While recent literature advocates a translingual approach to pedagogy, the implications of such an approach for teacher identity development has been little explored. This article presents case studies of two English-dominant California teachers who learned Spanish: a Filipino-American teacher of Spanish, and an Anglo-American teacher of ESL. Both teachers were interviewed as they began teaching and again three years later, as they increasingly acquired leadership roles in ethnically-diverse educational institutions. Theorizing identity development as a process of self-authoring, and breaking new ground within this paradigm by including the now-experienced teachers' analytical voices as co-authors to this article, we explore the discursive resources and practices they appropriated in their early years of teaching as evidenced in their narratives, as well as the ways that their emerging translingual identities enabled participation across linguistic and social barriers.