Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism (Critical Language and Literacy Studies, Volume 8)

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Decolonizing Literacy

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CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES Series Editors: Professor Vaidehi Ramanathan, University of California, USA, Professor Bonny Norton, University of British Columbia, Canada and Professor Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Critical Language and Literacy Studies is an international series that encourages monographs directly addressing issues of power (its flows, inequities, distributions, trajectories) in a variety of language- and literacy-related realms. The aim with this series is twofold: (1) to cultivate scholarship that openly engages with social, political, and historical dimensions in language and literacy studies, and (2) to widen disciplinary horizons by encouraging new work on topics that have received little focus (see below for partial list of subject areas) and that use innovative theoretical frameworks. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

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CRITICAL LANGUAGE AND LITERACY STUDIES Series Editors: Vaidehi Ramanathan, Bonny Norton and Alastair Pennycook

Decolonizing Literacy Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism

Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Hernandez-Zamora, Gregorio. Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism/Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora. Critical Language and Literacy Studies Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Literacy--Mexico. 2. Literacy--United States. 3. Literacy--Economic aspects. 4. Mexicans--Social conditions. 5. Mexicans--United States--Social conditions. I. Title. LC155.M5H47 2010 302.2’2440972n-dc22 2010005055 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-263-4 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-262-7 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario, M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2010 Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd., Salisbury, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.

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Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part 1: Winds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

Against the Winds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Economic Collapse and Literacy Agendas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Colonizing Representations of the ‘Illiterate’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Defining Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Key Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Postcolonial Subjects: Imperfect Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Everyday Life Glocal Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Global Citizens or Global Outcasts? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 History in Person . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Outline of Chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2

The Un-Making of the Illiterate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Introverted’ and ‘Extroverted’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colonial Creation of the Illiterate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decolonizing Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decolonizing Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Citizenship and Literacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside the Mexican Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 25 27 30 32 38 43

Part 2: Voices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3

Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saul and Chela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Saul’s Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sofia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Sofia’s Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55 57 68 73 82

v

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Alma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Learning from Alma’s Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 4

Transnationals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Laura’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pablo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Pablo’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

100 102 115 119 136

5

Survivors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Paula’s Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Felipe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Felipe’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141 143 153 158 173

Part 3: Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 6

Literacy Politics and Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Few People, Pervasive Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Old’ Practices in the WWW Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Overcoming a Naïve Worldview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging Classificatory Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What Is ‘Success’ in Language and Literacy Learning? . . . . . . . . Colonizing Language and Literacy Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

179 179 180 183 185 186 188

7

Decolonizing Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White Minds, Brown Hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Romanticized Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isolated Individuals versus Concentrated Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . Education for Voice and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decolonizing Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

190 190 192 194 196 199

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my Berkeley classmate (current UC Davis professor), Julia Menard-Warwick for encouraging this book project, as well as for her continued mentorship and assistance in linguistic and academic matters via email over the years. I am also very grateful to the editors of the Critical Language and Literacy Studies series of Multilingual Matters: Vaidehi Ramanathan, Bonny Norton and Alastair Pennycook, who offered me valuable revision suggestions on bibliographic, conceptual and organization aspects of the book. I especially thank Vai Ramanathan, for her kind and helpful feedback and encouragement all along the way. Additionally, I would like to thank my professors and fellow students at University of California Berkeley, for their assistance and guidance in the initial stages of my research. First, thanks to Glynda Hull, my advisor at Berkeley, who inspired, encouraged, and guided me throughout the intricate paths of the US academia. Also thanks to Anne H. Dyson for offering invaluable mentorship and scaffolding in matters of literacy theory and research (thanks Glynda and Anne for practicing as teachers what you preach as scholars). Also thanks to Rick Kern and Lilly Wong Fillmore for revising and commenting on my initial work. My life at Berkeley would haven’t been possible without the support and encouragement of my fellow students Julia Menard-Warwick, Fina Carpena, Marcelo Villagomez, Karin Zotzmann, Marco Bravo, Deb Palmer, Jessica Zacher, Andrea Dyrness, Sawako Suzuki, Dafney Blanca Dabach, Irene Fernandez, Monika Hachiya and Anne Whiteside, among others . . . As a post-doctoral fellow at The Center for the Americas in Vanderbilt University, I found also wonderful colleagues and fellows who supported and encouraged my research with Mexican immigrants, and offered invaluable advice and friendship. Special thanks go to Vera Kutzinsky and Robert Jiménez, who made it possible my stay at The Center for the Americas. My gratitude also to my Nashville colleagues and friends Giorleny Altamirano, Santiago Khalil, Anja Becker, Brad Teague, Stella Flores, Juan Canedo and Pamela Hull to whom I express my sincere gratitude. And special thanks vii

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and forever hugs go to my Mexican amigos and paisanos Pancho, Irma, Erandi, and their families, who made us feel at home in Nashville: thanks from me and my family. Back in Mexico, I am in debt with the scholars that encouraged and guided me as I found my way in the field of educational research: Rosa Nidia Buenfil advised and introduced me to the field of discourse and education; Emilia Ferreiro, Alejandra Pellicer, Miguel Angel Vargas, Bety Rodriguez and Rocio Vargas inspired and supported my initiation in the field of literacy research. I also thank Justa Ezpeleta, for encouraging and supporting my doctorate pursuits and applications. Thanks also to the adult education specialists in Mexico who assisted me with valuable information, opinions and stories: Ana Deltoro, Claudia Flores, Mercedes Ruiz, Tere Espinosa and Rocío Medina. Additionally, I am indebted to those who offered me solidarity, friendship, moral and financial support without which I would have not survived for so many years in the US and Mexico: MariCarmen González Videgaray, Rubén Romero, Angel Cabellos, Jorge Ocaña (†), Estela Ramírez, Rosi Quesada, Diego Lizarazo, Alma Carrasco, Sergio Montes, Paty Novela, Jorge Vaca, Margarita Castillo León, Rodolfo Ramirez, Claudia Bernaldez, Rosamaria Ramirez, Alejandro Canales, Mercedes Ruiz, Tere Barragán, Gema Jara, Soledad and Francisco Deceano . . . The research and writing of this book was possible thanks to the financial, logistic, and even emotional support in different stages by the following agencies and institutions in Mexico and the US: CONACYT; COMEXUS; Fulbright and McArthur-Ford-Hewlett programs (special thanks to Kate Leyva and Sandra Cervera); Institute of International Education (Mexico City, New York and San Francisco offices); International House, Berkeley (special thanks to Irene Fernandez); UC-MEXUS (thanks to Marlene de la Cruz and Christina Schneider); and GSE-UC Berkeley (thanks to Ilka Williams). I am totally in debt to the workers in Mexico and the US who have generously revealed their lives, and shared stories, thoughts, and meals with me over the last 10 years: Alicia, Soledad, Agustina, Beto, Sergio, Chuy, Paty, Feliciano, Pancho, Irma, Ofelia, Ricardo, Senovia, Rosario, Suriel, Carlos, Irineo, Jaime, Lucia, Judith, Federico, Agustin, Rebeca, Erandi, Ismael, Sandra … and many others whose stories and names I could not include here due to space limitations. Last but not the least, my gratitude to the members of my families, without whose endless cariño and support I couldn’t have gotten to this point: my little daughter Isali and my wife Rocio (always here, sometimes there); my sister Alicia and her funny family (Lucy, Miros and Hansel); the big Medinas family; and, of course, the Hernandez-Zamoras. Apologies to all those who have been with me over the years and whose names I have failed to mention.

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Preface

While it is predominantly about the problem of ‘the political’ and how issues regarding literacies are intricately tied to it, this volume by Gregorio Hernandez-Zamora addresses a range of crucial concerns, including how we think about the political in the context of literacies, the conditions under which authoritarian policies come into play, contexts in which they assume legitimacy, and ways in which strictures are countered and agencies displayed. It is also both an argument for understanding and approaching these connections, and means of conceptualizing what is at stake when considering them. The central issues concern how individuals attempt to understand the violence and limitations of the socially sanctioned political ideas and institutions they have inherited – colonial, patriarchal, religious – and work to both live with and transform their lives through literacy, despite them. These emerge through some key topical concerns in Hernandez-Zamora’s chapters that engage with notions of citizenship, transnationalism and agency. Situating these concerns in the Mexican community in which he was raised, Hernandez-Zamora aligns himself with researchers who seek to address ‘the here and now’, and he does this through in-depth, dense investigations of the lives of several individuals (Saul, Chela, Sofia, Alma, Laura, Pablo, Paula and Felipe) who grapple with that potent combination of poverty, indigeneity and colonialism. Anthropology has certainly in its different iterations addressed concerns relating to the ‘voice of the colonized’, including how indigenous peoples come to know or get known by colonizing tropes that emphasized the ‘different’ and the ‘exotic’ through very particular modalities of knowledge making, categorizing, comparing and translating. These ways of knowing were not only predicated upon the profound need to govern and rule the metropolis, but also for the metropolis to know themselves in ways – largely negative – that would make governance work smoothly. These internalized negative self-images are the very ones disrupted by Hernandez-Zamora himself and the voices of the colonized that he brings our attention to. ix

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One way in which he does this is by underscoring agency, a notion that runs thickly through his chapters – what it means, the local resistances it emerges from and the various contexts in which it emerges as a valuable concept even as it tends to romanticize struggles. Whether it is Saul and Chela, who through their ecclesiastical engagements negotiate complex texts and groups of people, serving as institutional brokers, or Sofia, who through her interest in natural medicine navigates socio-economic constraints, having taught herself to read and understand difficult healthrelated texts, or Alma, who overcomes domestic and sexual abuse, all of the voices make us pay heed to the notion of ‘the political’ and the importance of examining agency (and literacies) in terms of the historical and intellectual contexts we inherit. In doing so, they alert us to two simultaneous debates: one about what kinds of agentive political actions are possible (enabling, responsive, progressive) and two, the kinds of theorizing that emerge from our deliberations about political movements and their constraints. Agency, then, as we to come to realize in Hernandez-Zamora’s complex work, is not only deeply political and inherently subjective; it is a point of view that emerges from a very particular theoretical framing of fellow humans and the social webs we are a part of. While agency is typically viewed in terms of resisting power or transgressing (in)visible boundaries, the contradictions and complexities informing it perhaps exceed our abilities to adequately conceptualize it. Certainly, Hernandez-Zamora’s description of Pablo joining the army and the invisible literacies he engages in, or of Paula and Felipe, who despite living in extreme poverty, seek opportunities to transform their conditions, point to the numerous interactions they have to negotiate, and make us see how notions of ‘free agency’ (or being a ‘free agent’) may be more of a myth than we may wish to concede. As Hernandez-Zamora points out, our goals and what we seek do not exist in social vacuums; our subjective states of emotions and desire collide with, are part of, and are shaped by very complex forces (in this case indigeneity, poverty and colonialism), and perhaps we are less in control of these relations than we think (Ortner, 2006; Miller & Kumar, 2007). Acknowledging this complexity seems to be utterly crucial, since it makes us see that is not simply a matter of the ‘colonized speaking back’ or of asserting one’s voice and right to be heard, but perhaps of going further in terms of the level of interlocution (the power differential between researcher and informants, or between the researchers themselves), the deployment of methods (selecting certain investigative options instead of others) and the level of textualization (the actual written product that emerges from this fusion). So much about ‘agency’ emerges from our

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research interviewing – the questions we ask, those that we remain silent about, those that we rephrase. It makes us consider ways in which what we elicit from participants gets turned into public discourse that becomes available for research, and ways in which the intricate circulation of research texts creates different laminations of concepts (poverty, indigeneity and colonialism) even as they create different audiences (Briggs, 2007). The kind of information that Hernandez-Zamora has been able to garner is a result not just of his expert research interviewing skills but of his being part of the community he seeks to better understand, of knowing instinctively the communicative ideologies inherent in the interviewing process (what does/does not get said to whom and why, the strategic silences and revelations, the shared ways of communicating, the volubility). Agency emerges as much from us researchers reflecting on this layer of deliberations – since it gives us an opening into transgressive readings – as it does from the lives of the people that Hernandez-Zamora so evocatively writes about. Herein lies the punch and rigor of this volume. This powerful account of local literacies brings several significant dimensions to our book series. Similarly to Higgins’ (2009) recent book in this series, we see here the great complexity of interplay of local and global relations, and also the usefulness of thinking in terms of Bakhtin’s understandings of multivocality, dialogue and authorship. By focusing on the life histories of educationally excluded postcolonial subjects, HernandezZamora shows us how learning and literacy are tied up with their changing life trajectories. He draws to our attention the interplay between socioeconomic position and the conditions of possibility for making decisions about learning and change. This gives us insights not only into the situatedness of literacies, but also the material and personal conditions that make different forms of learning and literacy possible, and the changes that such practices may also then bring about. This view very obviously takes us far beyond a notion of literacy as merely a technical capacity for decoding and encoding script; it takes us instead towards a view of literacy as a practice in authoring one’s place in the world, for speaking up, and speaking against, and speaking with. The interplay between poverty, literacy and life trajectories helps us think beyond competing views of what constitutes critical literacy which, as Luke (1996, 2004) has observed, all too often leave us short by observing only that literacies are social practices (which should be a starting point, not an end), that teaching the ‘genres of power’ gives disadvantaged people access to power (such ‘logocetric’ claims have inadequate theories of the workings of language and power), that opening a space for the voices of the disenfranchised can bring about change (such ‘phonocentric’

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claims fail to show how this romanticized vision of voice brings about change). Instead, Hernandez-Zamora shows us through the lives of Saul, Chela, Sofia, Alma, Laura, Pablo, Paula and Felipe how we need to ask what it is in the lives of marginalized, alienated, unschooled, and colonized subjects that has enabled them to move from silence to a capacity to articulate their worlds. Once we understand the deeply political nature of literacy, of poverty, and of voice, we can start to think in terms of a literacy education that may enable multiple and diverse futures. Vaidehi Ramanathan, Alastair Pennycook, Bonny Norton October 2009

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Part 1

Winds

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Chapter 1

Against the Winds

We cannot predict the exact course that a grain of sand will take when dropped into the air. But we can predict the course that millions of grains will take when they are dropped into a strong wind: most of them will follow the wind’s direction, and just a few will leave the way. For most of humanity, a privileged minority enter the world with the winds at their back, while millions navigate against the winds. Although our fates are never pre-determined, we can predict that most of the former will reach high and far educationally, while most of the latter will lag behind. This book is about those people who have grown up against the winds. The economic, social and educational problems of people whose lives have proceeded for generations under material and cultural oppression cannot be explained away by the ‘poor literacy skills’ of their individual members, as agencies like the World Bank or OECD would have us believe. Poor literacy and school failure are not individual phenomena in the ex-colonial world,1 but rather the historical and pervasive result of invasions, slavery and modern ‘development policies’ that, like social winds, respectively push forward or inhibit learning and growth possibilities. While current technocratic language floods us with terms like ‘excellence’, ‘competencies’ or ‘standards’, education in our countries cannot be reduced to literacy and basic skills programs which bond our peoples into positions outside the ‘knowledge’ side of today’s polarization between knowledge and service work. The education needed in the so-called developing countries must aim for simpler but more challenging goals: to help us raise our heads, to overcome poor self-representation and to turn us into the authors of our own lives and futures. Yet envisioning such an education demands that we see beyond schools and classrooms. We need to look at the sociohistorical forces which systematically afford growth and learning possibilities to some, and deny them to others. Coming from a marginalized socioeconomic background myself, I have always realized how hard is to become educated when 3

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Part 1: Winds

one’s social world is so alien to that of the privileged or educated groups in society. You notice this everywhere, even in what you read. Take the case, for example, of a published US researcher (Gowen, 1992) who describes her formative years: the contrast between her educational milieu and mine is striking. She describes herself as a White, middle-class person whose life circumstances differed sharply from those of the Black kids in her hometown. Whereas she was born in the US, the country that became the empire of the planet after the fall of the Soviet Union, I was born in Mexico, a country familiar with the workings of imperialism and colonialism since its ‘discovery’ and conquest in the XVI century. This is significant in many ways. Whereas her childhood memories evoke images of the economic, scientific, and technological power of her nation (e.g. the image of a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral), mine are filled with the dust and mud of Ciudad Neza, the shanty town where I grew up at the margins of Mexico City. Whereas she learned to protect herself and her country from ‘the threat of communism’ by the time she was a high school student, as a high school student I learned to protect myself and my country from the threat of capitalism (i.e. economic and ecological depredation, poverty, and military atrocities carried out by US-sponsored military regimes in Latin America). While she reminds us that the Black students in her hometown in Florida were segregated and trained as auto mechanics or service workers, I myself became a car mechanic and service worker in Mexico. And while she came to realize as an adult the profound differences in the quality of education between the schools she attended as a child and the schools for Black kids, I came to realize as an adult the profound differences between the quality of school education I received as a child, and that of White and/or affluent people both in Mexico and in the US. Our globalized world is dramatically divided both within and between national boundaries.

Economic Collapse and Literacy Agendas In recent years, a standardized curriculum and literacy education have become the new credo for most ‘modernization’ strategies in Mexico and Latin America, tending to follow blindly such contested conservative US policies as No Child Left Behind or Read First, implemented by the Bush administration (McDermott & Hall, 2007; Pearson, 2007). The Mexican government, in particular, is fully engaged in curricular reforms aimed at standardizing the basic school curriculum, as well as in the generalized use of standardized tests and surveys to measure how well and how far these ‘standards of quality’ are achieved (Torres, 2003). By following this

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direction, the official agenda has focused on literacy and reading promotion programs (assuming that poor people ‘do not read’ and need ‘better reading habits’) while diverting attention from historical inequalities in the access to full education (Hernandez-Zamora, 2005, 2006). In ex-colonial countries, where most of the population is excluded from formal schooling, such politics might be seen as a kind of Matrix2 or placebo being prescribed to the uneducated masses to prevent them from watching the real world outside the top-down prepackaged, standardized and sanitized curricula and reading materials created for them by the ‘experts’, who are also designing their futureless lives. In fact, this politics of literacy and reading promotion veils the State’s abdication of its duty to educate our population, and misses – or neglects – the key barrier in marginalized people’s intellectual and literacy development: the social and intellectual confinement that pervades their lives and prevents them access to legitimate and powerful literate institutions and practices. In contrast, the histories of actual individuals show that grassroots groups and informal education often become the only available means for the marginalized to achieve an education and develop a literacy for their own voice, selfreconstruction and critical citizenship. The dismantling of the welfare state is also reflected in a growing official focus on the family as the central agent in the (successful or failing) literacy development of individuals, viewed as detached from history and social structures. When I was invited to an international panel in Mexico City to talk about the topic ‘Family and Reading’, I started by questioning: whose family are we talking about? belonging to which social class? with which schooling level?3 In Mexico these are unavoidable questions, since families are not made up of ‘readers’ or ‘non-readers’, as the official credo assumes, but of those who have too much, have-lesses, have-nots, and will-never-haves – as we can tell from the proposed economic strategies. According to the 2007 World Development Report of the World Bank, Mexico is still among the world leaders in unfair income distribution: 20% of the richest families receive 56.1% of the national income, while the poorest 20% can barely survive on 4.1%; that is, on crumbs. The stories of flesh and blood individuals which I have collected over the last 10 years in Mexico and the US show that those who grew up in marginal urban or rural Mexico have experienced the effects of a steady economic collapse since the late 1970s, involving massive unemployment, wage devaluation and the dismantling of local economies and livelihoods. Work itself has been taken away from millions of globalized individuals whose only options now are either joblessness, street ‘micro-businesses’, or servitude in those transnational corporations which flourish today in

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the Mexican economic wasteland. In the words of Zapatista subcomandante Marcos: Where there was a flag, today you see a mall. Where there was history, today there is a fast-food stand. Where the copihue flourished, there is now a wasteland. Where there was memory, today there is forgetfulness. Instead of justice, charity. (Marcos, 2004: 16) Millions have lost the material means of sustenance, and their life histories mirror the political and economic forces that have pushed them out of the education system and out of their own home countries: lives dominated by economic insecurity and permanent states of frustration, conflict and fear. The obvious result of this deliberate process of economic destruction has been an alarming growth in the levels of alcoholism and drug addiction, domestic and street violence, the emergence of a massive underground and criminal economy, and the collapse of the school system as a means of socioeconomic progress. In Mexico over 50% of people 15 years and older have less than nine grades of schooling, and fewer than 20% of those in the age group 18–24 have access to higher education.4 As for the families, among the Mexican marginalized sectors, the norm seems to be families broken up not only by mass migration to the US, but also (and to a large extent) by the domestic violence engendered by unemployment, limited education, sexism and growing hopelessness. These are the systematic patterns I have found both in the popular colonias (barrios) in Mexico, and in diverse Mexican ghettos in the US. Rural Mexico is in a worse situation still; according to official figures in 2004, 5 million families received 300 pesos bimonthly (less than USD30) to avoid starvation, through the anti-poverty program Oportunidades (Opportunities). A resident of the community in the state of Hidalgo where the Opportunities program began summed up its benefits: ‘Here we have survived thanks to the US. If we couldn’t cross the border, we would have already eaten each other!’ (El Universal, 11.09.2004: A22). Should we expect families in these economic conditions to experience school as a milieu to develop a love of books and reading? to develop literate behavior? to build active and literate citizens?

Colonizing Representations of the ‘Illiterate’ This grim landscape of an impossible normal life (Carpena-Mendez, 2007) constitutes the social system in which ex-colonized and now globalized Mexicans survive and struggle to negotiate a place for themselves. Millions of descendants of the former colonized or enslaved peoples are

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now classified as school failures, illiterates (absolute or ‘functional’), poor readers, bad writers, worse learners and slow thinkers. Yet this seemingly unstoppable trend of school failure and poor literacy cannot be reduced to a problem of poor habits and skills, fixable through standardized curriculum and accountability measures. Rather, the literacy trajectories of marginalized individuals must be contextualized within the powerful historical forces that started with material conquest and cultural colonization, and continued with postcolonial dependence, imperialism, ‘development’ strategies and neocolonial global exclusion (Galeano, 1973; Esteva, 1992; León-Portilla, 1992a; Mignolo, 1995, 2000; Wangoola, 1995; De Rivero, 2001; Jiménez & Smith, 2008). For five centuries Mexicans in particular have encountered European literacy and education as instruments of conquest and colonization, economic deprivation, and cultural assimilation and dislocation. And this social history of economic destruction, cultural alienation and educational segregation is inscribed in the personal histories of today’s globalized Mexicans. Thus, it causes indignation that, after destroying the life and educational possibilities of millions and the dignity of our educators, it is the same technocracies who decree that what their victims need is not full access to education and voice, citizenship and work, but ‘skills for life and work’, ‘better reading habits’, or ‘digital literacy’. Current education policies in Mexico and other former colonies, for example, are still based on simplistic notions of learning as the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and of teaching as the enforcement of a standardized curriculum. In practice, these programs socialize ‘human resources’ to expect limited occupational options, acquire subservient behaviors, and to adopt an attitude of flexibility towards frequent changes of job or even permanent joblessness. They overlook the deprived socioeconomic conditions in which individual lives are based, which hinder in fact their very desires and possibilities for intellectual, literacy and social growth. This declaration by a senior official illustrates the dominant ideology among our ‘experts’ in education: The use of new technologies will be the key to instruct marginal Mexicans . . . it is urgent to do something for the Mexicans without basic education. It is a population hardly trainable for work, since they lack the minimal skills to read, write, calculate, and learn. (La Jornada, 12.11.2000) This kind of easy assertion rests on three widespread and unquestioned beliefs: (1) people with little schooling lack ‘basic learning skills’, and therefore they are a problem for themselves, for their families, and for

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national development and competitiveness; (2) What they need are basic skills, basic competencies, and standardized basic literacy programs in order to become competent workers and citizens; (3) basic literacy and learning skills can and must be delivered to them through standard packaged curricula and technological artifacts such as textbooks and computers.

Defining Literacy Using a narrow concept of literacy as the ability to read and write, over the last 50 years educators, policymakers and curriculum designers in Latin America and other ex-colonial regions have sincerely believed in and worked at literacy programs intended to ‘eradicate illiteracy’. Despite its appearance, this definition is neither innocent nor obvious. It situates literacy in the individual person, rather than in society. It conceives of literacy as a neutral, transferable, measurable and inherently ennobling skill. So defined, it masks the inextricable ways in which literacy is intertwined with issues of access, ownership, and power (Gee, 1996). The policy questions arising from such narrow view are usually: How many illiterates are there still in the world? What is the best (i.e. quickest/cheapest) method to turn them literate? In this book I discuss the colonized and colonizing nature of this vision, and argue that the question to be pursued is rather: How are literacy, knowledge, and education differentially distributed among social groups and classes through the very politics of literacy and the education programs designed for the historically dispossessed? To be sure, there are millions whose knowledge and experiences in reading and writing are very limited, as some of the life stories in this book confirm, yet a purely technical version of literacy misses the key fact that the vast majority of these ‘people in need of literacy’ are not simply ‘illiterate individuals’ (defined by their cognitive relation to literacy), but members of voiceless groups whose lives are deprived of essential capabilities for subsistence, learning, freedom and citizenship. What the technical or technocratic vision deliberately forgets is that they are not isolated individuals but members of groups and nations whose entire economies, cultural and knowledge systems, and mother tongues have been historically destroyed by colonizing systems of power (e.g. military, economic, cultural and linguistic imperialism), and whose present outcome is a mass of people dispossessed, marginalized and silenced as learners, workers and citizens. Globalizing market forces exacerbate this historical plunder as new economies of language, literacy and knowledge polarize the access of variably empowered groups, races, genders

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and nations with regard to the education now required to partake in the knowledge economy (Reich, 1992; Drucker, 1993; Martin & Schumann, 1998; Lankshear & O’Connor, 1999). Informed by current sociocultural, dialogical and postcolonial research and theory, this book questions the commonly held idea that becoming literate is the simple acquisition of a technical ability (the ability to de/ code a script). Instead, Literacy is understood as a fundamental practice of voice and a tool for self-authoring one’s place in the world. As Linda Flower articulates, literacy is a means to speak up (to express ourselves), to speak against (to resist oppression) and to speak with (to dialogue across difference) (Flower, 2008: 78–79). I thus posit that becoming literate is not a simple but a complex process of the appropriation of the socially available meaning and discourse practices indispensable to understanding and shaping one’s place in the world. This process is dependent upon one’s entrance into literate dialogues, communities, and practices. Thereby, it often entails a conflicting transformation of one’s sense of identity (who I am) and agency (what I am capable of ). From this standpoint, literacy and education are inseparable aspects of the constitution of human agency, and their crucial role is to enable us to think and speak for ourselves. For the descendents of the colonial subservient castes, in particular, literacy and education are a means to stop depending on others (often the oppressors themselves) in order to speak and to be heard, seen and respected as citizens and human beings. Libertarian thinkers and fighters have always understood this selfevident truth, articulated by Martin Luther King in these terms: Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there, and he never voluntarily gives it up. And that is where the strong resistance comes. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance. Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil. … (Luther King Jr, 1957) In short, freedom must be achieved and exercised. But this is impossible if we don’t speak for ourselves. Literate people are not those who de/code texts, but those who use texts to decode the world and speak for themselves. Both my formal research and my contact with marginalized Mexicans since I was a child have taught me that those who have voice, have ideas. Those who have ideas are those who appropriate powerful language and discourses from others to become the authors and actors of their own place in the world. And this only happens through entrance into literacy-mediated dialogues and actions. Yet in post/colonial situations this process of

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appropriation is often conflictive for the subordinate groups, as they must appropriate the signs, practices and meanings of the dominant groups at the expense of their own cultural and linguistic loss or alienation. The significance of life history as a window to these processes is key, as Norton (2000) argues, because it allows us to hear the voices of particular learners, their histories, and the inextricable link between their identities and their learning opportunities.

Key Questions This book challenges assumptions about il-literacy by exploring the learning histories of marginalized individuals on both sides of the Mexican–US border, and by situating those personal stories in the social contexts available to them across their lifetimes. Given the lengthy nature of each individual case, I present selected cases, representing Mexicans who have struggled to survive and grow in Mexico, and those who have risked their lives by ‘illegally’ crossing the border in search of a fantasized ‘American dream’. These cases come from a larger corpus gathered as a part of an ongoing research carried out between 2001 and 2009 in Mexico and the US. Its goal has been to understand the meaning of literacy development in the lifelong trajectories of the socioeconomic and educational exclusion of postcolonial marginalized Mexicans, who are not yet full or truly citizens in either nation state: Mexico and the US. Assuming that development is a result of the interplay between available and appropriated practices, this investigation posits questions such these. What kind of cultural resources for learning are available to people living under socioeconomic marginality? What type of literate communities do they have access to in their lives? In which ways do their trajectories of schooling, work and social participation expand or constrain their access to literacymediated dialogues and practices? In which ways do the life histories of real people make us question our own theories and ideas about literacy and ‘being literate’? What kinds of learning and cultural resources make a difference in the individual literacy development of poor people?

