From las semillas to el Arbol: Cultivating a Borderlands Biliteracies Framework

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

Abstract

Objectives: The concept of biliteracy has largely been theorized with an emphasis on its instrumentality in literacy instruction for bi/multilingual learners. While this framing has offered ways to recognize and implement biliteracy instruction with bi/multilingual speakers, it continues to privilege a traditional view of bi/literacy that is devoid of the racialized lived experiences and critical literacies of communities of color. Advancing biliteracy scholarship, we argue that biliteracy for bi/multilingual students of color must be reconceptualized to reflect their critical perspectives on their ways of reading and writing in the world, entrenched in their experiences and historical marginalization based on the intersections of race and language.

Framework: To develop the borderlands biliteraceis framework, we draw from border scholarship (Anzaldúa, 1987; Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981; Mignolo, 2000; Trinidad Galvan, 2006) to bring together important concepts that were the semillas to our collective dreaming and theorization of el arbol. The semillas we draw on are Nepantla and Theory in the Flesh, Border Thinking, Ruptures, and Bilanguaging Love. Together these concepts, in non-hierarchical or cyclical ways, cultivate el arbol representing Borderlands Biliteracies. We collectively propose and use this framework to analyze the anecdotes we shared from our lived experiences.

Methods & Data: We theorize from our borderlands experiences as people who navigated the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Specifically, we draw on storytelling as a methodology for analyzing our borderlands experiences. Our narratives formed as part of our borderlands biliteracies and expound on how we now read and write the word and world. Author 1 shares her story of bordercrossing to the mercados in Mexico and how her mother taught them to navigate that bordercrossing experience. Author 2 shares his story of spending weekends at his abuelita’s house and how the kitchen table became a source and space of subaltern knowledge. They analyze their experiences through the borderland biliteracy framework to elucidate the framework.

Findings: Our findings demonstrate that the home and family practices experienced by Author 2 and 1 were an example of borderlands biliteracies. The critical articulations, the embodied experiences, and the practices were examples of how Author 1 and 2’s families were trying to inculcate by offering them the biliteracies necessary for their own sobrevivencia. In turn, Author 1’s children also contributed to the collective effort of protecting one another from the physical and ideological borders, the surveillance, and the economic and political oppression they faced.

Significance: In this theorization and analysis, we endeavored to situate our borderlands experiences to demonstrate how schools can draw on community and home practices for teaching biliteracies. Moving away from the historical silencing of traditional literacies, borderlands biliteracies honor, value, and legitimize the teaching and learning of language and literacy that emerges from intimate home spaces, familial practices, and community knowledge. As such, for us, this is a reframing that must take place in theory, research, and practice allowing us to center racialized bilinguals’ epistemologies in biliteracy instruction, curriculum, and its approaches.

Authors

• Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Enrique David Degollado, University of Iowa

• Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, Arizona State University