Notes
Diasporic Healing through Theory: Creating a Homeplace
Betina Hsieh
Abstract
In diaspora, there are layers of inevitable separation, loss, and liminality. These layers manifest in our everyday longings and lives. They are shaped by the contexts in which we live and the experiences which we have lived. When we approach diasporic experiences through theory, situating the personal alongside larger phenomena, theory can serve as a site of healing, creating possibilities of homecoming, and a path to community that honors the fullness of our cultural, linguistic, and diasporic identities. This theoretical essay is organized into two major parts that speak to and unpack the author’s experiences as a daughter of diaspora and a mother in diaspora. Each part begins with a personal reflection which is unpacked in relation to sociopolitical, racialized, and sociolinguistic contexts and theories, thereby situating individual experiences within collective social phenomena. The essay ends with a reflection on the possibility of embracing our whole selves as people of diaspora.
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.58117/rp9r-gq77
“Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” – bell hooks
In diaspora, there are layers of inevitable separation, loss, and liminality. These layers manifest in our everyday longings and lives. They are shaped by the contexts in which we live and the experiences which we have lived. Often, these layers are experienced as individual and intergenerational traumas, internalized through implicit and explicit messages told to us by the society that surround us, societies not designed to hold people of the diaspora and their loss, societies meant to confine us to boxes rather than supporting our self-definition and communal strength. Theory can help diasporic peoples to understand that our experiences are both our own (unique) and shared (communal). We can begin to (re)claim our healing and the fullness of our identities through counternarratives that speak back to the ways we have been “allowed” to be in spaces that cannot fully recognize us nor hold our loss and our strength. In this theoretical essay, I connect theory to my experiences as a daughter and granddaughter of diaspora and as a MotherScholar (Matias, 2022). Theory serves as a site of healing, creating possibilities of homecoming, and a path to community that honors the fullness of my cultural, linguistic, and diasporic identities. It is my hope that through my own healing, I may provide insight to other diasporic peoples who may find understanding and healing in theory that can bring forth brighter possible futures.
The essay is organized in two major parts to speak to my experiences as a daughter of diaspora and a mother in diaspora. Each major part begins with a reflection which is then unpacked in relation to sociopolitical contexts that inform those experiences and theories that help me to situate my own experiences as part of broader social phenomena. The essay ends with a reflection on the possibility of embracing our whole selves as people of diaspora.
Growing Up as a Daughter of Diaspora: Assimilation as a Path to Conditional “Acceptance”
When, as a child, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always responded that I wanted to be a mother. This was almost certainly because of the centrality of my mother and grandmother in my young life. My mother raised me as a divorced single mother, in a time when and culture where divorce was seen as a source of shame and failure, with single motherhood a consequence of one’s agency. My mother worked hard (by day as a chemist and by night as a waitress in my aunt’s Chinese restaurant) to provide for my brother and myself with no help from my father. My grandmother spent the most time with me in my early childhood because of the late nights my mother had to work. My grandmother had also been a single mother, widowed in Taiwan when my mother was just 75 days old, and raising two young girls on her own, with a small dental practice. She followed her children to this country, helping them with their children. I was raised with much love, but also in an environment of much disappointment, struggle, with dreams deferred, denied, and displaced.
In return for all my mother and grandmother’s struggles, all I wanted was to be a good daughter, and eventually a good mother myself. I hoped to care for my mother in her elder years, just as she had done for my grandmother, while carrying on their legacies through my own family.
Despite my deep desire to be a good daughter, I never felt good enough. I never felt like I fully belonged. Once I entered school, I was caught between wanting to fit in, in the predominantly White, suburban Southern California community where I grew up (with few other second generation Asian American kids raised by Asian immigrant single mothers), and the desire to honor the values and expectations of my mother, which often seemed so foreign to me. I loved my mother, but I felt acutely separated from her, in the way I grew up and the way I viewed the world, as an (Asian) American girl growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. After my grandmother died, I had no desire to learn or speak Mandarin or Hokkien. While my mother half-heartedly tried to teach me Mandarin using textbooks from Taiwan that my father sent to us when I was in middle school, I did not want to be associated with anything that might make me stand out as different, as a foreigner. We lived too far from a Mandarin heritage school for the drive to be feasible and it cost money that we didn’t have. Besides, my mother had been told by her graduate school professors that the key to my success was her ensuring that I spoke “perfect” English “without an accent.” She wanted a better life for me than she had. I wanted to be accepted by my peers. That meant (for me, at the time) doing what was expected of me: excelling at school, being agreeable, and trying to fit in, despite constantly feeling like the odd person out and carrying incredible loneliness.