Postcolonial Subjects: Imperfect Bodies At the dawn of the 21st century, millions of Mexicans face the legacies of past colonialism and present ‘market-friendly’ economic strategies. Those who were born to or were thrown into economic and educational segregation also endure tremendous barriers to learning and growth. During my ongoing years of research with marginalized people in Mexico

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and the US, I came to meet and interview a number of these creatures of the global age. Since I first started thinking of their stories, I distanced myself from the dominant views of literacy as a matter of functional skills. It was evident to me that all of them were ‘functionally literate’, that is, able to cope with the literacy demands in their (limited, confined) daily life contexts. It was rather less obvious that all of them used literacy for selfauthoring purposes: to give meaning to their lives, to self-categorize and self-position themselves in the world. Yet, in my view, what it crucially distinguishes them is the extent to which they have appropriated literacymediated practices and discourses to articulate a voice on issues that truly matter in their lives; to voice their concerns and claim their rights as citizens, human beings, workers, women or community members; to counter or resist the oppressive discourses of gender, class, religion, nationality or citizenship. Thus, the key difference was their varied appropriation of literacy to self-position themselves more consciously, critically and actively as learners, citizens and human beings. The individual voices of these people are usually absent in public discourse (e.g. government and media). Disregarded as people able to think and talk, they are always talked about, as if they have no thoughts of their own and as if they cannot not bear testament to their own social and inner lives. In language and literacy learning studies, in particular, their voices are often absent, as Norton notes: ‘What is absent from all these studies [. . .] are the voices of particular learners, their distinctive histories, their unique desires for the future’ (Norton, 2000: 47–48). For reasons of space, in this book I present only a few but lengthy individual cases, of people representing three major categories found in my analysis: agentive, ‘mainstream’ and transnational Mexican people. From the Mexican side of the border, I include Paula (aged 36, 8th grade), who has endured a life of extreme poverty, domestic violence and heavy shifts as a house cleaner in order to make a living; she claims to love reading ‘tragic stories’ in commercial magazines to hand. Saul and Chela (spouses in their 60s, 3rd and 6th grades), have little schooling but are specialized workers and socially committed citizens who think that ‘the project of the government in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual’. Sofia (aged 49, 4th grade), is engaged in social, political, religious, and alternative medicine activities, and became a competent naturist doctor, a free woman, a committed citizen and a popular educator. Alma (aged 43, 9th grade) left domestic confinement at the age of 33, got involved in community activism, and finally found spiritual shelter in a metaphysics group. Felipe (aged 50, 8th grade) grew up in a family of ‘scavengers’ on a large dump, whose attitude towards life was of

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survival and conformism. Yet he is also a skilled and competent worker (mason, grocer, swine butcher), and a competent literacy user. As for the US side of the border, I have included the stories of Pablo (aged 36, 9th grade), who fled Mexico after the catastrophic devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1995 (globally known as the tequila effect), and realized as a former soldier in the Mexican army that the government used the army ‘not to protect the citizens but to silence them’. Yet in the US he discovered that one of the few rights illegal immigrants are entitled to is ‘the right to remain silent’. There is also the case of Laura (aged 34, 9th grade) the migrant mother of two kids who warns them not to dream: ‘We tell them, “this is not your country, because you are not born here, and because you have no papers. You have no rights in the US”.’ Yet she also articulates the voice of the voiceless Mexicans who have abandoned trust in all terrestrial institutions: ‘It is irrelevant to me who wins the elections; it will always be the same. Anyone in power will only look for his own benefit.’ This book, then, is about people whose lives and bodies have been shaped and twisted by powerful historical, political and economic forces, often with devastating or dislocating consequences. Despite little schooling, they eagerly look for philosophies, theories and knowledge useful to explain themselves and the world, to build inner strength and motivation, to undertake action in the world, and to achieve a minimal sense of control over their own lives. However, the current top-down education and literacy strategies devised by the ‘experts’ for the neocolonialized poor are still anchored in misrepresentations of people whose actual lives, resources and barriers to learning and deploying knowledge are largely unknown to those who dictate ‘what they need’. All of them are economically marginalized people whose access to literacy, learning and broader growth opportunities have collided with the barriers of survival urgency, sub-employment, poor and truncated school trajectories, and ongoing forms of suffering (domestic violence, frustration, confinement, separation, malnutrition, diseases). Yet a more accurate characterization of their oppressed condition would involve a bodily dimension, for they own ‘imperfect bodies’. Just like me, they are crooked-nosed, black-haired, not so tall (most of them below 5.3 feet), with varied forms of either fatness (e.g. explicit bellies, fat deposits, ‘spare tires’ or declared obesity) or thinness (e.g. unhealthy slimness or skinniness). They exhibit crooked, missing or untreated teeth with cavities (i.e. in need of urgent but unaffordable dental work). Their ‘brown’ skins are often harsh, blemished, wrinkled, too dry or too greasy, thinned or thickened, chapped, bruised, patchy or at least sun-damaged. Their working-class hands look harsh, swollen, spotted or scratched. Their bodies carry reminiscences of mistreated past diseases, accidents, fractures, scars

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or marks left by blows or by poorly executed sutures. And so on and so forth. In short, this book investigates the learning trajectories of people who are not just low SES, underschooled, or transnational Mexicans, but human creatures who literally embody centuries of colonial legacy and decades of exhausting work shifts, malnutrition, mistreated illnesses and accidents, as well as long-term exposure to extremely hot or cold or dry or wet or dirty work environments. But why should the state of bodies matter in a book about literacy? It took millennia of human history to arrive at the idea that all humans are born free and equal, and that criteria of race, gender or class can no longer provide the foundation of the economic and political organization of society. Yet it has taken just two centuries – since the French Revolution – for us to realize that we are not actually equal or, more accurately, that we are not allowed to be equal by the powers that sustain ancestral privileges (Chomsky, 2002). While the life histories of the marginalized and little-educated individuals in this book eloquently testify to this truth, my own personal case is also evidence of it. Despite tremendous socioeconomic odds as a native of Ciudad Neza, I have been able to climb the entire educational ladder, from pre-school to postgraduate school and beyond (to post-doctoral studies). There are no further steps to be climbed, no higher degrees to be earned. I have fully ‘succeeded’ in the school system. Yet I can’t yet get tenure at an academic institution in my home country and city (Mexico City). Are my academic credentials insufficient? Do I need more peer-reviewed publications? Have I missed application deadlines? Do I need a special job permit? No way. To be honest, I must confess that for a person like me it is extremely hard (not impossible but really hard) to get a faculty position in my home country because I’m not white; I’m not tall; I’m not blond or red haired (not even light brown); I’m not sharp-nosed; I’m not blue- or green- or gray-eyed. On top of that, I have neither relatives nor palancas (connections) among the economic, political or intellectual Mexican elites. My last name is not classy (e.g. English, French, Jewish or at least Russian). Still worse, I lack the pleasant demeanor expected of a subservient brown, crooked-nosed, short, working-class born, mestizo and ‘ugly’ Mexican outcast. It could take the entire book to demonstrate my own life history as definite evidence that we, the post/ neocolonial (Mexican) subjects, have no legitimate place in the scientific and cultural institutions of a contemporary ‘democracy’ such as the Mexican one. It is enough to say that my own case would reveal why so many outcasts fiercely reject, resist, distrust or at least fear highbrow literacy practices as well as educational dead ends; why so many decide not

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to invest time, effort and their cultural capital in excluding academic settings (Bourdieu, 1977; Norton, 2000); why so many fear the years of work, sacrifice and tears required to earn a school credential whose currency is tiny in a globalized labor market where the sort of things that really matter are the color of your skin/hair/eyes, the size of your legs and arms, the ‘perfection’ and beauty of your facial features, the overall size and look of your body, the prestige and marketability of your name, or the nobility of your family name. Yet, it is Laura, a migrant Mexican woman in the US (see Chapter 4) who articulates this reality in more eloquent terms: I wanted to be a fly attendant in Mexico, so I went to a school but they told me ‘you don’t give the [right] measure; you have to be at least 1.60 meters tall’. I am 1.50, so I thought ‘perhaps I can use high heels’. But they told me, ‘you have to be 1.60 without shoes’. I got angry and I dropped the idea, because in Mexico they always tell you ‘you have to be perfect: your height, your size, and also slim’. So it wasn’t lack of money but that the first thing they saw on me was the size. The point of this story is that throughout Mexican colonial and neocolonial history the exclusion of native people and their descendants from the educational heights has been insidious and continuous (Freire, 1970/ 1997; Suarez, 2004; Rockwell, 2007). Consider just these recent figures: over 50% of all ‘adult people’ in Mexico (read brown, physically ‘imperfect’, poor people) have less than nine grades of schooling (INEGI, 2005; INEA, 2009). Yet among indigenous people (Mexicans whose mother tongue is not Spanish but a native language) the figure is 86.1% (Suarez, 2004). That is 86.1% without even basic schooling!

Everyday Life Glocal Contexts The individuals portrayed in this book are a sample of a larger group of people interviewed in marginalized areas of Mexico and the US: Mexico City and the State of Mexico in Mexico; and Mexican barrios or ghettos in three main regions of the US: San Francisco Bay Area (CA), Nashville (TS), and Charlotte (NC). While these are local settings, geographically distant from each other and situated in two different countries, all of them share common patterns of marginality, exclusion and limited or segregated access to education and other services. This is significant since we are supposed to have arrived at a ‘democratic’ capitalism (driven by ideals of science, progress and equality), after millennia of political regimes of legal and everyday exploitation, slavery or servitude. I believe, instead, that we are living in a terrifying historical age, in which the obsession for

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maintaining the concentration of power and privilege has overthrown not just alternative projects and governments, but also the very dreams or utopias of liberty, justice and equality built over the last 200 years. Today we seem to have returned to a fundamentalism that proclaims everywhere (in governments and enterprises, media and churches, schools and sport clubs) that no non-profitable idea, project or practice deserves trust and support – that it is dangerous and should not exist. Anything outside the logic of economic profitability is condemned to die from (financial) thirst and starvation. It matters little if it has its own logic and foundation. It matters not at all if it takes place in the North or the South, in the East or the West. This is why our research sites are no longer strictly local. The local has become global or glocal (Canagarajah, 2002; Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005; Lam, 2006; Sarroub, 2008). No single spot on Earth seems to be free from the agendas of privatization, commodification, standardization and the inherent suffocation of any form of social protest or resistance via militarization, media lynching and even education standardization. These are, at least, common methods of social control in today’s Mexican and US societies. From this standpoint, the individuals profiled in this book embody not just local, face-to-face interactions, histories and influences. Their life histories have been deeply shaped by supranational global processes: the destruction of local economies and livelihoods; the financial suffocation or privatization of public institutions (hospitals, schools, etc.); the continuous reduction of the buying power of the working classes; the meticulous dismantling of the welfare state; and the actual transformation of states into private property or at least servants of the private corporations (De Rivero, 2001; Achbar & Abbott, 2004; Leonard, 2007; Zotzmann, 2007a, 2007b). In the field of education the stories of real individuals reveal the continuous presence of impoverished schools and educators, and learning experiences that are more likely to discourage and exclude them than to act as a means of growth and social mobility. In short, the global is always present when locally situated individuals tell their stories. Most of the Mexican stories were collected in Iztapalapa, one of the 16 delegaciones or large districts into which Mexico City is divided. Iztapalapa is representative of the social and educational phenomena pervasive in marginal Third World urban areas, since it is a densely populated district (1.8 million), and is consistently described by official and media reports as the most chaotic, problematic and dangerous area of the city. As for the US stories, they were mostly collected in local Mexican or ‘Hispanic’ ghettos in the three states (California, Tennessee and North Carolina). While most Latin Americans hear from their migrant relatives

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in the US that they live in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco, the fact is that most (undocumented or ‘illegal’) migrants live in the periphery around the center (Canagarajah, 2002) – ghettos abundant in gang activity, fast-food restaurants, car dealer businesses, pawn shops, charity stores (such as Good Will, Salvation Army, or Family Dollar), flea markets, ‘Mexican’ grocery stores (named La vaquita, Mi ranchito, and the like), liquor shops, hundreds of Christian, Evangelical or Catholic churches, and ‘Se Habla Espanol’ (we speak Spanish) signs . . . but devoid of decent schools, university campuses, cultural centers, public hospitals, sport facilities or at least charming public parks like those available even in small Mexican towns. Thus, just as most migrant Mexicans living in New York do not live in Manhattan but in Queens or in Bronx, most Mexicans in San Francisco do not live around its glamorous districts, but in faraway places such as Richmond, Fruitvale, Martinez, Hayward or Concord. Similarly, most Mexicans in Nashville, Tennessee, do not live around the famous music venues of the Country Music City, but in marginalized and distant locations like Nolensville, Antioch, Gallatin, Smyrna and beyond. Integral to this context is a consistent pattern of school failure, gang and criminal activity, police surveillance, teen pregnancy and poverty that many think exclusive to the ex-colonial world. Many have crossed the Rio Bravo (Mexico–US border) just to find that they salieron de Guatemala para ir a Guatepeor (fled Guate-bad to fall in Guate-worse). This is why immigrants residing in these ghettos often describe their lives in the US as boring, socially and geographically confined, dangerous for their children, sad due to separation from their families in Mexico, and suffocating because it is impossible for them to freely travel back and forth between the two countries. They feel imprisoned in the Golden Cage – La jaula de oro. Understanding the nature of these glocal contexts is essential if we are to see why so many millions of formerly colonial subjects systematically lag behind in education. But we cannot understand this phenomenon if we narrow our gaze to the current histories of these focal individuals, for there are powerful historical and global forces at work in the shaping of individual lives in this truly neo-colonial world. I use the metaphor of Chaos, Carnitas and Carnival to describe some of the pervasive features of this world, within which peculiar educational processes occur. Before 9/11 2001, few people in the US imagined that terror was a global phenomenon. Yet, as diverse non-Western thinkers have explained (e.g. Galeano, 1973, 2000; Miyoshi, 1991; Wangoola, 1991, 2001; Marcos, 1994, 1997; De Rivero, 2001), for the last five centuries Asian, African and South American people have known all too well what global terror means. While the attack on the Twin Towers horrified the ‘civilized’ world (triggering a

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fierce military retaliation in Afghanistan, Iraq and . . .?), for centuries millions have been killed in the now ex-colonies and neither European nor North American governments have called those crimes ‘terrorism’; nor did they move a finger against the terrorists who committed such crimes. Between 50 and 100 million Africans were kidnapped and sold as slaves to American plantations. Almost the entire Asian territory was divided among the ‘civilized’ colonial empires, their lands exfoliated and their peoples silenced with opium, guns or napalm. Current North and Latin American lands were violently expropriated and their inhabitants massacred first by Spanish, Portuguese and Anglo conquistadores, then by transnational companies wanting oil, gold, silver, copper, fine woods or bananas. Yet no US president nor single US-sponsored military or civil puppet regime has called these genocides ‘terrorism’. This is why we can understand very little about the present educational predicament of our countries by looking solely at schools and classrooms. To understand why most of our poor children, youths and adults fail or are failed by educational institutions we must look at our long history of terror, first as colonies and then as hostages of ‘modernization’, ‘development’ and ‘globalization’ schemes whose outcome is a mass of deeply dependent economies, colonized ruling elites, and dislocated and chaotic societies. I use the terms chaos and carnitas to symbolize this pervasive context, in which millions struggle either to become educated, or to resist being educated. Peruvian thinker Oswaldo de Rivero has theorized that chaos is the present state of most ‘developing countries’, which have actually become Chaotic Ungovernable Entities (CUEs): national states whose power under present global capitalism is almost non-existent whether the task is to establish social justice, to protect the environment, to control the power of the media or to fight organized criminality. CUEs are overpopulated by millions of jobless poor who live with malnutrition, pollution and violence, places where the official world (State) is alienated from the ocean of people engaged in an economy outside of the national accounts, marginalized from global consumption, and seeking to affirm its identity not as a social class but through ethnic and provincial affinities, ancestral myths, magic-religious interpretations and/or radical ideologies of the violent rejection of modernity. Mexico is perhaps the epitome of a CUE. Carnitas is the Spanish word for chopped pork, popular in Mexican tacos. Yet historically, native peoples in Mexico and South America have been repeatedly and literally turned into carnitas. Examples abound. In 1521, during the Major Temple celebration in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Spanish soldiers betrayed Montezuma’s trust and used their swords to chop the Mexican leadership (political, intellectual, religious) into human carnitas.

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Tons of feet, arms, half-heads, brains and guts remained scattered for sale on the plaza.5 Afterwards, 95% of the native population died from overt genocide or inhumane work and life conditions. More recently, plenty of carnitas episodes have taken place in Latin America, such as the military coup of 9.11.1973 in Chile, where US-sponsored butcher A. Pinochet overthrew President Salvador Allende and prepared carnitas from 30,000 Chileans. Or when in 1980 US-backed Guatemalan militias tortured, cut to pieces and murdered thousands of Maya-Quiche Indians, including the close relatives of Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu. Or during the US-sponsored contra-revolutionary war in Nicaragua (1980–1990), where around 40,000 people were killed. Every single Latin American country was subject to these ‘counter-insurgency’ wars in Cold War times. Mexico was also active, with a dirty war involving massacres, brutal repression and thousands of tortured and ‘disappeared’ social fighters. Tlatelolco (1968), San Cosme (1971), Aguas Blancas (1995), Acteal (1997), Atenco (2006) and Oaxaca (2007) are but a few iconic sites of our modern carnitascarnivals (FEMOSPP, 2006; Hernandez-Zamora, 2008). Thus if Mexico City is a city built with and upon the debris of the former pre-Columbian city, today marginalized people can be seen as ‘carnitas’ or ‘social debris’ left by centuries of military and economic terrorism, euphemistically called ‘development policies’. The point is that the learning contexts of poor and outcast individuals and the education policies designed for them in Mexico, Latin America or in the recently ‘illegally invaded’ Europe and North America, are inseparable from our national histories of mass genocide and plunder, in which every attempt at autonomous development has ended up in carnitas-carnivals, where not only bodies but also native languages and literacies, religions, histories, cultural systems and social utopias have been shattered. As Noam Chomsky puts it, ‘Virtually every attempt to bring about any constructive change in this US-constructed chamber of horrors has met with a new dose of US violence’ (Chomsky, 1987: 329). Thus, if post-Cold War education strategies in Latin America have been integral to the economic agendas imposed by our ‘democratic’ regimes, the question for us as educators cannot simply be how to bring ‘literacy’ into the lives of ‘underdeveloped’ survivors of long-term civilizationterrorism. Rather, we must ask what kind of strategies we need in order to construct autonomous forms of existence based on socioeconomic justice and freedom, because so far most ‘modernizing’ economic and education policies have pushed our people to their knees and have become selfdestructive endeavors, as African educator Paulo Wangoola (1995) puts it. In particular, literacy programs in ex-colonial countries have historically been a key component of the Civilization-Carnitas program, for this is the

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kind of education devised for the poorest masses, and it starts with the premise that they do not need economic justice, full citizenship or true education (aimed at intellectual independence and growth), but instead ‘basic education’ and ‘literacy for all’, which casts them in practice into the position of disposable workers,6 struggling now to become ‘well paid disposable workers’ as displaced migrants in the US, the sick heart of the global economy (Bales, 1999).

Global Citizens or Global Outcasts? If millions of Mexicans are ‘citizens’ under state attack in Mexico, and plain ‘illegal aliens’ under state siege in the US, what place and identity is left for them to grow and learn, read and think, speak and write? My own personal history of marginalization and exclusion, and the histories of a number of other Mexicans that I have listened to on both sides of the border, have moved me to think of our place in today’s world as global outcasts rather than as ‘global citizens’. In this matter I agree with the Malayan-American anthropologist Aihwa Ong, as he argues that hierarchical schemes of racial and cultural difference intersect to differentially locate minorities of color from different class backgrounds as citizens of Western democracies (Ong, 1996). In fact, many Mexicans have become citizens of nowhere, people for whom the protection of a nation state has vanished, or to whom the state exists mainly in the form of a threat that systematically oppresses their present and shrinks their future. As a result, and as the life histories of the profiled individuals in this book will reveal, it is possible to identify three common stances towards citizenship among outcast Mexicans: rejection, vague desire and agentive consciousness. Rejection is a radical and explicitly articulated withdrawal from the public sphere of the political (national) community and its practices (e.g. ‘I have never voted, nor will I’). Vague desire might be seen as the articulation of a somehow abstract desire of having rights (e.g. ‘it would be good to have a work permit’). And agentive consciousness is a clearly articulated – often based on literacy-mediated discourses – affirmation of one’s voice and place as a human being and citizen with full rights. After years of listening to the stories of people at the margins in both countries, I realize that few Mexicans see themselves as true citizens. The fact is that millions of us have never been treated as citizens in Mexico, let alone in the US. While many of us, including most of the individuals profiled in this book, have been active participants in local projects, economic investments (e.g. through remittances) and political actions in both countries, these practices of citizenship (Castañeda, 2004), seem not to

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have been enough for us to be seen as full citizens in the liberal sense of being free and equal members of a nation state that protects our rights. We are supposed to be full members in the imagined community (Anderson, 1983) of a national state. The fact is that many Mexicans distrust and withdraw on both sides of the Mexico–US border, while others would like to be, assuming that they are not. Among the latter some engage in sociopolitical action to reclaim their citizenship rights (and thus develop and use a literacy-mediated voice), whereas others just complain in private (e.g. at home, or in front of a researcher). The entire drama of this kind of global social exclusion is perhaps best captured by the words of Pablo, one of the transnational Mexicans profiled in this book. As a former soldier in Mexico he witnessed how the state used the army not to protect but to silence its citizens. Yet in the US he realized that his only true right as ‘illegal’ migrant was this: ‘when the police arrest you, you have the right to remain silent’. This shocking phrase, the right to remain silent, symbolizes the opposite of what I explore in this book: the personal struggles for the literacy and voice of postcolonial Mexican individuals living under conditions of enforced or self-imposed silence. Yet as (disempowered) human beings they deserve due respect. They all make hard decisions and embrace the meanings and practices that enable them to cope with a sense of nobodyness while being members of a supposed community of equals (i.e. as citizens of a nation state that seems to exist only in theory). Integral to these choices is the adoption of ‘literacy paths’ to find their way in the middle of senselessness: some find refugee, escape or illumination in religious or supernatural texts and practices; others in media entertainment; others in political texts and struggles; and still others in culturally and ideologically hybrid practices. The key point to note here is the different relation of each individual with the public sphere, the sphere of the collective matters. Literacy matters precisely because of its potential as the tool and practice of voice, freedom and active citizenship. Paradoxically, the knowledge and literacy practices available and/or embraced by the disenfranchised often work to discourage and silence them as citizens. This is not a minor detail but a paramount issue for educators, because education and literacy are precisely both requisites and products of being a citizen (not a subservient caste) in the modern nation states. Let us remember that all pre-democratic regimes were based on the idea that some individuals are born to serve others, that people are not born equal, and that there are ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ people. According to this racist and classist logic, some have the right to speak (and read, write, think and learn), whereas others are bound to serve and ‘remain silent’. Thus, while ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ reason were the moral

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foundation of the hierarchical division of society, all projects of political liberalism, democratic education and critical literacy have always strived for a citizenry of educated, literate, equal and free human beings. The advent of modern democracy was supposed to end this ancient history of a system of castes, a social division of hierarchies and categories based on links of natural or divine character, enclosed on themselves. In the case of Mexico, the system of castes implanted by the Spanish rule (1521–1821) was officially over after the Declaration of Independence in 1821. While the three centuries that divided the Mexican society into three main castes (indios, mestizos and Europeans) and dozens of derived sub-castes (e.g. castizos, mulatos, negros, lobos, salta pa’tras, gibaros, etc.) is over, we have maintained de jure and de facto structures that guarantee a caste-like society, spread out now at a transnational or global level by massive migration to the US.

History in Person Why should the stories of a few individuals matter in a world of millions? Why should we care about their lives instead of directly measuring their literacy skills? Since the 20th century, literacy policies and programs have been implemented on the basis of a growing rhetoric about ‘alarming levels of functional illiteracy’ in the population. Official figures in countries like Mexico count the number of ‘illiterate’ adults in millions. Is not this enough evidence that millions lack the required skills to function as workers, citizens and learners? Isn’t it obvious that millions cannot read and write and need basic literacy skills? There are good reasons to do so. Paraphrasing US literacy scholar Anne Dyson (1997a: 26), what can we do with millions but count them? As Dyson argues, we need to study the peculiarities of individuals to trace their complex interactions with one another and their environment, in order to reveal and understand ‘dimensions of experience that are ordinarily invisible’ (Dyson, 1997a: 5). This is why in this work I often cite and describe at length the words and lives of particular individuals. It is a conscious decision based on the idea that postcolonial subjects have ideas of their own. And they are able to articulate them as long as they are given the opportunity to do so. Their words are active and critical interventions into the world, rather than mere ‘linguistic data’. The narratives of marginalized people are richly informative about their social realities and personal dilemmas, as well as about the available learning and literacy practices. Yet their words are texts and all text is open to interpretation. Readers will judge for themselves.

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While personal narrative can be only partially informative about actual literacy knowledge and skills, my dialogues with these people were in themselves spaces where their voices emerged. Voices which usually fade or are silenced in literacy tests, or in public spaces such as schools or workplaces, were recovered in these dialogues. Precisely because their stories reveal pervasive experiences of silencing (by spouses, schools, workplaces, churches, or state institutions and laws), most have been willing and eager to voice their thoughts at length, in their own language. They have shared memories, stories, yarns and criticisms; and they have talked about topics that they are rarely invited or allowed to mention in public: religion, politics, history, economy, governments, institutions, social movements, media stories, and their worries and hopes. Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) used the dialogic notion of voice as opposed to silence. In his view, meaning-making, access to wider discourses and the taking of an active stance of dialogue with one’s social world are dimensions of voice. Today this is a key theme in multilingual and multiliteracy research and education, as the work of Nancy Hornberger (2006) with native populations of South America has shown. She cites, for example, the contrasting attitude of a little Bolivian girl at school and at home: This little seven-year-old rarely, if ever, spoke in class; yet, at home, she was something of a livewire. She talked non-stop to me (in Quechua) [. . .] Then, as now, it struck me that this little girl, whom I call Basilia, lost her voice at school and found it at home and that use of her own language in familiar surroundings was key in the activation of her voice. (Hornberger, 2006: 278) Paraphrasing Hornberger, the stories of a few underschooled Mexicans matter because their voices that were lost at schools, workplaces, state institutions and the media, are found in dialogue with a researcher who is also a member of their community. This kind of work is indispensable in educational research, for ‘illiterate’ people are often treated as worthless information sources, even about their own lives, needs and learning processes. As Blommaert writes: ‘Millions of people . . . live “unofficial” lives, and no one cares about their names, birth dates, addresses, or, in a wider sense, subjectivity’ (Blommaert, 2008: XV). Many policymakers and researchers clearly believe that surveys and quantitative data are ‘scientific’ diagnosis methods. They treat people as passive recipients of prescribed curricular medicines. And they devise political agendas that prescribe top-down remedial programs delivered

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through material artifacts (textbooks and computers). Yet this ‘medicine’ is not really intended to heal the ‘patients’ but to spread the cancer of a free-market economy that demands an ever more flexible and skilled but voiceless workforce. International agencies like Unesco, the World Bank, and OECD, as well as the Mexican and US governments keep prescribing this medicine. Yet other voices claim that tests and surveys are narrow ways to understand the constraints faced by marginalized people to learn, grow and incorporate alien literacy practices into their lives (e.g. Freire, 1979/1997; Horton & Freire, 1990; Lytle, 1991; Hull, 1993a, 1993b, 2003; Farr & Guerra, 1995; Gee et al., 1996; Lankshear & O’Connor, 1999; CEAAL, 2000; Jiménez, 2003; Zentella, 2005; Vasquez, 2006; Bartlett, 2007; McGinnis et al., 2007; Sanchez, 2007; Sarroub, 2008). From their viewpoint, education and literacy can be reduced neither to the factors nor to the remedies of the free-market economy. Education is rather seen as integral to the projects of personal and social emancipation and justice. Yet they also care about people’s lives and histories, because learning and development cannot be observed through scores in standardized tests, but through situated action in social context and personal history (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 2003). Thus, it is important to listen to the winding life-roads of people who have overcome a sense of inferiority, hopelessness and conformism, and who have achieved a strong sense of agency so as to take their personal and community lives into their own hands, something unthinkable through World Bank-driven adult literacy education programs. By listening to them, we will meet History in person, for theirs are embodied histories of colonialism, globalization and migration, inscribed in their own bodies and in their stories of flesh-and-blood people.

