Community-based and formal Chinese language education in urban California, 50 years after Lau v. Nichols

Abstract

Through ethnographic fieldwork and sociological theory drawing from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article describes possibilities and restrictions for Chinese language education for Chinese-diasporic youth in the San Francisco area, 50 years after Lau v. Nichols. I examine four sites of this education, all of which serve these youth across a range of socioeconomic and language backgrounds in the metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area: a longstanding community-based school in San Francisco Chinatown, a private after-school program in an affluent suburb, a public high school in an affluent suburb, and a public high school in a working-class and ethnically diverse city in the East Bay area. These sites are variably defined and distinguished by social struggles to acquire and define what Bourdieu called linguistic cultural capital, or the communicative practices culturally and economically valued within a social context. I argue that educational affordances suited specifically to the diasporic-multilingual backgrounds and competences of these youth remain limited, such that the “monolingual orthodoxy” of language education prevails due to multiple social factors, ranging from the rising eminence of Mandarin language to progressive ideals of racial educational equity.