My mother was hit by a car, crossing the street from our home to the bus stop, and killed when I was 16 years old. I had been angry with her when she dropped me off at a friend’s house the night before. I remember the guilt I felt about my anger, the guilt I felt for not being grateful enough, and the deep sense of loss that felt unbearable. I was now more alone than ever. I graduated high school as valedictorian, honoring my mother in my graduation speech, but I felt like an invisible shell without her, like I was going through the motions of a predetermined life without any meaning. My grief was too painful to bear as a young girl, with no one who could understand how fragile I was beneath a determined strength to survive. All I could do to survive was to reject everything my mother held for me that now seemed lost forever: her language, her culture, our family, even her love of science. I held on only to the consistent messages of hard work, self-sacrifice, and survival. I was alone in a world that had no desire to know me.
Unpacking Contexts
My mother was born in Taiwan in 1938 and lived through Japanese colonial rule, World War II, and martial law under the Kuomintang-led Republic of China, being raised by her mother alongside her sister, one year her senior. She came to the United States in September 1964, as a graduate student in chemistry. Her arrival to the US was 15 months before the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965 (United States Congress, 1965) which eliminated discriminatory quotas against immigrants from Asian countries. It was also 16 months before William Petersen’s (1966) New York Times Magazine article touted Japanese Americans as the “Model Minority,” overcoming discrimination through hard work and a refusal to complain, in contrast to other communities of color. These contexts were critical in shaping my mother’s experiences as a first-generation adult immigrant to the US from Taiwan.
When my mother arrived in this country to obtain her master’s degree from a small Catholic university in upstate New York, she was one of only a few Asian immigrants. She later enrolled in a PhD program at a state university but left the program after marrying my father (who had immigrated to the US as a graduate student via Taiwan after the fall of the Nationalist government in China) and becoming pregnant with my brother. Not completing her PhD was one of my mother’s greatest regrets, however, she was determined that her children’s success would be her legacy. Her graduate school professors assured her that English was the key to her future children’s success and, having experienced multiple instances of discrimination and being passed over for promotions in favor of less-qualified peers in her professional life, she believed them.
The Immigration Act of 1965 allowed my mother to bring over my aunt’s family and my grandmother, initially providing work for them in a small Chinese restaurant my parents owned. After the divorce, my mother moved with my brother and me to a small Southern California suburb where her sister had opened a Chinese restaurant of her own. Enrolling my brother in elementary school, my mother had to complete the home language survey required by the state which asked which languages were spoken in the home by my brother and the adults around him. Having answered honestly that Mandarin Chinese was spoken, my brother was tested for English proficiency, which was confusing for him, as an advanced reader, and a source of shame for my mother, who learned that speaking languages other than English was a liability.
As the baby of our family and as her child more than anything, my mother wanted to protect me and ensure my academic success. I went to preschool during the day, despite the cost, for socialization and to perfect my English, only using Mandarin and some Hokkien (which I didn’t know at the time was a distinct linguistic dialect) at home with my grandmother who didn’t speak a lot of English. After my grandma died, I saw no use for Chinese as a language and launched myself fully into American middle grades books including The Baby-Sitters Club series, and eventually, teen suspense thrillers by Christopher Pike. Through these books, I realized that American teenagers had so much more freedom than I did. They went on dates, went unsupervised to the mall, and hung out at their friends’ houses. I wasn’t allowed to do any of this as it might distract from my studies.
Tensions between my mother’s desires for me to be successful in the US without becoming fully “American,” became fraught in my adolescence as I desired more independence. My mother undoubtedly saw me slipping away from her and feared that I might jeopardize the success she had strived so hard to set up for me. To reconnect me with my cultural and linguistic roots, she asked for my father to send a set of Chinese language textbooks from Taiwan, the only thing I ever remember her asking of him. She began teaching me, but I quickly lost interest. She did not have the energy to fight with me, so she acquiesced with the admonition that someday, I would regret not learning Mandarin when I had the chance. I thought the chances of this were slim at the time.
