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Blending Borders of Languageand Culture: Schooling in LaVillitaIrma M. Olmedo aa College of Education, University of Illinois–ChicagoPublished online: 08 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Irma M. Olmedo (2008) Blending Borders of Language andCulture: Schooling in La Villita, Journal of Latinos and Education, 8:1, 22-37, DOI:10.1080/15348430802466738

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Blending Borders of Languageand Culture: Schooling in La Villita

Irma M. OlmedoCollege of Education

University of Illinois–Chicago

This article examines the efforts of a school in a Mexican community in Chicago tohelp children and parents capitalize on the language and culture of their 2 worlds. Itbuilds on the concepts of border crossings and hybridity, metaphors used to describethe sociocultural and linguistic reality of people living transnationally. Some UScommunities though far from Mexico, nevertheless experience a border resultingfrom urban segregation in housing and schooling. The article develops the concept ofblending borders to characterize approaches employed by educators who seek tobuild on the funds of knowledge of Latino families for instruction and communitybuilding.

Key words: funds of knowledge, bilingual schooling, border crossings, school andcommunity, Mexican immigrants, sociolinguistics

Border crossings is an important expression recently used in writings to character-ize the transnational reality of Mexicans living in the United States. Border cross-ings is both a physical reality as well as a metaphor for the psychological and socialreality of many members of the community. The physical reality is exemplified bythe frequent visits of many Mexican families living in the United States to theirhomes and families in Mexico on a regular basis throughout the year. This also oc-curs for children who are occasionally absented from school to attend holidays, fu-nerals, and other family and cultural events in Mexico during the academic year orto spend summer vacations with their Mexican relatives. These border crossingshave become so common that there are even cases of Mexicans living in the United

JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION, 8(1), 22–37Copyright © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1534-8431 print / 1532-771X onlineDOI: 10.1080/15348430802466738

Correspondence should be addressed to Irma M. Olmedo, College of Education, University of Illi-nois–Chicago, 1040 West Harrison Street (M/C 147), Chicago, IL 60607. E-mail: iolmedo@uic.edu

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States who run for public office in Mexico. These border crossings function in bothdirections as well. There are school districts on the U.S. side of the border that en-roll students who cross the border on a daily basis because their homes are on theother side. Pugach (1998) described such a school in her book On the Border ofOpportunity, a school that bused students across the Mexico–U.S. border to attendschool and return home.

Border crossings is also a metaphor used for the sociopsychological reality ofpeoples whose lives are characterized by the presence of two cultures and theircommitment to crossing these borders to experience the totality of self. These cul-tures need not be only ethnicity but can include a variety of other categories, suchas gender, race, class, language, or sexual orientation. Some contemporary Mexi-can American writers, such as Anzaldúa (1987), have used this metaphor as a fea-ture of their creativity.

One need not live or exist at the border to experience borders and border cross-ings, however. Some communities in the United States, though far from Mexico,also experience a border resulting from racism or urban segregation in housing andschooling, or a linguistic border that limits school instruction to English-only poli-cies. This is the case in many urban areas, in which, as a result of housing segrega-tion, some neighborhoods become another nation, and moving from these neigh-borhoods to others is like crossing an international border. This is the case forplaces like La Villita on the south side of Chicago, the community in which the re-search for this paper was conducted.

This article builds on the metaphor of “border crossings” to examine a some-what different metaphor, namely “border blending.” I want to use the term blend-ing borders as a way of characterizing cultural and linguistic processes that indi-viduals engage in while recognizing the existence of borders but negotiating andnavigating the spaces in between them. The term can perhaps also be seen as re-lated to the concept of “hybridity,” a reality that develops in the context of culturaland linguistic contact situations where a new reality is created, a kind of “thirdspace” (González, 2001, p. 14). One can consider that in some ethnic communities,the borders of language and culture are “blended” in such a way that firm distinc-tions are not made between what is “from there” and what is “from here.” I see theblending of borders as a type of reality shared by many Mexican-background fami-lies, especially children, while living in the United States.

