ABSTRACT
Youth language brokering is defined as the multiple practices in which children, typically of immigrant parents, use their knowledge of two or more languages and cultures to speak, read, write, and do things for others. Despite a growing body of scholarship on this practice, the youth who engage in it have remained largely invisible in the U.S. public sphere, in which politically subordinated languages and their speakers are often racialized, marginalized, and devalued. Working from a sociolinguistic justice approach to education, this chapter builds on previous work by exploring how emotion and affect are connected to brokering during a classroom discussion between two Latina youth language brokers. The analysis pays particular attention to how students’ socioemotional histories and moment-to-moment interaction and embodiment through gesture, gaze, facial expressions, and other material resources shape the social space of the classroom. In doing so, the chapter argues for an understanding of bilingual youth as agents who are constantly engaged in meaning-making about emotions toward language brokering through processes of self-reflection and in social interaction with others.