Outline of Chapters The book is organized in three parts and seven chapters. Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2) introduces colonialism and globalization as the sociohistorical contexts that gave rise to the classification of colonized and dominated subjects as ‘illiterate’. It also reviews theoretical work that informs key connections, such as the link between learning, literacy and citizenship. Part 2 (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) presents in depth case studies of individual learners, grouped in turn in three categories: agents, transnationals and survivors. Chapter 3 presents cases of agentive people, whose histories of the appropriation of discourse and literacy resources are visibly marked by a strong sense of agency (self-direction, control and authorship of their own lives). Chapter 4 presents stories of transnational Mexican migrants

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in the US, whose experiences are to some extent qualitatively different from those of Mexicans who have lived only in Mexico. Chapter 5 focuses on individuals who are representative of a segment of politically detached people whose lives are lived in even worse economic situations, and whose ideological horizons are visibly marked by the persistence of more traditional or conservative perspectives. Finally, Part 3 (Chapters 6 and 7) synthesizes key patterns that cut across the individual cases, and situates them within current discussions on language and literacy policies and politics. Finally, Chapter 7 presents closing reflections on the educational and political implications of the issues discussed in the book, from the perspective of the decolonizing projects emerging in Mexico and Latin America in the post Cold War era.

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Chapter 2

The Un-Making of the Illiterate

When a people has their head in the Lion’s mouth, prudence requires them to take it out with great care. Cherokee Chief John Ross, before removal in 1838 It is often said that Quechua children, and indigenous children in many parts of the world, for that matter, are naturally shy and reticent, and that that is why they rarely speak in school [. . .] I think we should ask ourselves whether at least some of that reticence is due to the fact that the school language in many of these cases is a language entirely foreign to the child. Nancy Hornberger (2006: 278)

‘Introverted’ and ‘Extroverted’ Owing to a deeply rooted belief in Mexico that some children are born timid or ‘introverted’, whereas others are naturally self-confident or ‘extroverted’, as a child I was often classified and labeled as ‘introverted’ or ‘shy’. For many years I believed it, for my own parents and other relatives referred to me as a ‘timid’ boy. I thus grew up haunted by the fears and anxieties of public self-exposure. To avoid that risk, I remained silent even in family conversations where they were talking about me, or about matters that I cared about. I also remained mostly silent in my classrooms from elementary school up to college. Yet I simultaneously felt intrigued by the fact that just a few of my social circles (relatives, neighbors, schoolmates) were mysteriously articulate, talkative and confident. I used to think that they were ‘extroverted’ or ‘born speakers’. In other words, just like most people, I didn’t think of ‘introversion’ and ‘extroversion’ as socially constructed and learnt categories. Paradoxically, as an extremely ‘shy’ and silent child, my mind was often agonized by thoughts and words begging to get out, to be shouted and heard. Yet, as a car mechanic’s assistant in a Mexican shanty town the idea of expressing those thoughts by writing never crossed my mind. 25

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Decades later, as a researcher doing life history interviews with marginalized people, I realized that many of these equally silent people also had ideas of their own, as well as strong but suppressed desires to voice their thoughts. Yet many of them were also raised with the idea that they were deficient, incapable or ‘timid’ as speakers, writers or thinkers. Such is the case of Alberto, a taxi driver I extensively interviewed in Mexico City. He perceives himself as a person of a low status because he had little schooling (‘I only got to 9th grade’, he told me, noticeably ashamed). Yet, thanks to his passion for pre-Columbian Mexican history, and his fondness for books and information sources, he has become an expert in ancient Mexican history, particularly with regard to the Nahuatl peoples (people who inhabited the current territories of the Mexico City metropolitan area before the Spanish conquest in 1521). However, he made it clear to me that he feels intimidated and speechless every time he enters educational or cultural venues, such as museums, cultural centers and the like. When I asked him if he had asked questions or made comments in the lectures and conferences that he attends at the National Museum of Anthropology, he eloquently replied: Veeery rarely. I am a bit timid as to stand up and speak. Especially because you think ‘you never know what the level of these people around you is’. So you get intimidated; mostly because the moment you enter in a museum you see the difference in the people there: you see only brain people, smart people, students. I mean, you think ‘if I ask a question, maybe everyone laughs at me’. Alberto represents the majority of working class Mexicans who have been labeled and self-labeled as ‘timid’, ‘unskilled’, ‘inarticulate’ or ‘illiterate’ by the very educational institutions and discourses that claim to work in support of their education. Overlooked or ignored in these discourses is the fact that we all avoid the public expression (oral and written) of our thoughts in communicative situations where differences in linguistic and cultural capital are manifest, and where we are in a position of lower status or hierarchy. Paradoxically, while public discourses insist on treating ‘illiteracy’ as an illness that needs to be ‘eradicated’, a growing body of research in the fields of language and literacy learning has produced evidence that explicitly or implicitly questions and challenges the colonizing vision of the non-dominant populations (those who massively fail at school) as ‘shy’ and ‘illiterate’ people. Drawing from ethnographic work inside and outside school settings, this research has yielded evidence that supports the idea that, rather than a psychological trait, ‘shyness’ is a social construct

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resulting from an anticipated risk of engaging in linguistic performances under asymmetric power, knowledge and linguistic relations. Paradoxically too, the school is one of the key settings where people coming from historically subjugated groups (e.g. Mexicans in the US and indigenousorigin people in Latin America) feel threatened by and alienated from the ‘foreign’ nature of the predominant language. Thus, just as Hornberger notes in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, a number of scholars have come to question the supposed ‘natural’ shyness and reticence of indigenous and poor people in many parts of the world. In my own case, it took me years of political engagement, academic study and life experience to break my silence and engage in public dialogues, both by speaking and writing. I also needed to experience a life among racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse people in the US in order to sense what is ‘psychological’ and what is educative, what is individual and what is cultural or political in the shaping of one’s voice. While individual development is not mechanically conditioned by one’s position in the social world, the social world certainly plays a powerful role in the shaping of our speaking personalities, our very selves as ‘extroverted’ or ‘introverted’, as well as our willingness and ‘facility’ to adopt and use literacy to speak up (to express ourselves), to speak against (to resist oppression), and to speak with (to dialogue across difference) (Flower, 2008: 78–79).

The Colonial Creation of the Illiterate The Bicentennial Capitol Mall in Nashville (TN) is a large, grassy and ever-green square bordered by a wall of black marble in which is inscribed the official history of the state of Tennessee, from the ancient formation of sea sediments, still visible in the cliffs of its abundant hills, rivers and lakes, to the end of the 20th century. Inscribed on this wall are the words that Cherokee Chief, John Ross, pronounced in 1838, when the Indian Removal Act gave the Native Americans the choice between ‘voluntarily leaving’ or being ‘removed’ from their territories in the current states of Tennessee, Carolina del Norte, Georgia and Alabama. Acting with great caution to ‘get the head out of the Lion’s mouth’, the Cherokees undertook their migration to the West. Yet over 4000 people died on this journey, which they called Nunna daul Isunyi (‘The path where we cried’), known in English as The Trail of Tears. The Indian Removal Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, enforced the ‘voluntary’ removal of the Native peoples from their lands, but many refused to obey it. As a reaction, the White colonizers, ‘assisted

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by dogs’, drove the Indians out of their lands, as it states on commemorative signs about the foundation of Tennessee. Ironically, in 2008, nearly 200 years after these events, the Illegal Alien Employment Act was passed in the US to enforce the removal of (mostly Mexican) migrant workers from the same lands. Just like the Cherokees, in the last 500 years most of the native peoples of America and their descendents have been plundered, expelled or literally eliminated by the expansion of the European conquerors and colonizers in the current territories of the United States, Mexico and the rest of the Americas. Every plunder has been followed by the processes of Europeanization, cultural assimilation and subordination through multiple routes: education (implantation of a uniform school system); enforced citizenship (dismantling of autonomous forms of organization and government, and subordination to the new colonial powers); legislation (imposition of laws and codes which are unjust and undecipherable for natives); religious conversion (deliberate destruction of sacred texts, sites and native worship practices); co-optation or annihilation of intellectual leaders (a particularly intense process in Latin America during the conquest and in the second half of the 20th century). This is how a Navajo woman describes the educational experience of the native peoples in the US: Because the written word was often used to discredit Native American culture or rob us our rights, writing and reading are considered by some to be ‘White man’s activities. [. . .] The history of Indian education indicates that instruction in the White man’s Redding and writing came with damaging practices of indoctrination, assimilation, and colonization [. . .] The entire school experience was painful because of institutionalized racism and the goal of ‘removing the Indian’ from students. (White-Kaulaity, 2007: 561) ‘Removing the Indian’ (quitar lo indio) is still a common expression in Mexico, where linguistic assimilation (functional degradation of native languages and writing systems, and the material destruction of their texts) has been crucial in the discursive creation of ‘illiteracy’ and ‘illiterates’. As Jiménez, Smith and Martínez-León remind us, . . . the colonial experience served to create a historically conditioned context in which not only native literacies were prohibited, but also Mexicans’ use of the colonizers’ language and literacy became defined as perennially deficient. ( Jiménez et al., 2003: 492) The edifice of colonial and imperial domination always demands a discourse that supports and legitimizes it. Historically, the role of European

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writers has been central to this task. First, the Spanish chroniclers of the conquest, then anthropologists, and now the education ‘experts’ have all consistently portrayed colonized peoples as ‘. . . inferior, childlike, or feminine, incapable of looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly well for millennia) and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own best interests (today they are deemed to require “development”)’ (Young, 2003: 2). Here is an example of how Spanish chroniclers of the conquest portrayed the native Mexicans: What could have happened to these barbarians, more convenient and healthy than remaining submitted to the Empire of those whose prudence, virtue, and religion will have to convert them from barbarians, such that they barely deserve the name of human beings, into civilized men [. . .] from dumb and lascivious, into honest and upright; from impious and servants of the demons, into Christians, worshipers of the true God? They are beginning to receive the Christian religion [. . .], they are already receiving public preceptors of human letters and sciences, and what matters more, teachers of religion and customs. For many and very serious reasons, then, these barbarians are obligated to receive the empire of the Spanish [. . .] because virtue, humanity, and the true religion are more precious than gold and silver. ( Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, cited in Florescano, 1994: 278, my translation) At the dawn of the 21st century this racist discourse still persists in both Latin and North America. In the US, Latino scholars like Ana Celia Zentella have documented the racist discourses that, based on their Spanish accent, conceive of Latinos/as as ‘stupid, dirty, lazy, sexually loose, amoral, and violent’ (Zentella, 2003: 61). Meanwhile, in Mexico, the figure of José Vasconcelos (Secretary of Public Education after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920) is still celebrated in official and intellectual circles, despite his explicit defense of the cultural conquest of the indigenous peoples: . . . it is but a myth, such supposedly violent destruction of a culture. A conquistador who brings but violence is influenced and absorbed and remains in the subjugated people. But for this to occur, the submitted people have to possess a culture. In our lands, unfortunately, there were no elements to compete, let alone to overcome a Christian civilization. The worthless technique and childish ideology of our indigenous myths could barely retain the curiosity of the invaders. It takes monuments like the Bible or the Upanishads . . . to resist the invasions and to civilize the invaders, like in India or China. In our

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continent the destruction of the native ideology joined with the material conquest. But this destroyed ideology was replaced, and I don’t think anybody seriously thinks that it was replaced advantageously. (Vasconcelos, 1981: 152–153, my translation) This representation of the peoples who historically submitted in the Americas, as ‘lacking of culture’ remains as an ideology rooted in many educators who, in Mexico and the US, classify and racialize the descendants of the native peoples as ‘stupid’, ‘ignorant’, ‘illiterates’, or at least as ‘people without reading skills and habits’. Overlooked in both cases is the systematic effort to construct the identity of the dominated peoples as illiterates, and the crucial role of language and literacy education in this process. To turn the dispossessed into ‘literate’ people (alfabetizarlos) is thus integral to technocratic educational agendas in both Mexico and the US. Paradoxically, while portrayed as ‘illiterate’, ‘unskilled’ or ‘uneducated’, these groups have historically been excluded from the educational institutions of the dominant literate society. Thus, when they are urged to become literate they are somehow required to get their heads back into the lion’s mouth, since education and literacy imply that the subjugated must enter into institutions and discourses from which their groups of origin have been expelled, and where those who enter often experience cultural and linguistic loss, alienation, ambiguity towards the dominant language or a decline in their educational expectations (Fanon, 1967; Freire, 1970; Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Wong Fillmore, 1991; Ogbu, 1999; Valenzuela, 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; López, 2001; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Ramanathan, 2005b; Edelsky, 2006; Hall, 2006; White-Kaulaity, 2007).

Decolonizing Theory To counter the colonizing discourses on the literacy and education of the working poor, I adopt a theoretical perspective of learning and literacy as socially and culturally situated practices (e.g. Heath, 1983; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Street, 1984; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Hull & Hernandez-Zamora, 2008). From this socio-cultural approach, ‘the focus of learning and education is not children, nor schools, but human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various social institutions’ (Gee et al., 1996: 4). Learning is seen, then, as a ‘natural’ consequence of engaging in all cultural practices, not only in those of formal schooling. Hence access to more legitimate and empowering learning contexts is the crucial factor in cognitive and communicative development. From this standpoint, the focus of learning and literacy development shifts from the acquisition of a

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mental skill to the study of the access to new activities, communities, identities and their associated discursive resources. Consequently, researching literacy development shifts from assessing individual skills to investigating the unequally distributed barriers and opportunities for literacy learning and practice among variously empowered classes, ethnicities, genders and other social categories. Methodologically, two approaches or units of analysis become relevant: the study of communities (their shared discourse practices), and the study of individual trajectories of literacy practices across time and space. In this study I adopt the latter approach, whose guiding thesis is that literacy development is enabled or hindered by both social conditions and agentive decisions. People who start life with socioeconomic disadvantages, for example, face not only cognitive challenges in learning and growing as educated and literate persons, but also socio-historical structures of exclusion, which are exacerbated under colonial relations. In the current era of global capitalism, forms of neocolonialism are found not only in military, cultural or economic imperialism, but also in educational discourses and institutions which promote linguistic imperialism and assimilation (Pennycook, 1998, 2007; Canagarajah, 1999; Ramanathan, 2005a; Cummins, 2000), in cultural homogenization and educational standardization (Pearson, 2007), in education policies that reinforce the unjust distribution of learning resources, in top-down educational strategies that cast the subordinated into the lowest positions in the work market (Reich, 1992), and in varied forms of self-inferiorization, alienation and self-exclusion interiorized and enacted by the subordinated (Hernandez-Zamora, 2009). Neocolonialism, therefore, sets up powerful and systematic barriers against learning and growth throughout the life course of millions of members of the non-dominant groups. The study of the life histories of educationally excluded postcolonial subjects helps us to understand how learning and education take place and are embodied in the life trajectories of actual people. Yet these trajectories are not fixed and unchangeable. It is the interplay between socioeconomic positions and agentive decisions that defines learning and development possibilities. The stories of the individuals profiled in this book eloquently speak of present-day Mexicans who experience lifelong hardships in order to enter into or advance within the educational system. Likewise, they are people who find that the appropriation of the dominant (i.e. literate, Western oriented) ways with words challenge not only their cognitive capabilities, but their linguistic, cultural and ideological values and identities. The stories of some of them also show that critical and extended forms of literacy are tools of personal empowerment and decolonization, as these allow

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them to develop a sense of critical consciousness, agency and active citizenship. Yet, rather than assuming that literacy and schools are inherently good for dominated groups to develop their own voices, I argue that these trajectories of the learning of actual individuals can inform us about which learning theories and practices contribute to silence them, and which ones encourage and support their growth as speakers, writers and thinkers. From this perspective, voice and silence refer to both oral and written forms of expression. Just as a person with a voice may be expressive both orally and in writing, a voiceless subject is silent in both oral and written forms of expression.

Decolonizing Research Because language and literacy are key tools for the culture and central means of learning, anti-colonial researchers have sought to understand why so many learners from non-dominant groups fail to grasp those tools. However, the approach to investigating this differs greatly within ex-colonial centers and peripheries. In former European colonies like Mexico, where literacy is often seen as an inherently good and neutral ability (something to be loved and mastered by everyone), research tends to focus on the how (how do children and adults learn to read and write?) regardless of the who and why (who fails to learn literacy and why?). Precisely because of our colonial legacy, Latin American researchers (most of them of European and North American descent) tend to downplay or explicitly dismiss the colonizing implications of the official literacy programs and the often colonized ways of researching literacy. In the former colonial or imperial centers (Europe, US), on the other hand, researchers often acknowledge that, in colonial or neocolonial situations, the appropriation of the dominant language and literacy and the construction of a literate identity involve conflictive issues of ideological and cultural allegiance, ownership and identity for subordinate subjects. In this book I defend an understanding of literacy learning (becoming literate) as not just a psycholinguistic process, but centrally as a cultural, political and ideological experience of adopting and assimilating to the language, culture and ideologies of the dominant other. In historical situations of overt domination (e.g. slavery), the dominant language is the language of the master; under military colonial occupation, that language is the language of the invader; in postcolonial situations, that language is the language of the elite descendents of the colonial masters; in neocolonial situations, that language is the language of the dominant, ‘mainstream’ or privileged groups (e.g. Anglos in the US, European-descent elites in Latin America);

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in today’s context of massive South–North migration, that language is the language of the unwelcoming host countries, often the former metropolitan centers of the colonial or imperial systems (e.g. African migrants in Europe or Latin American migrants in the US). However, unlike mainstream literacy research, postcolonial researchers are beginning to look at the history of literacy education as integral to the history of colonial European expansion: The colonizing effort was all too often written not as a history of capitalist expansion, but as a massive, entirely laudable, educational enterprise [. . .] Schooling for the subject population entails the acquisition of the language and literacy of the colonial power [. . .] From the colonial to the postcolonial world the struggle for identity is a struggle to write the lives of subject peoples [. . .] The languages used and the literate means employed, the texts produced and read, tell us much of the construction and transformation of selves through literate practices. Literacy is neither cause nor consequence; the process of selfformation, self-fashioning is, rather, mediated by literacy. (Collins & Blot, 2003: 121–122) Although not all scholars explicitly adopt a postcolonial perspective, in North America and Europe there is evidently a shift from the vision of literacy learning as a cognitive and ideologically neutral mental process (taking place within the learner’s head) to the vision of language and literacy learning as a process which is never simply technical (e.g. the mastery of a skill or competence with a different grammar system), but which is always conflictive, for it demands the transformation of one’s sense of identity. In the US, for example, scholars have focused on the language and literacy socialization practices of ethnolinguistic minorities, such as African Americans, Native Americans and immigrant Mexicans; and the consistent finding is that learning the dominant forms of language (e.g. oral or written forms of English), is always a journey mined with dilemmas of cultural, identity and linguistic loss and allegiance (see, e.g. Cummins, 2000; Schecter & Bayley, 1997, 2002; Ogbu, 1999; SkutnabbKangas, 2000, 2004; McCarty et al., 2006; Hornberger, 2007). For historically subordinated, little-schooled and impoverished groups, becoming literate demands gaining access to exclusive linguistic markets (Bourdieu, 1991; Park & Wee, 2008) where domination relationships define the differential symbolic values of different languages, dialects and literacy practices. The drama of colonial and post- or neocolonial subjects is that they must access, learn and appropriate the language of their dominant group: its accents and styles, its genres and norms, its practices and associated

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ideologies, which often displace and devalue their own native forms and practices. ‘Success’ in acquiring this dominant way with words (oral and written) for subordinated subjects often means dividing themselves between different worlds. Anti-colonial revolutionary leaders and thinkers have long understood the identity conflicts of colonized and subordinated subjects as they seek to both accommodate and resist the dominant ways of thinking, speaking, reading/writing and being. In his eloquently entitled book, Black Skins, White Masks, revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon (1952/1967), for example, theorized the divided subjectivity of Black subjects as they try to appropriate and imitate the cultural codes of the White colonizers in former French colonies. Likewise, over the last three decades a growing body of academic work in fields as varied as situated learning, ethnography of communication, new literacy studies, second language acquisition (SLA), linguistic anthropology and sociology of education and culture have documented and theorized such conflict among diverse ‘minorities’ in various countries and regions. Few scholars in Latin America, like Luis E. López (2001), have argued that official ‘bilingual’ literacy education in Latin America has a colonizing character insofar as its goal is to ‘culturize’ the subjugated populations. Instead, US scholars of the pre-Columbian writing systems (e.g. Boone & Mignolo, 1994; Mignolo, 1995; Jiménez & Smith, 2008) have argued that these were true writing systems, rather than ‘pre-writing’, as was believed and used to justify the imposition of the Latin alphabet in colonial and postcolonial times. Likewise, several decades ago, ethnographers and sociolinguists in North America discovered the cultural conflict faced by native and linguistic minorities vis-à-vis mainstream or dominant groups. In a seminal study on interethnic communication between English speakers and native Alaskans (Athabaskans), Scollon and Scollon (1981) found that the communicative patterns and values of the dominant American and Canadian society, which they take for granted, radically differ from those of the native groups. ‘From the Athabaskan point of view what is usually experienced is that English speakers talk all the time, or talk too much. From the English point of view Athabaskans are said not to like to talk, or to be silent’ (1981: 14). Scollon and Scollon found that whereas the English speaker seeks to display his own abilities through talking, the Athabaskan avoids these self-displays. As a result, the English speakers come to believe that Athabaskans are unsure, aimless, incompetent and withdrawn; whereas Athabaskans believe that English speakers are far too talkative. According to these authors, literacy development is at the heart of this conflict; for an

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Athabaskan to produce an essay would require him or her to produce a major display, which goes against the belief of Athabaskans that public self-displays are forms of Anglo arrogance, which threaten their native (and subordinate) group’s ethnic identity. In her seminal ethnographic study, Heath (1983) also investigated three contiguous US communities in the 1960s and 1970s and found significant differences in the ‘ways with words’ that characterized Black working-class, White working-class and racially mixed middle-class communities. Heath revealed the interdependence of language use with values and ways of participating in different social worlds, and provided ample evidence that, far from being a neutral skill with clear cognitive or social consequences, literacy was variably experienced and offered differential rewards, depending on the distance that certain ways of using language diverged from the middle-class standard. Her research also showed that schools were unaware of the functional uses of written language in working-class communities, and also ignored the fact that people in these communities did not separate oral and literate forms of language; rather, they turned from written to spoken uses of language and vice versa as the occasion demanded. Therefore, it was inaccurate to characterize a social group as either an oral or literate culture: ‘it is neither, and it is both’. Another classical study of Native American children from the Warm Springs Reservation (Philips, 1972) asked why children seemed reluctant to talk in class. Philips found that, rather than this being due to a deficit in the communicative competence of the children and their communities, the ways of organizing participation in each setting were seen to follow divergent cultural structures, values and expectations. While schools valued and rewarded extended individual verbal performances before a large audience, Indian communities valued silence and the patient attention of children to adult conversations; also, while the school prized verbal forms of demonstrating knowledge, Indian communities valued practical, nonverbal ways of demonstrating knowledge and expertise. Philips concluded that there are culturally distinctive modes of communication that schools should acknowledge, rather than eliminate through cultural uniformity. Recent research on the Native Americans’ language loss has equally found evidence of the mutually constitutive relationship between language and identity. The stories and testimonials collected by Teresa McCarty and her colleagues among the Navajos eloquently express the shame and selfhate that push young people to give up their mother tongue: ‘If a child learns only English, you have lost your child’, Navajo elders say. Yet for youths the brutal images of the genocide suffered by Navajos at the hands

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of US military forces are still in their minds, as Jonathan, one of the interviewees, articulates: Like I said, this Long Walk syndrome . . . we’re afraid to be punished, we’re afraid that someone will whip us in the back. . . . You know, you forsake who you are, you give up having to learn Navajo . . . You’re having to give all that up, in order to accommodate the mainstream life . . . and many times, the older people will encourage English so they [youth] can make it in the Whiteman’s world. . . . Like I said, for me, it kind of confused me. Where was I in the world?’ (McCarty et al., 2006: 38–39) Similar studies with African Americans have documented the identity conflicts faced by Black people as they are ordered to learn standard (i.e. White) English in order to succeed in schools. In his study of a Black speech community in California, John Ogbu (1999) found that learning ‘proper English’ (i.e. the dominant White middle-class dialect) was perceived by his informants as a form of subtractive bilinguism, that is, a loss of their mother dialect (known in the US as Ebonics or African American Vernacular English). Ogbu’s informants recurrently declared that mastering proper English is a requirement imposed on Black people by their White American oppressors: ‘talking proper English is puttin’ on (exaggerating, performing)’; ‘it is literally insane and stuff to see people who pretend to be White’; ‘We get very angry [when someone pretends] to be White by talkin’ proper’; ‘when you get into this educational mode, you’re automatically being taught to be like White people, because it’s their system’. Ogbu concluded that learning proper English represents a conflict of collective identity for African Americans, as it results in dialect assimilation. Besides issues of identity and cultural conflict, another learning constraint among marginalized people is the limited access to actual practice and native speaker-writers. Researching immigrant English learners in Canada, Norton (2000) theorized what she called the paradox of language learning: ‘On the one hand, immigrant language learners need access to the social networks of target language speakers in order to practice and improve the target language; on the other hand, they have difficulty gaining access to these networks because common language is an a priori condition of entry into them’ (Norton, 2000: 47). Consistent with the stories of transnational Mexicans in this book (Chapter 5), Norton found that, despite years of life in Canada, immigrant women had little or no affective contact with native speakers; their only opportunities to use and learn English were always under asymmetrical relations of power (e.g. as

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subordinate employees in fast food restaurants), never required – nor allowed – to engage in lengthy and personally meaningful conversations. Similar and persistent conflicts of cultural and linguistic identity and allegiance, limited access to native speakers/readers/writers, and other constraints have been found by students of language and literacy learning among Mexicans and Latinos in the US. In her classical study, Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, Valdés (1996) found that, rather than any cultural deficit, the mismatch between the patterns of family interactive behavior and that valued by American schools (e.g. extended solo performances, competition for attention, etc.) was the major cause of school failure among Mexican children. The diverging ‘ways with words’ valued by Mexican families and by US schools prevented children from engaging in US schools. Also, in her recent work on the presence of the Spanish language in the US, Valdés and her colleagues remind us that despite the fact that Spanish is the language spoken by over 8 million Californians (out of a total population of 33.8 million, in 2003) ‘from the time of the conquest to the present [there exists a] segregation and exclusion of Spanish-speaking individuals after the imposition of English in California [. . .] Spanish language maintenance efforts are faced with extreme hostility by the non-Latino population’ (Valdés et al., 2006: 24). In her telling book, Subtractive Schooling: US Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, Valenzuela (1999) offered an explanation for the poor academic achievement of Mexican and Mexican American students in Texas: ‘Rather than functioning as a conduit for the attainment of the American dream, this large, overcrowded and underfunded urban school reproduces Mexican youth as a monolingual, English-speaking, ethnic minority, neither identified with Mexico nor equipped to function completely in America’s mainstream. For the majority of Seguín High School [Mexican students ...] schooling is a subtractive process’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 3). Valenzuela’s study is consistent with others which have also found a progressive decline in academic achievement among second, third and subsequent generations of Mexican-origin students: ‘Rather than revealing the upward mobility pattern historically evident among European-origin groups, research on generational attainments points to an “invisible ceiling” of blocked opportunity for Mexican people’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 4). The author argues that this reality is not separated from the ‘the larger project of cultural eradication in which schools play an important part’ (Valenzuela, 1999: 4). In another strand of research, language acquisition and socialization scholars interested in Mexican-origin people in the US have widely

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documented the dilemmas and ambiguities experienced by Mexican families as they seek to learn English in order to gain access to mainstream institutions, often at the cost of their children’s cultural and linguistic loss. Schecter and Bayley (2002), for example, have documented cases of Mexican families facing cultural dilemmas as they make decisions about their children’s education. Sooner or later, all observed families (middle and working class, with more or less schooling, more or less Americanized, etc.) face the dilemma of encouraging their children to become fully proficient in the English language, but at the expense of the loss of their cultural roots and eventually the loss of their mother tongue (Spanish). This was the case in the Villegas family, who followed school recommendations to use only English at home, in the hope that their daughter Diane would learn English as fluently as possible. At some point, Diana’s parents realized that by pushing their daughter to ‘adapt as quickly as possible to the (US) system’, they were also alienating her from her cultural roots: ‘we’re losing the use of the Spanish language at home. And with this, we are losing also some of the culture, and in the end it’s like they’re in limbo, they aren’t anywhere’ (Schecter & Bayley, 2002: 56).

