Fighting to Be Heard: Latina Adolescent Girls and Their Parents (Re)Claiming Their Wor(l)ds Through Writing

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Education for Girls of Color

Abstract

This presentation illuminates the voices, stories and ways of knowing of four Latin@ adolescent girls, Blanca, Elizabeth, Rocky and Reyna, as they participated alongside their mothers and fathers, Alma, Rose, Valente and Samuel, in Somos Escritores/We are Writers bilingual writing workshops. Somos Escritores was a family engagement space, created with and for Latina adolescent girls and their parents, that invited families to draw, write and share stories from their lived experiences. Workshops were designed to open space for the intergenerational exchange of stories and experiences within an oppressive anti-immigrant/anti-Latin@ political context in the southwestern part of the United States that worked to continuously silence and control their ways of knowing and being (Abrego & Menjívar, 2011).
To understand Somos Escritores, and the Latina adolescent girls, mothers, and fathers who participated in this “third space,” this pedagogical space, and the stories that are shared, I weave together multiple perspectives. These perspectives include Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE; Delgado Bernal, 1998), third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) and Nepantla (Anzaldúa, 1997). A CFE centers the voices and experiences of participants and is “concerned with the knowledge about Chicanas [Latinas]—about who generates an understanding of their experiences, and how this knowledge is legitimized or not legitimized” (Delgado Bernal, 1998, p. 560). Both “third space” (Gutiérrez, 2008) and “Nepantla” –the in-between space (Anzaldúa, 1997/2012) provide a lens to describe the spaces of liminality that the girls and their parents occupy and the transformative possibilities of Somos Escritores as a hybrid space. Together, these theorizations of spaces and borders, real and imagined, provide a lens into the lived realities and ways of knowing of the girls, the “nepantleras” (Anzaldúa, 2002, 2009) and their parents.

As a participant observer (Spradley, 1980), I conducted a case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Yin, 2015) of a six-week series of Somos Escritores/We are Writers summer writing workshops. In this role, I working alongside the teaching team to organize and facilitate workshops. During the summer, girls and their parents attended weekly writing workshops where bilingual texts, discussions, writing, drawing, and oral storytelling were used as tools to invite girls and their parents to craft and share stories from their lived experiences.

Drawing upon ethnographic field notes, girls’ and parents’ writing, interview transcripts and video recording of workshops, I provide insights into the ways that girls and their parents are “fighting to be heard.” Findings will highlight how the sharing of intergenerational stories mediated the creation of a community of writers (re)writing their pasts and (re)imagining their futures. Implications highlight what we can learn from Latina adolescent girls and their mothers and fathers in this pedagogical space about who they are, what matters to them and what they envision for their futures in order to create more inclusive spaces in our schools and curriculum that centers their voices, wisdom and ways of knowing.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, The University of Texas at Austin