In this article I use border blending to describe the many ways that administra-tors and teachers in this school reached out to recognize the community realitiesand also helped children to navigate in the spaces between the borders of languageand culture. In some schools with a large percentage of Latino children, bordersare metaphorically blended by creative teachers who seek to build on the funds ofknowledge of families and the linguistic resources of Mexican-background chil-dren to deliver and enrich classroom instruction. Those borders are also blended bycommitted administrators who seek to integrate aspects of the totality of the com-

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munity ethnic culture outside the school and to actively engage its members in thelife of the school.

SCHOOLING IN LA VILLITA

Communities such as La Villita in Chicago, as one of the Mexican neighborhoodsis known, though physically far removed from the Mexican border, neverthelessexperience a border as a result of urban segregation in housing and schooling. Thissegregation is evident when one considers that 140 of Chicago’s 400 elementaryschools and 16 high schools have a Latino majority population, enrolling morethan 121,000 students (Chicago Public Schools Evaluation Department, 2007).More than 80 of these elementary schools have a Hispanic student population ofmore than 80%, and these students are predominantly of Mexican background.These schools are concentrated in certain neighborhoods of the city, including Lit-tle Village and Pilsen on the south side of Chicago. In walking through these twocommunities, one is transported to Mexico as evidenced by the Mexican restau-rants, clothing and music stores, and supermarkets and the presence of social ser-vice and other community agencies advertising in Spanish and offering services toan immigrant community. Some have argued that it is possible for families to livein these communities and rarely need English or the services of mainstream Anglosociety for daily living.

This article reports on a year-long research project in an elementary school inLa Villita, a school attended by a 99% Latino student population, mostly Mexi-can or Mexican American. The article highlights the ways that demographiccharacteristics of the community have an impact on the schooling provided aswell as on the ways that children respond to features of instruction, including lit-eracy events. In many ways the responses of the children demonstrate the blend-ing of borders as children participate in events where languages and culturesoverlap.

PERSPECTIVES ON BORDER CROSSINGSAND SCHOOLING

The metaphor of border crossings has been used in much writing about MexicanAmericans (Anzaldúa, 1987; González, 2001; Vasquez, Pease-Alvarez, & Shan-non, 1994; Villa, 2000). The metaphor acknowledges the reality that many mem-bers of the community have a transnational existence whether or not they physi-cally cross the Mexican/U.S. border. Some researchers have sought to explore thecharacteristics of these “metaphoric borders” while avoiding static conceptions ofculture (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Olmedo, 1999; Reese, 2002; Trumbull, Roth-

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stein-Fisch, Greenfield, & Quiroz, 2001; Valdés, 1994). Educators and educationalresearchers also recognize that borders are also created by urban segregation inhousing and schooling. Such educators may attempt to define the ways that thoseborders can be eliminated or crossed in classrooms with sizable populations of stu-dents who are English language learners and whose family backgrounds are char-acterized as “other” by the mainstream (Carger, 1996; Gutiérrez, 1995; Matute-Bianchi, 1991; Suarez-Orozco, 1991; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001;Trueba & Bartolome, 2000).

Moll (2005) wrote about educational sovereignty as “the strength and power asocial setting like a school can garner by creating strategic social networks to en-hance its autonomy, mediate ideological and programmatic constraints, and pro-vide additive forms of schooling for all its students” (p. 11). Schools that providebilingual instruction to language-minority students are constantly under attackfrom a range of publics, and they have to develop ways to carve out a space for theirprograms by reaching out to their constituents. According to Moll, one way thatsome schools do this is through the creation of confianza “manifested in the mutualtrust established between teachers and administrators, which in turn generalizesto students and families” (p. 3). Such schools may also acknowledge and seek tobuild on the “funds of knowledge” of community members as a way to enhancetheir educational program. The term funds of knowledge constitutes the culturalways of community members; it conceptualizes dynamic aspects of cultureswithout stereotyping communities that are often silenced by educational policiesand practices (Gonzalez et al., 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992;Olmedo, 1999; Velez-Ibanez & Greenberg, 1992; Villenas, 2001). The metaphorof blending borders can also be used to characterize educational approaches thathelp students recognize and build on their family funds of knowledge, use theirhome language, and broaden their linguistic knowledge as they seek to learnEnglish.

