This article reports on a teacher education program's preparation of bilingual paraeducators during a period of conflicting educational reform of structured English immersion in Massachusetts. Drawing on nexus analysis of discourses (R. Scollon & S. W. Scollon, 2004), we discuss factors faced by Latino educators. These include competing discourses, historical institutional inequities, and boundaries circumscribing the interactions between university and communities. Through the use of a participant's text as a re-semiotized means of representing the new potentials that bilingual paraeducators bring to the field of teacher education, "cultural bumps" emerge and directions for teacher education are presented. (Contains 13 footnotes and 1 table.)