Transcending the Challenge at the Library

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges immigrant families face in local communities is the harmful quality of mainstream deficit perspectives about immigration. This chapter focuses on a group of Latinx immigrant families' first experiences with local public libraries' education services within the New Latino Diaspora of the U.S. Southeast, which has been the migratory destination of many immigrant families in the last two decades. It discusses a study that interrogates the efficacy of two acclaimed literacy development programs, Every Child Ready to Read and Prime Time Preschool. These programs were facilitated by public libraries in the state of Georgia and attended by Latinx immigrant families with young children. The study findings illustrate how the families' engagement in the programs disrupted injurious social narratives that privilege whiteness and inhibit the recognition of Latinx immigrants as members of local U.S. communities and mainstream American society.