My mother tried hard to give me some of the independence I saw, but she was afraid I was becoming “too American,” which to her meant that I would be rebellious, make an impulsive decision that would ruin my life, and get distracted from my studies. On February 2, 1995, she dropped me off at my best friend’s house where I would sleep over and we would take the bus to the movies the next day. I was mad at her because she wouldn’t let me use my newly minted driver’s license and the car to take my friends to the movie theatre, but I was secretly also excited because we were meeting up with other friends including my crush. I slammed the car door emphatically as I left her. The next morning, I woke up at 5:30 am and felt badly for the way I had left my mother. I thought about calling her but didn’t want to disturb my friend or her family who were sleeping. Less than two hours later, she was killed crossing the street from our house to the bus stop. And I was left, feeling completely alone and ashamed, to figure out who I was without my mother.
Theoretical Healing
It would be many long years before I learned about the theories of cultural assimilation and raciolinguistics that had shaped my childhood. It would be a long journey to find Critical Race Theory and AsianCrit as sites of healing. But through understanding, naming, and reframing my experiences, I began to find the healing my younger self needed.
A Bigger Picture. Cultural assimilation, a theory prevalent in the mid-1960s, during the time of my mother’s immigration, posits that immigrant groups should abandon their traditional ways, native languages and avoid being associated with their heritage communities in ways that could reinforce their foreignness. According to assimilation theory, by abandoning heritage culture and taking on cultural norms of the country in which they live, diasporic peoples provide the greatest advantages to themselves and future generations (Gordon, 1964). Through her immigration to the US, my mother entered a new cultural world and was introduced to new conceptions of success which seemed reliant upon cultural assimilation as a form of upward mobility. She chose initially to adopt a cultural assimilationist model through embracing the “English only” discourse of her graduate school professors. She believed that developing English to the exclusion of Mandarin and Hokkien would help her children to be successful and saw multilingualism as something that could put a barrier to our educational success.
As I grew older and distanced myself from my heritage culture, my mother later attempted to teach me Mandarin herself through textbooks. I struggled to understand this shift to wanting me to learn Mandarin, and the way my mother implemented it. My mother could, at any time, have chosen to speak to me only in Mandarin or Hokkien, but I only ever remember her speaking to me in English. Instead, her singular explicit effort to develop my Mandarin was through textbooks. Flores and Rosa’s (2015) discussion of raciolinguistic ideologies related to heritage language learning helps to give insight as to this choice and my youthful rejection of her efforts. Flores and Rosa argue that often heritage language learning, within additive monoglossic (dominant language normative) frameworks, is not valued for its association with culture, communication, and social practices, but instead is (and perhaps was for my mother) seen as a potential “academic” benefit. While this connection was likely un/subconscious for my mother, and my rejection of learning Mandarin was likely perceived by her as both a cultural and interpersonal rejection, this theoretical nuance can lend to a reinterpretation of my refusal to learn Mandarin.
Using Flores and Rosa’s (2015) insight alongside the historical analyses they later provide (2017) surrounding language colonization and the connections between language and power, this youthful rejection of my heritage language can be connected to both the power of internalized colonial discourses around linguistic proficiency and language hierarchies, and a lack of interest in acquiring my heritage language as an additive advantage. For me, Chinese languages had been “useful” only in providing a connection with my grandmother. After her passing when I was seven, speaking and learning Mandarin were completely disconnected from my sense of humanity and a source of shame. I did not need to learn Mandarin from my mother through textbooks at 13. I had done what I was supposed to, master English, and felt reluctant to take on a new language without community support.
A Different Story. In the later 20th century, scholars began to challenge the realities of full cultural assimilation, particularly for Asian diasporic peoples, in light of prevalent stereotypes like the forever foreigner (Tuan, 1998) which perpetuated the idea that Asian diasporic peoples were unassimilable within Western cultures. As I entered adulthood, segmented assimilation, in which some parts of one’s original ethnic culture are preserved while others are adapted to their new culture (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Zhou, 1997), was introduced, particularly in relation to the challenges for second generation children of immigrants, born in diaspora. However, for me, language, culture, and my mother as proxy for my Taiwanese heritage were so inextricably intertwined, after losing her, I spent much of my young adulthood wondering what, if any, connection remained for me to my culture.
