Search

U.S. Latinx youth from immigrant backgrounds bring to schools their transnational literacies, complex lived experiences of marginalization and resistance, and politicized translanguaging practices that are seldom recognized in classrooms. This article examines U.S. Latinx bilingual youth who participated in a podcast project within a Chicanx/Latinx Studies high school course that mobilized their bilingualism for literacy instruction. This ethnographic classroom study explores a curricular unit that allowed young people to use new media technologies to tell important stories of themselves and their social worlds at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States. Through translanguaging and translingual frames, I demonstrate how Latinx young people contest racist narratives, reclaim who they are, and author new spaces for solidarity. Findings detail the ways that students utilized podcasts as a tool to promote creativity and self-expression, and to connect personal experiences to broader pressing discourses about immigration, language, racialization processes, and resistance.

Music remains a fundamental aspect of sociocultural traditions and environments. In this article, I explore a sierreño band of translingual youth artists and their appropriation of norteño music in their designing of new forms of expression. Employing the concept of communities of practice, I examine three youth musicians' experiences as members of a grupo sierreño (sierreño band) to highlight the nature of learning, sharing, and collaborative cultural action taking place in the membership of this collective. I use translingual literacy and translanguaging as sociocultural frames for understanding how the focal bilingual youth leverage their full semiotic and linguistic repertoires for productive musical and cultural practice and literacy. Drawing from ethnographic methods, the findings highlight the translingual ingenuity and power of the focal youth musicians as active agents in the construction of their musical and linguistic lives and their families' financial stability through the formation of their own creative translingual economy. Attending to these cultural activities can shed light on how transnational and translingual young people negotiate and make decisions, sophisticatedly employ literacies to communicate and solve problems, and come to make sense of their social worlds. Thoughtfully considering the musicality of young people can help educators better understand them as agentic constructors of their own creative capacities, skills, knowledge, and cultural lifeworlds.

Changing demography in the Southwest USA has shifted the racial compositions of many neighborhoods that were once predominantly African American to majority Latinx immigrant communities (Orfield and Frankenberg 2014). Today, it's common for these two youth communities to learn side-by-side in urban and suburban classrooms where they are often positioned to share each other's cultural practices (Martinez 2017). However, language and literacy research often positions these two minoritized communities as mutually exclusive (Paris 2010). Moreover, while researchers have urged the analysis of these two youth communities comparatively few studies document classroom units that cultivate spaces for 'linguistic solidarity' (Martinez 2017). Drawing from an ethnographic study of an 11th-grade ethnic studies class, the authors explore how Arturo (third author) took up a critical translingual approach in his classroom where students--both Latinx and African American--collaborated through the cowriting of corridos (Mexican ballads) about their lived experiences with in/justice. The findings demonstrate the ways that this unit invited students to write across racial, ethnic, and linguistic borders and fostered language and cultural sharing, political consciousness, and solidarity.

For many Mexican-origin bi/multilingual children, Mexican music education begins early in their home. Music is inextricably linked with the sociocultural context in which it is produced, consumed, and taught and the interrelationship between music, society, and culture. Using ethnographic methods, this article examines a small group of bilingual and emergent bilingual Mexican-origin students who regularly congregated in their English teacher's classroom at lunchtime to recite and perform romance ballads, or what we refer to as baladas románticas, on a weekly basis. We use participant observation, plática-inspired interviews, focus groups, and video recordings to present ethnographic knowledge about how, for these young people, music was a way of being and a deliberate act to build community. Our findings describe the ways the bilingual students found themselves at the margins of their K-12 schooling experiences and, in turn, agentically fostered their own space for translingual expression and solace. This manifested in two primary ways: (1) how they collectively fostered their own form of convivencia (humanizing coexistence) anchored in their ancestral and cultural knowledge through their music-making; and (2) how their music-making allowed them to release translingual and transmodal play and creativity that might have otherwise been suppressed at school. We end with a call for literacy researchers and educators to continue to recognize and honor students' lived translingual experiences, identities, and musical gifts as resources for learning.

As mothers and education professors, we weave these two identities to reflect on the anti-racist K--12 schooling we envision and work toward for all children, including our own multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial children. We begin this article with a brief introduction to who we are as mothers, then shift to problematizing dominant school curricula and centering multiraciality and multilingualism as important elements in the lives of children. Lastly, we uplift culturally and linguistically relevant approaches to teaching and curriculum that can more fully honor and recognize students' bi/multilingualism and multiracial identities.

This article explores how a local community came to value a Latinx bookstore as a supplementary knowledge space for Latinx history, literature, and culture. Findings detail how the bookstore served as a catalyst for a heterogeneous group of Latinx families and educators to: (1) access empowering reflections of Latinx histories that were not found in traditional K-12 school curricula; and (2) build alternative libraries in homes and classrooms that centered Latinx communities' sociopolitical worlds.

