“There's nothing to read here…the newspaper is <i>cho cá</i>, for the fish!”: A Young Refugee‐Background Child Brokering Languages, Literacies, and Cultures as a Caring Multiliterate Practice

ABSTRACT This article shares stories of seven‐year‐old Anh, participating in brokering practices to support his mother at home as a caring multiliterate practice. We contextualize brokering as complex linguistic, cultural, social, and pragmatic negotiations, and emphasize the particularities and complexities of this affective labor that many children from immigrant and refugee backgrounds routinely undertake for their families and friends. Using perspectives of brokering, translanguaging, and multiliteracies, we share stories from a year‐long study and highlight Anh's capacities, care, and agency during brokering experiences. We describe how this young child supports his mother by providing kinship care for many daily tasks; ways that he guides complex cultural conversations for his mom; and also how he agentively resists brokering occasionally. Our analysis also emphasizes how intersectional inequities complicate the practice for Anh and his mother, and how he creatively communicates across languages, cultures, modes, and dominant white systemic expectations. Anh's stories highlight how an emergent bilingual's school literacies might appear to lag behind his peers while in reality he was performing complex and invisible multiliterate work at home. Valuing child brokering shifts attention to the profound capacities of young racialized children in understanding, mediating, and bridging the words, ideas, feelings, and actions of and for others. Implications center on systemic responsibilities to listen to children and family stories and recognize the significant language and literacy capacities that students demonstrate when brokering. In interpreting interactional and communicative forms with linguistic agency, affective competence, and creative problem‐solving, young children like Anh actively participate in translating cultures and navigating borders.