This article examines how students use gendered discourse practices in small peer group settings to accomplish their school tasks. The analysis contributes to the separate worlds hypothesis by showing how Latino children interactionally orient to their peer group as a gendered context. For 1 academic year, observations were made in an elementary bilingual classroom. The target 3rd-grade teacher referred to her student groups as "families," a label that emerged as a legitimizing metaphor for the group's collective action. In cooperating and competing to accomplish their school tasks, the students strategically used Spanish and English. Further, the girls in the "family" adopted a brokering role to facilitate group cooperation much as they would in their actual families. For bilingual children, gender differences are played out within a cultural milieu created at the junctures of home and classroom and at the intersection of language and ethnic identity.