Citizenship and Literacy The previous section makes it clear there is a growing body of research which reports eloquently on the cultural conflicts and dilemmas faced by subordinate or non-dominant groups as they are either ordered to learn or voluntarily commit to learning the dominant language and discourse practices in their own home (colonial or postcolonial) societies or as immigrants in their host countries. These include: conflicts of cultural and identity values; little or no access to native speakers and writers of the dominant languages; linguistically and culturally subtractive schools; fears of cultural and identity loss; derogatory attitudes towards their own cultural and linguistic forms; colonizing education policies, and so forth. Despite its contribution, this research tends to pay little attention to issues of transnationalism and citizenship, which are salient in my interviewees’ narratives as key dimensions affecting their literacy development. Of particular importance is the self-/exclusion as citizens that many Mexicans experience in both nation states (Mexico and the US), and also the pervasive self-authoring literacy practices most of them engage in, but which often go unnoticed or are neglected by educators and researchers in both countries. In my view, the connection between citizenship and literacy is a key dimension crucially affecting literacy development in the lives of marginalized Mexicans. I will explain why.

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Becoming literate and becoming a citizen are not separate things. In pre-democratic regimes there were no citizens, but only privileged and subservient castes. In times of the Spanish rule in Mexico (1521–1821), for example, non-European Mexicans (i.e. indigenous, mestizos, blacks, mulattos, etc.) were objects of classification within a system of castes explicitly intended to segregate them from the ruling caste of Spaniards. For three centuries indigenous Mexicans and mestizos were taught that their duty in the New Spain (as Mexico was known in colonial times) was to obey (obedecer), not to think, speak or posit questions. Subservient castes were not supposed to be literate and educated people, but obedient, silent and submissive servants. This colonial system of castes was codified in language practices whose traces are still visible in contemporary Mexican society. Particularly among the poor descendents of the colonial subservient castes, many adults teach and expect their children to respond mande usted (literally ‘to your command’, or ‘as you command me’) whenever they receive a call from an adult. This was the common practice in my own family, as it is today among many poor families. The educational questions emerging from this history are: what is the role of literacy education in teaching the descendents of the inferior colonial castes to see themselves (and to speak, read and write) as citizens rather than as subjects? How can people who were taught for generations to reply mande usted learn to address powerful people not as masters but as equal citizens? Both the stories of interviewed Mexicans and my own personal history have induced me to think that becoming a citizen is a crucial dimension to becoming educated and literate. While the teaching of the Latin alphabet in the time of the Spanish rule was integral to the enterprise of cultural and political domination, in today’s postcolonial and formally democratic Mexican society, literacy education is supposed to be integral to the constitution of an informed, active and even critical citizenry. Yet most research conducted about marginalized Mexicans on both sides of the border focuses only on the functional dimensions of these people’s literacy practices. The ability to accomplish daily life tasks involving texts has often been seen as the most important kind of literacy enacted and needed by (poor) adult learners (Auerbach, 1986, 1989; MenardWarwick, forthcoming). In the US, for example, research on migrant Mexicans has sought to counter the pitiful portrait of these little-schooled people as illiterate or unskilled workers by documenting the complex, meaningful and functional oral and written practices they engage in, in domains such as religion, official paperwork, language learning and interpersonal communication (e.g. Farr, 1994, 2005, 2006; Farr & Guerra, 1995; Guerra, 1998; Baquedano-López, 2000; Menard-Warwick, 2004,

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forthcoming). These works, however, pay little attention to the excluded or self-excluded situation of poor Mexicans as citizens in the two nation states they inhabit. In my own research I find this a crucial phenomenon: clearly, these individuals are excluded (or at least exhibit a weak sense of citizenship which leads them to self-exclusion) from public institutions and spaces where literacy is both demanded and afforded. The point is that remaining at the margins of the polis (political society) impairs these people’s opportunities and willingness to appropriate and enact extended and public forms of literacy, precisely those opportunities which would enable people to become citizens of a nation state. Besides their (self-)exclusion from formal education, many Mexicans seem to feel and perceive themselves as citizens of nowhere, as a people without a voice and with no full rights in either country. Thus, rather than becoming global citizens, marginalized Mexicans seem to be turning into sort of global outcasts. As Morán concluded from his study on Mexican enclaves or barrios in the US, ‘they are most likely to keep few privileges as citizens in Mexico while not being able to conquer other rights in the US’ (Morán, 2005: 13). The connections between literacy and citizenship should be seen from this perspective in terms different from the traditional conception of literacy as an instrumental skill that, once possessed, enables the person to learn (i.e. literacy as a ‘basic learning skill’) and perform as a ‘good worker and citizen’ (i.e. literacy for citizenship and productivity) (Rogers, 2007). Countering this dominant opinion, and basing my views on the actual trajectories of access to literate communities and practices across the lifetimes of real individuals, I began to think of literacy not as much as a condition for citizenship but the other way around: citizenship as a key context and condition for the development of a literacy-mediated public voice. I will next expand on this central issue. The focus on functional literacy among poor Mexicans in both countries (e.g. Ferreiro et al., 1983; Farr, 1994; Farr & Guerra, 1995; Kalman, 2001) misses the crucial dimension of literacy as a tool for self-authoring (Bakhtin, 1981; Holland et al., 1998; Vitanova, 2005) – what MenardWarwick (forthcoming) calls the ‘literacy of identification’. Self-authoring literacy is a practice aimed at the self-construction or re-construction of identities, rather than merely accomplishing daily tasks. From this perspective, migrants and marginalized people in general do not just cope with everyday literacy tasks, but constantly engage with texts, meanings and practices in order to become aware of, and self-author, their place in the world (Freire, 1970). As Dyson (1997b, 2003) puts it, to write a text is to write a place for oneself in the world. As the reader of this book will see, the individuals profiled in Chapters 3–5 are not only functional users of

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literacy and consumers of master narratives, but also quite often producers of critical counter-narratives (Peters & Lankshear, 1996; Andrews, 2002; McCarty et al., 2006). Yet, as millions of marginalized Mexicans are in fact excluded citizens (Castañeda, 2006) in both countries (i.e. segregated from educational, economic and political rights), they often find meaning and a sense of belonging in other, literacy-mediated but ‘hidden’ self-authoring sites and practices. The issue of who or what can enjoy rights is relevant here. Rights theorists distinguish rights as a choice and rights as a benefit. Choice theory asserts that rights can be exercised only by beings who are rational and capable of choice; that is, human beings. From this standpoint, animals cannot enjoy rights, for they are not rational and capable of choice. On the other hand, benefit theory associates rights with permission; hence rights may be enjoyed as benefits granted from outside (Robertson, 2002; Abercrombie et al., 2006; Bruce & Yearley, 2006). These distinctions make it clear that subjugated and colonized groups have been historically treated as non-humans, as beings incapable of reason and choice, thereby unable to enjoy and exercise rights. African Americans form an eloquent example of this history: kidnapped in Africa and involuntarily brought to America, they were literally sold and treated like animals incapable of rational thought, and were thus ineligible for citizenship (i.e. subjects of rights). When the US constitution was signed in 1787 in Philadelphia, PA, the Constitutional Convention debated whether black slaves should count as ‘population’, and finally determined that a slave was equivalent to ‘threefifths of a human being’ and thus unfit to vote and completely incapable of defining his/her personal destiny. Even after the formal (de jure) abolition of slavery in 1865, Black people experienced over a century of new laws and de facto practices primarily aimed at denying their intelligence and humanity, as a means of refusing their full right to citizenship. In this process, language and literacy tests were tools used to demonstrate their lack of intelligence. From the time of slavery until the 21st century, the history of African Americans might thus be seen not as much as a struggle for freedom but as a struggle for voice: the public display of their rationality and intelligence. In other words, for them the conquest of freedom and citizenship demanded the exercise of a literacy-mediated public voice. This is what powerful thinkers and speakers like Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcom X and Barack Obama did: to voice and enact the African American’s right to citizenship, while refusing to ask for benefits or permission. African American history acts as a mirror to understanding ours, the history of colonized Mexicans: we are seven centuries away from the rise

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of the Aztec Empire; five centuries from the Spanish conquest and destruction of it; two centuries from political independence from Spain; one century from the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 . . . yet rather than becoming free and equal members of a nation state, marginalized Mexicans are becoming a nation without state, united more as a ‘community of sentiment’ (Max Weber’s phrase), than as a political citizenry. As the cases of Pablo and Laura in Chapter 4 evidence, the story of 21st-century Mexican migrants in the US (often seen as ‘global migrants’) is precisely that, as postcolonial subjects, they are denied their right to citizenship. Citizenship is a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation state and civil society (Ong, 1996: 738). However, criminalizing laws position and push working-class Mexicans to place themselves as voiceless or silenced people within the US, subjects – at best – of ‘benefits’, ‘outcasts with permission’ (if at all) who exist outside the sphere of a nation state. Moreover, back home things are not substantively different: formal citizenship does not guarantee marginalized Mexicans full economic, educational and political rights, as the stories of Mexicans remaining in Mexico prove. The educational significance of this issue is paramount, for becoming literate means becoming able and willing to publicly articulate one’s voice. Thus, by citing at length the words of my interviewees in this book I seek to let the readers judge for themselves if these are people capable of choice and therefore entitled to citizenship. I count this as an indispensable task in literacy research and education, because claims of ‘illiteracy’ or ‘limited language and literacy proficiency’ have been – and still are – used as a moral justification to deny full citizenship (i.e. full rights) to historically subjugated groups. Since language (oral and written) display is perceived in education as the hallmark of knowledge and intelligence, silent/ silenced people are often seen and treated as ‘less intelligent’, and thus failed and eventually regarded as deserving of benefits or permission rather than citizenship and rights. Yet their narratives also make it clear that these social structures of domination and hierarchy are often internalized and reproduced, for example when they ask for ‘permission to travel and work’, rather than full citizenship. In my research I have progressively shifted from an exclusive focus on the history of literacy in the lives of my informants, to a broader interest in their broader life and learning trajectories. The reason for this is that almost from the beginning, at homes, schools or parties, I have found myself listening to conversations in which issues of personal trauma, low self-esteem, ideological inclinations, excluded citizenship and collective belonging prevailed. At some point I noticed that many of them

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spoke from an experienced or perceived sense of being unprotected (or fooled or attacked) citizens in Mexico, and of being outlawed and criminalized ‘illegal aliens’ in the US. Their literacy-related memoirs were thus filled with issues of economy, personal suffering, politics, citizenship, literacy and social history. I have adopted the term ‘outcasts’ to refer to this widespread sense among many Mexicans of having no legitimate place in either country. Even among those who have experienced a religious conversion (e.g. from Catholic to Protestant) which has involved an explicit distancing from political engagement and nation-state issues, it is evident how their new credo has been formed as a reaction to their disappointment with ‘human governments’. A recurrent finding in these narratives is the participants’ explicit references to their experiences, relationship and self-positioning (Menard-Warwick, 2004, 2005) vis-à-vis the nation states they inhabit, their sense of membership and identity in the two nations, and the most significant learning and literacy practices which develop their sense of identity and self-affiliation or self-exclusion in relation to the social institutions, groups and practices of the two nation states.

Inside the Mexican Community The next chapters (3–5) present a selection of in-depth case studies of marginalized Mexican individuals. Their narratives speak of people facing not only cultural and identity dilemmas, but also economic and political constraints which impose over their lives a persistent lack of freedom to make decisions, generate states of social and physical confinement, and instill a growing sense of alienation and exclusion as citizens of the two nation states they inhabit: Mexico and the US. Self-affiliations and ideological orientations These selected cases are part of a larger body of in-depth life-history interviews with marginalized Mexicans that I gathered between 2001 and 2008 in marginalized areas or barrios on both sides of the Mexico–US border. The stories were sometimes part of formal research projects, but were also a result of my personal interest and continued interaction with the Mexican community in both countries. In the large Mexico City area I have conversed with inhabitants of poor colonias such as those I myself have lived in. In the US, I worked with residents of Mexican or Latino barrios in three urban areas: Nashville (TN), San Francisco Bay Area (CA) and Charlotte (NC). In both countries, I sought to interview ordinary

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people who have experienced socioeconomic and/or educational marginalization for most of their lives. Ever since I was a high school student and political activist in Mexico City, I have noticed that most – if not all – people have strong ideas and opinions about the world and about their own place in the world; and that these ideas to a large extent influence their willingness to get involved in social practices of different types (e.g. religious, political, academic, etc.). In the sociological and educational literature this has often been theorized as ‘ideology’. While the term ideology is complex and contested by the social sciences literature, I use it to denote the sort of discourses and their associated practices that most people put in the foreground of their narratives, even when they are not explicitly requested to talk about their ideologies. In Table 2.1 I have listed the names and profiles of the people I have interviewed in depth through these years. Besides the demographic data of each individual (place of interview, sex, age, schooling and occupation), I include a column in which I note the key ideological orientation of each of them. Ideological orientation refers to the sort of discourses, practices and communities believed in or enacted by each person. These are often made evident through narratives that are used not only to tell facts or stories, but also to position themselves as social agents: as men or women, as members of a social class or socioeconomic group, as citizens and political agents of a nation state, as workers or as religious believers (or non-believers). These are narratives of social positioning (MenardWarwick, 2004, 2006) that directly or indirectly speak of both the possibilities and the constraints of each individual in their appropriation of language and literacy resources and practices. This is an important point to make. The cultural practices of nondominant groups are not only sources of funds of knowledge, as people like Moll and Greenberg (1990) posit, but also sources of cultural alienation. According to these authors, the idea of funds of knowledge implies that all households and all communities are rich sources of local knowledge that schools and education agents might and should use for pedagogical purposes. Yet I suggest that the daily contexts and interactions of marginalized people are also sites of cultural ‘whitening’, assimilation and colonization. As the stories of concrete individuals in this book show, marginalized subjects are often fervent consumers of US-manufactured cultural goods (e.g. media images and texts deploying the ‘beauty’ and ‘superiority’ of the US), which become, in turn, mental frameworks for them to construct and pursue ‘their own’ desires, life plans and even concrete actions. Through their stories we learn that some have migrated to the US, for example, not just for economic need but also because they

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Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City

Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City

Mexico City

Lulu

Saul

Sofia

Jimena

Felipe

Salvador

Jesus

Alma

Paula

Site of interview

Chela

Participant

Table 2.1 Participants

F

F

M

M

M

F

F

M

F

F

Sex

37

42

50

37

50

50

49

64

47

57

Age

9

9

8

7

8

6

6

3

1

1

Years of schooling

House cleaner, street vendor

Housewife, community activist

Natural healer

Technician (telephone company), writer

Pork-butcher, car repair assistant

Community center manager

Natural healer

Retired factory worker, activist

House cleaner

Religious activist, home

Occupation/s (when interviewed)

(Continued )

P: Media entertainment, conservative Catholicism

T: Spiritualism, metaphysics, naturist medicine S: Political activism (left), community activism

T: Naturist medicine P: Community activism

P: Social progressivism, fiction writing

T: Catholicism (conservative) P: Media entertainment

P: Media entertainment S: Community activism

T: Catholicism (social pastoral), naturist medicine

T: Catholicism (social pastoral), democracy, community and political activism

P: Media entertainment

T: Catholicism (progressive), democracy

Ideological orientationa

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Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City Mexico City


Crispina

Lucina

Ismael

Agustin

Susana

Rogelio

Isidoro

Olga

Federico Mexico City

Mexico City

Gudelia

Claudio

Mexico City Mexico City

Leticia

Mexico City

Site of interview

Adalberto

Participant

Table 2.1 Continued

M

M

F

M

M

F

M

M

F

F

F

F

M

Sex

44

27

28

37

17

31

29

19

18

44

43

36

37

Age

14

12

12

12

12

12

11

10

10

9

9

9

9

Years of schooling

Public employee, community activist

Technician (photocopiers)

Secretary, hamburger seller

Computer technician, karate instructor

Student, reading promoter

Home, ex-employee

Taxi driver

Unemployed

Home, preschool teacher

Housewife, AE instructor

Housewife, AE instructor

Secretary

Taxi driver, cultural promoter


T: Political activism, social struggle

S: Community activism

T: Zodiac, esoterism S: Community activism

T: Martial arts philosophies

T: Reading S: Community activism

P: Catholicism (progressive), feminism S: Community activism

T: Hip-hop and gangsta culture

P: Media entertainment, altruism




T: Mexicanism (culture, history) S: Community activism


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Mexico City CA, US CA, US CA, US NC, US NC, US NC, US NC, US TN, US TN, US

TN, US TN, US TN, US

Juan

Tatiana

Rosalba

Alina

Regina

Rafa

Gioconda

Julieta

Alfredo

Isabel

Fausto

Carla

Pablo

Laura

Anabel

Interpuesto

Esperanza

F

M

F

F

M

F

M

F

M

F

F

M

F

F

F

F

M

30

23

16

34

37

52

50

36

46

39

39

42

42

32

20

11

9

9

9

9

9

9

4

3

9

6

3

18

18

17

15

14

Janitor, home

Waiter

Student

Factory worker, home

Home restoration

Food delivery

Home painting

Housekeeping

Peasant

Cashier at fast-food restaurant

Dry cleaning ironer

Welder

Psychologist

General practitioner, college teacher, political leader

Preschool teacher

Public employee

Student

(Continued )

P: Community activism, reading, social consciousness

P: Work

P: Reading

T: Jehovah’s Witnesses, ‘American dream’ P: Media entertainment

P: Work, family, social criticism

P: Christianism

P: Catholicism (conservative)

P: Christianism (Evangelical church)

P: Work, family

P: Work, personal advancement

T: Bible study


P: Psychology

T: Democracy, political activism (left)

P: Altruism

P: Community activism

P: Community activism

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a

TN, US TN, US TN, US TN, US

Elizabeth

Jose Luis

Rosaura

Moni

F

F

M

F

F

Sex

32

47

33

32

25

Age

S: sympathizer; P: practitioner; TB: true believer.

TN, US

Site of interview

Eva

Participant

Table 2.1 Continued

12

16

14

14

12

Years of schooling

Waiter, student

Home, janitor

Grocery store employee

Student

Preacher, radio host


P: Work, personal advancement

T: Democracy, political activism

T: ‘American Dream’, God

S: Christianism (Christian church)

T: Christianism (Pentecostal church)


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49

‘always desired to know the US’ – a desire emerging from the reading and TV-watching of their early years. Other common practices are naming their children with English names (e.g. Jonathan, Brian, Anne Marie), and reliance on commercial media as a major source of information and entertainment. None of these practices is simply local or ‘cultural’. They are the sites where the economic, political and ideological agendas of agents such as media corporations are played out. However, as the column Ideological orientation in Table 2.1 shows, the relationship of a person with an identity/community is not an either/or matter. It should be situated in a continuum from less to more engagement, from being a ‘beginner’ or ‘sympathizer’ to becoming a ‘master’ or ‘true believer’. I regard as important both the nature of these ideological self-affiliations and the degree of involvement, for these are key to understanding the access of marginalized people to available discourse practices, including literacy-mediated practices. I met these and other people in the marginalized areas of both countries in which most working-class Mexicans live in times of globalization. I specifically gained entrance into their everyday life contexts through grassroots organizations, adult schools or social networks related to people in those areas. In Mexico City, the Aztahuacan Community Center (ACC, pseudonym) served as one of the nuclear sites from which I established contact with community residents. In the US, I entered into Mexican communities through adult schools (in Richmond, CA), Community Centers and churches (in Nashville, TN) and networks of friends and relatives (in Charlotte, NC). The Mexican community that I have investigated mostly consists of men and women aged between 18 and 64 years, with education ranging from incomplete basic schooling (less than 9th grade) to master’s degree (one subject), and income levels between US$100 and US$600 a month (in Mexico) and US$10 per hour (in the US). Their occupations are as varied as their ideological orientations (e.g. entry level jobs, community and/or political activism, housekeeping and domestic work, micro-businesses, alternative medicine, social-theology, esoterism, Catholicism, Christianity, media consumerism, etc.). They are native Spanish speakers, and while some have rural backgrounds, all of them have spent most of their lives in urban areas. Some of them are active participants in community groups, but others are more socially disengaged; while some were actively committed to their own advancement, others were not so. I intentionally explore the lives of individuals representing a range of schooling levels rather than only underschooled adults, because variably schooled individuals do not live and learn in isolation from one another.

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They belong to social networks involving interdependence. Thus, in order to understand how learning and literacy is carried out in marginalized contexts, we need to observe how education and literacy is socially distributed and shared in such communities. Key to this analysis is the extent and nature of people’s involvement in community organizations. I also think that the formal divide between adults with and without ‘basic education’ – the basis of current Mexican adult education programs and institutions – is of little use in understanding and addressing the educational needs of fundamentally excluded communities, regardless of the schooling levels of their individual members. Researching/living the community Most of the ideas and assertions advanced in this book are based on evidence gathered through my direct contact with people in Mexican communities in Mexico and the US. As a part of my formal research projects, I have gathered stories, photos and ‘field notes’. However, I have also learned about Mexican people through my lifelong membership of marginalized Mexican groups and the experience of struggling to push against the geographical, cultural and intellectual boundaries imposed by my own class, national, linguistic, ethnic and even racial origins. Learning and literacy theory has guided my searches and often my interpretations. But it is the voices, the stories, the images of concrete human beings who have been part of my life at different places and stages which provide the evidence for my arguments. Much of this work of ‘data collection’ has been carried out systematically. In most cases, I held several lengthy interviews over the course of several months with from two to five 2-hour-long interviews, depending on each individual’s availability and willingness. Most interviews were taped or digitally recorded and conducted in Spanish, and then transcribed and translated them into English by me. The interviews were often semi-structured, involving open-ended and probing questions about topics such as: the participants’ family backgrounds; their current activities; their trajectories of education, work and social participation in Mexico and the US; their most significant learning and literacy experiences from their own perspective; and their experiences with formal schooling. The interviews were carried out in varied settings, as suggested by each participant – at community centers, homes, workplaces, cars . . . even in the street. As an illustration of this, on some occasions I interviewed a taxi driver inside the very ‘ecological taxi’ he drives for about 10 hours daily in Mexico City.

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51

The final set of data for each individual consisted of transcriptions of interviews, a set of field notes, some written artifacts, and photos taken by me, in some cases. The written artifacts included texts written by participants, as well as reading materials and some personal documents. Unlike other projects related to adult literacy, I did not focus on collecting instrumental documents (Heath, 1982), such as birth certificates, commercial notes, restaurant tickets and the like. This kind of material has been much used to document the ‘range and complexity’ of the literacy practices of underschooled adults (e.g. Farr, 1994). Rather than collecting artifacts to document functional literacy, I sought to collect material that accounted for significant experiences of learning, social participation, ideological conversions or personally significant engagement with reading/writing. The amount and type of material collected for each person varied according to her/his unique situation and willingness to reveal aspects of their lives with me. I was able to build a confident and even friendly relationship with many of them, thus having access to formal and informal interviews, personal artifacts and observation of some activities; whereas in other cases the relationship was more distant. However, without exception all the people and their stories seemed to me rather interesting and revealing of the processes and dramas of living, surviving and learning at the margins of today’s global economy. Some stories are full of explicit references to literacy, whereas others focus on life issues such as work for survival or domestic violence. The presentation of the individual cases in Chapters 3–5 is based on certain analysis procedures. Based on my field notes and transcripts, I created a list of thematic codes (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998), such as work, school experiences, social participation, learning experiences, significant others, personal initiatives for learning, literacy experiences, and more. By coding the transcribed interviews, I was able to identify several key and recurrent themes, such as trajectory of social participation, social and institutional constraints for learning, powerful learning experiences, personal initiatives for learning, self-authoring practices and barriers to learning. These were the larger themes that would structure the write-up of the cases. Self-authoring practices Among these themes, I found self-authoring literacy practices (Bakhtin, 1981; Holland et al., 1998) to be a key theme, widespread across the life histories. Self-authoring literacy practices can be understood as practices involving print and multimodal texts that have significantly influenced people’s sense of identity, as well as their dis/engagement with particular

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discourses and communities. These are therefore practices that work both as lenses through which to see themselves and the world, and as agentive frameworks in the making of important decisions across their lifetimes. Unlike ‘functional’ literacy practices, self-authoring practices are not related to everyday life paperwork demands, but to the appropriation of meaningful discourses and symbols to construct self-definitions and self-affiliations in terms of class, national, ethnic, religious, gender and other social categories. Self-authoring practices may be more or less critical, in that they can serve or not to understand and challenge the person’s place in the social relationships of power and domination. In other words, people appropriate practices and discourses to understand their lives and define themselves, without seeking to question power relationships at a social scale. Such is the case of literacy-mediated religious beliefs found among many Mexicans. In the intra-individual analysis I pay special attention to identifying stories or references that might reveal unique paths of development and change, especially in the sense of agency and identity of each individual. I also seek to identify the key events or learning experiences which contributed to shaping these paths. The analysis of a number of cases reveals that literacy (and intellectual, personal and social) development is inextricably linked to a person’s sense of agency, which is in turn linked to their growing and changing sense of identity. Literacy, agency and identity are, thus, inseparable aspects in the study of individual development. This line of analysis also shows that access to learning contexts and resources is fostered or hindered by the interplay between social position and individual agency. While we all exert a sense of individual agency, the stories of a number of postcolonial subjects reveal significant differences in the kind of cultural and ideological repertoires appropriated and, therefore, in their self-perception and activity as literacy learners, thinkers and citizens. The presentation of the stories in the next chapters will focus, then, on the interplay between available and appropriated practices in the context of lifelong trajectories of economic marginalization and sociopolitical exclusion as citizens in one or both nation states.

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Voices

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Chapter 3

Agents

In this chapter I present selected cases of individuals whose lives have been lived in marginalized zones of Mexico City, but whose ideological, social and communicative growth is remarkable, despite the odds they have all faced as poor and little-educated people. Saul and Chela (spouses), Sofia and Alma are just a few selected examples of how a little schooling can be overcome by a strong sense of agency developed through social participation and the appropriation of powerful out-of-school discourses. Remarkably too, these people have been able to negotiate multiple discourses, a practice that the New London Group (NGL, 1996) sets at the heart of its notion of multiliteracies, which are central to current discussions on literacy and globalization. The term multiliteracies was coined by the NLG as an approach to literacy that overcame the limitations of traditional print-based and standard national language-oriented approaches to literacy, and that acknowledged that the negotiation of a multiplicity of discourses and cultural differences is central to today’s working, civic and private lives. While the NLG did not explicitly address dimensions of post- or neocolonial relations, its definition helpfully characterizes the nature of the discourse practices that people like those profiled in this chapter engage in, and which set them apart as individuals whose agentive decisions significantly further their literacy development. While the social and communicative interactions of most Mexicans that I have interviewed in both countries have been carried out more in face-to-face environments than in cyberspace settings, the stories of the individuals profiled here illustrate the types of strategies adopted by marginalized but agentive people to negotiate often conflicting discourses in their struggles for voice. As such, the narrated and enacted life trajectories of these individuals challenge product-oriented approaches that treat literacy as the acquisition of decontextualized skills (Canagarajah, 1999: 168).

55

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It was also the NLG who articulated the fundamental mission of education in these terms: ‘to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. Literacy pedagogy is expected to play a particularly important role in fulfilling this mission’ (NLG, 1996: 60). The defining commonality of the people represented by the individuals profiled in this chapter is that they precisely embody educated and literate citizens fully engaged in public, community, and economic life, against all odds, included limited formal education. They have all incorporated literacy as a key tool into social, civic and economic participation. What in their life trajectories accounts for this type of development? To advance a key finding, the single most important factor to consider here – I argue – is their identification with and appropriation of powerful discourses that have equipped them with intellectual and ideological tools to resist and counter colonizing ideologies, discourses and practices (including ideologies of education, literacy, gender and citizenship). They have appropriated discourses that challenge hegemonic cultural traditions (Canagarajah, 1999), such as sexism, political conformity or media alienation, and which allow them to elaborate counter-narratives (Andrews, 2002; Solis, 2004; McCarty et al., 2006; Brill de Ramírez, 2007), and to position themselves as free men and women, and as critical and active citizens, both in their narrated and their enacted spaces of identity. As long-term housewives and mothers with limited formal education, Alma and Sofia have struggled against male dominance, domestic captivity and a paralyzing sense of powerlessness. However, they have both developed a strong sense of agency that has fueled their decision to reach out and engage in social activities and groups that afford powerful discourse resources, new roles of competence and interaction with intellectual sponsors. On the other hand, Saul represents a working class man who, as much as the former women, embodies a remarkable history of agency and learning through engagement in literacy-mediated critical dialogues. Key to all these cases is that, despite poor educational resources or little formal education, people in these communities are able to learn and powerfully transform themselves into agents of their own lives, so long as they gain access to broader social networks and dialogues where intellectual sponsors make available theories, philosophies and discourse practices that become powerful learning experiences in their lives. However, the case of Alma complicates matters: while her trajectory is also a quest for personal liberation (from gendered subordination, domestic captivity and devalued self-perceptions), and she also escaped from her husband’s dominance, her personal growth is heavily influenced by a deep engagement in a

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spiritualist group whose beliefs and practices encouraged her to be more satisfied with her economic plight and less concerned with terrestrial matters. This re-focus on the spiritual, away from the material and political, which is common in a large segment of the poorest Mexicans in both sides of the border, certainly recalls Marx’s thesis that religion is the ‘opiate of the masses’; yet, as Alma’s case shows, her engagement in hybrid discourse practices (e.g. political activism and supernatural beliefs), is still a matter of interpretation and discussion.