Linguistic phenomena such as code-switching may be considered a form ofsuch blending of borders (Olmedo, 2003; Zentella, 1997). Individuals who areexposed to more than one language in their environment and who negotiate thereality of languages in contact develop ways to employ the resources of both oftheir languages in interaction. Although at one level code-switching refers tothe alternation between the two languages in speech, individuals who code-switch also capitalize on the resources of both languages to create a kind of hy-brid language that borrows patterns from each language. A variety of socialfunctions has been attributed to this sociolinguistic practice that is rather com-mon in many multilingual communities across a variety of languages. This arti-cle describes the various borders that exist and those that are blended in a bi-lingual school located in La Villita, where the school population is 99% ofLatino descent (primarily Mexican), where students are taught in both lan-guages, and where teachers seek to build on the funds of knowledge of commu-

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nity members and integrate the home and community cultures to enhance chil-dren’s education.

EXAMINING DAILY LIFE IN FRONTERA SCHOOLIN LA VILLITA

I engaged in a year-long research project in an elementary school in La Villita,which I call Frontera School (a pseudonym), to explore and document bilingual in-struction and children’s developing bilingualism in a second-grade classroom.Frontera School has a student population of 820 students in preschool to secondgrade, with 30 faculty members. Forty hours of videotapes of classroom instruc-tion and 26 hours of audiotapes of instruction and interviews with the children,some of their parents, and their teacher were made during the course of the aca-demic year. The focus of the research was on the language use and attitudes towardbilingualism and its cultural underpinnings in the neighborhood and among thefamilies. Samples of student work were also analyzed to explore the variety ofways that family funds of knowledge may have influenced children’s writing. Inaddition, field notes of school-based activities were examined and analyzed asdocumentation of efforts to provide a multicultural environment and as back-ground for analyzing the video- and audiotaped episodes.

I carried out discourse analysis of the video and audiotaped data sources usingethnographic and microethnographic approaches. In addition, I began to develop acase study of the school to describe the variety of ways in which the teachers andadministration sought to acknowledge the language and culture of communitymembers, a reality that I characterized as a blending of borders. Descriptions of thedemographics of the community and the schools in the area were background forraising questions about educational policies and practices in schools in such highlysegregated communities. School-based activities also documented the ways inwhich participation of community members was maximized.

COMPROMISO, CONFIANZA, AND COLABORACIONIN LA VILLITA

La Villita is a Mexican community on the south side of Chicago, ranked as one ofthe poorest in the city (López Castro, 1986). The 2000 Census recorded a popula-tion of 91,084, up 12.2% from 1990. A total of 83% of the population identifies asHispanic. This is the largest Mexican community in the Midwest and the 10th mostdensely populated neighborhood in Chicago. The community has the youngestmedian population in the city, with a median age of 20.9 years. Its schools are veryovercrowded. A new high school was recently built in the area after parents in the

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community held hunger strikes and demonstrations for it. Education levels arelower in Little Village than in any other Illinois Workforce Advantage Chicagocommunity (Illinois Workforce Advantage, n.d.).

La Villita is characterized by features of both Mexican immigrant culture andurban U.S. culture. In spite of the dire economic statistics of poverty, La Villita hasa very active Mexican business community, with businesses both Mexican ownedor managed, that cater to the Mexican residents (Casuso & Camacho, 1995). Thisis also the case for the large assortment of Mexican restaurants that exist in thearea. The use of Spanish is predominant in many domains, though English is oftenalso present. One can scarcely walk through its streets without seeing Spanish orbilingual signs in almost all establishments. Children are exposed to Spanish textsas they walk through many of the streets of their neighborhood. Some residentsclaim that it is possible to live in La Villita and rarely need to use English, giventhat so many services are available in Spanish.

The blending of borders is exemplified by three features of the ideological,sociocultural, and pedagogical reality of this school. I describe these three featuresusing the following terms: compromiso, confianza, and colaboración.

