This qualitative study examines Mexican-American emerging bilingual children's depictions of their lives in the form of written narratives and drawings as a window into their own understandings and interpretations of social contexts and life experiences. Narratives that include drawings were collected once a month in a first grade classroom during one school year in a two-way dual language school set in a border city that serves mostly Mexican-American students. Children's written and pictorial depictions of their experiences suggest they viewed their roles as valuable contributors to the family's well-being. They used both multimodal semiotic systems to express their social understandings of family and community networks, and their roles within them.