Literacies of Refuge: "Pidiendo Posada" as Ritual of Justice

• In Event: Where Do We Go From Here? Reimaging Educational Contexts in the Era of '45

Abstract

The authors respond to Patel’s (2018) recent call to imagine both schools and literacy as a sanctuary for im/migrant communities and to work to provide concrete practices and networks that schools and teachers can engage to stand more deeply in solidarity with vulnerable communities. Toward this end, this paper explores how a secondary ethnic studies course in Southern California leveraged Latinx immigrant families’ literacies rooted in the Mexican spiritual ritual of Las Posadas for in-school literacy instruction and to engage in community-responsive grassroots processions as social protest. This inquiry weaves theories of cultural modeling (Lee, 2007), translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014), and “lived civics” (Cohen, Kahne, & Marshall, 2018) with immigrant family social movements literature to demonstrate not only how teachers can leverage students’ lived histories and knowledge of immigrant rights movements to foster meaningful purposes for reading and writing, but also why leveraging students’ cultural, and community-based knowledge is critical to the progress of literacy pedagogies and grassroots social change. Using collaborative action ethnography (Erickson, 2006) and participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), the authors—one a university researcher and the other an ethnic studies classroom teacher—examine the literacy practices of a decade-long immigrant community-classroom partnership that unites migrant day laborers, parents, students, small children, teachers, and administrators in the name of justice, human rights, sanctuary, and refuge. Homing in on the 2017-2018 academic school year and using photographs, semi-structured interviews, students’ classroom and community-based literacy artifacts, focus groups, and field notes, this study asks (a) What do literacies look like in an ethnic studies course that designed learning around local community knowledge and sanctuary? And (b) How do students respond to such curricular designing? Through the use of a collaborative cycle of data analysis and both deductive and inductive approaches (Miles & Huberman, 1994), this study presents and analyzes ‘literacies of refuge’—classroom approaches to reading and writing that affirm the rights, dignity, humanity, legal protection, and futurity of migrant communities—within the exacerbated sociopolitical climate, and offers a discussion and implications for classroom practice and further research. Of significance, the authors highlight the academic learning involved in naming and mobilizing politicized “cultural data sets” (Lee, 2007) to the classroom as well as the transformative potential of leveraging students’ knowledge of contentious politics for in-school literacy instruction and civic education. Lastly, this paper contributes to ethnographic knowledge on school-based participatory and grassroots projects that build on the intergenerational literacies, socio-political awareness, and social movements of Latinx immigrant families in enduring climates of xenophobia.

Authors

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• Arturo Molina, Pomona Unified School District