Narratives de la Frontera: Examining Multimodal Cuentos as Fugitive Literacies on the Mexico/U.S. Borderlands

• In Event: 51.032 - Finding Freedom and Fugitivity in Literacies: Multimodal Narratives as Lived Resistance in Educational Spaces

Abstract

Our current political climate heightens the ways in which the histories and stories of immigrant and Latinx communities are positioned and read through White, Western frameworks (Ghiso & Campano, 2013; Saavedra, 2011; Patel, 2016). What has been taken up as truth and evidence in the classroom (k-16) and in community spaces frequently omits the knowledge, meaning making, and modalities that emerge from Chicanx/Latinx households and communities (Alvarez, 2017; Flores, 2018). This oversight is especially prevalent today, as racist-nativist discourses continue to criminalize and dehumanize the lives and bodies of those who live on or between physical borders (Perez Huber, 2015). Taking up this symposium’s theme of fugitivity as a way of tracing methods of refusal, resistance, and destabilizations, we present empirical data (e.g. narratives, stories, multimodal texts) from transnational, undocumented, mixed-status families situated in cross-educational settings on the Mexico/US border. We argue that the city of El Paso, Texas is a space to recognize fugitive knowledge through the lived experiences and literacy practices of community members who navigate learning in a borderland context (Durá, Salas, Medina-Jerez, & Hill, 2015).
This study explores the multimodal cuentos of Chicanx/Latinx youth and undergraduates in both the classroom and in community learning spaces. Multimodal cuentos are [digital] stories that illustrate how youth make meaning from their lived realities around knowledge production, culture, teaching and learning. These cuentos incorporate knowledge and experiences from both formal educational spaces and from youth’s own family and community literacy practices, showcasing how Chicanx/Latinx literacies expand traditional boundaries of learning while also leveraging multiple modes of composing. The authors highlight how multimodal cuentos and their respective pedagogical frameworks reflect the alternative narratives and ways of knowing that exist across, along, and on the border, demonstrating what the idea of fugitive literacies encompasses in the borderlands.
We situate our analysis of these multimodal cuentos within a Chicana feminist theoretical framework that acknowledges Chicanx/Latinx writing and communication practices as inherently polyvocal and multimodal (Anzaldua, 1987; Cruz, 2006; Gonzales, 2018; Peña, 2007; Rios, 2015). Within the field of education, Chicana feminist scholars have highlighted these processes of knowledge production to reframe the deficit discourses that emerge around Latinx/Chicanax students across k-16 educational spaces (Delgado Bernal, 2006; Yosso, 2005; Perez-Huber, 2009). In doing so, they have emphasized the rich cultural, linguistic, and embodied knowledge and literacies that exists in Chicanx/Latinx homes and communities (Saavedra, 2011; de los Rios, 2017;). Chicana/Latina feminists have also explored alternative sites for knowledge production, such the metaphorical borderlands. Exploring multimodal cuentos builds on and extends this work by providing illustrations of how youth negotiate meaning on and across contemporary physical borderlands. This paper, thus, takes up the idea of fugitivity as both a physical process of crossing borders and a lived practice of making meaning through various forms.  

Authors

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Texas at El Paso

• Laura Gonzales, The University of Texas - El Paso