Compromiso is translated as commitment. In the context of Frontera School,compromiso characterizes the ideological reality of teachers and administratorswho are committed to instruction that acknowledges and affirms the culture of thecommunity and the development of bilingualism for the children. Confianza, ormutual trust, is an outcome of compromiso. Parents and community membersplace their trust in the teachers and administrators because they see the ways thatthe school affirms their language and culture while also developing their children’sEnglish skills necessary for success in the broader Anglo society. Colaboración re-fers to collaboration or cooperation, the myriad ways that educators work togetherto help one another in the school and the ways they partner with community orga-nizations to undertake activities to benefit the whole community. This ideology isalso transmitted to students in the way that classroom instruction is organized sothat students recognize the validity of helping their peers, especially those who areless fluent in the languages or skills required for particular academic tasks.

RECOGNIZING MEXICAN COMMUNITY CULTUREIN THE SCHOOL: COMPROMISO AND CONFIANZA

The ideology of Frontera School can be characterized as one of compromiso andconfianza. The school is a comfortable place for Latino parents to enter, a placethat welcomes their engagement and responds to many of their needs. When thisresearch was carried out, both the principal and assistant principal were Latinas,one of Mexican background and the other Puerto Rican. Both were mothers whoseown children occasionally accompanied them to the school. Much of the staff is

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also made up of Latinos who speak Spanish freely and openly in school offices,hallways, the teachers’ lounge, and classrooms. Several of the non-Latino facultyalso speak Spanish, and at least two of those teachers are quite fluent Spanishspeakers. A mural outside the school includes the Mexican and American flags andchildren celebrating the activities of both nations in their school. Hallway displaysalso affirm the Spanish language and aspects of Mexican culture, as well as typicalaspects of American culture, like the celebration of traditional holidays.

The school has developed a series of programs to ensure active parental partici-pation in school activities and interaction, with the teachers and staff with childrenpresent. These programs often are related to cultural traditions that are part ofMexico, from which most of the student population comes. The range of activitiesscheduled in the school that involve parents from the community is rather exten-sive and is an outgrowth of the networks and partnerships that the school hasforged with more than 40 community organizations. Though some of the tradi-tional parent involvement activities are those that are carried out in all schools,such as parent night and school open houses, some others may be unique to thisschool or this community. One example is the Mexican folkloric dance classes of-fered for children, parents, and teachers either as part of physical education class orafter school. As part of this commitment, a theme related to Mexico’s folkloric tra-ditions is chosen for the year, and classrooms select one or more regions of Mexicothat they will focus on for producing local folk dances. One of the teachers takes atrip to Mexico to select authentic native dance costumes to use for these perfor-mances. During the year, parents, children, and teachers receive instruction fromcommunity dance teachers as a preliminary to performances in the community.These dance classes are also supplemented with two other types of physical activi-ties that might be considered more a part of mainstream—aerobic lessons for par-ents and community members and tae kwon do lessons offered weekly for childrenand parents.

Celebration of traditional Mexican holidays supplements that of traditionalU.S. holidays. On Children’s Day (Día de los niños), a traditional Mexican holidaycelebrated on April 30, children participate in a parade and festival and other class-room-based activities. On the Day of the Teacher (Día del Maestro), the parentsprepare Mexican meals for teachers. Recently this celebration became almost aweek-long one, because so much food was prepared that the teachers were not ableto eat it in only one day. The administration invites a mariachi group to serenadenot only the teachers but also the parents who have been active in school activities.

Frontera School builds on standard programs developed by the school district toenhance services to children and community members that might be overlooked orignored were it not for the compromiso of faculty and administrators. One exampleof this is the development of literacy classes in Spanish for mothers in the commu-nity. The school was implementing a school-based problem-solving program de-veloped by the district central office to identify and intervene with children having

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difficulty before they were officially scheduled or assessed for special services. Inthe process of initiating this program, administrators discovered that a number ofthe mothers of these children did not know how to read or write in Spanish, theirnative language. It would have been difficult for school administrators in anotherschool to become aware of this problem because rarely would parents reveal thisinadequacy to school authorities. However, because of the confianza that has beendeveloped in the school among parents, community members, and school staff,this information was not hidden as a source of shame but acknowledged as a legiti-mate community need. School administrators decided to begin literacy classes forthese women right in the school during school hours so the mothers would be ableto participate while their children were in class.

