Experiential Knowledge as Capital and Resistance among Families from Mexican Immigrant Backgrounds

This qualitative case study examined the creation process and final artifacts of two biliteracy family projects that children and families from Mexican immigrant backgrounds collaboratively created as part of classroom instruction. Data were collected during five months in a first grade bilingual classroom with 22 students and centered on six focal families. The theoretical lenses of critical race theory and community cultural wealth served to analyze how biliteracy family projects facilitate the integration of children and families’ experiential knowledge in a bilingual classroom and how such experiential knowledge emerges as forms of capital in the final products and during the creation process. Findings highlight how children’s experiential knowledge and culturally simultaneous identities appeared through a collaborative process, and how parents facilitated and negotiated their children’s cultural simultaneity as forms of capital. This facilitation included parental strategies that engaged multiples forms of community cultural wealth to avoid cultural loss and enact resistance. This article argues for an integrated and culturally sustaining classroom-based approach to merge classroom instruction with experiential knowledge while fostering meaningful family collaboration that illuminates the multiple forms of community cultural wealth in their experiences and lives outside of school.