In this article, I share two critical incidents from the vocabulary lessons in an instructional cycle on immigration with third-grade bilingual students. In sharing these critical incidents, I seek to raise awareness of how colonial legacies of cultural and linguistic domination permeate translanguaging pedagogy. I use critical reflection, classroom discourse analysis, and positioning theory to unpack the assumptions that guided my approach to translanguaging pedagogy in these lessons. In addition, I investigate the relationship between vocabulary learning and identity development by examining how the students and myself, as their teacher, positioned ourselves and the other participants in relation to the target words and how the interactions during these lessons expanded or constrained opportunities for identity development. The findings of this study show that the language fluidity in these lessons gave students the confidence to share experiences, raise questions, and contribute their perspectives. However, the vocabulary instruction activities overlooked the complexity of the concepts taught and missed significant opportunities for enhancing students' identity development. Moreover, these missed opportunities were related to my own colonial understandings of identity. These results suggest implications for teacher professional development and vocabulary instruction from a translanguaging perspective.