From DACA to Dark Souls: MMORPGs as Sanctuary, Sites of Language/Identity Development, and Third-Space Translanguaging Pedagogy for Los Otros Dreamers

ABSTRACT

Informed by the stories of transnational youth’s participation in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Mexico, this study explores the language/identity development and successful (re)integration of these youth in Mexican schools and communities. Drawing on students’ voices, we utilize a multimodal systemic functional linguistics framework to explain how engagement in MMORPGs allows youth to creatively demonstrate fields of knowledge and critically reposition themselves with positive in-the-moment and imagined identities. We call for teachers to create third spaces for youth to meet and play MMORPGs. Findings suggest that creating these blended affinity spaces may create opportunities for transnational youth to translanguage, find sanctuary within peer-interest-based communities of practice, maintain meaningful online connections with friends in the United States, form new important friendships, and create the identities needed for successful (re)integration in Mexico.

KEYWORDS:

• Blended affinity spaces
• game-ecology
• intra-game discourse
• meta-game discourse
• MMORPGs
• third spaces
• translanguaging

About the authors

Steve Daniel Przymus, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at Texas Christian University (TCU). His research focuses on translanguaging, advocating for continued bilingual education for exceptional emergent bilingual youth, the sociolinguistics of bilingualism, metonymy in linguistic landscapes, and the language development, identity, and education of transnational youth.

Martha Lengeling is a professor in the Language Department of the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. She teaches in the BA TESOL and MA Applied Linguistics in English Language Teaching. She holds a MA TESOL from West Virginia University (US) and a PhD in Language Studies from Kent University (UK).

Irasema Mora-Pablo is a full-time teacher at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico, in the Language Department and currently coordinates the MA in Applied Linguistics in English Language Teaching. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics, University of Kent, UK. Her areas of interest are bilingualism, return migration, and identity formation.

Omar Serna-Gutiérrez holds a bachelor’s in TESOL and a master’s in applied linguistics in ELT from the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. His work has focused on the academic and social (re)insertion of transnational students in Guanajuato, Mexico. His current research interests reside in the nexus between language education and transnationalism.