AFFIRMATION OF BILINGUALISM IN INSTRUCTION

An important feature of instruction in the school is the effort to teach English whilechildren’s Spanish-language skills are developed and enhanced. Though the schoolis implementing a transitional bilingual education program with the assumptionthat children will be transitioned into all-English classrooms when they leave forthe next school in third or fourth grade, Spanish is used extensively in a wide rangeof school activities that involve not only individual teachers but the total school.For example, under the Links to Literacy program, a chapter book is selected eachyear and all teachers are provided with English and Spanish versions of the book.The book selected during the year of the research was Cricket in Times Square. Theteachers read the book to the children in whatever language was most comprehen-sible for their class, and two of the teachers organized their students to performskits from scenes of the book in both languages. The skits were presented to otherclasses in the school and were very well received by the other children, who wereable to follow the skits because they had also been reading the story in their class-room. These are well-organized and well-planned all-school activities that displaycompromiso or commitment to the bilingual development of all children. They alsodemonstrate colaboración, as teachers have to work together to plan these school-wide activities around the reading of the book and the preparation of students forthe presentation of classroom plays.

The classroom in which I conducted the research was considered a dual-languageclassroom, though it did not conform to the traditional model of dual language inwhich approximately 50% of the student population consists of native speakers oftwo different languages. All of the 26 children in the classroom spoke Spanish, somewith more proficiency than others. Five were considered Spanish monolingual andwere very limited in their English language proficiency. The remainder spoke someEnglish with varying degrees of proficiency. The children were placed in groups forliteracy and writing activities, with 14 in the Spanish group and 12 in the English

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group. The groups were often divided into smaller groups of four to six for many ofthe classroom activities in learning centers that were conducted in either Spanishor English. Often, however, both languages were used interchangeably by the chil-dren, especially for peer interaction. Ms. Eliza, the teacher, though not a nativeSpanish speaker, was fluent in Spanish. Students had opportunities to write jour-nals in English or Spanish, to read and listen to stories in either language, to de-velop spelling and vocabulary skills in both languages, and to capitalize on theirbilingual skills to do their math activities. The classroom library was well stockedwith many books in both English and Spanish and some in bilingual editions.

The affirmation of bilingualism in all aspects of instruction is a characteristicfeature of Frontera School. Positive views on bilingualism were part of the ideo-logical orientation of the children. I interviewed them as to whether it was impor-tant to know Spanish and English and, if so, why; and how and with whom theyused their two languages. The children appeared to view their bilingualism asrather unremarkable; their reactions to my questions showed that they took it forgranted. An ideology of colaboración would be one way to characterize how theyexplained the value of their bilingual skills. In their responses they connected bilin-gualism to their role as family members and as classmates. They identified theneed to use Spanish to communicate with parents, grandparents, and younger sib-lings and a corresponding need to know English to help those family members ne-gotiate the non-Latino world. Genaro, for example, replied that it was importantfor him to know Spanish because “I have to traduce for my parents.” Though hewas somewhat fluent in English, his English often demonstrated features of hisSpanish usage, as is the case with his use of the invented word traduce (Spanishtraducir) to mean “translate.” Hortensia also affirmed the value of knowing bothlanguages: “Como cuando yo voy a la tienda con mi mami, ella no entiende eninglés y yo le ayudo” (When I go to the store with my mother, she doesn’t under-stand English and I help her). These were generally not the stores in the neighbor-hood, as in those stores the mother could use her Spanish. Ernesto affirmed thevalue of knowing Spanish when he mentioned his efforts to teach vocabulary to hisparents who did not know English: “Pues mi papá siempre necesita ayuda con lapalabra hammer. Y luego ya sabe como decirla bien. A mi mami le ayudo con lapalabra cookie y dessert y cooking, y ya ella sabe” (Well, my father always needshelp with the word hammer. And now he knows how to say it well. I help my momwith the word cookie and dessert and cooking, and now she knows). Ernesto en-gaged in gender-sensitive English instruction! Sylvia explained that she oftentranslated for her parents “porque yo tengo como unos amigos que viven allá y aquíy unos hablan inglés y español, pero mi mamá y mi papá no hablan mucho inglés.Pos si no saben algo que dicen mis amigos, yo digo qué, qué estaban hablando”(Because I have some friends who live there and here and some speak English andSpanish, but my mom and dad don’t speak English. So if they don’t know some-thing that my friends say, I say what they were saying).

