"Espérate, Vamos a Echar Chisme": Latinx Immigrants Co-Designing Participatory Action Research Through Communal Research Literacies

• In Event: Toward Literacies of Agency: Centering Transnational and Transfronterizx Communities and Their Knowledges

Abstract

Purpose: COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted undocumented immigrant communities and racially minoritized peoples in the U.S. (e.g. Hasan Bhuiyan et al, 2021). For undocumented youth and their families in the U.S., COVID-19 brought an increase in physical and mental health challenges (Birkenstock et al, 2021), along with long disruptions in their social lives (Falicov et al, 2020). While there is increasing research on the experiences and literacies of un/documented immigrants during this pandemic (e.g., Ghiso et al, 2022), and on the solidarity practices of immigrant families during COVID-19 (e.g., Falicov et al, 2020), there is a dearth of research on how Latinx transnational immigrant communities have mobilized their own grassroots research and related literacies as resources to respond to the pandemic. This longitudinal participatory action research (PAR) study addresses this gap by asking: How do Latinx transnational immigrant families co-create a longitudinal PAR study on the impact of COVID-19 on their communities? What role does literacy play in this process?

Theoretical Framework: Analysis is grounded in Chicana feminist epistemology, specifically on Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of choques, or “the experience of cultural collision…[that]...is fundamental to a Mestiza consciousness” (Torre & Ayala, 2009, p.390) which arises from historical and ongoing colonization. To do so, we draw on Torre & Ayala’s (2009) theorization of “choques as theorizing spaces” and as “moments of contestation and creative production” (p.390) erupting from tensions, disagreements, and differences in power dynamics within PAR projects. This concept helped us analyze how difference and tension can facilitate collective and ethical knowledge production and transformation. We also draw on a sociocultural understanding of literacy (e.g. Street, 1983) to pay attention to how literacy is mobilized in this context.

Methods and Data Sources: Drawing from a longitudinal PAR study by/with 15 Latinx immigrants on the impact of COVID-19 on their immigrant rights organizing and communal education practices, we analyzed open-ended interviews, artifacts, and observations from the study’s first year, when community members were first co-envisioning the study, and co-writing research instruments. Iterative data analysis included deductive and inductive coding, analytical memos and member checks.

Findings: Our co-design of this PAR project involved (1) intergenerational and transcultural “choques” that required we mobilize literacy and language to negotiate and meet each other across our differing borderlands, and (2) reciprocal trust and intergenerational learning, through community-building practices like chisme, which allowed us to listen to one another, read and write research instruments, collect data, analyze and discuss research findings, in ways that attended to our differing cultural, linguistic and literacy practices, transnational identities, and experiences as research “subjects”. These findings helped us theorize “communal research literacies” as the sociocultural literacy practices that facilitate intergenerational and communal negotiations across language, culture, and power toward reciprocal learning within transnational immigrant communities engaged in grassroots research practice. These findings illuminate the complexity of Latinx immigrants’ transnational literacies (e.g. Lam & Warriner, 2012) and research expertise, countering dominant deficit-based understandings of our community’s power as complexly literate knowledge producers.

Authors

• Alicia Rusoja, University of California - Davis

• Yared Portillo, University of California - Berkeley

• Olivia Vazquez Ponce, Belmont Charter High School