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Ana was a quiet, shy, six-year-old Mexican-American girl who spoke rarely in class. She was referred to me for counseling at school. We spent our first three sessions making bead bracelets together and speaking very little. I focused mainly on being friendly and present. Ana completed bracelets for herself and asked if she could make more for her sisters and cousins. I agreed and asked her to draw her family.
Ana drew a large extended family, and we wrote the names of all the people onto the drawing, adding the kinship terms in both Spanish and English: “grandma/abuelita,” “uncle/tio,” and so on. Ana was surprised when I asked her for the Spanish words.1 My Spanish is rudimentary, but I felt my lack of fluency was less important than my demonstration of openness to the fact that there were two equally valid languages in our shared field. I explained to her that I, too, speak two languages (French and English), and pointed out that between us, we spoke three languages. I was trying to dissolve the false insider/outsider opposition between Spanish and English, at the same time joining with Ana in a shared bilingual, bicultural status.
On the world map, we looked at California, France, and Mexico. We traced how far her parents had walked in order to get to America, framing this as a heroic journey. After this, Ana suddenly began to speak more. In fact, she changed from being almost silent to chattering happily nonstop in her sessions, telling me long, complicated stories about her family. It seemed simply validating her language, her family, and her family's story had created trust. But, as well as this, we had changed the predominant, hostile narrative about “illegal immigration” into a different family