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Though one is impressed with the connection the children make between theirbilingual skills and their responsibilities to their family, at times one can be over-whelmed by the seriousness of this responsibility. For example, Juan acknowl-edged that it was good to be bilingual and proceeded to explain why as follows:“My mom got abogado and abogado speak English. I help her sometime to sacarlealguien de la carcel; the abogado speak English” (My mom got a lawyer and thelawyer speak English. I help her sometimes to take someone out of prison; the law-yer speak English). Juan explained that because the lawyer did not speak English,he, Juan, had to translate for his mother the things she needed to do to get someoneout of prison on bail. This is quite a responsibility for a 7-year-old to shoulder!Nevertheless, he surely understood the value of being bilingual.

The idea of colaboración in terms of language usage is demonstrated throughchildren’s responsibilities to their peers in the classroom. This is an important re-sult of the way instruction is structured in the classroom and the ideology that Ms.Eliza tries to instill in the children. Ms. Eliza occasionally grouped the childrenheterogeneously in such a way that a monolingual Spanish speaker was in thegroup with the more fluent English speakers so that the more fluent speakers couldhelp him or her during English instruction. The same was the case that the morefluent Spanish readers and writers helped the more limited Spanish readers. Soniahighlighted the importance of being bilingual so she could help her classmates:“Sometimes when the teacher is talking English and Vani can’t … doesn’t knowwhat she’s saying I have to translate it for her. I’m telling her what the teacher issaying.” Similar responses were given by other students about the value of beingbilingual in the classroom.

In collaborating with one another, children engaged in what I have elsewherereferred to as the bilingual echo (Olmedo, 2003). The bilingual echo refers to thechildren’s use of various strategies for mediating conversations and helping oneanother to move across the two languages or to solve instances of miscom-munication. Many examples of the bilingual echo, with use of translation, para-phrasing, and code-switching were found in the data. For example, while Elsa washelping Francisca with a task, she said, “Hazlo así” and modeled the task. Sheturned to Jose and said, “Do it like this.” She moved over to model how the activitywas to be done.

The children often used code-switching strategies or language alternation for a va-riety of classroom functions. Their sensitivity to language varieties, synonyms, andmultiple ways of saying things is described through examples in the following section.

DEVELOPMENT OF BILITERACY

Given the transitional model of bilingual instruction that many schools implement,teachers confront pressure to help students learn enough English so that they can

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be transitioned into an English-only or mainstream classroom as soon as possibleor by third or fourth grade. For teachers who are nevertheless interested in enhanc-ing the children’s native language skills, even in the best equipped and best sup-plied bilingual programs, Spanish-language instructional materials are not alwaysas accessible as English-language materials, and teachers therefore have to impro-vise. This is also the case in Frontera School, in spite of the ideological orientationof teachers and administrators. One strategy that Ms. Eliza resorted to was usingEnglish-language workbook materials and duplicating masters and allowing thechildren to respond to the questions or the prompts in Spanish if they were unableto respond in English. Occasionally she would encourage them to use whateverEnglish they knew, even if they also had to mix it with Spanish to complete an as-signment. This was a somewhat pragmatic solution to the dilemma of providingchildren with many opportunities to write in spite of their limited fluency in Eng-lish. Therefore, students’ written responses were sometimes a mixture of Englishand Spanish.