Only much later, after I had become a mother myself did I find my way to Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1995) and AsianCrit (Chang, 1993), legal theories which had been applied to educational contexts (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and became central to my own collaborative work in analyzing the experiences of Asian and Asian American teachers (Kim & Hsieh, 2022). The tenets of AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018), particularly those of Asianization, transnational context, (re)constructive histories, and story, theory and praxis, also help me to reframe my own history, authoring a counterstory to my initial sense of shame and disconnection to my culture. Asianization, or the unique forms of racialization experienced by Asian diasporic peoples in Western cultures, highlights polarizing dichotomies of invisibility and hypervisibility (Kim & Hsieh, 2022) upheld by the Model Minority (Lee, 1996) and forever foreigner (Tuan, 1998) stereotypes. Transnational contexts consider the ways that journeys and contexts of (im)migration, generational differences, and (dis)connection to Asian heritage cultures may shape Asian Americans’ relationships to others and their own identities (Kim & Hsieh, 2022). (Re)constructive histories and story, theory and praxis bring forth authentic and often silenced narratives to understand and reclaim experiences often discursively framed through white supremacist lenses or simply erased from consciousness and the historical record (Iftikar & Museus, 2018).
In my experiences as a diasporic daughter, aspirations towards becoming a dutiful “Model Minority” to fulfill the wishes of my mother, came into conflict with my socialization in an American culture that prized individualism. My mother, as an immigrant, was cautious to not to make waves, and wanted me to similarly hold myself back for a chance at conditional acceptance. I was hypervisible only when standing out in socially acceptable (academic) ways and when asked how I learned to speak English so well. My affinity for English (Language Arts) and literature was received curiously by those outside of my family and seemed to me like an invisible marker of shame, ingratitude, or wastefulness, given the sacrifices my mother had made for me. I spent many years wondering if I should have chosen a path in the STEM fields (which was expected of me by society and might have been more lucrative and prestigious for my family) rather than pursuing a love of humanities, social science, and eventually, teaching. My mother’s migration experience and her inability to return to Taiwan (for financial and cultural reasons following my parents’ divorce) left a void for her and for me that felt like a severance from our Taiwanese roots. My mother’s premonition that I would regret not learning Mandarin was true, not because of potential career advancement, but because it would make reconnection with her and with Taiwan more difficult following her death. I understood my loss of language to be a lack of cultural connection to Taiwan and another huge source of shame. For years, I watched non-Taiwanese, non-Mandarin speaking friends visit Taiwan without a second thought, but I could not bring myself to go. Through AsianCrit, I can finally see the ways that linguistic colonialism and racial socialization shaped my (unachievable) early aspirations towards a white ideal, my desire to (not) learn Mandarin, and my sense that my cultural ties were represented solely by linguistic competence. Using AsianCrit, I can also reframe and reclaim my connection to my mother, grandmother, and their ancestral land and language, while acknowledging the deep sense of loss at not sharing the same language, frames of reference, and grounding in my mother(’s) land. Through this reclamation, I can heal the wounds of language loss and consider a path towards cultural understanding.
Mothering in Diaspora: Holding Space for the Unknown
My youngest child is my “mini-me.” I see in her worlds of possibility. She has grown up in a middle-class family where she has never known scarcity, with two parents who have roots in other countries (Peru and Taiwan) but have grown to adulthood in this country. She has grown up in a multilingual household where there are multiple languages that are distinct and overlap, that come through in song, media and phone calls and meetings with friends, that are valued as they are, often more fluid than fluent, as we forget the words or find them better expressed in another tongue.
My daughter began kindergarten online during a global pandemic, when people who looked like her mother were being targeted for violence. She began kindergarten 90% in a language (Korean) that was new to everyone in our home except for her brother who had studied a year of foreign language instruction in his middle school. Upon her return to school, she has been in lockdown at least once a year. In her four years of Korean Dual Language Immersion (KDLI) elementary school, she thrived linguistically. On the side, at home, she dabbled in learning French, Spanish, and Arabic.
