There is no shortage of narratives explicitly or implicitly denigrating bilingual students of color in academia or in broader societal discourse (De Costa, 2020; Flores et al., 2020; García & Solorza, 2021; Valencia, 1997). In the field of education and educational linguistics, assets-based pedagogies and orientations in language learning and teaching have emerged in recent decades to challenge damaging orientations that have historically dominated and continue to pervade today. One formulation of assets-based pedagogies is valuations of culture through metaphors of capital, such as funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) and community cultural wealth, including linguistic capital (Yosso, 2005). Thus, this review seeks to describe how ideas of culture and language have emerged and evolved from an asset-based perspective, in addition to dissecting metaphors of capital to deconstruct what these discourses consider valuable and describing the affordances and limitations of these framings.