Educational interpreters are not neutral mediators of messages. In education, they are policy brokers whose translations can reflect their own social identities and often align with larger social power dynamics, including deficit perspectives of racialized multilingual people. In U.S. schools, language minoritized parents have the right to make…

Federal and Arizona educational policies challenge U.S.-Mexico border educators to meet the diverse needs of bilingual, bicultural students while also being required to use instructional pedagogies that offer monolingual and monocultural schooling experiences. Ethnographic research captures American schooling experiences of Latino…

This dissertation aims to contribute knowledge to the literature about ESOL students' digital literacy practices related to educational purposes. I studied the varied digital literacy practices the students used as mediating tools to perform their university activities (e.g., crossing to come to school, communicate with classmates/instructors…

This project explores how the variation in language experiences and attitudes that Mexican American Spanish heritage speaker bilinguals in the United States have affects their speech perception in both their languages. Heritage language bilinguals speak as a first language a minority language that they have cultural ties to (e.g., Spanish in the…

This article examines the language ideologies of the lead teacher and of five Mexican mothers of Spanish-speaking, emergent bilingual children in a Head Start program in Arizona. Data from semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and participant-observation field notes were analyzed using the interrelated concepts of language ideologies…

Research Findings: Using two groups of dual language learners (DLLs), the current study examined links between two developmental constructs closely linked to school readiness: the home language environment (HLE) and executive function (EF). In a sample of 90 children (age range = 38-70 months, 59% girls) from either Mexican American (MA, N = 46)…

Research Findings: The Latino population within the U.S. is heterogeneous with diversity in education level, country of origin, and English language fluency. Latino children often enter school with limited English language skills. In the current study, we surveyed 448 Latino families of Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican descent regarding their home…

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in scholarship on Latino educational history and a new nonbinary umbrella term, Latinx, that a younger generation prefers. Many of historian Victoria-María MacDonald's astute observations in 2001 presaged the growth of the field. Focus has increased on Spanish-surnamed teachers and discussions have grown…

The children of (im)migrants are the fastest growing population in U.S. schools at the same time there is increased anti-(im)migrant discourse, creating a unique linguistic ecology for its students. These multinational, multilingual, and multicultural students often encounter mononational, monolingual, and monocultural ideologies in their schools…

This study examined the concurrent relations of English (EL) and heritage language (HL) proficiency to executive functions (EF) among low-income dual language learners (DLLs) from immigrant families. In a sample of 90 children (age = 38-70 months) from Chinese-speaking Chinese American and Spanish-speaking Mexican American families recruited from…

Youth who exhibit externalizing problems during childhood and adolescence are at an increased risk for a wide range of detrimental life outcomes. Despite the profound consequences of externalizing problems for children, their families, and their communities, we know less about the precise trajectory of externalizing symptoms across late childhood…

Parental involvement plays an important role in the academic success of children. Schools in new gateway states where there has not been a longstanding tradition of immigration often lack the cultural knowledge and linguistic resources necessary to serve immigrant youth and their families effectively. By examining the experiences of Mexican…

This study reports on Mexican-origin university students' perceptions of their K-12 literacy experiences and preparation for college-level reading. Participants were first-generation college students from Spanish-dominant homes enrolled in a reading-intensive course at a four-year Hispanic-serving institution. The study was conducted as part of an…

This article describes the process of teaching English as a second language to members of an underprivileged local community. This initiative was developed as a result of a collaboration between a community center and a university. Three 1st-year TESOL master's candidates volunteered to design and teach curriculum to immigrant community members on…

This chapter proposes a conceptual framework that merges intersectionality and policy analysis as an analytical tool to understand the nuanced, multilayered, compounded educational inequality encountered specifically by low-income, Latino Spanish-speaking students in Arizona K-12 public schools as a function of intersecting educational policies.…