When we moved last summer, “heritage school” (on Saturdays) was the simplest way for her to continue learning Korean. There was no KDLI program developed enough for her, and so we enrolled her. In this school, a heritage school, where she, a non-Korean Korean speaker tested into the advanced class, I saw my daughter experience shame and struggle with her language for the first time. Within weeks, she began to resist completing her homework and going to class. Even after moving her down to the advanced intermediate class, she struggled, not because of the language but because the other children made her feel ashamed of who she was, experiences she didn’t have and things she didn’t know. My heart hurt for her. After 8 weeks, I made the decision for her to stop going to heritage school.
I want my daughter to love language(s). I want her to feel whole and proud of her expanding and expansive language repertoires. I want her to be proud of her cultural and linguistic heritages and knowledge, including and beyond language. And yet, even as a literacy and language educator and scholar, and especially, as a child of diaspora, I don’t yet know how to create and hold a space I am only discovering now, alongside her. I understand conceptually the idea of “decolonizing” my mind, but in practice, it is much more difficult.
Unpacking Contexts
After my mother’s death, in college, I had spent a year abroad in France where I developed my French language skills to the level of proficiency necessary for higher education in French. Less than a year later, I met the man who would become my husband, a generation 1.5 immigrant from Peru who came to the US at age nine. He still spoke Spanish to his parents and has facility in both Spanish and English. My youngest child, J, was born in 2015, in Southern California. I was an assistant professor of secondary literacy at the time of her birth. By the time she turned three, I had achieved tenure. My husband began learning Arabic when J was six, at the local mosque. J’s older brother, my son, N, nine years her senior, spent 9 years learning Mandarin in two Mandarin immersion programs and in two heritage schools (Hsieh et al., 2020). In middle school, he began to study Korean as his world language elective.
J’s entry into a Korean Dual Language Immersion (KDLI) Program was through a confluence of circumstances. The spring prior to kindergarten (2020), we had toured our neighborhood school, walking through three kindergarten classes, two in English (including one focused on English instruction for emergent bilinguals) and one in Korean (KDLI). The principal explained her desire to start a Spanish Dual Language Immersion (SDLI) pathway. Because we wanted J to learn Spanish, one of her heritage languages, we asked the principal to put her on the waitlist for the possible SDLI pathway. When the COVID-19 pandemic shifted instruction to a virtual setting, there was no longer enough interest in SDLI at the site. Because we wanted J to go to our neighborhood school and because we valued multilingualism in our family, we enrolled her in the KDLI program, even though only N had emergent knowledge of Korean as a language.
J rapidly developed Korean language skills, being able to read, write, listen, and speak at levels that surprised her teachers, given that we did not speak Korean at home. Alongside Korean, she strengthened her reading and writing skills in English, she studied some Arabic in Sunday school alongside her father, as well as asking him to teach her some Spanish phrases at home. We moved to the Pacific Northwest in the summer before she started fourth grade. Because KDLI was not an option, the only formal learning environment for her to learn Korean was a Saturday Korean heritage school. I was reluctant to enroll her in heritage school because I had struggled with heritage school pedagogies in Mandarin when N attended heritage school (Hsieh et al., 2020), however, I felt at a loss to support her Korean language skills in other ways and reluctant for her not to have opportunities to continue her language development.
She entered Korean school, and almost immediately it was clear that it was not an affirming space for her or for our family. Despite her strong academic Korean level, she felt completely lost in her first week in the advanced Korean class and asked to be moved down. Even in the advanced intermediate class, she felt completely out of place, noting that her classmates spoke Korean to one another on breaks, expressed shock that she had never been to Korea, and pointedly corrected mistakes she made when they were working in groups, shaming her for not knowing everyday phrases that seemed very basic to them. In both her classes, it was assumed that all families spoke Korean, and I felt badly when the teacher noted that she would translate the homework assignment for our family (exclusively) each week. J quickly became resistant to going to Saturday school and to doing the homework, crying and expressing anger when she had to do the work. She was not doing this in relation to her elementary school homework, so we knew this was a challenge related to heritage school. After 8 weeks, she stopped attending school and we are now in the process of looking for options for individual tutoring within my professional and personal networks to support J’s ongoing language development in Korean.
