Enacting (De)Colonial Discourses: Chinese Immigrant Families Fostering Chinese Heritage Language, Culture, and Knowledge in the United States

• In Event: Raising Bilingual Children: Asian Immigrant Parents' Experiences in and Across Home, School, and Community Spaces

Abstract

Since the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Chinese immigrants have lived with ethnic discrimination and experienced anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S. This pattern of disparaging non-dominant cultures, languages, and identities in the “coloniality of being” of immigrants, including Chinese immigrants, remains today. Powerful ideological discourses are part of colonial legacies which exist in modernity to benefit the reproduction of dominant power. This paper examines Chinese immigrant parents’ discourses to answer the research question: How do Chinese immigrant parents’ discursive practices and ideologies push forward the decolonial project or perpetuate the colonial matrix of power?

Authors

• Nuo Xu, University of Utah

• Veronica E. Valdez, University of Utah