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Based on ethnographic fieldwork research of the authors in schools in Chiapas, Mexico, the article provides an overview of efforts being made to address the unique educational needs of Mexico's Indigenous populations through intercultural bilingual education programs. The article examines the Indigenous teachers' commitment to intercultural bilingual education, as opposed to their incomplete understandings of bilingual teaching practices and biliteracy practices. In so doing, the article questions the efficacy of top-down language education policies when they are State reactions to bottom-up efforts of revolutionary movements, such as the Zapatistas. Given the historical and socioeconomic oppression of the Indigenous populations in Chiapas, intercultural bilingual education acts only as a palliative, leaving the Indigenous peoples without the structural incorporation into the economic and political life of Mexico for which they struggled. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

Bilingual classrooms most often have strict language arrangements about when and who should speak what language to whom. This practice responds to diglossic arrangements and models of bilingualism developed in the 20th century. However, in the 21st century, heteroglossic bilingual conceptualizations are needed in which the complex discursive practices of multilingual students, their translanguagings, are used in sense-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today. Examining the case of a network of U.S. secondary schools for newcomer immigrants, the International High Schools, this article looks at how students' plurilingual abilities are built through seven principles that support dynamic plurilingual practices in instruction--heterogeneity, collaboration, learner-centeredness, language and content integration, language use from students up, experiential learning, and local autonomy and responsibility. As a result, students become not only more knowledgeable and academically successful but also more confident users of academic English, better at translanguaging, and more plurilingual-proficient. The article presents translanguaging in education as the constant adaptation of linguistic resources in the service of meaning-making and in tending to the singularities in the pluralities that make up multilingual classrooms today.

This paper describes the ways in which New York City schools have responded to the multilingualism of its children in the last 40 years, and suggests changes needed in order to accommodate the greater linguistic heterogeneity of the city. In the predominantly Puerto Rican community of the 1960s and 1970s, traditional bilingual education programs were the best way to educate language minority children. But in the twenty-first century, with the demographic shifts and the technological advances of a globalized world, other understandings of bilingualism in education are needed. The paper ends by suggesting ways in which traditional bilingual education may exist alongside other more dynamic approaches of bilingualism in education that consider the city's growing linguistic heterogeneity, thus constructing a future from the past. (Contains 2 figures, 4 tables, and 6 notes.)