Diasporic Dreamers: Transborder Families Soñando Futuros

• In Event: Decolonizing Literacy Pedagogies Built From Border-Crossers’ Civic Saberes

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores the ways parents in transborder families write speculative narratives for children’s futures. I identify this practice as altermundos literacies, the practice of writing other worlds into being that can challenge the constraints imposed by racial capitalism (Kelley, 2002; Merla-Watson, 2017). I seek to answer two research questions:
(1) How are transborder parents’ literacy practices mobilized in the creation and enactment of speculative narratives for their family’s futures?
(2) What altermundos are evident in these speculative narratives?

Framework: This study uses a transborder lens and continues to build on work in border literacies to understand the knowledge, navigational skills, and complex understandings that come from lives built between and across geopolitical borders (Anzaldúa, 1987; Degollado, et al., 2021; Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2020). Crucially, this study understands imagination as a literacy practice—a way of writing that seeks “to see the future in the present,” (Kelley, 2002). To theorize the concept of altermundos literacies, I draw on scholars of Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and Latinx futurity who pose the kinds of what if’s that transborder families are also dreaming into being (Baudemann, 2016; Kelley, 2002; Merla Watson, 2017; Ramirez, 2004; Toliver, 2021).

Methods: Our findings come from an ethnographic study with ten mixed-status families in Puebla, México that took place over the course of one year. Participating families had recently relocated to México from the United States.

Data: Data includes field notes from participant observation and interviews. The sub-corpus of data in this study includes participant observations in five community workshops, ten informal visits with community members, and nine visits to families’ homes, as well as seven interviews with parents and ten interviews with children.

Results: Findings show how families dreams traverse innumerable oppressive systems within the U.S. and México and the varying rates of success they have in converting those dreams into tangible realities. I will share examples from two families with varying experiences dreaming their altermundos into being—Jayson and Linda’s family and Yadira’s family. Across both examples, I will show how the altermundos literacies developed in transborder families can invite all of us to imagine futures beyond borders.

Significance:
This study has implications for research, P16 education, and policy contexts. Findings demonstrate the power of family’s dreams to imagine new possibilities beyond current constraints that may challenge many researchers’ assumptions about what is normal. I also see the potential in this study to challenge the assumptions that can be made about families who are forced to parent across borders (Oliveira, 2018) and to signal the powerful role schools play in families’ dreams. Finally, these families point clearly to the policy constraints that are inhibiting their ability to bring their dreams into being, calling us into the lucha of challenging borders and dreaming new futures.

Author

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