An example of that pragmatic response to literacy was the teacher’s use of a du-plicating master about Martin Luther King. As is common in many elementaryschools, during February, as part of Black History Month, children were exposedto instruction about African American heroes, especially Martin Luther King. Af-ter hearing a story about Martin Luther King, the children were to use a worksheetexercise to explain why he was a hero. The writing prompt started “This heroaward goes to_______.” The student would fill in “Martin Luther King” in theblank space. The next prompt was “You are my hero because,” and the studentswould complete the sentence based on the story that Ms. Eliza had read to themabout Martin Luther King. Maria wrote, “Ayudo al pais a hacer un mejor lugar yhablo con toda la gente y dijo que las personas blancas sean amigos con la gentede color” (You helped the country to be a better place and you spoke with all thepeople and said that White people should be friends with Black people). (It is un-clear from the writing whether Maria meant “you” or “he” because the subject pro-noun is omitted in Spanish.)

Katarina, who also did not know much English, wrote, “You are my hero be-cause luchó para que fueran a todas las escuelas y parques, restaurantes, trabajosbuenos y los baños públicos” (You/he struggled so that people could go to all theschools, parks, restaurants, good jobs and public baths).

The children had made some grammatical and spelling errors in their originalwritten drafts in Spanish, as many second graders do, but the transcripts above arefrom the corrected versions that were posted on the bulletin board and thereforethose original errors do not appear here even though these versions have errors.However, the overall meaning of the responses was comprehensible and showedthat the children understood the concepts being taught. They were coherent basedon the content that students were learning from the books that they had read or thathad been read to them. The responses showed that the children had understood im-

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portant concepts about Martin Luther King and segregation in the South. For teach-ers who realize that they are not only teaching English but are responsible for teach-ing concepts and content matter, what the children wrote was important, even if itwas written in Spanish and not in English, and even if the writing demonstrated somespelling and/or grammatical errors common for monolingual writers of that age.

Where the written texts became more problematic was when Ms. Eliza encour-aged the students to try to write what they could in English. At those times childrenwould occasionally write responses such as the following, using an invented spell-ing for their English sentences. The worksheet prompt was “If I were the teacher Iwould,” Maria wrote, “Gefim 2 grmrgs an gefin fritam an sam fitam on Frereys”(Give them two homeworks and give them free time and some free time on Fri-days). To the prompt “My friend likes to play,” Soledad wrote “Jaidengosi” (whenI asked what she meant, she translated “a escondidas,” meaning hide-and-go-seek).

Analysis of this writing shows the efforts of the children to use their knowledgeof Spanish phonetics to mimic the English sounds that they hear before they areable to spell those words correctly. In the first example, this is shown in the spellingof “gefim” for “give them” and “fritam” for “free time.” In the second example,“Jaidengosi,” this is clear from the use of j for the English h sound, ai for the Eng-lish long i, and i at the end for the English ee. Although these texts show the chil-dren’s errors and a kind of hybrid language, they also show their creativity in ac-cessing the resources of their native language to respond to the academic task.

COLABORACION IN CLASSROOM STRUCTURE

The concept of colaboración is exemplified in the way that classroom groups arestructured for instruction. Children are encouraged to work together, to help oneanother, and to do so across their two languages. An example of this comes from anactivity in which a group of boys had to interview each other and complete aworksheet in English about what they had learned through the interview. Theworksheet focused on what activities children like to do after school and on week-ends.

Boy 1: We like to talk, to write, to play tic tac toeBoy 2: Play tic tac toe andBoy 1: You know how to write play? PLAY [spells out the word in Spanish]Boy 3: El ya terminó [He finished already].Boy 2: Yo ya llené toda la la line [I already filled out the whole line]. I like to play

hide and seek.Boy 1: Hide and seek? You know how to write hide and seek?Boy 2: H, I de isla [to distinguish from English e].

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The boy spelled the word in Spanish, using the Spanish letter sounds, includingthe I, which in Spanish sounds like E. He explained that it is the I that would beused in island to distinguish it from the English sound E. This shows a rather so-phisticated knowledge of the sounds and orthography of both languages, a skillthat might be overlooked or might not be developed if the children were preventedfrom using the knowledge that they already possessed in their first language in or-der to build new knowledge.

