“Desde chiquitos, les digo”: Southwestern and Midwestern Mexican Immigrant Mothers Cultivando Borderlands Biliteracies

In today’s political landscape, understanding how Latine/x immigrant families are teaching or fostering biliteracies among their children is critical to implementing culturally and linguistically sustaining practices that support their identities, academic achievement, and family and community resilience in the face of systemic marginalization. This study centers the voices and stories of six Mexican immigrant mothers from the Southwest and Midwest region of the United States. The study employs a pláticas and draws on the theory of borderlands biliteracies to understand how Mexican immigrant mothers are teaching biliteracies in the context of their home. The findings revealed how the mothers supported their children in cultivating biliteracies by making sense of raciolinguistic borders in their day-to-day schooling experiences; and how to enact biliteracies with orgullo (pride) and solidaridad (solidarity) for the collective well-being and for transforming the world. The findings have implications for expanding how biliteracies are cultivated in schools.