Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility

Abstract

Drawing from an ethnography with mixed-status families residing in Mexico, we examine what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people's innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible mononational institutions divided by borders. Through close attention to the literacy practices families engaged in as they applied for their children's U.S. passports from Mexico, we demonstrate how these literacies were not just about expanding authentic ways of reading and writing to include both U.S. and Mexican ways, but instead required unique transborder literacies across mutually unintelligible, racializing mononational systems so that children could (re)access their rights on both sides of the border. We argue that recognizing families’ complex transborder literacy practices of (in)visibility could offer a novel anti-oppressive lens to transform how educators make sense of the complexity of immigrant families’ literacies, movements, and educational supports across borders and national schooling systems.

Implications of the Science of Learning and Development for the Field of Literacy

“…In the area of literacy, scholarship has focused on the meaning-making and communication practices in which transnational people engage across contexts, for different purposes, and across time (Lam & Warriner, 2012). For example, literacy scholarship has shown the particular purposes of writing in transnational life, such as to establish economic need, acquire citizenship status, maintain intimate partnerships, and reflect on life (de los Ríos, 2018;Gallo & Adams Corral, 2023;Skerrett, 2012;Viera, 2016Viera, , 2019. Much of this work has focused on the specific uses of digital media and other technologies in transnational life and on building and sustaining transnational communities and multilingual reading and writing repertoires (Lam, 2014;Lam & Christiansen, 2022;Machado & Hartman, 2021;Martínez-Roldán & Sayer, 2006).…”

Documentation Status and Youth’s Critical Consciousness across Borders

“…The second study was an in-depth interview study with high school seniors in Pennsylvania from mixed-status Mexican-origin families who had previously participated in a multi-year ethnographic study with Sarah during elementary school. Young people from this study navigated inequities such as managing invisibility from government authorities to evade familial deportation alongside hypervisibility to access higher education or employment (Gallo and Adams Corral 2023).…”