Enrichment, empowerment, and emancipation: Chinese and Latinx immigrant parental investment in U.S. bilingual education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Immigrant parents have varied yet comparable language ideologies, perspectives, and experiences. In this qualitative case study, 67 immigrant parents were interviewed, 37 Chinese and 30 Latinx, whose children were enrolled in Mandarin–English and Spanish–English bilingual after-school programs at two urban public elementary schools in the U.S. Northeast megalopolis. Critical discourse analysis of the interview transcripts revealed parents’ encompassing beliefs in bilingual education as a sociocultural investment in learning Chinese and Spanish. The study identifies three types of sociocultural investment: enrichment, empowerment, and emancipation. Enrichment is premised on the immigrant parents’ expectations of additive bilingual development in their child’s education. Empowerment is rooted in the immigrant parents’ agentic motivations to instrumentalize their child’s non-English language and provide cultural capital for immediate and transnational contexts. Emancipation emerges from immigrant parents’ experiences of liberation from subtractive bilingualism, limited educational experiences, and negative associations of ethnolinguistic identity institutionalized by the dominant (White) English-speaking society. These findings indicate that the cultures and languages transmitted through immigrant parents’ sociocultural investment in bilingualism are equally transmissible through investment in bilingual education. (176 words)