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This practitioner inquiry article examines the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in the U.S. Co-written by two of the youth who participated in this research, alongside the fellow immigrant activist who designed and carried out the year-long study, this paper analyzes a subset of qualitative data from the research and argues that young Latinx immigrant organizers are organic intellectuals who, as grassroots educators, mobilize their coalitional multimodal literacies to critically examine the common sense, meaning the dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions, of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., and transform it into one that is inclusive, intergenerational, and challenging of colonial logics that separate oppressed and racialized communities from each other. Implications include conceptualizing socioemotional relational intuition as a component of multimodality and engaging young Latinx immigrants as grassroots educators whose coalitional multimodal literacies envision and enact a decolonial world.

This article draws from a decade-long community-based research partnership oriented toward learning from and supporting immigrant youth and families as they advocate for themselves in the face of educational inequity. In particular, we focus on examining the trajectory and insights of the partnership in light of ongoing educational, health, and sociopolitical crises during the pandemic and the racial uprisings against police violence. We sought to understand how the work shifted in response to these global crises and also what sustained our collaboration during these times. As we showcase through representative examples of our inquiries, members of different immigrant communities in our partnership drew on their individual and collective experiences to engage in research as an act of care, to address pragmatic and immediate needs in their schooling, and to contend with traumatic legacies of oppression. Expanding networks of care and the intellectual legacy of the collaboration itself–what we refer to as an intellectual commons–created the foundation to sustain and amplify our work together during a time of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]