Speaking the Word and the World en la villa inmigrante: Translanguaging Praxis Through the Arts

• In Event: Collaboration for Transformation: Critical, Community-Led Action Research in Language Education Policy

Abstract

This paper discusses a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project with young people through the arts at a community center, Revolución Arte (RevArte), serving Latinx immigrant families. Connecting Freirean praxis with the concept of translanguaging, I explore how, through the arts, young researchers spoke the word and the world to reflect on the complex web of language-based power relations and institutional practices upholding longstanding inequities for them and their families. I also show how they engaged in translanguaging praxis (Author et al., 2019) to create artwork to challenge such inequitable power relations and practices.

In the paper, I use the term villa inmigrante to conceptualize how immigrants understand and reconcile the multiple, conflicting realities they face daily (Arango, 2013). RevArte, part of la villa inmigrante, is located in a town that has become home to thousands of Latinx immigrants in recent decades. RevArte runs arts programs year-round for young people and adults. Research participants included 30 young Latinxs ages seven through 12, six Latinx high schoolers, and six teachers, both Latinx and non-Latinx, who created bilingual poetry, film, theater pieces at RevArte’s three-week summer camp. Guided by YPAR (Caraballo et al., 2017), participants first identified concerns and questions about how they used Spanish and English. They then developed and analyzed language surveys for their peers. I describe how through translanguaging praxis, they used survey data to reflect on and revise poetry, film, and theater pieces they created on the topics of immigration, bilingualism, and biculturalism.

By praxis, I mean “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970, 79). Such praxis does not exist outside of the dialectical relationship of action-reflection and practice-theory (ibid, 156). Thus, theory and practice are continually formed and reshaped in relation to each other, and praxis is grounded in critical dialogue (ibid.). To explore how participants engaged in translanguaging praxis, I draw on both translanguaging practices, “multiple discursive practices in which bilinguals engage in order to make sense of their bilingual worlds,” (García 2009, 45) and translanguaging pedagogies, or teaching through the strategic use of students’ language practices. Translanguaging praxis then involves reflection-action and theory-practice guided by translanguaging practice and pedagogy. What I show in this paper is that translanguaging praxis, through and with the arts, can serve to challenge longstanding inequities Latinx immigrants face in their daily lives. I argue that translanguaging is not only a political act (Flores, 2017), but that it can also be a critical, rebellious and creative one through which educators, students and families can respond to dominant narratives on Latinx immigrants in the US, speaking the word and the world and co-constructing counter-stories through which they express who they are from their own perspectives and in dialogue with each other.

Author

• Holly Link, Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Eduación (CCATE)