In this article, we examine fugitivity and fugitive literacies as they are enacted by transfronterizx youth—young people who cross and experience life on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. Through a community-based literacy project located on the border between El Paso, Texas, USA, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, this article focuses on storytelling and multimodal creation, what we refer to as multimodal cuentos. Findings illustrate the ways in which Chicanx/Latinx transfronterizx youth exhibit, build, and sustain their ways of resisting white, Western, hegemonic definitions of literacy through communication and creativity. We theorize the notion of fugitivity on the border and share potential implications for language and literacy education for Chicanx/Latinx border crossers.
This article highlights how Chicanx/Latinx youth draw on their lived realities as lenses to guide their inquiry and share their findings in a Youth Participatory Action Research project. In this project, youth collected testimonios from residents and staff within their migrant housing community to better understand histories of migration and community building. Drawing on a critical multimodal analysis framework which centers Chicanx/Latinx youth literacies and epistemologies, this article focuses on how youth drew on their community cultural knowledge and lived experiences in multimodal creation to bring attention to sociopolitical issues they cared about and impacted their community.A fter collecting oral and written testimonios from residents at Comunidad Miravalle, a migrant housing complex, youth researchers spread their data across a large table to collectively analyze the lived experiences of their community members. They highlighted excerpts of printed-out testimonios in different colored markers, cut up pieces of text, and made piles according to themes that emerged. During a break from this youth-driven data analysis, I posted a question on the dry-erase board that asked, "How is your interpretation of the data different than if someone else was looking at it?" In his journal response, David stated, "Because we have lived it and we studied all these things. " Similarly, Rolando's journal response read, "Because [the other person] is just reading it, not knowing […] all that the people that live here go through. " Through their writing, David and Rolando both highlighted the epistemological orientations Latinx youth bring to youth participatory action research (YPAR). Their words emphasized the knowledge and expertise that comes from living one's own reality and bringing that understanding to inquiry. Like David and Rolando, other youth in the group recognized the sensibilities they carried with them as assets to their research. They agreed that being members of Comunidad Miravalle offered them a unique perspective that others would not have when looking at the data. This knowledge is central to understanding how literacies are embodied, reflective of lived experiences, and leveraged by youth who are given the opportunity to participate in community research.Scholars have looked at the unique knowledge Chicanx/Latinx 1 youth bring with them to their literacy practices, especially how those literacies reflect the experiences of navigating racialized, gendered, sex-
In this article, the authors take a reflective, self-study journey that digs into their own embodied literacies as Chicana feminist literacy researchers. Chicana/Latina feminisms offer an/other angle for exploring embodied literacies and are one way to center bodies and knowledge from the margins. The authors emphasize Anzaldúa’s concept of geographies of selves as an entry point for theorizing the embodied literacies of Chicanas/Latinas. To support this excavation process, the authors demonstrate how autohistoria-teoría, as a methodological approach to literacies, can be used to locate, narrate, and document the embodied literacies of Chicanas/Latinas. The findings demonstrate how places and people shape knowledge and ways of reading the world and thus impact the literacies imprinted on bodies.
This article narrates the contours of a digital “kitchen table talk”–a conversation that brought together WoC from various areas of literacy and language education to discuss the state of the field and the next steps in transforming literacy studies and education for GFoC. Using bell hooks’s concept of “homeplace,” we bring together the reflections of eleven WoC across intersected Black, Latina, and Asian identities to examine the realities of GFoC, the urgency around their lives and needs, as well as self-examination of our role in the academy taking up feminist projects with GFoC.
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