ABSTRACT
Above we see the value that this mother holds for academic reading and we sense the difficulty that providing opportunities for academic literacy practices present for this immigrant Latino family. Ethnographic work with Latino families has consistently shown that Latino parents have a strong value for education and want their children to reach a level of financial and social success beyond that which they themselves have known, often having aspirations for higher education (Auerbach, 2006; Delgado-Gaitan, 2001). However, their efforts toward orienting their children toward academic ends are often misunderstood or dismissed because they do not resemble the types of white middle-class practices that have come to characterize parent involvement (Crozier, 2001; Lopez, 2001). Indeed my work in California public schools shows that Latino parents are often poorly informed and sometimes deceived about their children’s educational trajectories (Monzó, 2005). This suggests that there may be a perception that because families lack sufficient knowledge about our educational system their input on academic matters is of little consequence. However, Latino parents support their children’s education in a variety of non-mainstream ways, including offering consejos
(Delgado-Gaitan, 1994) and showing them what hard work really is to encourage educational persistence (Lopez, 2001).
