About the Book
Developed from the First Binational Symposium on border language issues, held in 1992, Open Signs brings linguistics, education, and public policy into direct conversation with the social realities of the U.S.-Mexico border. The book asks what bilingualism means when languages meet not in abstraction but in schools, families, public institutions, migration, and everyday border life.
Contributors include Margarita Hidalgo, Horacio González, Jesús Becerra Villegas, Santos Carrasco Arellanes, Thomas S. Donahue, and Gerardo López Cruz. Their studies address theories of bilingualism, the political and social consequences of U.S. language policy in the borderlands, and the ways bilingual children acquire literacy. Published by the Binational Press / Editorial Binacional, the volume extends the consortium’s original literary mission into the study of language as one of the border’s most consequential cultural practices.