Siting Biliteracy in New Mexican Borderlands

ABSTRACT

A Participatory Design Research (PDR) conducted with fifteen Chicana dual language bilingual teachers in New Mexico focused on expanding their understandings of their own translanguaging, so as to transform their concept of biliteracy and design their biliteracy instruction as a site for resistance and transformation of bilingual marginalized students. After reviewing how translanguaging shapes understandings of biliteracy, and describing the intervention done with the teachers, one teacher’s emerging transformative stance toward biliteracy is highlighted, as she co-designs a borderland biliteracy unit within her Spanish Language Arts curriculum. The article shows how this teacher’s instructional design impacts the students’ biliterate learning by highlighting the work and writing of one student.

KEYWORDS:

• Biliteracy
• bilingualism
• New Mexico
• Chicanx
• dual language bilingual education
• Southwest
• translanguaging

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ La Quebrada is a pseudonym.

² New Mexico has a complex history, and its bilingual residents often go by different names, depending on whether their families have been in New Mexico for generations or are recent immigrants. Nevertheless, the New Mexican teachers involved in this study self-identified as Chicanxs. For example, Maestra Otero repeatedly told Author 1 that she identified as Chicana because she shared with other Chicanxs in the Southwest a history of having been colonized, and a use of language that had much in common.