This article regards the fast demographic shifts in modern American society as they manifest themselves in today’s classrooms in the United States. An attempt to express these twenty-first-century student identities is pointed out in data from an ethnographic case study exploring the literacy practices of one student of Filipino and American heritage. Créolization theory is employed to further debate and give context to local meaning-making emerging against global and colonial designs. This article adds a much required paradigm shift in education aimed at expressing student reality, supplying theoretical frameworks for further debate, and outlining the capacity for an active engagement with cosmopolitanism.