Theoretical Healing
While I did not realize it, linguistic theory held insight into why I never felt adequate in my language development and could also provide a site of healing for me to reclaim the ways language(s) and culture(s) have shaped and continue to shape the way I see, walk in the world, and mother. My experiences with heritage language learning, and those of my children in formal heritage school settings, have been determined by an understanding of the goals of language as developing and retaining full (i.e. native speaker level) proficiency. Our incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2002) of language, manifested through our inability to function in and across linguistic settings with “perfect” language skills signaled our own inadequacies, both in language, and for me, as cultural connection. Translanguaging (Garcia, 2009; Wei, 2018) as a decolonial approach (Garcia et al., 2021) to applied linguistics, language development, and language education, however, provides a site of healing, both for my daughtering and mothering self, and for others in similar positions to those of my family. Translanguaging as theory helps to conceptualize the complexity, nuance, and heterogeneity of language practices for people who are multilingual. By broadening notions of multilingualism to include people with diverse language repertoires and varying “levels of proficiency” related to different tasks, translanguaging considers language in terms of linguistic repertoires that shape and help us make and communicate meaning of complex situations in a globalized (and racialized) world.
Terms like incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2002) and research highlighting “significant gaps in linguistic knowledge” for (adult) heritage speakers when compared with peers of their age who are “fully competent in a language” (Montrul, 2011, p.158) reinforce deficit ideologies related to perceived linguistic competence, including beliefs held by multilingual people themselves. Increasing globalization which has expanded language varieties, cross-linguistic contact, and new models of communicative competence challenge dated notions of native speaker models as the marker of linguistic competence (Hodgson, 2014); however, notions of inadequacy among multilinguals who are not native speakers often persists with individual and social consequences. In my story of language learning, a sense of inadequacy has prevented me from feeling a sense of connection with my heritage culture and from visiting my mother’s homeland because of the shame of perceived linguistic incompetence. I can see this hesitance passed down to my own children who struggle to engage their full linguistic repertoires in situations where they feel judged for what they know or do not know (both linguistically and culturally).
Translanguaging, however, offers possibilities for racialized bilinguals which affirm their cultural and linguistic knowledges, abilities, and navigation, acknowledging the complexities of language learning, development, and use, particularly related to raciolinguistics (Garcia et al., 2021). Allowing for the vast heterogeneity of language practices in an expansive rather than hierarchical way, and examining how sociopolitical contexts shape linguistic perspectives, permits me, as someone who has always felt a “loss” of her heritage language to find theoretical healing. Through this framework, I can acknowledge (and mourn) the loss of culturally embedded linguistic competencies that came with my mother’s migration journey, the sociopolitical forces that shaped her trajectory, and my subsequent upbringing in a society which upheld monoglossic norms and stigmatized language practices of racialized communities while also affirming the cultural knowledge that shapes meaning making as I come in contact with my heritage languages, actively seek to learn them, and emotion as I use and speak them.
Translanguaging also allows for me to consider more diverse and expansive learning contexts given the goals and purposes of language learning for my children. For J, specifically, translanguaging allows me to listen to and co-construct with her how she wants to develop and use her linguistic repertoire (e.g. to connect with others; to explore language variation, structures, and ideas; to make meaning in specific media-based or cultural contexts) and to find spaces for her learning that affirm her personhood and her unique goals. My hope then becomes affirming her agency, her full cultural and linguistic repertoires, and her growth as a global citizen with particular layers of cultural understanding supported by linguistic development.
Creating the Possibility of Homecoming: Embracing Our Whole Selves and Communities
In my initial draft of this conclusion, I wrote, “I am painfully imperfect. I will almost certainly never be seen as fully American. I cannot be fully Taiwanese. And I am not meant to be,” however, in the process of writing and the exploration of theory, I realize that while there is truth to these statements, there are also other truths and possibilities. My hope for myself, for my children, and for other multilingual people, particularly those who have racially minoritized identities and histories of language loss in and across diaspora, is that we might find a way to create what bell hooks (1990) has called a homeplace, a space of affirmation, healing, and love within cultural contexts where white supremacy and deficit language ideologies do not allow for us to be fully seen. Whether in theoretical (i.e. metaphorical), virtual, or physical spaces, homeplaces where multilingual speakers can be seen and valued as part of evolving linguistic and cultural contexts can be spaces of resistance, wholeness, and community. As researchers who may be multilingual migrants and ParentScholars (Matias & Nishi, 2018), holding deep commitments to the creation of these homeplaces for ourselves and our families, we can continue to bring light to our experiences and those of others, hold them in relation to theoretical frameworks, push for criticality, and honor the complexities and future-shaping possibilities of our work.
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