Pushing Boundaries: Language and Culture in a Mexicano Community

Pushing Boundaries offers a unique perspective on the ways bilingual children and their families use and learn language in Eastside, a Mexicano immigrant community in Northern California. The authors track how children use language in a variety of settings: home, school, and community. What they discover is that at times, these bilingual children use both Spanish and English in the same conversation and that they often help their non-English-speaking adult family members and friends translate and interpret the modern world. The authors demonstrate how ethnic children, in collaboration with those around them, learn to engage in meaningful interactions, to derive meaning from written or oral texts, and to use their first language and cultural knowledge as a critical component for learning their second language and its underlying cultural norms.