Bilingual and Literacy Studies Faculty Publications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2026

Abstract

This investigation draws from the concepts of agency (Bourdieu 1990), Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005) and neoliberalism in multilingual education (Del Persio and Wong 2020; Martínez-Prieto, 2025, 2025a), to analyze the way bilingual pre-service teachers (n = 50) make sense of the contributions and systemic segregation that their grandparents experience in the bilingual educational system at the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), Texas. This case study is based on the analysis of students’ reflections (n = 50), the author’s field notes (n = 23), and the analysis of pedagogical materials (n = 42) at the research site. Because of the neoliberal orientations of U.S. society, along with hegemonic notions of family structure in current academic discussions, pre-service teachers found that formal education has not acknowledged the contributions that grandparents have made to linguistic and cultural preservation in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In a similar tone, despite their contributions, grandparents are not always considered active and meaningful members of their community by the Texas educational system. Notwithstanding such lack of recognition, pre-service teachers emphasized that transnational grandparents in the RGV are agentive to continue being considered valuable and able to communicate with younger generations.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Language and Education on May 2026, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2025.2608795

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

First Page

582

Last Page

596

Publication Title

Language and Education

DOI

10.1080/09500782.2025.2608795

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Available for download on Monday, July 05, 2027

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