ABSTRACT
The reality of transnational communities in the context of globalization has captured the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The most salient transnational communities in the United States are Mexican, and although sociologists and anthropologists, among others, have documented the experiences of these communities (e.g. Hirsch, 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1995; Massey, Alarcon, Durand, and González, 1987; Smith, 2006), the language and literacy practices of transnationals figure only incidentally, if at all, in these studies. Farr (2006) and Dick (2006, 2010), in contrast, focus centrally on language practices in transnational Mexican communities, and Farr (1994a, 1994b, and 2000) and Guerra and Farr (2002) explore literacy practices in a transnational community. This chapter more specifically focuses on how transnationalism is shaping parental language ideologies in Mexico that now emphasize the importance of acquiring both oral skills and literacy in English in non-traditional ways. To clarify, we use the term “transnational community” to refer to social networks that live on “both sides of a nation-state border and maintain social, economic, political, and emotional ties that extend” between two countries (Farr, 2006, 5). By extension, we use the term “transnationals” to refer to people who maintain such ties, whether or not they are part of an established transnational community. In some mid-size towns in Mexico, for example, the presence of transnationalism is felt even though the entire town is not linked to a specific site in the U.S. from and to which migrants move, because a sufficient number of people have migrated, and returned, to effect changes in traditional language and literacy ideologies.
