Southwest Borderland Voices and Stories: Community Cultural Wealth as Living Literacies

Abstract


 
 
 This study qualitatively examines the literacy experiences of three Southwest Borderland Latinos who left high school before graduating. Addressing a gap in the literature that reveals the limited attention paid to how students who left high school before graduating generate and use community cultural wealth (Burciaga & Erbstein, 2012), this investigation explores the vibrant role and contribution of community cultural wealth in literacy development. Through the frameworks of New Literacy Studies (NLS) and family literacy within the context of the Southwest Borderlands, and employing the tool of counternarratives through a Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) lens, this study provides a platform for validating and affirming the voices, stories, experiences, and knowledges of the research participants. Utilizing portraiture as the methodology illuminates the living literacies that transpired when the participants read their world and the word (Freire, 2006). 
 
 

Listening for the Literacy Story: Implementing Holistic and Asset‐Based Literacy Curriculum through Literacy Portraiture

“…I n this discussion, I advocate implementing literacy portraiture within the school-based literacy curriculum when working with culturally and linguistically diverse adolescent and adult learners. My experience utilizing literacy portraiture with Latinx adults (Henderson, 2020) and in pre-service and inservice contexts proved a holistic and humanizing approach (Freire & Macedo, 1987;Kabuto & Harmey, 2020;Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 2005) that speaks back to deficit-thinking stances (Valencia, 2010) and fosters asset-based perspectives. Literacy portraiture served as a valuable tool for illuminating the individual and their uses of multiple and multimodal literacies, highlighting varied pathways towards literacy and recognizing the essential role of family and community in literacy development.…”