Reimagining Citizenship through Bilingualism: The Migrant Bilingual Child in Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus

Abstract

Bringing together bilingualism and citizenship may seem a counterintuitive gesture to many given that the most prominent relationship between language and citizenship historically in the United States has been that of literacy in English as proof of citizenship. 1 It is increasingly becoming questionable, however, to what extent the monolingual approach to citizenship that distributes rights and obligations in relation to English and assumes a correspondence between one state and one language can meaningfully account for the practices of citizenship. In After Race Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres draw attention to how the changing demographics of the United States—most notably the increasing number of Spanish-speaking populations—have necessitated “the redefining of current ideas of citizenship” (2004, 69). 2 One productive result of such efforts to redefine citizenship is the notion of cultural citizenship, initially proposed by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo and subsequently advanced by other scholars (Rosaldo 1997, 1994; Ong 1996; Flores and Benmayor 1997). A reaction to the limits of the legal and normative idea of citizenship, cultural citizenship locates the substantial meaning of citizenship in the everyday practices of sharing space and forming and exchanging ideas. In its initial formulation by Rosaldo, it radically decentered the emphasis on state power in citizenship by relocating the substance of citizenship in the lives of those considered outside the regime of citizenship such as minority groups or immigrants. Other scholars such as Aihwa Ong have tried to view cultural citizenship as registering both the regulatory force of the legal, normative side of citizenship and the revisions to such citizenship that occur in the lived realities of the disenfranchised. According to