Language, culture and border lives:mestizajeas positionality / Lengua, cultura y vidas de frontera: el mestizaje como posicionalidad

Abstract

Recent scholarly work has focused on borders, both geopolitical and cultural, giving attention to border lives and identities. This article, which focuses on sociocultural practices, addresses what can be called border languaculture. With attention on the Texas-Mexico border in North America, the authors discuss three key features of hybrid practices on the US 'side': (1) code-mixing that has a strong rhetorical component; (2) crossborder continuation but transformation of 'traditional' forms and conventions associated historically with Spain and Mexico; and (3) creation of 'new' hybrid forms and cultural products that establish social affiliations and distinctions. These languacultural features support the central point of the article: that self-positioning in this borderland is characterized by the multiplicity, contradictions and syncretism now being labeled mestizaje. Although cultural change has often been explained through acculturation, the syncretic nature of these border practices is better explained through transculturation, which emphasizes mutual influences and shifting power relations.

Characterizing Competing Tensions in Black Immigrant Literacies: Beyond Partial Representations of Success

“…The findings also provide teachers with insights about how this Black immigrant youth experienced her literacies in ways that can allow them to seek broader understandings about the informal literacies of Black (and other underserved) youth. Beyond this, our study reaffirms the need for transnational and community literacies (Gutiérrez et al, 2017; Jiménez et al, 2009; Nelson, Barrera, Skinner, & Fuentes, 2016), curriculum (Skerrett, 2012, 2015), and spaces (Horowitz, 2012; Lizárraga & Gutiérrez, 2018) that foreground race (Willis, 2018) for immigrant youth of color. The quantitative evidence presented here regarding the supposed underperformance of Black immigrant youth as related to the PISA reading literacy average and the accompanying qualitative insights suggest that teachers cannot afford to overlook the literacy needs of Black (and other underserved) youth based on assumptions about model‐minority academic literacy success.…”

Global Literacies Research Diversity: A Manifesto for Change

“…Likewise, literacies have provided tools for representing our worlds-enlisted for reflection, celebration, and the formulation and critique of new thinking and innovation. As a result of handheld communications, global media, and the internet, literacies seem to play an ever more pervasive role in our lives, as social media opens up access and new channels for shuttle diplomacy and border-crossings (Gutiérrez et al, 2017;Horowitz, 2012;Hull et al, 2010;Luke, 2004Luke, , 2018Nelson et al, 2016;Tierney, 2018b).…”

Toward a Model of Global Meaning Making

“…If greater trafficking between East and West, North and South is an aspiration, then the logic and regulatory monoculture nature of scientific knowledge must be confronted with approaches to knowledge that are decolonizing, emancipatory, and supportive of diversity (de Sousa Santos, Nunes, & Meneses, 2007). Perhaps global meaning making should consider the modes of operation of people who cross the line (Gutiérrez et al, 2017), who are skilled at adaptation, engage in digital innovations of scholarly presentations, or forms of translanguaging especially along borders where cultures cross or brush up against one another (Kim, 2016; Nelson et al, 2016).…”

“…It may be that “uptakes” occur horizontally across sites or boundaries, not unlike the translanguaging that occurs at borders as cultures brush against one another (e.g., Nelson et al, 2016) or as individuals or groups toy with or test boundaries with what might be termed line stepping . As Gutiérrez et al (2017) describe, Line-stepping is an instantiation of boundary crossing where an individual deliberately and consciously pushes against society’s ideological constraints.…”

“…The proposed model builds upon discussions among the growing circle of literacy scholars invested in global thinking, especially researchers investigating translanguaging, hybridity and global mobility (e.g., Lam & Warriner, 2012; Nelson, Barrera, Skinner, & Fuentes, 2016; Pieterese, 2005; Rizvi, 2009; Robertson, 1985) cosmopolitanism (e.g., Bhabha, 1994; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2010; Luke, 2004), and global citizenship (e.g., Torres, 2015; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2015). This model stems from the search for other spaces as discussed by Gutiérrez (2008, 2011) and Gutiérrez, Baquedano-López, and Tejeda (1999), the argument for a more generous science respectful of cultures (e.g., Campano, Honeyford, Sánchez, & Vander Zanden, 2010; de Sousa Santos, 2007b, 2013; Singh, Fenway, & Apple, 2005; Stein, 2017b).…”