In this critical ethnographic dissertation, I explore the expropriation of bilingual education and the cultural (re)production of eliteness through prestige trilingual education by immersing myself for ten months in a small, suburban, charter elementary school called Desert Language Academy (DLA) in the U.S. state of Arizona. Desert Language Academy uses a trilingual immersion model with Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and English as languages of instruction for all students in Kindergarten through sixth grade, and primarily caters to White and English-privileged families who live in the local suburb of Heavenly Hills. Desert Language Academy’s suburban location, private school history, and one-way world language orientation are unique factors that shape the school’s implementation, and are seen as products of Arizona’s legacy of restrictive, English-Only educational language policy and the state’s minimally-regulated “Wild West” school choice environment. A kaleidoscopic theoretical framework integrates social-cultural (re)production theory, neoliberal and neoconservative education policies and policymaking in Arizona, and raciolinguistic ideology in order to critically explore the experiences of students, teachers, and school administrators amid the school’s implementation and growth.The findings interrogate social, cultural, and linguistic processes, as well as political pressures, which have shaped the school’s evolution from private to public charter status, as well as its present implementation of a one-way world language model that prioritizes additional language learning and idealizes global citizenship for White, English-privileged, and affluent students. I specifically attend to the resistive language policymaking of racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically minoritized students and teachers who creatively used language and appropriated language policy in order to contest the construction of DLA as an elite school that excludes and Otherizes racialized peoples while White and English-privileged students are distinguished as elite, cosmopolitan, global citizens. This study critiques the role of multiscalar education and language policies in (re)producing the expropriation of bilingual education and its social, cultural, linguistic, and educational impacts on multilingual students, teachers, and administrators. In sharing these stories, I also intend to illuminate the discursive processes through which racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically minoritized students and teachers hope and demand for inclusive curriculum, instruction, and language policies.

Having adequate social networks and community connections is important for individuals, as it allows them to connect to resources, receive support from friends and family. This is especially important for individuals who identify with multiple minority identities, with this study focusing on LGBTQIA+ Latinx college students. The purpose of this study is to determine how individuals in social organizations, specifically ones that cater to specific minority identities, shift their multiple identities and self-presentation in response to the boundaries of membership and community. The study also looks at how they adapt these concepts to their social worlds, in which I describe social boundaries. Throughout the course of the study, by interviewing participants, observing their events, and analyzing the responses to the survey, it was found that queer Latinx students were interested in creating their own social worlds suited for their specific multiple marginalized identities. This was primarily due to participants acknowledging that due to the organizations focusing on only one aspect of their identity, they sometimes did not have the full support of their community. Participants also found that, by creating their own organizations, it allowed them to not only build their own support network but also provide one for other students. Even so, participants have also found that by making connections in their student organization and with friends within the greater LGBTQIA+ Latinx community at ASU, their interpersonal relationships have a higher determining factor in whether they feel connected to their respective communities, rather than through their participation in social worlds.

Social scientific scholarship has emphasized how parents’ undocumented legal status might influence the emotional, social, and economic well-being of mixed immigration status families, pointing to a greater need to better understand the lived realities of the undocumented population. Although Arizona is home to a large and growing number of undocumented migrants, a strongly anti-immigrant socio-political environment shapes the experiences and opportunities that migrants encounter. With an estimated 16 million people living in mixed-status families nationwide and over five million children under 18 living with at least one undocumented parent, deportability is an urgent social problem. This qualitative dissertation draws on narrative and discursive methods to shed light on the spatiotemporal dimensions of undocumented migrant mothers’ narratives, with a particular focus on the understudied area of how identities are constructed, performed and/or resisted in narratives of the future. Narrative inquiry is a useful method to explore issues of identity construction and negotiation in migration contexts. Theoretically, my approach leans on identity as a discursive practice, as contextualized and negotiated in storytelling. The study is further guided by a dialogic/performative approach to narrative. Analytic concepts, such as (im)mobility and imagination, and Bakhtinian theory of novelness, particularly dialogism and chronotope, also inform my approach to narrative analysis. Data come from sixteen hours of semi-structured interviews with seven undocumented mothers from Mexico who live in mixed-status families in Arizona. The findings show that the participants oftentimes felt at the bottom of the local social hierarchy due to their undocumented legal status. Furthermore, findings shed light on how the participants perceived, imagined, negotiated and sometimes resisted various social and spatial (im)mobilities in contexts of illness, loss, and grieving. The analysis also demonstrates how the participants navigate their spatiotemporal fragility through discourses of imagination and contrastive chronotopes as they raise their children and consider alternative timespaces for their future.