“Mi Lucha es Tu Lucha; Tu Lucha es Mi Lucha”: Latinx immigrant youth organizers facilitating a new common sense through coalitional multimodal literacies

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Coalitional multimodal literacy
• Latinx
• immigrant rights
• coalitional literacy
• literacy
• practitioner inquiry
• coloniality

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgment

The writing of this article was supported by the Research Justice at the Intersections Fellowship at Mills College. The authors would like to thank Erika Guadalupe Nuñez and Vicko Alvarez Vega for their powerful educational work through their art and organizing, and for their permission to center their work in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We follow the practice of the Literacy Futurisms Collective-in-the-Making (2021) who, inspired by Pérez Huber’s (2010) work, capitalize “color” when referring to racialized peoples.

2 We refer to all participants, locations and organizations using their real names, per participants’ requests.

3 The DREAM Act refers to the “Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors” Act, which was first introduced in 2001. It sought to give immigration relief and access to higher education to “exceptional” undocumented young people who came to the United States as children. The Act has never passed the House and the Senate (Matos, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alicia Rusoja

Alicia Rusoja, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis.

Yared Portillo

Yared Portillo, M.S.Ed., is a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

Olivia Vazquez Ponce

Olivia Vazquez Ponce is an undergraduate DACAmented student at Swarthmore College.