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Recent news of immigration in the U.S. has focused on the criminal dimensions of the issue: from Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano's plea to the public to help out in domestic counterterrorism efforts to the recent refusal of the U.S. to create enforceable rules regarding immigrant detention (even in light of a report documenting the mistreatment of detainees in such facilities).

Youth Radio-Los Angeles wanted to get beyond the headlines and find out what immigrant youth in the U.S. have to confront on a day-to-day basis, especially in this economic climate. We spoke with Dr. Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, an Associate Professor in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Her recent book, Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth, Language, and Culture (Rutgers UP, 2009), looks at the way in which immigrant youth have to navigate the public sphere both with and for their families and how such experiences impact their development into adults.

Below she discusses with us the specific phenomenon of "language brokering," which is when immigrant youth have to translate or interpret for their family in daily life.

Q: Is Los Angeles unique in the amount of language brokering that occurs here?

FAULSTICH ORELLANA: So I guess the point I’m making about Los Angeles is that the specific work that kids do as language brokers may well depend upon two things: the particular neighborhood their families live in and what bilingual services are available or not -- and the activities their families are involved in. So every day life may mean going to the store, the bank, taking care of phone calls and some excursions of the immediate area to maybe buy specialized goods.

 Q: Did you ever come across a young person who had to help with something like a bankruptsy or foreclosure, something more complex than a day-to-day transaction?

FAULSTICH ORELLANA: I did watch a transaction that was a seemingly everyday innocent store exchange. The girl went with her father to try to rent an instrument; the father played in a band. In the negotiations about what instrument they could rent, there’s this way in which the transcript suggests that the store personnel was focusing on pointing them to lower cost instruments, emphasizing how much they cost, saying "Well, you have to pay you know." And so these are the subtle ways in which I think kids made sense of how their families are being treated as customers, [that they're] questionable, maybe can’t afford things. And in that sense, kids are mediating that. And in this case, the girl then helped her father to fill out an application for credit at the store and then ultimately they were denied the credit and they weren’t told why.

 Q: Does language brokering affect the parents as well? For instance, does it help immigrant parents assimilate into mainstream culture?

FAULSTICH ORELLANA: Absolutely. Kids are helping their families do things they wouldn’t do otherwise, making it possible to do such things like apply for credit, rent instruments and buy things at stores that might not otherwise buy. Kids are brokering especially the purchase of technology. I had a case of a girl--I followed her a long time--she’s helped her family through all kids of things from the time when they ran a restaurant. They were managers and owned an apartment building. [She helped] with the credit fraud case their family was involved in when someone was using their credit. So she had to help clear their name. Next, her parents are working toward retirement. Now she’s older; she’s in her twenties. So she’s not a child anymore, but she’s still the child of immigrants so, now, most recently, she has helped them in working out their retirement problem.

 Q: Have any of the youth you've interviewed ever been taken advantage of on account of their age?

FAULSTICH ORELLANA: I don’t have evidence about that, but I will say [that] the child is mediating, but parents are involved often more than people realize. Parents are reading the overall situation; they're reading body language, [and] parents may understand more English than they can speak, and so it's definitely not just falling on the child; but there may well be cases when this does happen. I do know some families I’ve worked with--the same girl that applied for the credit. They ordered a computer on some online special, and it didn’t work right, and they had a lot of problems with that. And the girl did try to call and get their money back and was unsuccessful. And whether they would have fallen prey to this anyway, it's hard to say, but she was the one who was involved in this and tried to help the family.

Q: Any final thoughts?

FAULSTICH ORELLANA: Often, when I speak to people about this practice of language brokering, the focus goes on, isn't the burden on kids and somehow it's the parents that are putting their kids in this position. But, I think it's really important to emphasize that kids are providing services not just to their parents, but to a whole array of institutions. And the financial domain is one of the ways that they're helping their parents to be consumers. And in that sense, their contributions to the economy should not be underestimated.