants and people of color much more than they are interacting with Whites. I would have liked to know a bit more about how Mexican and Korean children experience language brokering when communicating with non-White service providers, landlords, store owners, employers, and other adults who do not speak their parents’ language. How do those interactions inform their broader understanding of their parents’ dignity and deservingness in US society? And how does resistance or compliance in those cases help disrupt or sustain racial hierarchies in the city?
Language Brokers comprehensively covers how children of Korean and Mexican immigrants interact with White gatekeepers and service providers. Mexican boys who translate for parents at their jobs in wealthy neighborhoods will understand that they are perceived as menacing and criminal, while Mexican girls will be treated as though they are powerless. Korean girls and boys receive the message that they are to be subservient. All of the youth translators, Kwon argues, come to understand that they must act in accordance with what she labels “doing American.” As they gather more information about what behavior will best achieve their goals for their loved ones—whether this is to prevent wage theft, avoid predatory charges from banks and credit card companies, or extend the grace period for late rent payments—they learn to “fit in” and not ruffle any feathers. This requires “avoiding outward expressions of anger” and managing their emotions to appear “calm and friendly” to people who are quite often making decisions that will harm their families (p. 125). In the face of what are clear injustices, immigrant children of color learn that they are not permitted to access a full range of human emotions and that they are at the mercy of people who do not see them or their parents as full human beings.
Kwon argues that immigrants’ citizenship rights are being denied in these interactions. Beyond that, I believe it is their full humanity that is at stake when children must learn to navigate the expectations of prejudiced people acting within structures that produce and robustly sustain inequality. Developmentally, it would be ideal for all children to feel safe and loved as they learn who they are and how to be in the world. Racial capitalism denies children of color in impoverished families such freedom and protection, instead encouraging them to perform whiteness in their speech and behavior for access to basic material needs. And even when they attempt to subvert such expectations by being more “assertive,” without structural access to time, material resources, and the kind of intergenerational cultural capital that they have come to understand as most truly “American,” they are only achieving partial dignity while unintentionally sustaining White supremacy. I want more for those children. I want more for all of us.
Kwon’s book begins with a conversation about how to attain more for these children. She ends Language Brokers with practical suggestions to address the problems facing monolingual immigrants. First, she says, we should raise awareness about the laws that already exist to provide translation for immigrants. Specifically, at the federal level, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “mandates language access for federally funded programs” (p. 180) while California laws similarly require language access in state and local agencies, as well as within healthcare contexts. At the very least, we can ensure that immigrants have access to legally mandated translation services. Then, we need to use available telephone interpreter services rather than continue to rely on overworked bilingual employees for ad hoc translations. It should be the responsibility of English-speaking institutions to hire sufficient certified interpreters to meet the institution’s needs and to pay bilingual staff for their additional labor when they are tasked with translation work. Institutional change should also happen in schools to accommodate children in marginalized communities who have different responsibilities and support structures than those presumed by educators. Frontline social service providers must also be educated to take children seriously and work with them as partners to communicate with their parents. These, and the suggestion to include diverse family experiences in K-12 curriculum to normalize children’s translation work (p. 185), are all excellent starting points to improve the immediate translation experiences of children.
Kwon meticulously guides readers through the frustrating, unfair contexts in which Korean and Mexican children translators do what she calls “inclusion work”—“Americanizing” their parents’ migration stories, constructing themselves as “good” (non-lazy, docile) immigrants, and seeing themselves as upwardly mobile contributors to society—to secure basic needs and respect for their parents. Kwon’s analytical insights propel us to do better by these children in immediate ways. Beyond the scope of the book and over a longer time period, my hope is that we can dig deeper for more durable changes. I wonder how we might understand immigrant families differently if we broadened conversations in schools and political debates to center colonialism and imperialism as root causes of migration? How might children’s understandings of their parents’ situations in this country shift if they understood the role of White supremacy and racial capitalism? Would they value their parents’ language and culture differently relative to a mainstream White “American” identity if they understood the history and mechanisms sustaining settler-colonialism? Would they want to continue to pursue “inclusion work” in a country whose wealth was produced through genocide on stolen land, and on the backs of enslaved people? Would this kind of knowledge more effectively disrupt the current conditions for child language brokers?
Kwon’s is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on children of immigrants. She provides compelling evidence that not only are they knowing and reflexive social actors (p. 182), but also that they are not passively assimilating into whiteness. Even though institutions try to discipline them into understanding White middle class norms as the core of what is truly “American,” children are also inspired to negotiate and subvert dominant ideologies. They draw on multiple cultural representations from ethnic and mainstream media that offer them new repertoires from which to articulate belonging and deservingness. Unfortunately, their “inclusion work” currently serves to make them more palatable to Whites who have the power to approve or deny them access to their families’ basic needs. I want better for them and for all of us. I want children of immigrants to feel supported in exploring a full range of healthy experiences and emotions in life. I want all people to have meaningful access to basic rights and services. I want the concept of deservingness to become obsolete in relation to who we value as fully human. And I want to dissolve racial capitalism’s hold on what we come to define and experience as dignity. It is my hope that by adding an awareness of colonialism, imperialism, White supremacy, settler-colonialism, genocide, land theft, and slavery to our deeper conversations of what is truly “American,” we create new repertoires to collectively and more justly subvert the structures that target the dignity of immigrants and their children.
