Translingual Youth Podcasts as Acoustic Allies: Writing and Negotiating Identities at the Intersection of Literacies, Language and Racialization

ABSTRACT

U.S. Latinx youth from immigrant backgrounds bring to schools their transnational literacies, complex lived experiences of marginalization and resistance, and politicized translanguaging practices that are seldom recognized in classrooms. This article examines U.S. Latinx bilingual youth who participated in a podcast project within a Chicanx/Latinx Studies high school course that mobilized their bilingualism for literacy instruction. This ethnographic classroom study explores a curricular unit that allowed young people to use new media technologies to tell important stories of themselves and their social worlds at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States. Through translanguaging and translingual frames, I demonstrate how Latinx young people contest racist narratives, reclaim who they are, and author new spaces for solidarity. Findings detail the ways that students utilized podcasts as a tool to promote creativity and self-expression, and to connect personal experiences to broader pressing discourses about immigration, language, racialization processes, and resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• literacies
• podcasts
• translanguaging
• transnational

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cati V. de los Ríos

Cati V. de los Ríos is an Assistant Professor of Literacy, Reading and Bi/Multilingual Education at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her research on Latinx adolescents’ translingual literacies has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, Ford Foundation, and National Council of Teachers of English.