ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes spontaneous writing, or freewrites, produced by Spanish–English bilingual students of Latinx descent at a California high school in response to Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Anzaldúa focuses on the political dimensions of translation and translatability, such as the replacement of nonhegemonic varieties of Spanish with hegemonic English and the accommodation of monolingual English speakers through translation. The students’ freewrites reveal their perspectives on the day-to-day stakes of translation and reflect the discriminatory ideologies that severely limit the presence of translation in the classroom, a situation that has led previous researchers to call for an understanding of bilingual youth translators as gifted and to highlight the pedagogical usefulness of language brokering. This chapter echoes these calls but expands the context beyond brokering to include literary translation, arguing that making legitimate the presence of many forms of translation in educational spaces has the power to develop communicative agency and inform culturally sustaining pedagogies.