Legitimizing Language Traffick(ing) Through a Community of Support

Abstract

In this chapter, we tell our stories as four bilingual Latin American marriage and family therapists (MFTs) who have been coming together to form a community of support. Our stories highlight the complexities of providing therapeutic services in a language different from that of our training and the mainstream understandings of bilingual clinical work. The chapter illustrates how the work developed in our collaborative community has helped legitimize the unconventional ways in which we practice. Individual narratives provide examples of clinical language and therapeutic practices, which include language traffick(ing), palabras de a centavo and terapia de la calle. Our hope in contributing this chapter is to expand the field’s interest in the topic of therapy in languages other than English.