“La biblioteca es importante”: A Case Study of an Emergent Bilingual Public Library in the Nuevo U.S. South

Research examining ethnolinguistic community schools (García, Zakharia, & Otcu, 2013 García, O., Zakharia, Z., & Otcu, B. (2013). Bilingual community education for American children: Beyond heritage languages in a global city. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. [Google Scholar]) proposes that local spaces not directly affiliated with schools sustain bilingualism and identity. Though researchers often theorize about how community schools sustain home language literacies, less research examines how local public spaces sustain bilingualism among immigrant communities and, more broadly, what this would resemble. With a conceptual framework modeled after García's (2009 García, O. (2009). Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century. In A. Mohanty, M. Panda, R. Phillipson, & T. Skutnabb-Kangas (Eds.), Multilingual education for social justice: Globalizing the local (pp. 128–145). New Delhi, India: Orient Blackswan. [Google Scholar], 2011 García, O. (2011). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. New York, NY: Wiley and Blackwell. [Google Scholar]) theorization of translanguaging as a dynamic bilingual practice, we offer a counter to monolingual assumptions permeating current language education policy and ideologies. This case study of a public library examines a translanguaging space that offers a window into an emerging Latin American immigrant community in the U.S. South and the complexities of bilingual contact in the United States as a whole. We found that this nurturing public library fostered bilingualism, intentionally refuting language-minoritized stigmas for students learning English. With targeted programming and mentorship, the library challenged misinterpreted “deficit” views of emergent bilingual communities with reoriented views of English language learning to a translingual orientation (Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011 Horner, B., Lu, M. Z., Royster, J. J., & Trimbur, J. (2011). Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English, 73(3), 299–317. [Google Scholar]) that extends the innovative and critical practices of shuttling across diverse language repertoires. The public space of the library honored and cultivated the literacy practices of its local communities, and the importance of this is, without overstating, that public spaces for bilingual learning further the missions of all schools.