Saul and Chela The project of the government in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual Saul We often see persons who have had little schooling and in whose case the absence of set schooling proves to be a positive asset. They have at least retained their native common sense and power of judgment, and its exercise in the actual conditions of living has given them the precious gift of the ability to learn from the experiences they have . . . John Dewey

With just three years of schooling, Saul has grown impressively as a worker, thinker, and literate and committed citizen. At age 64 he is, as Dewey notes, a man with little schooling but an outstanding capacity to learn and to grow from lived experience. He is a retired worker of the metal mechanics industry in Mexico City. He spent over 40 years in different companies, advancing from apprentice to expert in a range of areas, such as rubber, plastic, glass and machinery. Eventually he became a floor supervisor, a position in which he supervised even engineers, and then he became the owner of his own small family business, producing and selling machines. As a citizen, Saul was always a socially committed person. He became an institute and literacy broker and a supportive activist for working-class struggles and social movements for democracy. He also joined a Grassroots Ecclesial Community (GEC), a group within the Latin American Catholic Church whose work is based on the tenets of critical theology. In recent years, he also coordinated a dance class and a reading and reflection group in a community center for seniors. I talked with Saul at his home, where I met Chela, his wife, and learned that they have been a hard working and wise couple. They made an honest living for themselves and their four children. Because I could not interview Chela to the same extent and to the same depth as Saul, I focus here on Saul’s history, although Chela’s words are cited in some parts.

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Constraints and available practices Poverty, school and family

Saul and Chela’s modest home is on a second floor, surrounded by the typical symbols of urban marginality in Mexico City: small businesses (e.g. tire-repair, auto-parts and car body shops) on a noisy avenue crowded with ‘microbuses’, ‘ecological’ taxis and smog. On my visits, they always offered me plain water, served in a glass decorated with flowers. The adjacent, dusty and barren lot has a few emaciated trees, yet Saul has gotten into trouble for defending this lot from ‘abusive people who have used false documents to “demonstrate” their right to property. I have denounced them, even though they have threatened me with death.’ Saul’s project is to turn this barren lot into a public garden or ‘green area’. Saul’s father was a worker specialized in roofing; his mother was a housewife. Neither of them went to school: ‘Our economic situation at home was very critical. We were 10 mouths to feed and my father’s salary was not enough.’ Saul was born in Mexico City and always lived in working-class neighborhoods and vecindades. These are old apartment buildings where the residents share a central patio, as well as common stories, fiestas, fights and gossips. By living in vecindades Saul learned a lot about poor people’s language, culture and survival strategies. Saul’s school experience was brief and traumatic. Because of his family’s poverty he was sent to primary school until he was 10 years old, which turned him into a target for his fellow students’ teasing: ‘I was ten and they were six years old; they believed I was useless, stupid . . . I started thinking about dropping out of school . . . it was unbearable, that life of humiliation.’ He finally left in the third grade, driven out by the teachers’ authoritarianism as well: ‘they were not teachers but dictators! [. . .] I said to myself: “why should I stand those beatings from the teachers?” [I quit and] I devoted myself to work on a full-time basis.’ Saul was only 13 years old when he started to work as tianguero (street vendor), and as an assistant in a dry-cleaners. Despite his short school trajectory, Saul’s older siblings were key role models for work and commitment for him, since they all studied and worked. Several of them attained vocational education or learned a trade (e.g. mechanics or electronics), but it was Mario, the eldest, who exerted the most significant influence upon him: ‘He was very idealistic. He was three years older than me, wrote his own biography, and prepared his own funeral, which means he was a person with courage and conviction. He did not go to school, either, but he read a lot; it was his addiction, for he worked in the Library of Mexico.’ Saul showed me Mario’s written

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memories, and spoke with much pride about his brother, insisting that despite his lack of schooling Mario had been a knowledgeable and capable man. Mario died of an illness, but he was a key influence in Saul’s intellectual and moral development. Available economic activities and literacy demands

While Saul was still a young worker (age 25), he and his wife wisely planned for their economic future by setting up a small family business dealing in machinery design, production and sales. Chela describes how the initiative started: That period was very cruel to us because my husband got sick . . . Yet he kept working, and I always took the precaution of saving some money. When I had 5,000 pesos, in 1980, I told him: ‘look, there is this money; before you get old and no company hires you, why don’t you buy a little machine and we set up a small business?’ Saul listened to his wife and they set up a small business producing plastic compacters, extruders, grinders, etc. Eventually this became a learning experience for the whole family. Saul explains how this initiative fueled their ‘intellectual and physical development’: The experience of not depending on the employer was very important for our own intellectual and physical development, for we worked as a family. I was able to unite the whole family in the work process: I designed and calculated; my wife was dedicated to the final process, the final touch to the painting, the presentation – so that the machine was marketable. The boys traced and shaped pieces; and the girls collaborated in everything. As Saul showed me the drawings of the types of machines they produced, he explained to me the kind of knowledge needed to design and produce these machines: ‘you have to know the resistance of materials; the horse-power required by each machine . . . the resistance of steel blades . . . what shape of mold you need, depending on the profile you want for the pipe; we can get round pipes, squared, triangular, and so on.’ Identities of competence: ‘I am a specialized worker’

Saul spent over 40 years as a factory worker in the metal mechanics industry, where he specialized in a range of sub-areas. What is remarkable about this trajectory is his drive to constantly reposition himself in arenas and activities that afford new learning demands and possibilities, including technical knowledge, specialized languages and literacies, and vocational competence.

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Saul’s character as a capable person and worker was evident in our interviews, where he always called himself ‘capable worker’, ‘specialized worker’, ‘industrial mechanic’ or ‘good technician’, emphasizing that he had learnt a lot despite his minimal formal education: ‘I had the opportunity to study only through 3rd grade; yet over time, through practice I work at the level of engineers.’ Even now he has retired, he still offers his services as an independent industrial advisor: ‘I investigate machinery markets; I request literature about machines; that is, papers with information about characteristics, models, and all that.’ Key to Saul’s development as a worker and intellectual advancement was his willing flexibility across workplaces and positions, which gave him new and multifaceted learning opportunities which, in turn, allowed him to climb from entrylevel to specialized functions and then to hierarchical roles: S:

I decided not to continue as a mechanic of the ‘stock’, of the generality . . . This helped me not to be confined in one single factory; if you [do], you become a very efficient and fast worker, but in one single area [ . . .] I did not work more than two years in each factory, because once I got an idea of one process, for example the processes of rubber, I looked for another factory where I could change my facet [ . . .] I had the good fortune to have engineers who had graduated from university under my charge . . . they were my assistants [when] I was the boss of the maintenance department . . . I coordinated their work, so I had certain status over them. G: How did you get in that position? S: Well, over the years one gains experience that is more practical than technical [. . .] I never needed recommendation letters or certificates; one gets respected without the need of school certificates. Apprenticeship and expert guidance

A key experience in Saul’s learning trajectory was his apprenticeship under an expert mechanic. This particular mechanic was a key influence on Saul’s evolving attitude, skills and commitment as a competent industrial worker. In Saul’s view, he learnt three things with him: constancy, love for work, and an understanding of the evolutionary nature of learning and mastering any trade. I was influenced by the presence of a charismatic master mechanic. A charismatic teacher is very important in order to allow the apprentice to understand better. . . . Before learning the machines’ operation, what I learned from the maestro [was] to be punctual and to put a lot of love into the job. Knowing how to operate the machines is not the most

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important thing but – I can say this for I have already lived through it – developing LOVE for the work. . . . The work itself develops over time; any craft one really wants to master takes many years; it cannot be acquired overnight. It’s like wine: the older the wine the more delicious it tastes. Saul’s history of learning as industrial worker cannot be detached from the larger history of industrialization and economic growth in Mexico during the 1940s–1970s. While he became competent and self-confident without any need for ‘recommendation letters or school certificates’, he understands that things have changed in today’s economic context: ‘in the 50s to 70s there was an [economic] boom; today it is harder because the market is saturated; thousands of companies fight each other for the markets.’

Appropriated practices and discourses Self-authoring practices and new roles of competence: Believer, citizen and educator. Besides his lifelong trajectory as industrial worker, Saul has also had a lifelong history of social participation as a critical religious believer, activist and citizen, and popular educator. It is tricky to separating the religious from the social work in his life trajectory, since his vision and practice of both areas are intertwined: his social and political work is rooted in his critical religious convictions, and his vision and practice within the church have been influenced by his social work. Critical and congruent believer. When Saul and his wife arrived in Iztapalapa, they joined a Grassroots Ecclesial Community (GEC), a critical group within the Catholic Church which is committed to the intensive study of religious and non-religious texts related to sociopolitical issues, as well as practical activism in the community. In this practicing community, Saul and Chela developed an identity as congruent believers: ‘we are people very committed to practice what we believe in; our work is like an apostolate: not only reading a book but giving a life testimony’, Saul explains. Through this role, he and his wife have developed an impressive conceptual understanding of sociopolitical matters such as the distinction between individual faith and the politics and power of the Catholic Church: ‘The church, I wonder if you understand this, is the group of members that conforms it, not the temple. The temple is quite another thing; and the hierarchy is yet another thing.’ Saul’s understanding of the

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history and tenets of GECs within the Latin American Catholic Church is also unusual: G: I have heard about GECs, but I don’t really know what they are. S: Yes, it is a Latin American movement, not exclusively Mexican; it comes from Brazil. It was founded years ago by bishop Helder Camara, who worked in the Brazilian ghettos, in favor of the poor. Then, it was spread to Latin America through Colombia. . . . there have been great movements within the Catholic Church in favor of the community. G: How do you know all this history? S: [Saul smiles and his eyes express: ‘obvious’] ha-ha-ha . . . well we document ourselves; we have contact with ecclesial movements and they send us documents . . . In saying this, Saul stands up, walks to his small bookcase, takes a pile of papers and comes back to the table. Without uttering a word he hands me an issue of the bulletin Envío (Shipment), published by the Center for Ecumenical Studies. He opens one of them and shows me an article: G: What is this? S: ‘Religious movements within the church’, it is about other expressions, other forms of acting and working because . . . To explain this we have to get deeper into the religious system, right? There are two lines within the Catholic Church. G: Which ones? S: The traditionalist and the modern, the vanguard. The traditionalist is the one who venerates the God, the traditional Christ that we see crucified in the church. And we work with the Christ alive, the Christ that questions us in each step we take: the sick, the prisoner, the needy . . . So, what happens with the Catholic hierarchy? They question our work, because, in turn, through our practical work, we question the traditionalism and the apathy of the Catholic hierarchy. Saul takes other issues of the bulletin Envío and talks about articles such as ‘Social finances for development’ (‘it explains the government’s theory of development . . . but it’s only theory’, he remarks). Then he gets the papers from their seminars out of a fat binder. The table of contents includes titles like: ‘Structural analysis’, ‘Political situation analysis’ and ‘Faces and changes of hope’. He continues talking about their reading activities: ‘We gather and, under the light of the Bible’s word, we analyze, we study, and we look at the economic, political and social situation we

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are living in in this country.’ As I hear his words I remember Freire’s famous definition of literacy as ‘reading the word to read the world’. We get another idea not only about politics, but also about the attitude of the catholic hierarchs and their work, that should be social but it isn’t. Through study, preparation and real participation, we learned that the work of the Catholic Church in Mexico is capitalist, rather than social-Christian. The word Christian commits ANYONE who calls himself Christian to look after humankind: the strong must care for the weak; the rich for the poor . . . and we don’t find this in the Catholic hierarchy. Based on these tenets of social Christianism, Saul and Chela have linked their religious belief with a sociopolitical practice of active solidarity with local and national social movements, thus extending their sense of membership and identity beyond the local: ‘We have economically and morally supported social movements of workers and Christians in our community, which means not only our colonia, but the entire city and the country.’ Active citizen and literacy/institutional broker. A unusual role for a littleschooled person is that of a literacy broker. Yet Saul is one of these cases. He works as an institutional and written-language broker for the community. While petition-writing and negotiations with public institutions are functions typically assigned to individuals with higher education and status, Saul has learned to write and submit petition letters on his own. Interestingly, Saul sees the development of his writing ability as directly related to his oral interaction with people of higher education and status in industry. By interacting with engineers and other professionals, Saul explains, he expanded or ‘refined’ his expressive resources: G: It is unusual that people with little schooling directly write documents and petitions. When did you start writing petition letters? S: Well . . . what happens is that I have participated in and had relationships within the industry with people who have trained as engineers, electro-mechanics, businessmen . . . and my contact with them has given to me . . . I can say that it has refined the way I express myself, the way I write or posit situations appropriately. But there is not a specific date; it evolved gradually, according to my contact with the industry. A Vygotskian interpretation of this narrative is that interaction with ‘more capable’ others (‘people who have trained’) represented a zone of development for Saul, where he appropriated new means of expression.

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Interestingly, he transferred this knowledge to the written mode. Thus oral interaction, rather than instruction in writing conventions, was key in Saul’s development as a writer. Yet his development as a writer was also mediated by his direct contact with local leaders who encouraged and supported his learning, particularly in matters of bureaucracy, politics and their relevant communication practices (e.g. negotiations, letter-writing, newspaper reading). As a result he eventually developed into a competent broker and writer. Saul particularly mentions the influence of Ruben Arde (a former community leader, Delegado of Iztapalapa and federal deputy) as the person who taught him how to be a committed citizen: Working next to Ruben Arde Islas I had the opportunity to learn how to carry out paperwork and negotiate demands in the Delegation and other institutions . . . This man taught us how to defend ourselves . . . he was the one who taught us how to react, how to present our demands before the authorities [and] how to know our rights. Saul showed me some petition letters he had written and explained how he writes them. I usually write my own papers; I write them in such a way that they effectively reach the addressee [ . . .] I learnt in practice; I have visited government offices so often that one begins to pick up the many forms to reach them [the authorities], and the [need for being] incisive [persuasive], because the problem is not to leave the document, but that this is incisive . . . to have him feel the need of the people who are requesting something . . . Remarkably, Saul learned that an effective petition must not only be clear about the point being requested but, most importantly, it must be ‘incisive’ (sharp, persuasive). To do that, the writer must use the most effective style and tone so that the letter ‘reaches the sentimental point of the public official.’ Interestingly, for Saul, a competent writer must be also a competent citizen who understands the limited power of a written petition to solve problems in Mexican institutions: If one goes alone to the public office no one cares about it; when you arrive with a group of 20, 50 people, they start to think twice; the words begin to weigh. A person alone is in the desert [ . . .] Look, if a petition for providing a public service is asked as a favor, they don’t do it, even though they know that we need it; if they don’t feel the pressure they don’t do it.

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As a result of his commitment as a active citizen, Saul also developed an informed and critical vision about local and national issues. This is how, for example, Saul talks about the U.S.-backed economic privatization strategies in Mexico: The goal of privatization policies is to surrender the uranium deposits, the oil, the fine woods. . . . The government is surrendering the country to the United States through the Puebla–Panama project. . . . few people know what the Puebla–Panama project is, its geographic area . . . and the interest of the United States about this project . . . What do we need? to support movements against governmental repression . . . we have to support them to liberate ourselves. And that’s what we have been emphatically doing. Saul’s identity as a committed citizen is expressed, in turn, in his attitude as a critical and committed reader who reads voluntarily and makes informed choices. For example, Saul and Chela have read newspapers and magazines usually read by college-educated people in Mexico – publications such as La Jornada (a national newspaper) or Milenio and Proceso (magazines of sociopolitical analysis): ‘They are newspapers that, within the political sphere, we know that they are a bit more conscientious about telling the truth.’ Drawing on these reading practices, Saul and Chela have developed a distinction between being informed through print and through electronic media, especially the TV: Because TV, by the time it gets to the public, is already ‘watered down’ . . . instead, in the newspaper we see the articles, and we see WHO are writing those articles, and we know WHAT PERSONS are really honest in their writing . . . for it isn’t a matter of reading the paper and believing everything, right? No, we have to know . . . Unlike most of the people I have interviewed, Saul and Chela even provided names of specific journalists and analysts that they considered honest: ‘For example, in La Jornada, Vallina about the ecclesial; Aviles on politics; Bellinghausen on issues of Chiapas . . . not just them, of course.’ Popular educator. In recent years Saul has been volunteering in a community center for the elderly called Casa de día (Day House). ‘“Elderly people” is just a label, for we have people in their forties who are more hopeless than if they were 75 or 80 years old’, he remarks. Day House, Saul informed me, is coordinated by Dr Nora Tzingo Noroyoki, a specialist in geriatrics of Chinese ancestry who teaches at the National University, and who is involved in community work with the elderly poor in Mexico City.

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Dr. Nora has been also an intellectual sponsor for Saul: ‘she coordinates Casa de día . . . she has a tremendous vocation and enthusiasm for her work with the elderly’. In Casa de día Saul teaches a dance class, and co-ordinates reading activities and life history conversations with a group of 30 people. This is how Saul describes his work: We talk to them, give them demonstrations, and teach, so that they raise their mental state . . . I personally teach a dance class and organize reading sessions. After reading we do a personal analysis in which each participant says what they understood and WHAT benefit we could get from these readings . . . Saul took the initiative to create a space for dialogue and reflection called ‘This is my story’, where each participant tells the group a kind of spoken biography: As they hear these stories, many of our members seem to live their lives again; they remember and start telling their own personal histories. We take turns to present our stories. It is a very nice moment because it is a mental relief for us. Some of them even shake in emotion when recalling those stories. Saul said of self-authoring counter-narratives: ‘The project of the government in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual.’ Another remarkable sign of Saul and Chela’s critical consciousness is the way they articulate their criticism of official education, the goal of which is, in Saul’s terms, ‘to limit the intellectual development of the individual.’ In the next passage, which Chela takes part in, they both position themselves as people critical of official adult education. G: S:

Ch:

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Have you ever participated in adult education classes or had the intention to get your certificate of primary education? [emphatic] No, no no no no no, that’s not our area . . . What good is a primary certificate if the people become blinder than . . .? The system of adult education is but a source of employment for instructors and coordinators because they lack real vocation . . . they are teachers BY necessity; they are unemployed . . . we all know that. No, this is my opinion, there are many people that I know personally who supposedly finished primary, secondary, high school, and when you tell them: ‘would you kindly read this for me?’, they spell out the words painfully. So, what’s the point of finishing middle or high school? No, we would rather document ourselves

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with this [she points at a pile of papers in a small bookcase], which is what allows us to make our work concrete. We avoid the problem of spending time ‘studying’ and ‘studying’, and at the end DOING NOTHING, for we’d go to our graves. We’re better off DOING something. Saul questions the usefulness of a formal certificate issued by a program run by unprepared instructors (‘they are teachers BY necessity . . .’). Chela sharply illustrates the poor learning attained through such pseudoeducation (‘they spell out the words so painfully’). They both declare, instead, the importance of studying significant and useful reading materials (‘we would rather document ourselves with this’) and of using their knowledge to DO something useful in their lives. As our dialogue continues, Saul further elaborates on his criticism of formal education, its pedagogy, instructional materials and ultimate goals: G: S:

G: S:

It is said that we have a big problem with adults without basic education in Mexico . . . Unfortunately, projects end up just as projects. The little they achieve is just to justify the huge expenditure, because they spend more in propaganda than in real actions through the INEA [National Institute for Adult Education]. Look, those programs of study via television [distance education] are useless because 90% of those who study there don’t progress . . . because their materials come already limited . . . do you know the book Spanish Grammar, published in 1950? No, I don’t. Instead we use the grammar book from 2000. It is incomplete; it consists of only two or three ‘small jumps’ and you don’t get anywhere. How about [the book of] Civism? That one is limited too. . . . The government’s objective in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual. Why? Because the government has had huge social problems with students, with college-educated people who know what it is all about with the government.

Saul’s assertion that ‘The government’s objective in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual’ defies the popular view of little-schooled people as incapable of conceptual and critical thought. Yet Saul’s stance has developed through critical literacy practices, such as those afforded by the grassroots organizations he has joined. In his lucid comment, he also notes the key role of higher education in the formation of an active citizenry (‘the government has had huge social problems with students, with college-educated people who know what it is all about’).

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It is worth noting here that these critical analysis skills have emerged as a product of the interplay between available resources (e.g. grassroots groups, critical study practices) and his own socially-oriented agency. This sense of agency was repeatedly evident in my conversations with Saul and Chela, who often set personal interests and initiatives against any external prescription of ideas, practices or reading materials: G: S:

Ch: S: Ch:

So what are the books you believe people should really study? No, there are no special books for everybody to read. What must exist is an initiative of preparation, of study, of ambition to know something else . . . The desire, above all . . . The ambition. The desire to know the news at least, not on TV but in the paper . . .

Learning from Saul’s Case Access Trajectory of practices

Just like the rest of the profiled individuals, Saul’s access to formal education and legitimate learning practices was limited as he grew up under urban marginality. His memories of learning to read and write in school speak of traditional methods and ‘rigid rules’ (e.g. reading aloud with a focus on speed and pronunciation; writing focused on calligraphy). Likewise, the available opportunities in out-of-school settings were mostly survival activities which he had no choice but to take (e.g. street vendor, factory worker). Yet, while he grew up and lived his entire lifetime in marginalized areas of Mexico City, he and his wife were able to overcome their little formal education by taking advantage of their working-class activities as opportunities to learn. In particular, and unlike even people with higher schooling levels, they both expanded their social worlds and accessed powerful learning experiences in a range of spheres, such as work and business, politics, social and religious activism, as well as family activities. In the case of Saul (who is the focus of this case study), his development was crucially fueled by his engagement in work places, community organizations and social movements which offered sophisticated, powerful and critical knowledge and discourse practices often unavailable in standard adult education. As a result, Saul grew remarkably as a specialized worker, critical thinker, competent speaker/writer, active citizen, good parent and sensitive human being. How did he turn so little schooling into a ‘positive asset’, as John Dewey posits? What kind of experiences really supported his exceptional intellectual and literacy growth?

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I believe that social theories of learning and literacy are relevant here to account for Saul’s outstanding intellectual, literate and social development. Quite evidently, Saul’s narrative reveals a lifelong trajectory of social participation in which learning took place as he engaged in new activities and communities where he developed identities of mastery (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 41), such as becoming a specialized worker or institutional broker, and where he entered into new social dialogues and appropriated a broader set of discourse practices. Saul’s sense of self-worth and competence furthered his agency to make ideological and action choices that expanded, in turn, his social roles, commitments and practices, including literacy practices. His narrated history also shows that his literacy-mediated sense of agency and identity evolved through encounters with intellectual sponsors, appropriation of empowering roles and discourses and social membership in critical literate communities; all of these critical learning resources are absent in standard education programs that Saul and Chela themselves describe as an education aimed at ‘limiting the intellectual development of the individual.’ Appropriation Identity and literacy development

As sociocultural literacy theorists argue, the incorporation of literacy into a person’s life is a product of the interplay between literacy practices and identity (trans)formation (e.g. Hansen & Liu, 1997; Holland et al., 1998; Collins & Blot, 2003; Bartlett, 2005; Blomaert, 2008). Certainly, a crucial factor in Saul’s remarkable growth as a literate and critical citizen was his ongoing interest and engagement in a range of work, political, social and religious practices and discourses, and his willingness to appropriate and actively utilize their respective language and literacy practices. In particular, Saul’s trajectory reveals an ongoing interplay between his appropriation of identities of competence and commitment (as a worker, citizen and Christian believer) on the one hand, and his appropriation of the social languages (Gee, 1996) and literacy practices required to perform those identities. Thus, his trajectory is one of an ongoing expansion of social and literacy engagements, and the consequent expansion of his sense of agency and social identity. Literacy as a mastery of secondary discourses

In this analysis, Gee’s definition of literacy as ‘mastery of a secondary discourse’ (Gee, 1996: 143) may also play an explanatory role. According to Gee, discourse is everything people say, think and do when enacting a certain social identity. Primary discourses are those learned at home, and

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secondary discourses are related to secondary institutions or groups. It follows that becoming literate demands a ‘mastery of a secondary discourse’ (Gee, 1996: 143) or a ‘control of secondary uses of language’ (Gee, 1991: 8). In Saul’s particular case, it is clear that, as he became a competent participant in diverse communities (e.g. specialized industrial worker, community broker, social activist, popular educator), he became aware of himself as enacting the specific identities demanded by each position and, in turn, as a capable user of the respective social languages. In his own words, ‘what happens is that I have participated in and had relationship within the industry with people who have trained as engineers, electro-mechanics, businessmen ... and my contact with them has given to me ... it has refined the way I express myself, the way I write or posit situations appropriately.’ Apprenticeship in communities of practice

Saul’s learning trajectory is also an illustration of the appropriation and mastery of different discourses (e.g. discourses of technical competence, of active citizenship, of social commitment) through acquisition or informal apprenticeship, rather than through learning or formal instruction (Rogoff, 1990; Gee, 1996; Bartlett, 2005). That is, the power of his learning experiences relied precisely on his engagement as a participant in practices where more expert practitioners (who I call intellectual sponsors), guided, supported, encouraged, modeled and scaffolded (Cumming-Potvin, 2007) his learning towards full participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Gee theorizes this process as acquisition (learning of discourses ‘by exposure to models, a process of trial and error, and practice within social groups, without formal teaching’), as opposed to learning (learning that ‘involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching or through certain life-experiences that trigger conscious reflection’ (Gee, 1996: 138). What Gee argues is that discourses are mastered through acquisition, not through learning. That is, people come to appropriate a discourse, and enact the proper social identity, ‘not by overt instruction, but by enculturation or apprenticeship into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the discourse’ (Gee, 1996: 139). This notion of acquiring new discourses (with their inherent languages and literacies) through apprenticeship is also central in the work of situated learning theorists, like Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, which define learning as changing participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In short, the importance of apprenticeship in the acquisition of social identities and literacies is eloquently illustrated by the trajectory of a little-schooled individual who has been

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apprenticed not only in technical activities and skills, but also in the discourse practices around such activities, and which has resulted in full participation and social membership. In all these groups or communities of practice, his roles and identities have evolved from the periphery into mastery, including roles of responsibility requiring literacy tasks (e.g. factory supervisor, institutional broker, popular educator). Intellectual sponsors

Far from being a strictly personal and mental development, Saul’s history demonstrates a co-construction of his individual and collective self. His intrapersonal learning is inseparable from his interpersonal (Vygotsky, 1978) engagement in varied activities and communities that afforded him direct contact with intellectual sponsors who have guided (Lave & Wenger, 1991), supported and scaffolded his learning and growth. By intellectual sponsors I mean concrete (flesh and blood) individuals who model, encourage, guide, support or scaffold others to engage in broader, often literacymediated and critical, intellectual and social commitments. They are individuals who embody, in the eyes of the learners, a reputable ethical, moral and intellectual authority, technical competence, as well as a facility with oral and written language tasks, particularly in public spaces and events. (Chapter 6 further elaborates on intellectual sponsors.) In Saul’s case, his significant intellectual sponsors were his brothers (librarians and technicians); his wife and children (co-workers and co-thinkers); his college-educated bosses and colleagues; some community leaders (e.g. Ruben Arde, community leader; Eduardo, progressive pastor; Dr Nora, co-ordinator of the center for elderly people). Saul’s contact with these individuals always took place through the communities of practice available in his life context: the workplaces, grassroots organizations and social movements he joined across his lifetime. In his own perception, for example, Saul developed a strong sense of agency thanks to the early influence of his brothers (who modeled and encouraged critical literacy behavior, professionalism as workers, and commitment as a citizens); likewise he attributes his sophisticated or ‘refined’ oral and written skills to his contact with college-educated work colleagues, as well as to specific local leaders who taught him and others ‘how to react, how to present our demands . . . how to learn to know our rights.’ History in person: Becoming a decolonized thinker and free citizen

Beside matters of cognitive and literacy development, Saul’s personal history speaks powerfully of an individual growing up in contemporary postcolonial Mexican society, where education and learning resources are

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systematically skimped on for marginalized groups. He embodies not just a trajectory of cognitive or literacy development, but a history of evolving freedom, voice and citizenship. Thus, his personal history intersects with the larger history of a nation emerging from three centuries of European colonialism, whose legacy of sociopolitical, cultural and educational segregation and subjugation has not yet been truly abolished, despite changes in the legal codes of the postcolonial nation. The point is that, as Angela Davis (2006) eloquently argues, the structures of social oppression and injustice have never been graciously abolished by presidents, legislators or judges suddenly aware of the injustices and immoralities of such a status quo; they have always been disestablished because ordinary people, like Saul, collectively become aware of themselves as potential agents of social change; as people who have learned to critically perceive their relationship to social reality; as people able to take into their own hands the transformation of social realities which had appeared unchangeable and inalterable. Saul’s history is that of an individual engaged in the social struggles for freedom of modern Mexico. He is a person learning not just how to read and write, but also struggling to become a free citizen and a decolonized thinker. In this sense, his words can be seen a scream on a wall stating: in order to learn, grow, reclaim, and exert my rights as a citizen and human being, I have had to defy the colonialism rooted in the everyday practices of today’s institutions: the Catholic Church (‘we learned that the work of the Catholic Church in Mexico is capitalist, rather than social-Christian’), the state (‘the word alone is weightless [for the state authorities] unless it is accompanied by people in action’), and the very educational system (‘the project of the government in education is to limit the intellectual development of the individual’). From this perspective, Saul’s strong voice as a thinking being, active citizen, skilled worker and congruent believer, speaks not only of a ‘literate’ but essentially of a decolonized subject reclaiming full citizenship, and rejecting being diminished as a subjugated subservient of institutions that strip the poor from any say in making the decisions that control their lives. Thus freedom is a key word, for it is freedom that Saul has struggled to achieve and exert: freedom to think, act, move and make decisions about his life. As the reader will learn, freedom is exactly what is absent in the lives of the other individuals profiled in this book, since they have felt confined, trapped, unable to freely decide their own destinies. And I argue that the absence of this fundamental human right, the experience of freedom, is at the heart of becoming literate, for literacy and education are both conditions and outcomes of experiencing freedom.

