This case study examines how preservice teachers make meaning of "American culture" while being cognizant of personal bonding between a Japanese ex-inmate and the community he connected with in prison--whom he refers to affectionately as his Chicano homies--in the college course "Culture and Languages of the United States." The study explores a more transformative pedagogical approach and aims to raise awareness of the preservice teachers regarding: how a knowledge of self in a sociopolitical sense enables their teaching to be more accessible and relevant to their students, and using counternarratives to widen the teachers' worldviews to create more inclusive teaching practices and rebuild equity and justice in education. This study examines how preschool teacher candidates at a Japanese university discussed Chicanx culture and how it was relevant to them reflecting and questioning the practice of equating the term with "American culture."