Description
Book SynopsisIn 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
