Undocumented Emergent Bilinguals as Professional and Activist Writers

• In Event: 64.085 - Centering Marginalized Voices: Emergent and Experienced Bilinguals as Writers "in the Struggle"

Abstract

The lived experiences of the undocumented multilingual young adults, who have made their way through college, and/or are currently enrolled at an institution of higher education in the U.S., offers a close look at how their undocumented activist experiences in immigrant rights advocacy shape and foster their bilingual language practices and ideology, specifically in academic writing.

With a conceptual framework modeled after García and Li Wei’s (2014) theorization of dynamic bilingual practices that ought to be studied from a transglossic perspective, and Flores’s call for language exploration through educational spaces that view racialized and marginalized bilinguals as language architects (2016), this paper focuses on Jung, a South Korean immigrant student who through his nine years of U.S. schooling (including college) has been categorized as an English Language Learner (ELL). Jung speaks, reads, and writes in French, English, and Spanish and he constantly negotiates these languages through his professional immigration advocacy work, in which the stakes of writing are extremely high because they are related to policy and deportation. However, Jung’s schooling settings rarely acknowledged or fostered these gifts. In fact, per Jung’s perspective, professors’ grammar checking as opposed to feedback over arguments, influenced his dislike for writing. As Jung put it, “I hated writing in college.” Yet Jung’s professional writing is extremely effective. It demonstrates how bilingual literacies are not only enriching to a person’s academic life but can explicitly challenge monolingual assumptions about citizenship and linguistic legitimacy.

Drawing from data generated from a larger three-year ethnography of the multilingual writing practices of twelve undocumented young adults in the U.S. South and Northeast, this paper traces one of the common patterns that emerged in the data (Saldaña, 2013), by which undocumented multilinguals treat their remarkable language and academic literacy negotiations as everyday happenings—and yet their schools have marked these students as in “need” of language. Over the course of the study, more than 450 pages of field notes and interview transcripts from nearly 30 hours of audio recordings and five hours of video footage, and 60 different multimodal and alphabetic-writing texts that young adults in this study produced in relation to immigrant rights advocacy were collected. Cyclical conversations via text message and email about the young adults’ writing were also added to the data, as a way to trace the academic texts within their histories and contexts (Lillis & Curry, 2010).

By examining these multilingual young adults’ politicized discourse, per their lived experience as undocumented immigrants who participate in out-of-school settings that foster biculturality and bilingualism (Author D., 2016), and via a focus on Jung, this paper offers strong insight on the emergent bilingual consciousness and practices of racialized and minoritized bilinguals, hinting at their extraordinary linguistic architecture. In addition, this paper shows the implications of pervasive monolingual ideologies in schools, and the ways in which these ideologies can work against the growth of academic writing.

Author

• Sara P. Alvarez, Queens College, CUNY