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Sofia We all have knowledge . . . But we lack a paper that says that we know Sofia

Sofia is 49 years old, and has had six years of schooling. She is a naturist healer, mother of six children, and wife of a man who failed to keep her under his control. Coming from a family of peasants in the state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in Mexico, she and her family arrived in Iztapalapa, at the edges of Mexico City, in the early 1980s, a period in which the economic crisis pushed millions to migrate from rural areas to Mexico City and the US. In Iztapalapa, they experienced urban deprivation and marginality – economic hardship, odd jobs and permanent struggles for housing and public services, such as water, electricity and sewage. Yet, in this context she became a socially committed woman, engaged in community activism and political work within assorted types of grassroots organizations: religious, alternative medicine and political. She learnt to orchestrate these seemingly diverse activities operatively and ideologically, and developed a set of practices consistent with what they preach. This demonstrates that, given the proper resources and support, a marginalized area such as Iztapalapa can also be a site for learning and growth, where people are able to lead productive and humanizing lives, in spite the opposing forces of global capitalism. Constraints and available practices Poverty, truncated education and confinement

In a soft voice, Sofia recalls her peasant origin, her truncated schooling, and her family’s hardships as migrants in Mexico City in the 1970s: I was born in a little town in Guerrero in 1953. My parents were peasants; they grew maize, beans. . . . I went through fourth grade; my parents didn’t have money to send me to school in Tlapehuala; besides, I was a girl and they had the idea that ‘you are going to get married; you are a girl, what for?’. . . I got married at 16; at 17 I had my first daughter, Senovia . . . When the children grew up, we had to come here [to Mexico City] to put them in school. We didn’t have a house, we rented a little room; then we sought a piece of land and found this one. Even though it was in the ravine we said: ‘there’s no choice’. My husband worked in Aurrerá [supermarket] but earned very little and left. Then he worked as a policeman at nights and I helped him by working as a seamstress at home and at a clothing factory that fell

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down in the earthquake of 1985. We had to pay a lot of money for this lot and for the children’s school. Sofia describes as follows the way she learnt how to read in primary school: We had books; I started with the alphabet in first grade; the teacher had us read the books . . . back home my mom asked me to read aloud for her; she had her stick because if I didn’t read well, she would beat me. Sofia did not finish primary schooling as a girl, but many years later, through adult education (AE) classes. Yet, like many of the women I met in Iztapalapa, in her view the key obstacle to her personal growth was her husband, who was reluctant to let her neglect her home activities. He gets angry when I go out: ‘you quit your duties, your house, your children, everything.’ ‘Yes’, I tell him [ . . .], and I think: ‘I’m not going to do anything if I stay home washing, ironing, cooking; that’s not what I want.’ To exert control upon Sofia, her husband tried different tactics. First, he asked her to attend the same naturist medicine courses that he attended, and then he invited her to work with him at a shop in order to keep close surveillance upon her: Then my husband came up with the idea of setting up a small shop, ‘so that we are a united family and you no longer go out; you’ll stay in the shop and I’ll supply it.’ After a year [ . . .] I quit. He wanted to impose on me about everything, and I don’t like it. By the time I met her, Sofia was well aware of the oppressed condition of many women, not only subject to male control but also compliant with such a status quo: . . . your husband says: ‘you stay at home and I work. You look after the kids and cook; [so that] when I’m back home everything is ready.’ That’s the way they like but they never ask the woman what she wants. They say ‘she doesn’t say a word and she’s okay, and the husband is happy.’ Well, apparently he is ‘happy’, but he isn’t, and the woman is dying of depression, not knowing what to do. . . . Most women assume this, but I don’t like it. . . . I used to say ‘no, I have to do what I want to do’ [ . . .] If I stay home respecting the imposition, I’d die.

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Formal adult education

In 1985, aged 32, Sofia decided to resume her basic education and enrolled in AE classes; yet she could not finish until many years later in 1999, at the age of 45. Her motivations to complete her basic schooling were to counter the stigma of ‘ignorance’ in her children’s and other people’s eyes, and to get ‘the papers’ to find a better job. Yet her learning experiences in adult classes consisted of ‘listening to the teacher in front of a blackboard’, doing textbook exercises and taking tests. She finally got her certificate of secundaria (9th grade) by attending a few classes and taking an exam consisting of 150 questions. This was her last attempt at formal school education, for she then devoted herself to community activism in health, political and religious groups. As we learn from her narratives describing her social participation, the impact of formal AE in her personal and intellectual growth was minimal, compared to her experiences in informal learning sites, activities and communities. Appropriated practices and discourses As an agentive woman, Sofia strove to free herself from domestic confinement and actively engaged in the various progressive groups available in Iztapalapa, the local community where she lived. Through these groups, devoted to religious practice, alternative health, or civic and political action, Sofia engaged in group activities that afforded access to intellectual guidance, powerful discourses, roles of competence and empowering pedagogies otherwise unavailable in the deprived school system in marginalized Mexican communities. Religious literacy: Community of readers, critical reading and intellectual guidance

At that time Sofia was spending most of her time raising her children and working to contribute to the family budget. She also attended religious mass at a local Catholic church, where she came to meet a progressive pastor called Eduardo. Under his guidance, Sofia and a group of other 30 people constituted a Grassroots Ecclesial Community (GEC), a group that she then joined. GECs are part of a Latin American movement within the Catholic church led by a principle of ‘life testimony’, defined by Sofia as ‘not only praying with words, but also with actions’. She also explains that, GECs is a movement within the Catholic church, but it does not depend on what a priest says. They work with a different vision: to do what God really wants, because God doesn’t want people to be

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unhappy. How do we do it? By taking care of others; helping others to see that a different life is possible, because happiness is constructed, not granted from heaven. . . . Sofia explains that this GEC originally gathered at the local church, but ‘the priest disagreed with our idea that there is a different way to deliver the gospel. He got angry and called us rebels and communists and said that there was no room for us. We left the church.’ The GEC continued its work and eventually became a key learning space for her. Under Eduardo’s guidance, little-schooled people like Sofia engaged in workshops and seminars aimed at a critical study of the gospel. A key pedagogical part of the GEC’s work was the ‘analysis of the local reality’ through the critical reading of books, newspapers and magazines. Eduardo also encouraged Sofia to enroll in a more academic course entitled ‘Formation for an evangelizing social practice’, which was very significant for her as a learning experience: I took some courses at Antonio de Montesinos Center. In these, we carried out analysis of reality. We had to read more, to stay informed, to analyze what is happening on the basis of newspapers and copies of books about local analysis, the types of churches, the way people live, what they think. This is local analysis: how the people live their religion, their faith. Then you have social analysis, which mixes religion with politics. It is not possible to separate religion from politics; Jesus also did politics . . . yes, those courses are very good, mhm. A significant aspect of these courses – which Sofia attended on Saturdays for a whole year – was the opportunity to interact with college-educated people, a rare experience for little-schooled people attending adult education classes: ‘I was the only one with primary schooling; I think I hadn’t even finished my primary by then.’ In contrast to other types of religious groups (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses) that encourage people to withdraw from active citizenship (see Laura’s case in Chapter 4), the groups joined by Sofia strongly encouraged the development of a public and critical voice as a citizen, as well as a growing sense of agency used to resist and contest authoritative discourses (Bakhtin, 1981) through the articulation of critical counter-narratives (Andrews et al., 2004; Peters & Lankshear, 1996; McCarty et al., 2006). An incident which took place during one of my visits to Sofia’s small naturist shop, at her house, demonstrates an example of this critical stance. Someone – a Jehovah’s Witness – knocked at the door; Sofia opened it and let the visitor

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know that she already knew the Bible and was working to improve the world. When the visitor left, I asked her: G: So, what is the difference between your (GEC’s) vision and the Jehovah’s Witnesses’? S: Many things. They say that there won’t be death. That everything will be nice. Well, it may be true but we still need to do a lot of work, not just God. . . . They say that God will send the change. Well, God wants it but we humans have to act. It is with our action that change will happen. But if we call ourselves Christians and we know WHAT are we doing and WHY are we doing it, then the change will take place. There are people who claim to be Catholic or whatever, but live in apathy. They say: ‘just me and my family’. Yet their families are not really well because, for example, if there is no employment, there won’t be any for their families either. . . . So here is where we collide, where we disagree . . . In this fragment, Sofia positions herself as a critical believer and citizen who claims at the same time a religious faith and a conviction for civic action. To do this, she articulates a literacy-mediated counter-narrative that criticizes the Jehovah´s Witnesses’ dominant narrative of political apathy and individualism (‘just me and my family’) and calls for a change that is not just spiritual but also economic (‘if there is no employment, there won’t be any for their families either’). Interestingly, she is directly opposing these views, formed and informed through her engagement in progressive religious groups, to the (conservative) discourse of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (‘we humans have to act . . . here is where we collide’). In this respect, Sofia’s narrative opposes Laura’s (see Chapter 4), who uses Jehovah’s Witness teachings to justify her radical distrust and withdrawal from political and civic action. Civic and political literacy: Getting out of confinement, new roles and intellectual guidance

In line with her belief that religion and politics are inseparable (‘Jesus also did politics’), Sofia became active in local struggles for improvements in public services, as well as in broader struggles for democracy in Mexico. Through a local committee of the PRD (Democratic Revolution Party) she became an activist and worked as ‘social promoter’ for several years. Her entrance into the world of politics was triggered by the national movement against the then ruling party-of-state PRI, during the presidential campaign of the opposing candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988. In the next fragment she explains how she first became involved in these

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activities, about the local leaders who mediated her involvement, and the roles she took: S:

I met doctor Alina and she invited me to work in our colonia [barrio] . . . in 1987–88, when the PRD was created. I affiliated myself in the PRD, as well as my family and acquaintances. I participated as a brigadista in the campaign. A brigadista is the one who works at raising consciousness in the people through domiciliary visits, inviting them to participate in the elections, showing them the candidate’s program. G: Why did you affiliate with the PRD? S: When I first got here [to Iztapalapa] I voted for Lopez Portillo.7 I even went to downtown Iztapalapa for a campaign rally; they said, ‘the price of meat will increase to 3 pesos’, and I said, ‘Oh my God! It’s too expensive!’ But I still voted for them. Yet in 1988 this girl came and invited me. I went to a meeting in the Cristal Auditorium, when the party [PRD8] was in formation. Valentin Campa,9 Ruben Arde,10 and Dr. Mariano Ramos were all there. I wanted to meet people who were working for the colonia because one often votes without even knowing why. So I started recruiting people; I affiliated all my neighbors, about 20. . . . the PRD promised to fight against those who had been in power for a long time and had impoverished our country. I thought ‘that’s true’, and I remembered when I lived in the countryside, people are poorer [ . . .]. Right now the countryside is abandoned and the people have migrated to the U.S . . . That’s why I affiliated myself in the PRD . . . Her lifelong experience of rural and urban poverty made Sofia sensitive to the hopes for change represented by a presidential candidate in a political conjuncture. By attending diverse events (such as the Kristal Auditorium meeting) she got in touch directly with local and national leaders, and heard appealing voices that articulated both her own lived experiences and the teachings of her religious group (‘the PRD promised to fight against those who . . . had impoverished our country . . . and I thought “that’s true”’). Naturism and the Movement of Popular Health: Access to roles of competence, agency and refashioned identity

Deterred by the inefficacy and cost of institutional medicine, Sofia’s family engaged in the practice of naturist or traditional medicine. They all used books such as Health at Everyone’s Reach (La salud al alcance de todos), to learn how to cure their family members with natural, cheaper and more effective treatments than those provided by local clinics. Yet Sofia became

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more intensively engaged in the practice of alternative medicine, and eventually became a member of the MPH (Movement of Popular Health), a network of alternative medicine groups growing fast in Mexico, whose slogan is ‘If you care for your body, you can care for the world’. They called it a movement because it has grown a lot. It began with three or four people; now it is many many people [ . . .] it began offering workshops to health promoters on how to gather the knowledge and wisdom of the people, because the people know about plants . . . it also helps people to cure themselves and care for the nature [ . . .]. But the movement has also an economic side, because people create their own medicine with their own plants. This way we also hit the big [transnational] laboratories, because people know their plants, prepare them, and cure themselves . . . Eventually, Sofia became a curandera (healer), as she describes herself. While she values her role and knowledge as curandera (informed by study, practice and the extensive reading of books) she is aware of the inferior status of her knowledge vis-à-vis that of licensed doctors: G: Are you a naturist doctor? S: mmm, well no, I am a curandera, we are curanderos, because . . . well doctors are recognized by a university, right? And we aren’t. We have knowledge . . . how can I call it? from the people, from the ancestors. But we don’t have a paper that that says that we know, he-he-he. G: But you have just showed me a pile of books that you read . . . S: He-he-he!! . . . but we lack a paper that guarantees our knowledge, do we? Both as a curandera and as a workshop instructor Sofia practices varied types of therapy: auriculoterapia, juice therapy, herbal therapy, microdose, massage therapy, finger puncture, magnet therapy, aromatherapy and hug therapy. In addition, she organized and coordinates a group for alternative medicine in San Sebastian church: ‘I am the person in charge, but I don’t call myself “co-ordinator”. I’m just one more compañera [fellow].’ In the next quotation, Sofia describes this work and its guiding principles: We sit under the trees and chat. We work with people who want to learn or to participate by donating their knowledge to others. We look for any space and work there: churches, community centers, homes . . . There are people who know a lot about plants, so I want to invite them to share their knowledge; I mean we all know, we all have knowledge, we just have to get together in order to donate it.

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‘Donating knowledge’, not selling or buying it, is a central principle of the MPH, opposed not only to schools (which regulate access to knowledge) but also to global capitalism, which controls the production, circulation and appropriation of knowledge. In an interview with Guadalupe Corona, one of the leaders of the MPH and Sofia’s mentor, she explained this subverting idea: ‘We believe that knowledge belongs and has ever belonged to the people, and you cannot claim as a personal property what belongs to the people.’ Despite her expertise in natural health, Sofia still takes ongoing courses for health promoters at Villa Estrella Community Center. Interestingly, these courses are taught by university-educated leaders of the MPH, such as Guadalupe Corona or Jesus Ramirez, who are professors of chemistry and philosophy at the National University. According to Sofia these workshops are also attended by nurses, doctors and other professionals, and they represent true learning spaces or zones of development (Vygotsky, 1978), where newcomers and old timers with varied schooling levels and areas of expertise meet and share knowledge. In Sofia’s terms, ‘here is where you learn, because some know one thing and others know about another, and we share it’. For Sofia, participation in alternative medicine activities demanded reading practices involving materials such as books, brochures and diagrams. The selection of these materials is not guided by individual preference or ‘reading ability’ but by the experience of the MPH as a community of practice: they acquire, recommend and distribute these materials. Most importantly, while there are times of individual study, the use and interpretation of these books usually takes place in the context of workshops and therapeutic activities. Among the titles that guide her practice as curandera, Sofia particularly showed and talked to me about You Can Heal your Life (Tú puedes sanar tu vida), by Louise Hay (‘this book is about the therapies that help people, because illnesses often have to do with emotions, and we have found that this really happens’); Cure Yourself with Digitpuncture: the Pressure of a Finger in the Right Site, by Pierre Diderot and Chi-Cheng-Chou (‘they are Japanese’, Sofia notes); Magnet-Therapy (‘yes, magnets help with many things: weight loss, migraine, to regulate calcium, and provide energy’); Therapeutic Dictionary: the New Manual of Healing with Bach Flowers, by Gotz Blome (a 380-page volume about which Sofia comments: ‘Bach flowers seem to me sort of divine . . . in oil or microdoses they cure your emotions’). Sofia explained that these books and reading practices circulate through social networks that purchase, photocopy and circulate them among the compañeros of the MPH: ‘I got them from the MPH people; they buy the

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books so that we can photocopy them.’ She explained that they read them ‘chapter-by-chapter’, and then apply this knowledge in on-hands activities at workshops and other events. For example, they used the book You Can Heal your Life to understand the concept of ‘affirmations’ (‘affirmations help you to heal your inner self of things you have carried since your childhood, like when they made us believe that we were foolish and good for nothing’), and then carried out a practical activity based on this concept. The variety and complexity of the reading materials and practices in which a woman with incomplete primary school is able and willing to engage counters the assumption of formal literacy programs that often define little-schooled adults as learners who must start with easy (‘basic’ or childlike) reading material and activities. A key learning context: Empowering versus banking pedagogy at women’s workshops

Another key learning and literacy experience for Sofia were the workshops on women’s rights which she took in an NGO called Popular Women Defenders (Defensoras Populares) in which all participants except her were high school- or college-educated women: ‘in those workshops there were only professionals; I was the only one with just primary school’. One day, Sofia proudly showed me one by one the 23 diplomas she earned in these gendered-oriented workshops. These were some of the topics covered: ‘Furthering a gender culture’, ‘Group management’, ‘Pacific conflict resolution’, ‘Economic, political, and social rights’, ‘Oratory’, ‘Violence and legal procedures’, ‘Mistreated women’, ‘Female leadership’ and ‘Emergency contraception’. As a part of her personal history, these workshops represented a powerful learning experience, for they involved significant and critical topics, dialogic and active pedagogies, and interaction with women of diverse occupations and educational levels. Sofia learnt about these workshops from a friend: ‘It was advertised in a newspaper; a friend of mine told me.’ As a housewife trapped in a tedious life, Sofia saw these workshops as an opportunity to get out and learn new things. In the end, they proved a unique learning experience for Sofia, since they were jointly offered and staffed by professionals committed to a gender-oriented education for the empowerment of women. Besides being exposed to a thematically rich and critical curriculum, Sofia had also the opportunity to interact in these workshops with college-educated, friendly and supportive women in a non-threatening context: G: How did you feel at classes where most participants had college education?

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S:

Well, it seemed very good to me. I felt at ease with them because these women did not discriminate against others for not having formal studies. Quite the contrary; we were very well integrated. And they were all professionals, people who work in the government or in their communities; they all are leaders. G: Did you feel at a disadvantage in reading or other activities there? S: Reading? No. Sometimes I had to work in small groups with them. There were things I didn’t understand because they speak differently and say long words . . . but I was there anyway, with them. Sofia eloquently articulates the radical contrast between this learning experience and her previous adult education classes: It is veeery different . . . [in AE classes] people are more silent, and the teacher is the only one who speaks; the one who teaches in his blaaackboard. These workshops are different: you have to participate, you speak, you discuss, it’s just different, isn’t it? I don’t know, schools bore me, like I don’t learn [. . .] Sometimes I even fall asleep, he-he.

Learning from Sofia’s Case Access Trajectory of practices

Seen from a lifelong perspective, Sofia spent most of her first 30 years of life in survival activities (e.g. raising children, working for survival). In this context, intellectually oriented or extended written language activities were irrelevant or at least minimal in her life. Doubtless the two main barriers to her social and intellectual development were her class and gender conditions. As a poor woman subjected to limiting gender roles she had little access to any demand or cultural resources for learning. In this sense, not reading/writing in her life was caused by lack of money and time rather than by lack of skills or ‘habits’. Literacy as a learning and action tool was both little demanded and of little usefulness given her urgent personal and family needs (‘I didn’t read anything . . . I had no time for anything’). It is also noticeable that her learning experiences at school (as a child and adult) were too poor to contribute significantly to her intellectual, literacy and socioeconomic progress. Yet for her the lack of a formal BE certificate represented a stigma that pushed her to enroll in AE classes. Powerful learning experiences

Key in Sofia’s learning trajectory was her agentive ability to free herself from domestic captivity and to engage in socially oriented activities

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(‘I wanted to know other things, because what can a woman do at home? She does laundry, irons, sweeps; that’s all she does’). It was only after this ‘getting out’ that she experienced more powerful literate and intellectual challenges and learning opportunities, through involvement in grassroots community groups, led by capable and supportive activists and leaders. It was in these communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) or discourse communities (Gee, 1996) that Sofia experienced powerful learning experiences characterized by direct interaction with more capable others (Vygotsky, 1978); these were often college-educated professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, psychologists) who scaffolded thinking, reading and speaking activities otherwise difficult for her (‘I was the only one with primary schooling’). These activities took place under non-hierarchical and non-exclusive relations uncommon in formal AE classes which are usually carefully designed to segregate students according to school grade and ‘skill level’ (‘I felt at ease with them because these women did not discriminate against others for not having formal studies’). As a result, Sofia perceived a contrast between the dialogic and active pedagogy enacted at both GEC and women’s workshops (‘workshops are different; you have to participate, you speak, you discuss’), and the passive pedagogy of the AE classes (‘in AE classes people are more silent, and the teacher is the only one who speaks’). Appropriation Literacy development: From confinement to social dialogues and powerful discourses

Sofia learnt how to read and write in a basic sense (decoding) as a child. Yet before she was 30, her reading and writing practices were notably limited to everyday ‘functional’ tasks, since her social and intellectual worlds were so narrow that extended reading/writing were neither a necessity nor a possibility. It is when she engages in out-of-home groups and activities that her more significant experiences with literacy begin to evolve. Through social participation in community organizations (e.g. GEC, PRD, MPH, Popular Defenders) Sofia entered into spaces of critical and literacymediated dialogues and practices. From her own perspective, the key event that marked her true take-off as a reader, thinker and free woman was her enrollment in ‘Analysis of Reality’ courses, taken at age 31 with progressive theologist Eduardo, as a part of the GECs’ formative work: G: When in your lifetime did you start reading newspapers and other materials? S: When? After I began to participate more in the community . . . when I took the courses in the church [ . . .] we began to read newspapers,

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books, the Proceso [a magazine of political analysis], La Jornada [a newspaper] . . . yes, reading, reading, reading, because we had courses on Christology and Analysis of Reality with Eduardo. Through participation in groups such as MPH, GEC, PRD and Popular Defenders, Sofia had access to broader social dialogues (Bakhtin, 1981) and secondary discourses (Gee, 1991) about politics and democracy, alternative medicines, theology, and gender issues (women’s health, rights and leadership). These discourses were largely based on critical philosophies that counter the dominant economic, philosophical and educational principles of the free-market economy, such as cooperation versus competence, collectivism versus individualism, solidarity versus selfishness, popular and free knowledge versus commodified and copyrighted knowledge; non-commercial, Oriental/pre-Columbian medicine versus Western, transnational, institutionalized medicine. Thus a crucial factor in her process of growth, change and personal liberation was her engagement in groups where her capabilities and knowledge were recognized and valued, and where she was in touch with people, ideas and activities that expanded her ideological horizons, her world knowledge, her radius of action, her self-perception as a competent and free woman, and her personal expectations of growth. For Sofia, a little-schooled woman, an inhabitant of one of the most marginalized areas in Mexico City, participating in a Grassroots Ecclesial Community represented a powerful learning experience involving access to and membership of a broader, supportive and socially committed social network (engaged in altruistic and solidarity actions with poor individuals and social movements). It also promoted access to intense critical literacy practices (e.g. dialogue and discussion, guided reading and critical study of religious and non-religious texts). In this way, the GEC was one of the learning communities that afforded the proper support for Sofia to expand her intellectual tools, world view and literacy practices. A key resource available through this type of experience was a direct contact and mentoring relationship with intellectual sponsors like Eduardo, a doctor in theology, as well as with diverse leaders she met in workshops and conferences (‘when we have conferences many people come from other countries, not only from Mexico’). In other words, her learning experience was mediated by joint activities and critical dialogues with ‘more capable’ (Vygotsky, 1978) individuals, rather than through rote exercise and dead information delivered through didactic materials, which are the pervading means of instruction in formal AE programs. These individuals played essential roles such as ideological/spiritual guides, teachers and entrance

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doors into institutions and worlds otherwise inaccessible to poor and little-educated people like Sofia.

Alma When you master your chakras it’s wonderful’ Alma I was a woman devoted only to washing clothes, to ironing, to being in the kitchen, to not going out. . . . I began to get involved in the social work with the community. . . . I learnt that we have to advise the husbands, not to ask them for permission, because ‘you are not my owner, I am a woman, I am free, and I am able to do many things that I DO KNOW I have the capacity for, as well . . .’ Alma Only by remaining in a closed environment, one without writing or thought, completely off the maps of socio-ideological becoming, could a man [sic] fail to sense this activity of selecting a language and rest assured in the inviolability of his own language, the conviction that his anguage is predetermined. M. Bakhtin (1981: 295)

Like most women in marginal Third World ghettos, Alma, aged 42, has struggled against the barriers of socioeconomic, domestic and intellectual confinement. She left school at age 14, got married, had six children, and spent 20 years almost exclusively doing domestic chores. It was only after many years of marriage that Alma began to escape from domestic captivity and engage in outside social, cultural, political and spiritual activities, which visibly expanded her social and intellectual worlds. Her case illustrates how learning and growth are possible through social participation and reflexive self-reconstruction. Crucial in facing her husband’s resistance to out-of-home activities was the support and encouragement of other socially committed ‘women with decision’, as she refers to them. Thanks to them, Alma got involved in diverse community activities, such as struggles for public services, improvement of her children’s schools, political activism and participation in gender-oriented workshops. Eventually, she became involved in the foundation of Aztahuacan Community Center (ACC, a local community center), and became president of the Parents Association at her children’s elementary school. However, and unlike most community activists, Alma also got deeply involved in a spiritualist group (which she refers to as ‘my group’), whose members believe in supernatural phenomena (e.g. reincarnation and communication with spirits) but also in the power of an individual to control her own body and mind.

