Language Brokers
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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.
—Jessica Calarco, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Language Brokers offers an illuminating, complex, and theoretically sophisticated account of Korean and Mexican immigrant youth who translate for their parents within the context of American institutions. In a compelling, beautifully written book, Kwon uses an intersectional lens to expand our understanding of the multiple inequalities that immigrant youth navigate and resist on behalf of their families, providing new insights about race, immigration, citizenship, and deservingness."
—Dina Okamoto, Indiana University
