Diego leans over his paper and reads aloud the beginning of a new sentence he is writing, âWhen your factoryâŠâ In Spanish, he begins to ask Zulema, who is sitting next to him, how to say something (âcĂłmo se/how do youâ), but before he can finish his question, she leans over and reads what he wrote aloud to herself. As she reads, Diego jumps in with a suggestion for a next word: âcome.â Zulema, eyes still on the paper, quickly rephrases it to the past tense, saying âcame,â and Diego nods in agreement. He then suggests additional wording, and together they animatedly discuss whether âcame to my land,â âcame to the land,â or âcame to our landâ would be the best option. They eventually agree that the last version would be most suitable, with Zulema noting, âOUR land, yeah, suena mejor/it sounds better.â Diego nods and writes this new phrase on his paper. (Observation, 7 February 2008)
I watched many in- and out-of-class writing sessions such as this one, in which bilingual youth acted as co-authors, tutors, and editors, often interlacing their conversations about what they were writing with jokes, gossip, and comments about the latest photos they had posted online. Yet these were not the only interactions through which young people created texts. In both English and Spanish, they engaged with adults, orally and in writing, and they drew from other written and multimodal texts, often using various digital technologies to do so. They also interacted with less tangible but often quite impactful policies, practices, and discourses in ways that shaped their opportunities to create texts and the texts themselves.
Their stories tell of the successes, difficulties, compromises, strategies, and struggles involved in developing bilingual and biliterate repertoires both inside and outside of schooling. By following these youth through adolescence and into early adulthood, I was able to witness their language and literacy journeys across multiple contexts and years. Doing so allowed me to better understand how a range of discourses, governmental and institutional policies and practices, individuals, texts, and technologies served to facilitate and/or hinder the development of their bilingual and biliterate expertise. Longitudinal Interactional Histories: Bilingual and Biliterate Journeys of Mexican Immigrant-Origin Youth aims to provide insight into patterns of language and literacy development as they occur in and across multiple and diverse settings during linguistically minoritized youthâs adolescence and young adulthood.
This book analyzes the experiences of five young people: Jaime, Ana, Diego, Fabiola, and Maria. As immigrant-origin individuals from Spanish-speaking homes who were classified by their school system as âEnglish learners,â they are part of a large and growing demographic in the United States, one that tends to be discussed as a problem to be fixed in schools rather than as the foundation of our increasingly multilingual1 society. While theories of language acquisition and development have arguably experienced a multilingual turn (May, 2014) in recent years through increasing recognition of the fundamental role of all languages in individualsâ repertoires, the contexts in which the youth in this study developed language and literacy expertise varied in their support for multilingualism. A better understanding of the promises and contradictions inherent in such settings and their implications for language and literacy development has much to offer the fields of education, rhetoric and composition, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics.
This study draws upon eight years of data collection, which started when youth began ninth grade at South Sierra High School, a small charter school in the Northern California community of South Sierra, and extended four years after their high school graduation.2 All five were assessed to be at beginning or intermediate English language proficiency overall and in writing when they began high school, according to standardized English language proficiency test results, had lived in Mexico for at least some of their school-aged years, and spoke Spanish as a dominant home language3 (see Kibler, 2009). They all graduated on time, four from South Sierra High School and one from neighboring West Hills High School. After graduation, the participants dispersed geographically, with Maria moving to the East Coast of the United States, Diego to Southern California, and Fabiola to a different part of Northern California. Ana and Jaime remained in the South Sierra community and lived with family there. The academic and vocational paths they pursued also differed: Maria undertook Catholic religious training, Diego and Fabiola went to universities , Jamie took classes at community college, and Ana enrolled in a cosmetology program. As they progressed through and beyond these institutions, the language and literacy practices in which they engaged became increasingly diverse.