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At some point in my research, I hesitated to continue interviewing Alma, for she never missed an opportunity to lecture me passionately about metaphysics and to try and persuade me to join her group. So long as she talked to me about her activities in the community, I was comfortable with our exchanges, but once she started talking about ‘spiritualism’, ‘other worlds’ beings’, ‘ascended masters’, ‘revelations’, ‘chakras’ or ‘reincarnation’, I felt uneasy, for supernatural phenomena did not sound to me like what educators think learning and literacy ‘development’ are about. Yet, over time I began to make sense of Alma’s singular passage from domestic confinement to community/political activism and, eventually, to metaphysics, in terms of a trajectory of personal empowerment and ideological and intellectual growth. I realized as well that hers was not a rare case but a widespread phenomenon in poor areas of the city,11 where these are the sort of discourse resources available to millions who have been excluded from legitimate and formal educational opportunities. I decided then to explore why these fast-growing ideologies and groups (esoteric, spiritualist) are so appealing to many poor people, and my intuition was that, unlike formal adult education programs, these groups effectively work in expanding people’s sense of identity, agency (self-control), self-worth and knowledge. As Alma told me: Some time ago I was pondering and I wondered ‘who I am? What am I doing here?’ And here in the group Avatar del Kosmos I started to find answers . . . here we study chemistry, math, physiology, biology, etc. . . . and even though it is a reality that cannot be seen nor touched, you feel it, it vibrates; when you actually master your chakras it is fabulous! wonderful!! . . . Now I don’t care about money, but about knowledge. Constraints and available practices Poverty, truncated education and confinement

By the time I met her, Alma lived with her husband and their youngest daughter, aged 13, in a very modest house right in front of ACC, a community center of which she was one of the founder members. Her other five children (aged 25, 23, 21, 18 and 15) had all left home, though none of them had finished high school due to the need to work, early pregnancy, gang engagement or ‘rebelliousness’. Alma’s childhood was not only hard but also traumatic. This became evident to me from our very first encounter, when she spontaneously talked about her experiences of poverty, domestic mistreatment and even sexual abuse. During this interview which took place in ACC, she was joined by her 2-year-old granddaughter, of whom she said: ‘I have already

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started the procedures to gain custody of her; [whispering:] she was raped, probably in her very house. Her mom, my daughter-in-law, is always in trouble, she has been stabbed a couple of times.’ I could barely mutter: ‘Dr Alina12 has told me that there are many cases of sexual abuse in Iztapalapa’, before Alma revealed ‘I am one of them.’ Alma’s father left home when she was a little girl; so as the oldest among her nine siblings, she took care of them. At the age of seven she witnessed her younger sister being run over by a car, and at the age of eight, she was a victim of sexual abuse. It is a trauma that you carry inside, and you have to get rid of it. My mom was very ignorant, I got traumatized . . . [frowning] I have had many problems but one thinks: ‘I can’t continue with this; I must do something.’ By the time she was 14, her drama became unbearable; she dropped out of school and ran away with her boyfriend, got pregnant and ended up living with a jealous man who kept her away from any school and work activities outside of the home. A: I wanted to leave school and get a job, for I’d seen the limitations at home: my mom had no money to buy me books . . . [and] I had many traumas; I was about to commit suicide two or three times . . . then I got together with my partner, but we quarreled a lot – he with his sour character, and me with my joyful character . . . that was the problem, he always said that I cheated on him. . . . He put pressure on me because I worked [and] he said ‘you can’t earn more than me’. He even threatened me when I was about 23 years old . . . so I left the job where I was held in high esteem and had good working conditions because of the fear of losing my children. I was stupid, a coward, more weak than anything . . . G: Weak . . . A: Weak in the sense that I felt attacked but I just cried and held myself back; I didn’t go out [of the house] any more. I thought that they were right, that I was doing something wrong. . . . Trapped by her poor economic situation, her husband’s control and her own feelings of powerlessness, Alma no longer enrolled in formal school courses: ‘I took some short courses but never finished because of the economic pressure . . . that was the main pressure.’ Getting out of the home: Activism and triumphs in the community

After many years of domesticity, at the age of 32, Alma began to get out of the house. Encouraged by some residents and activists, she started as a

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peripheral supporter in the electoral processes and struggles for public services, and ended up as a full protagonist in projects such as the foundation of ACC and the construction of a new primary school. Her initiation into community activities began in 1992: I began to participate at the invitation of Carlos, Dr Alina’s husband, although I was a woman only devoted to washing clothes, ironing, cooking . . . I began as a kind of secretary for Carlos . . . then I got involved in social work within the community . . . I was one of the initiators of the House of Culture. First we cleared the land, everything, it was ugly, there were dead dogs, holes . . . we got trucks full of soil and machinery to flatten the terrain ( . . .). We were a group of women, mainly housewives . . . We carried out home visits, convincing the people that we could do big things in this area . . . then we came up with the idea of a green area and a house of culture for the benefit of the community . . . then we attended meetings in the Delegation [Iztapalapa] and in the Regency [Mexico City’s government] . . . there was lots and lots of movement . . . We accomplished this, and now ACC is a reality; there it is! Key to Alma’s entrance into the non-domestic world was the motivation and support of local leaders and activists, like Yolanda, Alina and other ‘women with decision’, as she calls them. With them, she learnt something fundamental: that being a woman meant neither subordination nor inferiority in respect to men: Yolanda was a big support for me, because I had many problems with my husband and she was the one who always faced him: ‘you know what? we are going to such and such a place and we are letting you know’. She taught me that we have to let the husbands know, not to ask them for permission, because ‘you are not my owner, I am a woman, I am free, and I am able to do many things that I KNOW I can do.’ As a block representative in the Comité Vecinal (neighborhood committee), she also participated in various campaigns for the introduction of public services in SMA, such as water, sewerage, electricity and pavements. These actions involved constant negotiations with the authorities of Iztapalapa and Mexico City, in which Alma learnt that, just like husbands, public authorities (usually college-educated men) were not superior to under-schooled and poor women either. They were women with decision, old women who said: ‘we are going to such place, we invite you’ . . . and I liked that because I thought: ‘how

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nice it is that we women participate, help each other, and realize that the authorities are not above us but that they DEPEND upon us. Authorities deserve respect just as we deserve respect from them; and we aren’t ‘simple housewives’, as those licenciados used to tell us: ‘ignorant [women], go home and care for your children’ . . . and I thought ‘how is it possible that they want to see us as ignorant? We are not ignorant. Perhaps we don’t have schooling, a degree, but we DO HAVE abilities too.’ As did many people in this community, Alma also met Rene A., a community leader who later became Iztapalapa’s mayor and federal congressman, and with whom she and others became members of a political party: ‘I participated in the elections, in the voting stands; I was a vote promoter . . . later, I was also in the Civic Union of Iztapalapa, as a representative from the school.’ Appropriated practices and discourses Experiencing power

For a woman with a deeply rooted sense of impotency and hopelessness, experiencing power (i.e. knowing that accomplishing personal or collective ends is possible) was a decisive factor in her personal and intellectual growth. Through social engagement Alma did not only expand her world view; she also played a key role in important collective triumphs (e.g. the construction of ACC and a primary school; introduction of public services) that dramatically fueled her sense of self-worth as a free and capable woman and of her identity as a committed citizen, all of which moved her to take on roles of higher responsibility in relation to both the community and herself. I got fully involved in the Parents’ Association at the school, within the Civic Union of Iztapalapa. I was the president of the school and I sent oficios [formal letters] demanding the construction of a new school, because our school was already 20 years old and it was only a little room made of metal sheet, and we got it . . . We achieved many positive things for the school. I even talked to the engineers: ‘you know what? If you are going to construct a school, do it well.’ And they would say: ‘she is not that ignorant; she knows what she is asking for.’ And the school was built, we did it! As did many poor women in Iztapalapa, Alma also engaged in political activism through the PRD, the political party of local leaders like Rene A. and Dr Alina. As a PRD activist, Alma carried out house-to-house

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canvassing, a task that demanded both conviction and oral skills to persuade the people to engage in political activity: G: I noticed that you were recruiting people to join the PRD, didn’t you? A: Oh yes, I recruited some people . . . G: What was recruitment work about? A: Well, we have to talk, to dialogue with the people; to invite them, not to force them, because you can’t compel them. The dialogue, to make them understand that there must be a change; that even though the party commits errors . . . we have to keep faith in something. And yes, those people said: ‘yes, I will participate’. Self-authoring practices: From politics to metaphysics

By the time I met Alma, she was still engaged in community activism, yet she was moving towards a deeper involvement and belief in what she called ‘my group’, a spiritualist group named Avatar del Kosmos. Certainly, through community and political activism Alma had freed herself from domestic captivity and realized her learning capacity, but economic limitations made it impossible for her to seek further formal education (‘what I lack is THIS [her hand gestures ‘money’]: a budget to study and still afford to pay for my expenses’). Pushed by her strong desire to learn but lacking the ‘basic skill’ of affording a formal education, Alma got involved in this spiritualist group. While spiritualism may cause ideological uneasiness among educated people, I discovered through Alma that it is these groups, rather than formal adult education classes, that offer poor people the social and intellectual shelter essential to develop a stronger sense of agency (self-control/direction) and to overcome feelings of powerlessness that diminish their self-image as learners, thinkers and actors. Since Alma kept talking to me about ‘her group’ with passion and conviction, it became evident to me that she felt empowered within this group, and so I decided to explore further why was it so important to her as a learning experience. What I learnt was that for people like Alma (economically and educationally marginalized; socially confined to domestic and local little worlds) a group like Avatar del Kosmos represented a powerful ideological, symbolic and social space that, for her, radically changed her self-perception and much of her world view. Yet, paradoxically, through Avatar del Kosmos Alma entered into new social conversations that expanded at once her sense of self-awareness and agency, and also undermined her belief and commitment toward other forms

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of social action. The strong supernatural and individualistic nature of this group’s ideology moved Alma away from more sociopolitical discourses and commitments, which demanded a more mundane and collective approach to social issues of diverse types. A: I joined a spiritualist group about four years ago . . . I got in touch with it through one of my brothers. Some time ago I was in a state of searching; at some point I wondered ‘who am I?’, ‘what am I doing here?’ And here in the group I began to find answers. We are the group Avatar del Kosmos; it is led by a doctor, I mean our Guide . . . we study metaphysics. G: What is metaphysics? A: Well, the knowledge of your inner self; the knowledge of your chakras, the energy you have as a human . . . and I say ‘I’m not so far from the reality’, though it is a reality that cannot be seen or touched; but you feel it, it vibrates; and once you master your chakras, wow! It’s fabulous! It’s wonderful!! Notice that while Alma had first met with this group in the 1980s, it was not until the late 1990s (around age 38) that she got deeply involved in it, to the point that she always referred to it using a first-person plural pronoun (‘we are the group Avatar del Kosmos’). This group, whose offices were not in Iztapalapa but in downtown Mexico City, was led by a spiritual and intellectual guide named Heptab Heliel, for whom Alma felt a profound respect, to the extent that she always referred to him as El Maestro (the Teacher). Alma informed me that there were about 50 members of this group, many of them with higher education credentials: ‘there are lawyers, doctors, teachers and secretaries among us . . . all kinds of people; people with schooling and people without schooling’. Alma explained to me what they do in the group: We carry out energy fixings and meditation; we study the knowledge of herbolaria (herb-based medicine) . . . we study physics, math, chemistry, history, geography, astrology . . . We also go camping in Tepoztlan, where other groups meet . . . they also give us tapes that they record for us with knowledge about the cosmos . . . we also get out from our material bodies through meditation and . . . [at this point of her talk, I – the researcher – couldn’t refrain a gesture of incredulity] mjm, at the beginning many people think that this is impossible . . . well there are many very interesting things, I mean everything becomes knowledge for us. It is as though we were at a university, but a spiritualist university . . . it has been very good for me to know these things.

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Unlike formal literacy and adult education classes, where students deal individually with textbook exercises, learning in Avatar del Kosmos involved varied and engaging intellectual, social and physical experiences, like meditation sessions, lectures on various topics and periodic outings to natural and archeological sites. On Sundays we meet with other fellow groups. We go to the Museum of Anthropology, decipher the glyphs in statues and pieces like the Aztec calendar; each little stone in the Aztec calendar means a year . . . they lecture us about the Tiger Man and the Ocelotl (characters of the Aztec mythology); they also lecture us about sexual matters, because we can use our sexual organism to feed ourselves, but we also learn to open up our brains more, the gray matter, because sometimes we cannot retain everything they tell us . . . we have to know how to retain knowledge and also extract and analyze it properly, and we do all that through exercises. They have taught us that the Mexicas or Aztecs had a lot of knowledge . . . [and] we also learn about our own medicinal plants, eatable plants, eatable roots, and everything we can eat from the land . . . Participation in Avatar del Kosmos also involved specific reading and writing activities: the reading of what Alma calls hojas (sheets of paper with transcriptions of the Maestro’s talks), as well as photocopies of books; and the writing of ‘messages’; as well as self-authoring exercises such as ‘True Visualization’ (described below). Alma explains these activities: G: Do you have to read in these activities? A: Yes, we have many books . . . In this group we began with talks; then they started to give us this knowledge by means of sheets, photocopies they made for us. We had to get the essence of what was written there, I mean to get out the knowledge . . . but once you get deeper and deeper and deeper, you get not only the material [knowledge] but the most spiritual one . . . G: What kind of books did you read? A: They are books that we ourselves have been writing . . . I’m going to make some photocopies for you, copies of everything they – these beings – have given us, and that we have noted down on the sheets. In their daily sessions (from 6 to 9 p.m.) at Avatar del Kosmos, Alma explains, they write ‘messages’, that she swears are dictated to them by the ‘ascended masters’, such dissimilar figures as Martin Luther King, Pope Angelo Roncalli/Juan XXIII, Gandhi, Carl Sagan and others whose names she seems to be quite familiar with. At some point she insisted on

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giving me ‘a book that we are writing . . . I mean, that they dictate to us’. And days later she brought me a 100-page binder with transcriptions of lectures by Maestro Heptab Heliel, poems composed by Alma, and texts of uncertain origin but written in a rather biblical style. It’s not only me; everybody in the group receives the messages, messages like the earthquake . . . like the eruption of the Popocatepetl volcano . . . like hurricanes . . . we all are receiving this advice. I tell you, we are in touch with those beings . . . I know it sounds fantastic, but they are among us, on this planet . . . I mean they are beings that died but their knowledge has transcended life and death . . . Yes, and even the supposedly ‘intellectual’ people are sometimes very backward in this knowledge, for today even the scientists are recognizing that we handle everything by means of energy . . . While this group’s philosophy certainly falls within the supernatural, its practices and goals are quite terrestrial, for they explicitly aim to teaching the members how to increase their power to author their own lives. The following field note excerpt illustrates the sort of thing people are expected to learn in this group: Alma insisted on lending me a 90-minute audio cassette containing a lecture given by her Maestro. The cassette’s label reads Yo Soy (I Am). I listen to it and I hear El Maestro’s gentle, paused and firm voice talking about True Visualization: ‘an exercise to control and direct our visualizations to realize a given purpose’, he explains. With this method, he goes on, a person can achieve ‘tangible outcomes’, for s/he ‘gets the control in her hands and determines, decides and commands herself to discipline and consciously control her human self; s/he selects what must be and mustn’t be in her sphere of action and, through the process of visualization, draws in her mind the image of a given life-plan; it keeps it in her mind and carries it out until manifestation.’ An important aspect of the method, the Maestro explains, involves putting one’s plan in words: ‘The second phase is about expressing, telling your plan with words, as clearly and concisely as possible. You must write it down, so that you keep a visible and tangible record of your desire in the outer world.’ (Field note excerpt, and transcription of audio cassette – Yo Soy) While official literacy and AE programs, at least in Mexico and other ex-colonial countries, are still devised under a deficit model of learning (Erickson, 1986; Vasquez et al., 1994; Rogoff, 2003; Vasquez, 2006), under the assumption that what poor people need to learn are ‘basic skills’ to

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cope with ‘functional’ reading/writing tasks, we see in this passage a very different educational approach, based on the assumption of people’s capacities and potential. Even though this group’s practices are driven by supernatural and spiritual assumptions and ends, its ‘pedagogy’ is interestingly consistent with current sociocultural theories of learning and human agency, according to which the development of one’s sense of agency is a crucial aspect of a person’s development. Agency is defined as ‘the realized capacity of people to act upon their world’ (Inden, cited in Holland et al., 1998: 23). This self-authoring capacity (Bakhtin’s term), or voluntary control over one’s thinking and behavior (Vygotsky’s term) grows out of one’s sense of identity or self-understanding, which is mediated in turn by oral or written symbols, precisely what True Visualization is about (the cassette label explicitly states the intention of supporting the group members’ articulation of their identities: Yo Soy/I am). Thus, while the learners’ explicit articulation of who they are and the development of their power to act purposively and reflectively upon their own lives is absent in formal AE programs, this is a central goal in Avatar del Kosmos’ pedagogy. As Alma acknowledges: ‘we have learnt to master more our physical matter, and we are trying to master our own minds’. In contrast, too, Avatar del Kosmos’ pedagogy explicitly addresses the most critical desires and concerns of its members (through visualizing a given purpose, putting it into written words, and working to achieving ‘tangible outcomes’), whereas literacy and adult education programs are often designed under ideologically ‘neutral’ and ‘functionally’ decontextualized grounds. The problem here is that this context-free/portable skills, or ‘all-purpose-flour’ (Hull, 1993a) approach to literacy and adult education becomes a curriculum insensitive to the most poignant issues in the lives of the learners. In other words, literacy programs seem to teach students how to write to know how to write, whereas a group such as Alma’s teaches how them to write to know how to live. Another feature that made Avatar del Kosmos an appealing learning and social context for a person overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness like Alma, was the strong sense of community belonging that it affords: ‘I tell you, when we go out to the countryside, we are like a unity, nothing else, we are ONE, we are all equal.’ It seems plausible to think, therefore, that as a result of these powerful spiritual, intellectual and social experiences in Avatar del Kosmos, Alma’s own self-perception and life priorities changed. So, we want to overcome our selfishness, our interest in material things . . . from what we learn we search for ourselves, why am I here?

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I used to want to go to college, to become someone, someone great, to have a perfect house, a car, I don’t know, material things. This was important to me in the past; now I don’t care very much about that. Well, it is necessary, but I no longer see it as my priority, it no longer inspires me. Now I want to grow, to get past what I just told you: the traumas, all that negativity that I used to feel . . . What is notable is Alma’s explicit articulation of the shifts in her life priorities (from ‘selfishness’ or desire for material goods, to a search for herself and for personal growth) as a process strongly connected to her participation and experience in Avatar del Kosmos (‘from what we learn we search for our self . . .’). And this articulation clearly speaks of the crucial role of ideological interpellation in the constitution and transformation of subjectivities.

Learning from Alma’s Case Access Trajectory of practices

Discussing literacy directly with Alma was not an easy task. She spontaneously talked to me about various issues in her lifetime (poverty and marginality, sexual and domestic abuse, husband’s control, traumatic experiences). Yet I was finally able to trace Alma’s literacy engagements on the basis of her narratives about the key stages and topics of her lifetime. The following are the most salient themes in Alma’s narratives. Firstly, she was mostly devoted to domestic chores until she was around 32 years old. In this situation, her opportunities and demands for thinking, speaking and reading/writing in public spaces or about public issues were rather limited in amount and kind. While she learnt how to read and write in a basic sense (de/coding) as a child, she has no memorable school experiences with reading and writing, even though she attended school until the 9th grade. Nevertheless, during her teen years she started to write poems on her own, mostly for self-expressive purposes (e.g. she wrote the poem Adios mundo, adios – Goodbye world, goodbye – in a moment of despair and suicidal thoughts). Secondly, for a person whose life had been so socially and ideologically limited, getting out of home and engaging in community groups were crucial experiences in her process of intellectual, personal and communicative growth. This participation expanded her social network, and allowed her to enter into new social dialogues, roles and practices. In particular she began to get involved in community activities demanding public language practices, such as public

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assemblies, group discussions and paperwork and negotiations with local institutions. She also became president of the Parents’ Association at her children’s elementary school, where she used and developed petition letters (formal letters on behalf of individuals or a group of citizens, and addressed to public authorities to request or demand something). Thus, through civic and political activity, Alma developed a commitment and competency as a citizen, while she dealt with procedures, paperwork and negotiations with government offices, as well as with reading materials such as flyers, petition letters and political documents. Thirdly, while Alma became familiar with the content, function, wording and administrative steps for using petition letters, her participant role (Reder, 1987) in these literacy events was often peripheral, since she used the written materials, but did not compose or edit them. This is normal given the customary social division of literacy skills in the community, where the composition of relevant documents or the conduct of key face-to-face negotiations usually relies on university-educated literacy mediators (Baynham, 1993). This division is not simply related to the level of skills, but fundamentally to social status. In Alma’s words, ‘the [academic] degree is very important because it opens doors to you, and we don’t have degrees.’ Fourthly, as Alma began to get drawn into spiritualist activities, she got also involved in new reading and writing tasks, such as reflective reading and collective study of ‘sheets’ (lectures or texts written by El Maestro, as well as material coming from various kinds of books). As for writing, she wrote diverse poems and literary-prose texts, though she attributed them to the ‘beings that dictate them to us’. Seen as a whole, Alma has had few opportunities to develop a broad repertoire of literacy skills. Yet a crucial aspect of her communicative development is that, through engagement in groups driven by varied ideologies and commitments (e.g. politics, gender, science, supernatural), she has appropriated a range of voices (Bakhtin, 1981) or secondary discourses (Gee, 1996) and used them effectively to expand and change her world view, her self-perception and her very competence as a speaker; all of which have noticeably enhanced her social competence to deal with and remake her family relationships, her role in the community and her status vis-à-vis the public authorities. While she has not developed confidence as a speaker before large audiences, it is evident that Alma has acquired the confidence to speak in small group events, like meetings, assemblies and even negotiations under the asymmetrical relations of power with highly schooled public authorities (‘we have been in meetings in the Regency and I don’t feel scared to talk, even to the licenciados, who are so tricky’). An example of this competence are the successful negotiations that she led for the construction of a new school in the community.

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Appropriation Literacy development: From functional to citizenship to self-authoring practices

In the particular case of Alma, her literacy history is best understood in terms of the ideological model of literacy (as opposed to the autonomous model) posited by Street. It is clear that most of her experiences with oral and written language emerged and were either constrained or enabled by the social and ideological formations in which those practices and she herself were embedded. This was the case in her gender ideologies that justified her confinement for many years in domestic chores, to her access to broader reading, writing and speaking demands and practices as she entered the ideological/practical worlds of community activism, national politics and metaphysics. In all these contexts it seems useless or at least artificial to separate her oral and written practices from her cultural and ideological engagements. It would be also misleading to see her language and literacy practices separated from the contents and meanings imposed by the ideologies afforded by the local groups and practices she came to feel as her own. In addition, seen from a life trajectory perspective, her literacy development is clearly a movement away from enclosed primary discourses (Gee, 1996) (her family of origin, then her marriage and the small social worlds enabled by both) towards a varied and hybrid set of secondary discourses, ranging from leftist politics and progressive feminism to spiritualism and metaphysics. And as other informants describe her, she was able to move from being ‘a typical woman of Aztahuacan’ (i.e. submissive, fearful, dependent, as described by Dr Alina) to a full participant in political and other activities (independent, stronger, more self-confident, and with a broader knowledge of the world, in Dr Alina’s words). In these shifts Alma was certainly able to acquire and enact the necessary (secondary) uses of language demanded by these secondary discourses, in Gee’s terms. In more dynamic terms, as suggested by Bakhtin, the case of Alma also illustrates that ideological change is a key dimension in the histories of learning and growth of individuals who begin their lives in closed or very limited socio-ideological worlds, and progressively appropriate new practices and their associated languages and ideologies. As they manage to overcome a state of socio-ideological confinement, they find themselves in situations which both broaden and question their customary ideologies and discourse practices, including language and literacy practices. Ideological becoming is, thus, a crucial concept to understand how and why people engage or disengage, succeed or fail, as learners and participants in activities that involve discourse practices (oral, written, multimodal and

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embodied) the forms and meanings of which may align or conflict with their previous identities and practices. As Alma progressively got engaged in community activism, national politics and metaphysics, she also appropriated and expanded her repertoire of symbolic means (ideologically imbued words) to both understand, express and experience herself (‘when you actually master your chakras it is fabulous! wonderful!! You feel it!, it vibrates!!). It is clear that her identity shifts from submissive housewife to active citizen (engaged in political activity) and then to metaphysics practitioner (committed to mastery of her own mind and body), involved daunting ideological shifts. And it was these shifts in her beliefs about herself (‘I was stupid, a coward, weak . . .’) and about her place in the world (‘Perhaps we don’t have schooling, a degree, but we do have abilities too’), which both afforded and impelled her desire and willingness to try to appropriate new roles, identities and discourse practices, including literacy and language practices. Now, the materialized/embodied nature of ideology is quite visible in Alma’s case. During the years she spent mostly engaged in domestic chores, she was in fact enacting (through practical activity) the sexist ideology of male dominance and female subordination that she verbally articulates in her narrative as, ‘I was a woman devoted only to washing clothes, to ironing, to being in the kitchen, to not going out . . . I was stupid, a coward, weak . . . I thought that they [men] were right, that I was doing something wrong . . .’ Later in her narrative, Alma did not only explain how her ideas about different topics changed (e.g. about gender relations and women’s capabilities; about democracy and citizenship; about spiritualism and the power over one’s body and mind), she also described how she was enacting those new ideas. For example, in the political field she regularly participated in meetings, negotiations, home-to-home visits and supervision of ballot stands, whereas in the spiritual field, she began to regularly attend Avatar del Kosmos sessions and activities such as camping, visiting museums, naturist forms of medicine and chakra fixings. In other words, her ideological becoming did not just take place mentally but also practically; she did not only began to think differently but also to act and feel different (‘even though it is a reality that cannot be seen nor touched, you feel it, it vibrates!’). The theoretical point here is that those ‘new ideas’ or ideologies (thematically focused systems of ideas) did not only exist in the form of knowledge within her mind, but also in the form of actions and practices enacted by her body in the outer world. A key pedagogical implication of this is that if we want to create conscious, informed, critical and active citizens, as well as engaged and critical readers/writers, pedagogies based on passive and transmissive learning

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models are the worst way to do it. Quite the opposite, we need to engage the entire person in the world (body and mind, thought and emotion, reflection and action) in the actual educational process for, as Paulo Freire never ceased to repeat, education is not about regulating the way the world ‘enters into’ the students’ heads, but about encouraging and supporting the way students enter into the world. And a pedagogy based on these principles is not only consistent with current theories of socially and culturally situated learning, but also with current theories of identity and subjectivity which offer the best conceptual tools to inform pedagogy practices committed to the learners’ ideological (and identity) becoming.

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Chapter 4

Transnationals

The global spread both of migration flows and of information and communication technologies has fueled an emergent field of transnational literacy studies (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Jiménez, 2003; Lam, 2006). Central themes in this research are the multiple and contested nature of new transnational spaces of identity, the construction and narration of self and identity through the multimodal literacy practices involved in transnational interaction, the multifaceted print and digital practices that are crossing national borders, and the evidence of trajectories of literacy practices across time and space (Hornberger, 2007; Warriner, 2007). Much of the empirical research around these themes focuses on the use of digital media by young people as means of maintaining and developing relationships with people, media and events across territorial boundaries (McGinnis et al., 2007; Lam, 2009b). Examples are the study of tagging and graffiti practices among Mexican youths (Bruna, 2007), the educational trajectories and literacy practices of Latino immigrants in the US (Jiménez, 2003; Bartlett, 2007; García & Bartlett, 2007; Rubinstein-Ávila, 2007), or the use of social networking websites (e.g. MySpace or Facebook) as sites of identity work (Lam, 2006, 2009a; McGinnis et al., 2007). This chapter, however, is mostly concerned with older people or with young people in adult roles (e.g. work, parenting) who also engage in transnational practices, but of different natures. While the term ‘transnationals’ is mostly used in the literature to describe people who have moved bodily across national borders while still maintaining practices associated with their home countries (Hornberger, 2007), the life stories of both groups of Mexicans (those living in Mexico or in the US) in my research show that they all actually engage in transnational literacy practices. This is obvious from the moment they engage in the reading, consumption and appropriation of texts, discourses and practices which originate from multiple national origins and cross national borders. Even though the

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interviewees might not be aware of the global or transnational nature of their discourse practices, examples of this abound in all the stories I have gathered. Take the individuals who have grown up and lived only in Mexico; they all have heavily engaged in and been influenced by discursive and symbolic material and practices which have mostly (but not exclusively) originated in the US. These print and media materials often convey cross-national images, language and ideologies. Others have appropriated critical texts, discourses and practices to utilize in practices related to religion, community and political activism, health promotion, or spiritualism. The consumed materials, ideas and practices come from virtually all of the five continents, and are particularly influenced by Latin America, the US and Europe. The cases in this chapter of Laura and Pablo are eloquent illustrations of this. As a girl growing up in Mexico, Laura was exposed to and eventually joined the discourse practices of the Christian religious group known as ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’. As we all know, the Christian religion and its texts originated in the Middle East and Europe; the Jehovah’s Witness are a network that spans countries and continents. Laura joined this group (through reading, believing and active practices) in Mexico. Many years later, as a transnational migrant in the US, she maintained these practices through the cross-national circulation of texts and reading practices with her mother and other members of the group (e.g. they read and comment on passages of religious texts over the phone). As for Pablo, his desires and plans to migrate to the US clearly emerged because as a child he engaged in reading commercial comics that included the stories of migrants. It thus becomes clear that the transnational functions of most literacy practices (reshaping people’s sense of belonging, identity and social networking) take place not only as they migrate to the US or other countries, but from their very home countries. This is the case of most Mexicans who have never left Mexican territory. Yet, it is also clear that those who have migrated to the US (transnational migrants), find themselves detached and alienated as citizens of a nation state, which imposes further limitations on their access to learning and literacy practices. In most cases, as the stories of Laura and Pablo show, migrant Mexicans leave their home country with feelings of having always been unprotected citizens or even under attack, only to arrive in a land where from the very start they are clearly defined as non-citizens or ‘illegal aliens’. How does this condition of being a true citizen of nowhere affect their ideological and educational trajectories? What sort of literacies do they seek in order to make sense of their place in this world?

