Reencuentro: Using Puerto Rican Children's Literature as a Space for Social Actionings and Awareness

• In Event: Rememorying With Picture Books in the Formation of New Diasporic Literary and Anticolonial Caribbean Knowledges

Abstract

This presentation illustrates how three Puerto Rican educators and researchers partnered with a Puerto Rican children’s books author to engage in inquiry cycles around their experiences with Puerto Rican children’s literature, specifically Vicki and the Summer of Change by Raquel Ortiz. By engaging in dialogue and sharing/responding to written reflections, we unpack and demonstrate our process of what we mean by Reconoc-eR-– to acknowledge and to re-learn– in storying as transformational actionings to resist the conditions of invisibility, silence, and impossibility that sustain coloniality.
In order to center our lived experiences as part of our work towards epistemic justice, we draw from Women of Color feminist epistemologies that focus on intersectionality and how “social phenomena such as race, class, and gender….mutually construct one another" (Collins, 1998, p.205) and create a “situatedness [that] affects not just what [an individual] knows, but also how she or he knows” (Tuana, 2017, p. 126). Our presentation is also informed by Rhee’s (2020) concept of rememory, which entails a process of both forgetting and remembering at once; “Rememory is fluid with the past, present, and future…The remembering and the forgetting allow a different kind of thinking and enacting research, perhaps more bold and open to different possibilities (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 406).
For this presentation, we illustrate an approach that centers both collective sensemaking and individual self-reflection and writing. Our purpose is to highlight a critical methodology that provides “a space to pivot, pause, and reimagine how we as scholars doing inquiry with/for minoritized and marginalized groups perform and present our research” (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 402) We met four times through Zoom during the 2021-2022 academic year to share our stories about our schooling experiences, our interactions with Puerto Rican children’s texts, and the parallels and contradictions in our stories. We engaged in a recursive process where we transcribed our Zoom conversations and individually went through the transcriptions, annotating and highlighting themes we identified across the conversations. We then came back together to discuss our observations and engage in dialogue about similarities in our notes. Finally, we co-constructed a writing prompt based on commonly identified themes and ensuing dialogue. The prompt was as follows: Write about your process of ReconoceR (cycles of acknowledging and re-learning), your connection to education, literacies, each other, and/or stories through our conversations and explorations of Vicki and the Summer of Change. In what ways do these reflections lead to decolonial practices/actions? By responding to a co-constructed prompt based on our previous conversations and sensemaking, we hoped to “cultivate connections by accentuating the textures and relationships, even the contradictions, within and across common-disparate lives” (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 406).
We argue our collective approach supported our construction of new decolonial imaginaries that center community, knowledge and activism in literary analysis/discussion. This communal approach to literary engagement also surfaced the affective and proleptic possibilities of children’s literature when these texts are used as vessels for exploration of the self, history, and the future.

Authors

• Francisco L. Torres, Kent State University
  Presenting Author

• Astrid Nicholl Sambolín Morales, Kent State University
  Presenting Author