Resisting Our Erasure: Our Language, Our Histories, and Our Futures. A CPAR Study with Emerging Multilingual Adults from Mexico and Central America

• In Event: Critical Ethnography to Interrogate, Organize and Imagine Justicia: Learning in, from, with, and amongst comunidad

Abstract

This study uses Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) to explore how emerging multilingual adults (EMAs) from Mexico and Central America navigate and resist dominant ideologies and barriers in English language learning spaces in New Jersey (Flores & Rosa, 2015). In partnership with members from a nonprofit workers’ center, the project centers community knowledge through pláticas (group dialogues) and testimonios (urgent narratives of histories), both rooted in historical Latinx cultural traditions (González, M. S., et al, 2003). These methods were used to co-construct research questions and surface personal and collective histories of migration, language, labor, and education. Framed by decolonial theory and critical pedagogy, the study challenges hegemonic definitions of valid knowledge and highlights the epistemic and political power of EMA communities (Freire, 1970). This transformative work questions epistemology, power, and truth, and also imagines more equitable, culturally responsive language education en comunidad en el futuro.

Author

• Amanda Marie Dominguez, Rutgers University