(Re)constructing Latino Identities Through Multimedia Hybrid Narratives: Young Latino Men Composing Digital Stories

• In Event: Latino/a Students Using New Digital Technologies to Develop Hybrid Literacies and Craft Agentive Selves

Abstract

In this 21st Century, we know that youth, including Latino youth, actively transform content and recreate their realities through the use of digital tools. We believe that digital story production exemplifies the nature of this participatory culture, described as not only individuals consuming information but actively participating in the creation of content (Jenkins et al., 2006). As a multimedia hybrid narrative form, digital stories have been argued to be a means, through which people make sense of their world construct a sense-of-self, and/or narrate the self (Davis, 2009; Hull & Katz, 2006). In this paper we explore the digital stories of a small group of young Latino men within an out-of-school time program. We specifically explore the use of digital storytelling as a space where these young Latino men carved out and maintained multilayered identities through their cultural and material creations.

We view digital stories as hybrid texts situated in social, cultural, political and global contexts, therefore this research draws on the work in the New Literacy Studies (Barton, 2001; Street, 2003), multiliteracies (Kress, 2003; New London Group, 2000) and youth identity construction (Moje & Luke, 2009) for theoretical frameworks to consider the relational aspects of youth’s literacies and identities. Work within the New Literacy Studies examines the ways literacy practices, including multimodal literacy practices, are situated in social, cultural, political and global contexts, and the ways these practices and contexts play a role in identity construction (Bartlett, 2003; Moje & Luke, 2009). The research presented also serves to extend earlier work that takes a sociocultural perspective on multimodal literacy practices of Latino youth (e.g. McGinnis, Goodstein-Stolzenberg, Saliani, 2007; Moje, 2000; Sanchez, 2007) by exploring the ways Latino youth from Salvadoran and Dominican families use digital storytelling to explore, construct and recreate identities.

The ethnographic approaches of the New Literacy Studies were adopted to investigate the intersection of the youths’ identities with their multimedia hybrid narratives within out-of-school-time program We combined several data collection methods over a two year time span; in-depth and ongoing interviews, observational data obtained during the program hours, and review of the hybrid textual productions. Data sources were coded and categorized thematically based on the theoretical framework and grounded theory approaches (Strauss & Corbin, 1996). Particularly for this research, Kress’ (2003) notion of “design” provides an avenue through which we analyzed the multimedia hybrid productions of the youth.

This paper reveals that through their creation of hybrid narrative texts, the young Latino men mediate their experiences with their world, and shape their interpretations of life in relation to broader sociopolitical contexts. Each youth made use of the digital tools to represent, recreate, repurpose and retell their lived experiences - enacting selves through affinities, affiliations, and in relation to larger anti-immigrant sentiments. We discuss how each youth takes an authorial stance that is intrinsically shaped by local, national and global understandings. This paper will raise new pedagogical possibilities and questions about Latino youth as producers of digital texts in the context of today’s world.

Authors

• Theresa A. Mcginnis, Hofstra University

• Andrea Garcia, Hofstra University