Exploring Mujerista Literacies Among Chicana/Latina Youth

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

Abstract

This paper examines the literacies of four Chicana/Latina youth over a 7-week Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project in an im(migrant) housing community in the rocky mountain region. While many scholars have taken up work around the literacies of students of color (Paris & Alim, 2014; Morell & Duncan- Andrade, 2005; Jocson, 2016), there is a dearth of literature that examines and emphasizes the literacies of girls and young women of color, particularly for Chicana/Latina youth. This silence[ing] is frightening considering the continued global and national attacks on women—their lives, bodies, and knowledge (Winn, 2010). There is, thus, a moral and political imperative to reveal the literacies of young women of color to support them and serve as allies in addressing and resisting systemic oppression and social injustice. The author situates her discussion of mujerista literacies within the broader theoretical concepts of Chicana feminisms, critical literacies, and Black girl literacies. From this framework, she specifically highlights mujerista literacies as literacies that take up specific feminist/womanist (Walker, 1984) politics to disrupt dominant systems of oppression and work towards sociopolitical re-imaginations and change.

In this YPAR project, youth collected and analyzed testimonios of residents in their migrant housing complex. This paper specifically focuses on how the young women on the youth research team used various texts, practices, and platforms to make meaning and to share their ideas. The analysis for this paper in focuses on how these young women participated in various aspects of the project and what this looks like across modes (visual, aural, written, gestural, embodied, etc.) and through particular modalities (pen for writing, plática for dialogue, body for gestures, etc.) (Jewitt, 2005; Omerbasic, 2015; Vasudevan, 2014). The author thus, takes up multimodality as both a theoretical orientation and as an analytical method through which she examined and coded data.

The findings discussed in this paper expose how the mujerista literacies of the young women in this study are located within their bodies, reflect Chicana/Latina pedagogies, and move across geopolitical spaces and borders. In line with the ways in which Chicana feminists have identified knowledge production as often contradictory, ambiguous, and tension rich, the literacies of these young women are also messy, making visible the how they navigate competing discourses, cultures, and ideologies. The paper highlights examples from the data to showcase the various ways mujerista literacies emerged over the 7-week Youth Participatory Action Research project. The argue that mujerista literacies are (1) disruptive (2) reflective and shifting, and (3) em[bodied] and intergenerational. I demonstrate how these literacies unfolded throughout the summer and in different contexts. These findings show how examining mujerista literacies can provide a theoretical lens for illuminating the critical literacies of Chicana/Latina feminist youth as they make meaning of their lived realities and the worlds they traverse.

Author

• Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder