ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Richardson Bruna illustrates the cognitive, linguistic, and affiliative role of language play in the schooling lives of young Mexican adolescents. While all students forge academic identities out of the relationships they discover or create between school-, community-, and family-based knowledges, immigrant youth do so while also learning a new culture and language. Richardson Bruna takes up the notion of border crossing to relate the literal movement Mexican immigrant youth have made across the physical Mexico-U.S. border to their continued, more figurative, movement between the linguistic borders of Spanish and English. Framing this linguistic border-crossing with ideas of literacy development, oral culture, humor, and power, Richardson Bruna regards Mexican adolescents’ playful language use as an important display of their evolving biliteracy, one that, for them, is historically culturally relevant and, most strategically within science, makes space for their voices in a place where those voices are traditionally seldom heard.
