How Children of Immigrants Use Media to Connect Their Families to the Community

Past research on children and media exploring embedded patterns of domestic media connections has generally been limited to majority culture, middle-class families. This study explored how these dynamics are different in immigrant families, with particular focus on ways these children “broker” new and traditional media forms to connect their families to local resources and ultimately, contribute to their families' settlement. Utilizing Livingstone's domestic infrastructure as a heuristic tool, interviews with forty-two parents and children in an immigrant Latino community in Los Angeles revealed how families connect with and make sense of information about community resources and services, as a precursor to deciding where to go and who to trust in their local area. Understanding how children's media brokering activities link their families to their communities has wider application to the study of children, family, and media practices in other urban centers as population diversity continues to increase worldwide.