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Background or Context: Middle-school Girls of Color experience complex systems of relationships, structures, and situations in and out of school spaces. Their experiences, however, are often at the margins or excluded from middle school curricula and after-school programming. In this article, we focus on how young women engage with chisme to liberate themselves from social and academic pressures placed upon them. Purpose and Research Questions: Our study seeks to center and explore the ways of knowing and being of Latina/x middle school girls with particular attention to the role of chisme. We draw on Chicana/Latina feminist perspectives to address the following research questions: (1) How do middle school Latina/x girls define chisme? (2) How and why was chisme enacted or leveraged to co-create a trusting space in an after-school program for middle school Latina/x girls? Research Design: We employed a practitioner research inquiry design to explore chisme as a literacy practice of Latina/x middle-school girls in an after-school program. The after-school program, Latina/x Girlhood Narratives, was implemented in a middle school in a mid-sized, urban city in the Midwest region of the United States. Analytically, we engaged in video data analysis and qualitative coding analysis to examine the data. Results and Conclusions: Three main findings emerged from the study: (1) shared understandings: chismes, rumors, and snitching; (2) todo or la mitad del chisme: a process and product of confianza; and (3) from chismes to liberatory literacy practices of desahogamiento. Our study demonstrates how chisme, in particular, not only was vital to building and deepening confianza, but also allowed access to the girls' ideas for activities and pedagogies. The field of education must continue to work to make visible the ways in which Latina/x girls engage with themselves and the world in order to sustain better relationships with and for them, and to build pathways for Latina/x girls to see themselves as successful in schools and in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]