Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article we focus on how two Brazilian elementary school-aged children with transnational and transborder lives and ties experience their childhood while navigating a Portuguese-English dual language bilingual program (DLBE) designed to serve the local Brazilian immigrant community. Through in-depth portraits of Ana and Luis (pseudonyms), we aim to elucidate how they practiced, experienced, and made sense of their childhoods in educational settings. Through these portraits of Luis and Ana we argue that Brazilian im/migrant children are actively building their visibility in schools, so that their transnational and transborder identities are seen as legitimate and valid. We have constructed these portraits of Luis and Ana after conducting three years of ethnographic research during which we observed 84 children from first to third grade enrolled in a DLBE program at one elementary school in the northeastern U.S. Brazilian children enrolled in the program were either newcomer immigrants to the U.S. or born in the U.S. with at least one Brazilian immigrant parent (second-generation immigrants). In this article we focus our attention on children’s enactments of their transnational experiences inside the classroom. Building on previous work which centered children in migratory processes (Heidbrick, 2020; Orellana, 2012; Orellana etal. 2001), we turn our attention to classroom spaces.

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