Grad - Lim

Abstract

Bilingualism and citizenship may seem a counterintuitive juxtaposition given that citizenship in the U.S. is largely conceived in relation to literacy in English. The monolingual approach to citizenship, however, falls short of accounting for the linguistic diversity in the lived practices of citizenship. This paper situates bilingualism in the notion of cultural citizenship, proposed by anthropologist Renato Rosaldo to attend to the limits of the legal notion of citizenship, and examines how the Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes presents a way of re-imagining citizenship through bilingualism. The migrant bilingual child in Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) stands outside the legal notion of citizenship in her exclusion from institutional education and as racialized labor. Lim suggests that Viramontes constructs a meaningful dual belonging for the migrant bilingual child that simultaneously attends to her agency and the social conditions of that agency by making bilingualism integral to the articulation of cultural citizenship.