The importance of grandparents in bilingual education in the borderlands

Abstract This investigation draws from the concepts of agency (Bourdieu 1990), Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso 2005) and neoliberalism in multilingual education (Del Persio and Wong 2020; Martínez-Prieto, 2025, 2025a), to analyze the way bilingual pre-service teachers (n = 50) make sense of the contributions and systemic segregation that their grandparents experience in the bilingual educational system at the Rio Grande Valley (RGV), Texas. This case study is based on the analysis of students’ reflections (n = 50), the author’s field notes (n = 23), and the analysis of pedagogical materials (n = 42) at the research site. Because of the neoliberal orientations of U.S. society, along with hegemonic notions of family structure in current academic discussions, pre-service teachers found that formal education has not acknowledged the contributions that grandparents have made to linguistic and cultural preservation in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In a similar tone, despite their contributions, grandparents are not always considered active and meaningful members of their community by the Texas educational system. Notwithstanding such lack of recognition, pre-service teachers emphasized that transnational grandparents in the RGV are agentive to continue being considered valuable and able to communicate with younger generations.