Storying Border-crossing Identities: Centering Young Latine/x Transnational Children and Youth’s Multimodal Writing With The Arts

• In Event: Methodologies for Exploring and Creating Narratives of Migration and Transnationalism in Various Contexts

Abstract

Significance: Latine/x children and youth of transnational mixed-status backgrounds are often perceived in education as not wanting to share about their identities, or about their lives across borders due to the risks of exposure. Under this perspective, it is easy for educators to ignore these students, and avoid learning about who they are and their stories. The purpose of the study is to explore what happens when Latine/x children and youth engage with multimodal writing with the arts and participatory methods to express their border-crossing identities and experiences.

Conceptual Framework: Identity is conceptualized as self-understandings always in the making, being shaped and reshaped by our experiences in and with the world in relation to intersectional social constructions (i.e. gender, race, class, etc.; Urrieta, 2009). For young transnational children and youth, identity becomes a more complex entrejido/weaving of experiences in, with, and across multiple worlds—border crossing identity. Here, we use border-crossing identity as a theoretical concept to capture and understand how the experiences with and across borders continue to shape the everyday sense of self and how transnational Latine/x children and youth author their identity to others.

Methods & Sources: Drawing from multimodal writing with the arts (Wager et al., 2017) and participation methods with children (Templeton 2018; Kwon, 2022), we explore how young Latine/x children and youth of diverse transnational origins document and story their experiences with and across borders. Data sources included children’s artistic creations and multimodal narrations created in an afterschool program in the Midwest. The analysis we conducted examines the internal narratives (Banks & Zeitlyn, 2015) of the stories documented by the children (e.g. what they choose to create, what places and people get included in their artistic creations) and the external narratives (e.g. what kinds of talk stem from their artistic creations, what aspects of their artistic creations express deep connections). The analysis braids together stories that Latine/x transnational children express about their border-crossing lives and identities.

Findings & Conclusion: The findings of this study demonstrate that young Latine/x transnational children and youth want to share their stories through a variety of multimodal artistic expressions. The internal narrative of their artistic multimodal creations demonstrates that children and youth chose to include important family members that live across borders, their homes and communities in and across borders, and the landscapes of their countries of origins. The external narrative illustrates and shares a humanizing view of transnationalism that centers border-crossing identities as complex and experiences that are shaped by family connections and loving relationships that are sustained across borders. Lastly, by integrating approaches and methods that center children’s narratives and identities, the stories were heard, seen, and listened to by all (i.e., children, youth, and researchers) forging complex understandings of Latine/x identities and border crossing stories. The study also provides insights to alternative approaches to writing and research methodologies that can expand our understanding of Latine/x transnational children and youth’s stories and identities.

Authors

• Shuai Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Qinchun Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Idalia Nunez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign