Passports, Papeles, and Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Borderlands Biliteracies: Centering Education on the Realities of Transfronterizx Communities (Table 12)

Abstract

Objectives: Through an examination of mixed-status families’ literacy practices around U.S. passport applications while in Mexico, we examine what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people’s innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible mononational institutions divided by borders. We demonstrate how these literacies were not just about expanding authentic ways of reading and writing to include both US ways and Mexican ways, but instead required unique transborder literacies across mutually unintelligible, racializing mononational systems so that children could (re)access their rights on both sides of the border.

Framework: Our research adopts a transborder lens, in which border crossers experience an in-betweenness as part of their everyday lives that actively counters the assumption of mononationalism and monolingualism (Anzaldúa, 1987; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020; Mignolo, 2000). By focusing on transborder parents’ literacies with and for their children, we seek to recognize ways of knowing, reading, and writing from lives at the margins as they engage in acts “of questioning, challenging, and pushing boundaries” that require deterritorialization (Degollado et al., 2021, p. 457).

Methods: The data presented here draws from a yearlong ethnographic study conducted
in 2016-2017 in 5 Mexican schools located far from the border with students who had recently arrived from the United States. This study unfolded when Trump was elected president to the United States, fostering a context in which children, parents, and educators regularly voiced concerns if the new administration could revoke their U.S.-born children’s citizenship. Study methods entailed participant observation in schools, community gatherings, workshops, and families’ homes as well as interviews and artifacts that provided descriptive validity across timescales and sources.

Data: Using a qualitative data software program we open-coded (Saldaña 2015) the
corpus of data, iteratively refining each code and its description. Here we focus on codes
such as ‘papeles’ [papers], ‘‘re/accessing citizenship,’ ‘border inspection,’ and ‘transborder geographies.’

Results: We highlight how families engaged in creative interactions around texts to facilitate their movement across institutions divided by physical and metaphorical borders. These are literacies that, depending on the context, facilitate invisibility or hypervisibility to those inspecting and policing borders. We highlight how parents, who developed a wide range of transborder knowledges through living undocumented in the United States, had to dextereously maneuver between literacies of invisibility—in which they sought to evade inspection and policing of their presence in the US and border crossing—with newer literacies of hypervisibility to document and prove their US-born children’s claims to movement and belonging within and across borders.

Significance: Schools on both sides of the border operate as sites of assimilation, where only certain literacy practices are recognized as actual literacies and ascribed value (Patel, 2018; de los Ríos & Molina, 2020). We argue that recognizing families’ complex transborder literacy practices of (in)visibility could offer a novel anti-oppressive lens to transform how educators make sense of the complexity of immigrant families’ movements, educational supports, and decision-making processes across borders and national schooling systems.

Authors

• Sarah Gallo, Rutgers University
  Presenting Author

• Melissa Adams Corral, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley
  Presenting Author