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students' writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent's participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student's writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students' histories are inextricably linked.

This article explores how a secondary ethnic studies course leveraged 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. Using ethnographic and participatory design research, the authors--one a university researcher and the other an ethnic studies teacher--examine the literacy practices of a long-standing immigrant community--classroom partnership that unites day laborers, families, students, and teachers in the name of justice and refuge. Using photographs, interviews, students' 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? (b) How do students respond to such curricular design? This study contributes ethnographic knowledge on school-based participatory research projects that build on the intergenerational literacies, sociopolitical awareness, and social movements of Latinx immigrant families.

Drawing from the theoretical contributions of Ethnic Studies, activist new media, and critical digital literacies, this article explores the nature of a ninth-grade curricular unit about how one's daily environment impacts one's health and well-being. Using a combination of ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods, the authors highlight an Ethnic Studies teacher's innovative and community-based pedagogy that honed students' critical digital literacies and civic action practices through their engagement with the digital media app "See, Click, Fix." Findings detail students' perspectives about how the unit both helped them resist deficit-oriented ideologies and served as a conduit for critical civic literacies. The authors contend that the fostering of critical digital literacies remain extremely imperative to the future and expansion of Ethnic Studies courses.

In this research article, Cati V. de los Ríos examines US-Mexican transnational youths' engagement with the Mexican musical genre corridos, border folk ballads, and its subgenre, narcocorridos, folk ballads that illuminate elements of the drug trade and often glamorize drug cartels. She draws from ethnographic methods to present empirical knowledge of four young musicians' critical readings of these genres and their place-making and community-binding practices across their public high school. She demonstrates how these transnational youth draw from their communicative practices to construct meaningful communities on their school campus and details how their evocative musical school performances serve as a cultural resistance to contemporary anti-migrant sentiments. Rather than positioning youth consumption of narcocorridos as simply a "deviant" activity, the findings argue that youth engage critically, intellectually, and aesthetically with narcocorridos as a popular culture practice and that some songs carry important transnational critiques and lessons on capitalism, state-sanctioned violence, and globalization.

Authors of the NCTE policy brief on translanguaging discuss possibilities for the field of English language arts by sharing examples from their expansive work on translanguaging in teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the critical digital literacy practices of Latinx bilingual youth in the United States enrolled in a secondary ethnic studies course. Despite the expansion of digital tools in classrooms, empirical studies on the pedagogical affordances of such tools, and how they enhance youth's critical digital literacies and understandings of themselves remain scarce. The author relies on participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of writing within a unit that incorporated students' twenty-first century language and literacy practices via Vine's social media platform to explore issues of power and privilege within an exacerbated sociopolitical climate. Findings reveal the ways in which students drew on a range of fluid linguistic and literate practices to make meaning of themselves, problematize oppressive dominant discourses, and negotiate more desired identities and literacies. Attention to young people's translanguaging and multimodal codemeshing practices on social media platforms can harvest critical insight about what constitutes twenty-first century critical digital literacies.

Despite growing Indigenous Latine/x immigrant populations, Indigenous Latine/x parents' and families' diverse forms of involvement across schools and communities continue to be absent from greater discourses in education. This article explores an Indigenous Quechua and Mexican family's perspectives on multilingualism, culture, learning, and community engagement through danza azteca, a traditional Mesoamerican dance practice. This study asks, according to the focal family, what are some of the motivations for and lessons learned through their participation in danza azteca? Drawing on ethnographic research in California, the findings highlight how danza azteca was a way for the family to participate spiritually and civically in their communities across modes and languages, teach and learn about racial in/justice, and foster greater spaces for humanity. The article ends with a discussion and implications for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the national media continues to highlight the tensions of cultural politics in education, there is a need for young people and educators to be equipped for the daunting local, national, and global challenges that mark their everyday lives. Many educators and young people alike are interested in engaging youth in civic reasoning and discourse that prepares them to meet those many challenges. This article highlights applications of civic reasoning and discourse in three contexts: a traditional high school social studies classroom, a hybrid school-community action project, and an out-of-school Youth Participatory Action Research program. We argue that these case studies show a path forward for developing students' civic reasoning and discourse skills because the students turn toward and lean into what we define as moments of critical dissonance : in each case, the students and educators work together to engage, rather than avoid, complex sociopolitical realities, even while holding a variety of racial, ethnic, political, and cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses California school districts prepare for a new requirement that all high school students take an ethnic studies course for graduation, contentious conversations continue about a "model" ethnic studies curriculum for the state's K–12 schools. Less attention, however, has been given to the role of relationality in the vision, development, implementation, and longevity of ethnic studies courses and programs. In.