Latina Voice in Dialogue with Literacy

ABSTRACT

This study follows the literacy experiences of four Latina middle schoolers as they read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and compose home language narratives in their heritage voices. Both their vibrant ethnic cultures and other intersecting rays of identities are analyzed in the vein of their literate identities. Through analysis of their writing and speech, the girls present hybridized identities on the border between cultures and languages. Their position and identities in the social world of middle school are discussed and how transactions with literacy can dialogically influence those identities to enact critically conscious pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• critical pedagogy
• hybridity
• Latina culture
• translanguaging

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaodi Zhou

Xiaodi Zhou is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies at the College of Education and P16 Integration at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is a believer of dialogic cultural theories, and has research interests in the intersections of race, gender, and class in the literature of children and adolescents, and in the influence of literacy practices on the identities of minority youths, particularly Latinx, in the United States. He enjoys writing, traveling, trying new foods, and spending time with his wife and two young children.