Youthâs languages and literacies are described and analyzed as social practices, ones that take place in social, cultural, and historical contexts that are embedded within each other (IvaniÄ, 2004) and across time. I also take a critical-sociocultural orientation to language and literacy development, recognizing the power relationships that are visible in individualsâ experiences and the ways in which institutional and social forces shape language and literacy practices (Moje & Lewis, 2007). From this perspective, it is imperative to counter the predominant deficit-oriented discourses4 that tend to linguistically minoritize the capacities and assets of multilingual youth from immigrant backgrounds by devaluing or ignoring their home and community language and literacy resources. In response to these concerns, this book is dedicated to seeking goodness, which Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) described as âan intentionally generous and eclectic process that begins by searching for what is good and healthy and assumes that the expression of goodness will always be laced with imperfectionsâ (p. 9).
I use writing in particular as a lens through which to explore language and literacy practices over time for several reasons. First, written texts are deeply enmeshed with other multimodal practices. As individuals write, they are often doing so in response to other texts they have read or seen and conversations they have had with other people, both in the moment of a literacy event and in the days, weeks, months, and years preceding it. In this sense, writing not only demonstrates a multivocality that is of interest to many scholars but also offers a valuable means of understanding how various aspects of an individualâs language and literacy expertise work together within a given social context. Second, while many aspects of language and literacy practices can beâand often areâtreated as âproductsâ to be measured and assessed within the context of educational institutions and research, writing in particular tends to be viewed in this manner and to be used as a gatekeeper to accessing educational opportunities. Such a trend disadvantages many immigrant-origin multilingual writers, whose strengths and expertise can easily be overlooked when only considering the texts they produce rather than both the complex (and often multilingual) processes through which they create texts and the minoritizing discourses they may encounter as they do so, particularly in educational settings. Third, I focus on writing because of its potential to be a powerful means of both communication and reflection: As Jaime explains in Chap. 4, writers âexpress something, a point of view that you really have. I mean, itâs something I could go back to later on and reflect on, like itâs a permanent point of view for myselfâ (Interview, 24 May 2014).
To tell the stories of these young people, I have used what I call a âlongitudinal interactional histories approachâ (LIHA) to qualitative data analysis. It draws upon interviews and samples of youthâs writing over time, along with ethnographic observations during their early high school careers, to understand three key phenomena: the interactions individuals had with discourses, governmental and institutional policies and practices, individuals, texts, and technologies while creating their own texts in and out of school ; how those interactions shaped their texts; and how their texts (and the processes through which they were created) changed over time. While each young personâs story is necessarily unique, I argue that their language and literacy journeys reflect larger trends among multilinguals from immigrant backgrounds in the United States in three key respects. First, non-English resources tended to be marginalized by academic and institutional policies and practices, but bilingual and biliterate expertise was often key to academic and professional activities and identities . Second, success within institutions depended not only on young peopleâs literacy expertise and development but also on having a range of mutually reinforcing and supportive interactions with discourses, governmental and institutional policies and practices, individuals, texts, and technologies. Third, even in the most promising situations, youth had relatively few opportunities to develop robust biliterate repertoires within traditional educational settings.
A Rationale
While this book addresses issues of language and literacy through the lenses of multilingualism and immigration in ways that are applicable to many individuals, the focus on youth of Mexican origin5 in the United States is a purposeful one. The imperative for improving educational opportunities for this group has never been more urgent. As GĂĄndara (2015) argued, âPoverty, unequal K-12 schooling opportunities, low parental education, and low expectations of Mexican-origin youthâs abilities and educational prospects remain endemicâ (p. ix). Such inequitable circumstances have had dramatic impacts. Recent census data suggest that individuals of Mexican originâwho comprise 64.1% of the Latinx6 population in the United States, or 34.6 million peopleâhave higher average levels of poverty and lower levels of academic achievement and advancement relative to the overall Latinx and US populations (LĂłpez & Patten, 2015; see also Jensen & Sawyer, 2013).7
Another reason I focus on Mexican-origin youth in particular is that educational and other discourses tend to âessentialize the Hispanic/Latino category, erasing the experiences of Mexican American men and womenâ (Zambrana & Hurtado, 2015, p. 78). Indeed, research itself often fails to disaggregate Latinx populations by country of origin, a trend that is reflected in the studies I reference ...