Literacies of Spatial Tense: Mobility and Indigenous Belonging

• In Event: Reenvisioning Educational Experiences: Lessons From (Im)migrant Communities

Abstract

The displacement of Indigenous communities in the settler colonial state generated by European expansion and US and Asian capitalist investments has created its own type of spatiality, its indigenous colonial transit (Byrd, 2011). Indigenous migrants extend, and in some cases, contract, Western temporalities creating new adjacencies that destabilize and partition notions of home, culture, and language. As migrant communities reinvent literacy forms and acts of social belonging, they interrupt Western education models that impose their own cognitive cargo and limitations. In this paper we examine the mediation and embodiment of literacy through (alter)native modalities and through multiple lenses and languages (simultaneously) beyond the normative cognitive process of textual decoding and encoding. To achieve our aims, we present an analysis of literacy activities in two diasporic communities in Northern California studied separately. The first is a group of Maya families from Yucatan, Mexico, at a Kinder-5th grade elementary school in San Francisco. The second is a group of youth and adults connected to Oceania, especially Tonga, who have created educational spaces within and on the periphery of the Oakland Unified School District.

We draw from Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2011) theorizations of social tense as the lived “divisions of tense that help shape how social belonging, abandonment, and endurance are enunciated and experienced” (p. 11). Extending Povinelli’s work, we advance the notion of spatial tense which we see inherently emerging out of the theoretical and pragmatic instabilities of human belonging in forced mobility, in the two cases we discuss, by displacement from indigenous lands. Reminiscent of chronotopic ontologies and their genres (Basso, 1984; Bakhtin, 1981), we argue that practices of spatial tense are actions that can generate or confine location and movement. In the context of the Indigenous communities we work with, the pragmatics of social tense become situated refusals of dominant spatio-temporal lines and trajectories; they are rejections of settler time and space, often in extended displaced, diasporic, translocal or transnational existence. By spatial tense we also mean the discursive processes whereby migrants, and children of migrants, create and engage literacies to both read and occupy graded locations that are beyond the “here” and “there,” often in projection of other(ed) spaces of belonging and further instability.
Our mode of inquiry is comparative and collaborative (De Genova & Ramos-Zayas, 2003, p.22). Drawing from ethnographic interviews and analyses of cultural and/or indigenous activities we discuss how participants in the two cases reappropriate literacies and mobilities, and enact versions of spatial tense that extend location and Indigenous belonging across regional, transregional, and multiple land/ocean locations. Maya students and families re-envision and learn to discursively represent and embody multiple spatial and temporal sites of belonging in classroom lessons and extracurricular activities. Young Pacific Islander students at an after school program re-embody traditional movements and gestures of family, a correspondence with kin both physically present as well as ancestrally. In all these cases youth and adults recall, create, and blend literacies across genealogy and space.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Nathan Gong, University of California - Berkeley