Centering the Marginalized Identities of Immigrant Students of Color in the Literacy Classroom

The widespread degradation of immigrant communities of color in the Unites States has made the correlation between racial and linguistic discrimination increasingly clear. This paper describes some of the ways that the co-construction of race and language, or raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), further marginalize children of immigrant communities in schools. Attention is particularly drawn to literacy classrooms of all grades, where students’ linguistic identities are pushed aside as monolingual middle-class White language practices set the standards for reading, listening, speaking, and writing instruction. The author calls for educators to embrace translanguaging (García, 2009) as a way to dismantle raciolinguistic hierarchies at the classroom level. Concrete examples of how a translanguaging approach can be implemented to center the identities of immigrant children and children of immigrant families in literacy classrooms are provided.