The children are encouraged to use the resources of both of their languagesto assist one another in completing tasks. In this example, we see the three boyscollaborating to finish the task; using code-switching, both intersentential andintrasentential; and using Spanish spelling for the child who has more difficultywriting in English. It is a testament to one boy’s Spanish literacy skill that hewas able to explain what kind of I should be used by using the letter I in theword island so that his classmate would not be confused by the English lettersound E.

A similar episode occurred when a child attempted to retell the story of the Gin-gerbread Man that they had read in English by discussing it with another classmatein Spanish. Such an activity was not unusual in this classroom because studentswere exposed to stories in both English and Spanish and had opportunities to dis-cuss their stories in both languages as well. In her explanation she mentioned thatthe wolf (el lobo) would eat the gingerbread man. Another child interrupted andcorrected, “No es el lobo, es el zorro, it’s a fox,” thus code-switching to clarify thefacts of the case.

One of the features of colaboración is that children are also developing theircommunicative skills, understanding paralinguistic cues and other pragmatic strat-egies for ensuring comprehension. As part of my research I conducted interviewswith the children in the class to understand their views on their own bilingualismand how they used their two languages in the classroom or at home. One of thequestions was the following: “If a new child came to your class who didn’t knowEnglish or Spanish, how could you help him/her?” This question aimed to under-stand what children understood about how to use their languages to collaboratewith their peers to facilitate classroom interaction and the variety of strategies theywould employ to do so.

Katarina, one of the more bilingual speakers, responded as follows:“En el papel le puedo dibujar lo que tiene que hacer. Y también puedo hacerle

señas. Como es que si quiere hacer otra cosa y yo le digo que no, yo le hago unaseña que no”

(I would draw on a piece of paper what he has to do. I would also make gestures.For example if he says he wants to do something else and I say no, I do like this).Katarina made a gesture with her finger to symbolize “no.” She obviously under-stood the rules for making communication comprehensible, supplementing theverbal message with visuals and paralinguistic cues.

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Many urban communities and even some rural communities in the United Statesare characterized by the presence of pockets of populations with linguistic and cul-tural roots from other countries. Some of these “pockets” include sizable numbersof immigrants and children of immigrants whose lives continue to be characterizedby the “home” culture, where the home is in another society. Schools need to findways to acknowledge this reality at the same time that they prepare children tofunction in the broader mainstream community of the United States. It is importantfor educators and researchers to consider how this can be done successfully, howclassroom instruction can be conducted to help all students succeed in theseschools, and how school activities can be organized so that the school does not be-come an “alien” community for family members.

The neighborhood of La Villita exists physically and metaphorically acrossborders, given urban housing segregation and related schooling segregation as wellas the presence of identifiably Mexican institutions and establishments with thevisibility of Spanish. Frontera School is engaged in a process that I call blendingborders because teachers, administrators, and children integrate aspects of theirMexican culture and Spanish language into the culture of the school at the sametime that children are learning to speak, read, and write English and participate inAmerican society. With a school population that is 99% Latino (mainly Mexican),school staff have taken ideological positions to blend those borders of languageand culture in school activities and in the curriculum. Compromiso, confianza, andcolaboración (commitment, trust, and collaboration) would be three ways to char-acterize the ideology that helps them to blend those borders and create a schoolcommunity that acknowledges and affirms the linguistic and cultural realities ofthe homes and families from which the children come, at the same time that thechildren are adding English and mainstream ways to their repertoires.

The findings of this research may have some implications for the schooling of chil-dren in other bilingual programs. Teachers and administrators in these programs arechallenged to help children learn content area concepts while simultaneously develop-ing their English language skills. All teachers in bilingual classrooms are simulta-neously teaching content and language. Educators should recognize that it is importantto capitalize on the linguistic skills and funds of knowledge of children and commu-nity members and to build on these if they are to help children cross the borders—boththe physical and metaphorical ones—that are present in their environments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I express appreciation to the University of Illinois–Chicago Great Cities Institutefor providing me with a Faculty Scholar’s Award to pursue this research.

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