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Laura I have never voted, nor will I Laura

Laura is a 34-year-old woman with nine years of schooling in Mexico. She migrated to the US in 1996 to join her husband Pablo (see his case study below), a construction worker with whom she has two sons, aged 10 and 12, but she has her own distinctive personal trajectory, desires and ideologies. Worn out and distressed by their lifelong condition of economic crisis, aggravated by the huge devaluation of the Mexican peso in 1995, Laura and her family fled Mexico and risked their lives by ‘illegally’ crossing the Rio Bravo and walking through the Arizona desert for three days and nights in search of the ‘American Dream’. In 2008, after 13 years in the US, their dream seems to have reached a dead end, due to the post-9/11 flood of antiimmigrant laws, as well as dark economic forecasts of an economic crash announced as ‘the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression’. Constraints and available practices Poverty and marginalization in Mexico

Just like the rest of my interviewees, Laura’s inherited educational capital is very limited. For at least three generations no one in her family has attained more than basic schooling (grades 1–9 in Mexico). Among her grandparents, parents and siblings, only one person has attended high school (one of her brothers) but he dropped out in the second semester. Her grandparents, peasants in Tlaxcala, had less than two grades of primary schooling. Her father, who spent his entire life as a factory worker in a transnational car component corporation (Federal Mogul), studied until the third grade. Her mother, devoted to domestic chores, had only four grades of schooling. Despite this transgenerational history of little schooling and having grown up in a Naucalpan, an overpopulated area of poor ravines in west Mexico City, Laura portrays herself and her family as not particularly poor people: ‘We lived in a poor colonia, I mean not poor poor, because it wasn’t like those of the marginalized, with cardboard houses, right? . . . it was . . . it was . . . it was nice; quiet but with lots of holes in the streets; many streets without electricity; there was no school. . . .’ In a similar manner, Laura portrays her siblings not as school drop-outs (due to economic need) but as hardworking men: G: So, why did they drop out of school? I: Because of lack of money, I mean they knew that there was need of money at home, to help my mother, because in fact my oldest brother

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did not finish secundaria in order to work [. . .] he started to work in a factory when he was 16, and the others too. I mean they all worked since very young, so I’ve never seen them in poverty [. . .] I don’t really see poverty in my family, no. Laura also asserts that poverty is evident and striking in Mexico, and that the government is to blame for it (‘You see it every single day. When you walk down the street in Mexico you see poverty, you see lots of homeless children; you see poor elderly people, and you think “where is the government that promised more jobs?”’); yet she thinks that her own family was not poor and marginalized, but consisted of hard-working people. School: Unmemorable experiences, further discrimination

Laura describes her experiences of basic school in Mexico as ‘nice’ and ‘fun’. She says nothing particularly positive or negative about her teachers or her schools. Rather, she describes her school years as a nice period of her lifetime: ‘To me, the nicest epoch was when I was in secundaria (7–9 grades); I mean it was the nicest epoch in my life, perhaps because I met friends and made relationships with fellow students, I began to have boyfriends, to skip classes . . .’ As a student, Laura asserts that she did well in general, except in the 1st grade of elementary school, ‘that I failed and had to repeat, because I couldn’t learn to read, I think because I didn’t attend kindergarten. In secundaria, I did well in all subjects, except in math, which I failed in 1st and 2nd (7th, 8th) grades.’ As for her experiences with literacy in school, Laura recalls that she liked Spanish lessons in secundaria: ‘I think I did well in it, because I always had the aim of learning to write well, with good orthography.’ Once Laura finished secundaria school (grade 9), she did not continue to preparatoria (high school) because her family could not afford it: ‘I didn’t apply to high school; my mom said that I would not continue since she had no money to pay for it. I told her to let me enroll in a short vocational program to become a secretary, and she said Ok.’ Laura then enrolled in a program to become an accountant’s assistant: ‘It was the cheapest school in Naucalpan.’ After graduation, Laura began to work as a receptionist in a factory, yet her deepest desire was to study to become a flight attendant: G: Why did you want to be a fly attendant? I: To learn languages, and above all to travel and know [other places]. G: How did you come to . . . did you personally know someone who was fly attendant? I: No no no no . . . I always watched on the TV that if you are a fly attendant you will travel, like in the movies, right? . . . that you arrive in one country, then in other . . .

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Spurred on by this desire, Laura investigated and found a vocational school in downtown Mexico City. Yet she could not enroll in it, partly because of the high tuition fees, but above all she was denied admission due to her small body size: I wanted to be a fly attendant in Mexico, so I went to a school but they told me ‘you don’t make the measure; you have to be at least 1.60 meters tall’. I am 1.50, so I thought ‘perhaps I can wear high heels’, but they told me ‘you have to be 1.60 WITHOUT SHOES’. I got angry and I dropped the idea, because in Mexico they always tell you ‘you have to be perfect: your height, your size, and also slim’. So it wasn’t lack of money but that the first thing they saw on me was the size. Perhaps this heartbreaking experience of institutional exclusion discouraged Laura from engaging in further formal education in Mexico. Instead, she decided to follow her husband, who was already in the US, fulfilling in this way her old desire to travel, learn languages and get to know the US. Confinement in the US

Laura’s self-positioning as a person growing up in not-so-poor conditions is somehow re-edited as she tells the story of her arrival as an undocumented migrant in the US. While she was forced to live in poor and segregated conditions, she sees her arrival in the US as a significant leap forward in the economic status of her family. Most of Laura’s hardworking brothers migrated to Tennessee in the early 1990s. All of them earned a living working for wages in restaurants like McDonalds or in the construction industry. Yet most of Laura’s brothers moved to an isolated small town 40 minutes north of Nashville, due to the tightening anti-immigrant raids in the Nashville area. By the time I met her, she and her family (husband, two sons and one of her brothers) lived in a traila (Spanglish for trailer) in a trailer park of about 300 ‘mobile homes’ located in a district mostly inhabited by Mexican, Central American and Kurdish migrants. The trailas in this complex are all made of metal sheets, but they come in various shapes and sizes. Most of them are small, but some are the size and shape of normal houses. Laura and Pablo’s traila is already owned by them; so they only have to pay US$400 a month (in 2008) to rent the land where the traila is parked. The only way to avoid this rent is to move the traila onto another complex. Their traila complex is located about 30 miles south of downtown Nashville, right next to a railroad track. The noisy trains make the trailas tremble at least 20 times a day. Originally inhabited by US citizens, most of them have left as migrants

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began to arrive. Today only a few retired Anglo-Americans and AfricanAmericans remain in the complex. Although Spanish is the language spoken among family members, bilingual activity is common, as their children speak in English with most of their friends, and their next door neighbors are a couple of elderly retired Americans. Yet when they first moved into this home, Laura and her family faced hostility from their white neighbor. For nearly a year they experienced racist insults and aggression: ‘she used to sweep her garbage into our yard; she went out of her traila and called us names; she often screamed at us “why you came here? You should be back in your country, fucking Mexicans!”’ However, getting a house-shaped traila in a segregated area of the conservative South represented a triumph in Laura and Pablo’s journey of survival, for they had risked their own and their children’s lives to cross the border: ‘We walked for three days and nights in the desert; we drank dirty green water for the cows; we starved; we withstood the hot weather, snakes, migra helicopters, and the uncertainty about our kids (ages 1 and 3) that we left in the hands of two young coyotes.’ If Laura rarely went out and traveled in Mexico (‘I don’t really know Mexico City; our parents never took us out’), in the US her life has been similarly confined. She and her family have inhabited a series of unconventional households in isolated locations: a small room in a faraway street between two hills; the basement of her husband’s boss; and the traila they currently inhabit on the outskirts of Nashville. Strikingly, while living under such conditions, Laura has developed a sense of caring from apparently altruistic individuals who have supported their initial settlement in the US. I:

When we came back in 1999, we left our children back in Mexico, with my mom. We returned and lived in the house of Pablo’s boss, his current boss. We lived in the basement, and they lived upstairs [. . .] G: Why did Pablo’s boss let you live in his house? I: Because he knew that we didn’t have a place to go. [. . .] When I came from Mexico, the old man asked Pablo: ‘where are you going to live with your wife?’ and Pablo says, ‘in the traila’; and the old man said, ‘but there are many men there, how can you take your wife in there?’ ‘Just while we find a better place’, Pablo said. ‘No’, he said, ‘we have a lot of space in our basement and you can stay here in my house’. So we cleaned the basement and we slept there. It was equipped with everything; he had beds, a sofa, a TV, radio, I mean we didn’t buy anything. He had a refrigerator there, in the garage, and he even bought a sink so that I didn’t have to go upstairs to wash my dishes

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. . . he installed a laundry sink for me, and bought me a little electric stove so that I cooked apart, ‘so that you don’t have to go upstairs with my wife; you can cook here.’ I mean he arranged everything there, like a little apartment for us, in his house. In this segment of her narrative, Laura expresses the sense of caring and protection that a Mexican migrant and her family feel they have gained from particular individuals, her husband’s boss in this case (‘he arranged everything there, like a little apartment for us, in his house’), rather than the national states she and her family struggle to be part of. On the one hand she feels that the Mexican government and Mexican politics are of little use to the poor (‘the government is useless . . .’); on the other, she and her entire family are officially criminalized as ‘illegal aliens’ by the US government. They are excluded in both countries from official institutions and spaces of learning, protection and growth. They must rely on people interested in their work (e.g. her husband’s boss) or her social network of relatives and friends, neither of which, however, are able to grant them access to institutional spaces and resources for further education. Work in the US: Segregation, instability and racism

As a migrant who has lived for 12 years in the US, Laura has spent most of her time working as a blue collar worker in various packing plants and warehouses. Her last permanent job was in a warehouse packing and supplying car parts on demand to the Nissan assembly plant in Nashville. She kept this job for four years, but resigned ‘voluntarily’ when the workers were notified that their immigration documents would be checked. This was in 2006. After that she has been unable to find a permanent job. In the first 7 months of 2008 alone she took five different jobs and left each of them in under three days, which is how long it takes to check workers’ documents (Social Security Number and Green Card). Luckily, she has managed to stay in her last job for a little over a month. It is in a warehouse that packs and distributes CDs for consumer stores like Wal-Mart. Laura’s duties are to stick logos and bar codes on boxes, and to classify, separate and stack them. She works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week, for $9 per hour, a low salary by US standards. Yet she makes $216 in just two days, more she would make in a whole month in Mexico, where the minimum wage in 2008 was US$160 a month! The difference in salaries is reason enough for Laura to justify her migration to the US, as she tells us in this description of an occasion when she responded to the constant antiMexican remarks of an African-American coworker: She kept making remarks about Mexicans: why we are here, why we take their jobs, etc. So I told her: ‘Have you forgotten where you came

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from? And how did you come here? If you don’t know your or your ancestors history, I do. We at least were not brought as slaves. Besides, if there is no food in your house and your children are asking you, and you see that there is plenty of food in your neighbor’s house, wouldn’t you go there? There you go: there is no food in Mexico; there are plenty here. That’s why we came.’ In answering the racist remarks of her Black coworker, Laura displayed a counter-narrative that presented herself as the central figure of a master US narrative (Mexicans are law-breakers), as well as a member of an oppressed group (Mexicans) who, unlike her interlocutor’s group (African Americans), at least know the history and the reasons of their coming to the US. Her statement also implicitly informs us of another type of selfauthoring and transnational literacy practice she has engaged in: the study of US history. Ironically, in other parts of our conversations she acknowledged an awareness of her ‘illegal’ status and her little likelihood of a future in the US: G: What are your current opportunities of employment? I: Right now very few, basically because I am not a resident, I am an illegal person . . . G: So if it’s harder to get a job, what are your prospects for the future? I: What I’m thinking about the future is to go back to Mexico [. . .] I think we’ll leave (the US) because it is harder these days: the police detains you, and you know that they are deporting people because of lack of driver’s license and social security . . . So if it happens to us, if it happens, we’ll go back Mexico. Appropriated practices and discourses Self-authoring reading and media practices: the American Dream

As a child and young woman, Laura became deeply engaged and influenced, not by school literacy, but by the texts and practices available in her home: commercial comic books and media images of the US. G: Tell me about what you have read on your own initiative. I: ‘To be honest, I was never a lover of reading. [As a child] I just read cheap literature, like Lagrimas & Risas [Tears and Laughter] or this comic-book El libro semanal [The Weekly Book] that my father bought every week. This is what we read, because I have never read a book, a real book, I mean book-books. I have read a lot, but material from the Jehovah Witnesses; they give you many books for you to read, and I have read them, but mostly to learn about religion . . .’

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G: How many Libros semanales did you read? I: Uuuuuuf! I think at least 200. Paralleling her profuse consumption of commercial reading material, Laura also developed an early fascination for the US which was influenced by media images. Eventually she developed a strong desire to get to know the US personally, and this became fact when her husband invited her to join him (he migrated to the US a year before Laura). In the following excerpt Laura explicitly articulates the power of media images in the constitution of her desires: G: Why did you come to the US for the first time? I: The first time? First of all because of a dream that I had since I was a girl (primeramente que nada fue por un sueño que tenía de chica): I always wanted to know the US, always. G: Since when and how did that dream emerge? I: Since I was in primary school. When you watch the TV, they show you that the US is the dreamland [el país de los sueños]. I mean, you create an ideal of the US [como que te haces un ideal de EU], as if the US is, as they say, the ‘American Dream’, that there is nothing better than the US [. . .] So I always said: ‘I WANT to know the US.’ G: What images do you remember the most? What grabbed your attention? I: First of all the movies. In Mexico they show you a lot of movies, they show you New York, Miami, California [. . .] in the movies you watch what New York is like, in fact one of my dreams is to go to New York [. . .] what fascinates me is that in the movies you are standing and everything that surrounds you are buildings, I mean skyscrapers, right? [. . .] then they show you Disneyland Disneyland Disneyland and. . . I think it was there where I saw my ideal of the US, when I said ‘the US is pretty’, I mean there, on the TV . . . If the power of media images of the US was able to fashion fantasies and desires in Laura’s inner life, the vision of the ‘real’ US struck her when she first arrived at the apartment of one of her brothers who lived in Tennessee. Strikingly, Laura’s narrative of her first encounter with the real US adopts the tone of a moment of epiphany, while in fact she is simply describing the standard furniture and appliances that normal housing is equipped with both in Mexico and in the US: And I swear to you, when I first came here, when we arrived in a truck at the apartments where my brother lived, woooow! I watched and everything looked WONDERFUL to me [. . .] I mean, it struck me,

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wooow! It’s so preety! It was an apartment that seemed so nice to me because in Mexico I never had . . . since we always lived poor [vivimos pobres] . . . well you compare your little stove with a whole kitchen. . . . So you see that all apartments here have a kitchen, refrigerator, stove, microwave, even dishwashers, and you say ‘wow!’ I mean, ‘how can you afford the rent of this apartment equipped with everything, even with closets and all?’, when in Mexico you can only afford to rent two little empty rooms [. . .] It was so nice to me, especially the laundry machines [. . .] Seriously, I got truly impressed! [quede maravillada!] . . . Just as her husband Pablo describes his amazement at the ‘modern technology, machinery and forms of work’ discovered in Nashville (see Pablo’s case study below), for Laura the passage from the mentally imagined to the physically attainable put her in a new place from which to plan her future life. Ironically, the epilogue of the story is that, although she and her husband have already attained material well-being (an equipped trailer-home, two trucks, etc.), as ‘illegal aliens’ in the US they have reached a dead end in which the ‘American Dream’ has become unrealizable, and the future of the entire family is compromised. De jure and de facto structures continually cast and confine them in a marginal geographic and social ghetto that prevents her children from attaining an advanced education (higher education for undocumented youth is either forbidden by law, or extremely expensive). Laura is so aware of their literacy-mediated ‘illegal’ status (their lack of documents), that now she even advises her children ‘not to dream’: Parents must take that idea [that they have a future in the US] away from their children. I tell my children ‘This is not your country, because you are not born here and you are not from here because you have no papers. You have no rights as long as you don’t have a Social Security number.’ I cut their wings before they start flying. Learning English: Opportunities to talk with native speakers (smile and say ‘May I take your order?’)

While Laura’s experience of physical, social and ideological confinement in both Mexico and the US parallels that of the other profiled women, her experience as a transnational migrant, her life in the US and her ideological choices made language learning possibilities available to her which were non-existent for the non-migrant women. Quite significantly, and consistently with her ideological fascination with the US, she is perhaps the most proficient English speaker of all migrant workers I have met there. Her fluent speech is obvious when she talks on the phone or in

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person with various native English speakers. She is even able to understand and respond to the very marked Southern accents of White and Black Americans. Paradoxically, her acquisition of the English language occurred through maintaining low hierarchical situations in the US: as a kind of refugee in the basement of her husband’s boss; as a housekeeper in a local hotel; as an entry-level employee in transnational corporations such as McDonalds or Nissan. The following narratives describe some of these English learning experiences: At home (the basement) I: We lived for about four months in the house of Pablo’s boss. [. . .] Since I had daily contact with the lady (the boss’s wife), obviously, you listen to the English every day and start learning it. I mean, Pablo went to work and he left me alone with the lady. [. . .] We used to watch the news on the TV, in English, everything in English, and she spoke to me in English. [. . .] So I used to tell her that I needed a job, and she told me ‘let’s go to a hotel here, up the hill . . .’ At the hotel (housekeeper) I: So the lady took me to the hotel because she knew the owners, and they hired me as housekeeping [original in English]. It was my first job . . . So I started, and since everyone was American, you listen to English every day. So I liked it and I thought, ‘well, I feel useful at least’ [. . .], and the girls that worked with me were really nice people, and they taught me little by little. I mean, I started to learn what you have to say there, many words in English, like how to say ‘clean here, clean there’. So I worked there for about three months. Then Pablo didn’t want to live in his boss’s house any longer and we moved to this side of Nashville . . . At McDonalds (cashier) I: So I left that job and moved to this side of Nashville. I looked for job and I worked in McDonalds for six months, as a cashier. And again I had an American manager [. . .] and she seemed to me a good person because she told me ‘I know you can speak in English and you will do it . . . I’m going to train you in the register, and you will learn . . .’ And she said ‘do you know what lettuce, tomato, bread is?’ ‘Yes, I know that’, I said. She said ‘you just listen to when they order, or by combo number, and the drink sizes – small, large, medium . . . it’s not hard’. So she taught me the register and told me how to say que va a llevar in English: ‘when they arrive, you smile and say “may I take your order?”’. ‘Okay,’ I said.

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G: Do you have to smile? I: Yes, I mean all the time she told me, ‘you smile, and don’t feel nervous’. But sometimes there are harsh and impatient people that even say, ‘I don’t know why they don’t put someone who speaks English here.’ It frustrated me, but she told me, ‘don’t worry, they are stupid people.’ [. . .] So there were racist people who were impatient with you; I felt bad but I said ‘I’m going to learn English and I’m going to tell you what you need to listen.’ G: So if I worked as a cashier, what do I have to know? I: Well the way they taught me, the first thing is ‘may I take your order?’, I mean I always said, ‘Hi, what would you like to eat?’, or ‘May I take your order?’, I mean ‘¿puedo tomar tu orden?’ This is what they taught me how to say. And that’s it, because the rest is by number, ‘combo number one’, and they just tell you what else they want or don’t want. Some people say ‘no lettuce’, ‘no onions’, ‘no pickles’, ‘no mustard’. So when they say ‘no’, well you know that that means NO; so it wasn’t hard to me . . . Unlike the Mexicans who have only lived in Mexico, Laura has certainly broadened her communicative repertoire with a second language: English. However her learning contexts of English were service job positions which limited the language demands to formulaic expressions of service (‘may I take your order?’), and which demanded little written English, if any. Following Pennycook’s work on English linguistic imperialism, we might interpret Laura’s experience of learning English in US workplaces as reminiscent of the Robinson Crusoe’s English lessons to Friday, in which the European master (Crusoe) taught the Native servant (Friday) ‘everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful’ (Defoe, 1719/1910, cited in Pennycook, 1998: 11). Paradoxically, Laura sees herself as a person in a privileged situation, because of her daily contact with ‘nice people’ who only spoke English to her (‘obviously, you start learning it’). In the end, her relatively advanced knowledge of oral English is of little use for further education or work advancement in the US. Her undocumented status prevents her from access to better jobs or higher education. Moreover, her work opportunities have shrunk. By 2008 it was impossible for her to perform even the entry-level jobs she had held in businesses like McDonalds or Nissan when arrived in the US. During 2008 alone she has been fired from at least five smaller companies due to her lack of papers. Cornered and with no choice, Laura is taking the housecleaning jobs that she was reluctant to accept even when she first arrived in the US.

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Self-exclusion practices: Political distrust and citizenship Despite her formal status as a citizen in Mexico, Laura was always distrustful and reluctant to engage in politics and citizenship practices. She distrusts governments, politicians and politics, to the extent that she is unwilling to exercise her right to vote in Mexican elections, a right that she lacks in the US. To start with, she recognizes a key difference in her civil status in both countries: Well in this country (USA) you know that you are not a resident, let alone a citizen. That means I don’t have any rights . . . well I do have rights, but not as a citizen. So you know that you cannot lead a free life in here . . . because you know that your Hispanic look will always drive people to see you as an illegal that does not belong in this country. Whereas in Mexico, the big difference is that you can travel anywhere, and you don’t feel intimidated because it is my country and I can do whatever I want. Paradoxically, while Laura asserts that she feels ‘free’ in Mexico but not in the US, she thinks that governments and politicians in both countries are distrustful, corrupt and unjust, thus undeserving of her attention and participation. G: I: G: I:

Did you ever vote in elections? No, I have never voted; nor will I. Why? The truth, I have never liked politics, and I think I would never give my vote to any president, or candidate. Who wins is indifferent to me. G: Why? I: Because . . . I think that there will always be a corrupt government, no matter what. So what to vote for? . . . I would not vote in the US either, even if I was a citizen . . . Laura’s self-exclusion from her political rights as a citizen of Mexico, and as potential citizen in the US, have two different roots: a root based on experience, and a literacy-mediated ideological root. Her experience root is linked to her long-term disappointment with the unfulfilled promises of the Mexican presidents, which she articulates with a socially critical voice: G: What did you see or live in Mexico that made you think so? I: To me, I feel that no matter who gets the presidency . . . they will always work to their own benefit; they will never do anything for the people . . . so what’s the point? G: Where did you see that?

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I:

The truth, since I was growing up until now I have seen the Mexican presidents: when they are campaigning they promise many things, that there will be changes, that they will help the needy, that poverty will end . . . but once they are in charge you know that they don’t do it, they forget everything. So I think to myself, why I should waste my time going to vote for people who are not even going to do what they promise? G: What exactly do you remember? I: You see it every single day. When you walk down on Mexican streets you see poverty, you see lots of homeless children, you see poor elderly people, and you think ‘where is the government that promised more jobs? [. . .] Where are the promises made by the government? Where?’

Religious literacy: Access to a community of readers, literacy sponsors and significant learning experiences

Laura’s distrust of politics and politicians was also reinforced when she engaged in religious reading practices mediated by the interpretive community of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian group which was also joined by her mother, who lives in Mexico. This is a transnational literacy practice insofar as Laura initiated it in Mexico and maintains it in the US, for example by speaking on the phone with her mother: ‘Sometimes my mom calls me and she reads the new stuff for me . . . I mean, I keep learning.’ Despite its conservative nature, this is one of the most significant literacy learning experiences of Laura’s entire lifetime. She chose to begin Bible study with the Jehovah’s Witnesses when she was 13 years old. The experience influenced her so deeply that she even abandoned her faith in the Catholic Church, which her family had held for generations. When asked about the main differences she perceived between the two churches, she articulated a lengthy and thoughtful explanation, which included not only matters of religious belief but also the kind of learning and reading experiences found in both churches: G: Why did you begin studying with them [Jehovah’s Witnesses]? I: Well, I did it because they always knock at your door and talk to you about the word of God, so I always wanted to learn because I used to attend a Catholic church and I never learned anything there. I mean, you learn NOTHING; you just go and learn to recite everything (te sabes todo de corridito), from memory, but you don’t even know what they are talking about. So I wonder: ‘what do they study?’ G: What other differences from the Catholic Church did you see by then?

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I:

Well, there are many differences [. . .] with the Jehovah Witnesses all the time it’s different [. . .] every week you go and learn something different. I feel that every day they teach you, you learn more and more and more and more, different things. G: What do they do so that you learn, as opposed to the Catholic Church? I: The effort they put so that you sit with them and they read the book, and if you don’t understand, they look for two or three more chapters in the Bible, so that you see where it comes from. I mean it’s not just ‘here it says this’, because in the Bible it is not in just one chapter. It can be in two, three, or in the whole book. So they explain to you where that came from and why. So I feel it is the effort they put in to explain over and over, and why, and who said it. Whereas in the Catholic Church, no, because when they start giving you the word of God, they tell you everything very quickly, but never explain it to you, and you don’t even see from which chapter of the book it comes, from which verse. So it’s like something that escapes from you (haz de cuenta que es algo que se te va). And here, with the Jehovah Witnesses they keep reminding you which chapter, which verse, and which book. So it’s like something that you take with you in your memory, in your memory, in your memory. So it is a more complete study. Although Laura uses ordinary terms to explain why she felt that learning was possible in one group, but not in the other, her narrative seems to illustrate the distinction between a passive, spoon-feeding or transmissive pedagogy (enacted by the learning practices of the Catholic Church), and the more active, varied, and supportive form of pedagogy enacted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While the content and the outcome of this learning experience may be critically analyzed (e.g. followers of this group end up abandoning their own political rights and responsibilities), the point to note here is the power of a ‘good’ pedagogy in shaping the learners’ sense of identity as people able to learn, as soon they have the appropriate support. Significantly, Laura describes a learning process directly involving the interpretation, comprehension (what and where it says, where else in the book, who said that and why) and final appropriation of a complex message (‘the word of God’) in a very complex and lengthy reading material (the Bible). It must be also noted that the power of this learning experience spans not only Laura’s development as a reader, but her entire development as a person and as a social agent, who uses her knowledge to make decisions about how and where and why she should engage or not in other contexts of life.

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Learning from Laura’s Story Access Trajectory of practices

Despite her own perception (‘I don’t see poverty in my family’), Laura grew up in conditions of visible marginality and poverty. She witnessed the perennial impoverishment of people around her community, despite the promises of governments and politicians (‘You see it every single day . . . in Mexico you see poverty . . . and you think, where is the government that promised more jobs?’); she has struggled for a lifetime for economic survival. In this lifelong context of socioeconomic deprivation, the learning and literacy practices available to her have been limited and limiting: basic schools providing unmemorable learning experiences; social and geographic confinement (‘I don’t really know Mexico City; our parents never took us out’); a legacy of non-existent or limited educational capital (parents and grandparents with no more than three years of schooling; siblings and herself with truncated studies due to family poverty); aborted intentions for further education due to painful racial/body discrimination (‘I dropped the idea because in Mexico they always tell you you have to be perfect: your height, your size, and also slim’); and segregated life and work opportunities as an undocumented migrant in the US. Thus, with few, poor and unchallenging educational opportunities and with few intellectual or literate communities available within her social worlds in both countries, Laura’s upbringing and life was circumscribed by the intellectual scope of those around her (Vygotsky, 1978: 88): her siblings, mother and husband, all of them little schooled, some of them very religious, and none of them engaged in any significant form of social participation or citizenship practices. The most significant discourses and practices afforded by these within-the-family learning communities were media consumption, religious study, political detachment and entry-level jobs. Why should she engage in any form of academic, political, literary or critical literacy practice? As she admits, ‘Being honest, I was never a lover of reading. I just read cheap literature . . . because my father bought them [. . .] I have read a lot, but those [books] of the Jehovah Witnesses . . . to learn about religion . . .’. Looking beyond the individual level, Laura’s case is an example of the historical and social processes that structure and maintain educational inequality over lifetimes and across generations. The four generations involved in her narratives (grandparents, parents, siblings and children) reveal a bare history of intergenerational transmission of educational inequality (Bowles & Gintis, 2002; Sharkey, 2008; Wu, 2008) or cultural and social

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reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977). From her unschooled grandparents to her ‘illegal’ children (to whom doors and expectations of higher education in the US are closed, for – as Laura says – ‘I cut their wings before they started to fly’), this family is just one a case among the millions of dispossessed families whose limited access to literacy and education persists across generations. The power of migratory policies as a constraining context on the lives and expectations of undocumented migrants is asserted by research carried out a few years ago, when the anti-immigrant policies were less severe. Menard-Warwick (2005), for example, found that Latin American immigrants in the US tended to make some educational progress from one generation to the next, and expected that progress to continue. On the other hand, the story of Laura, like the story of Pablo and most ‘illegal’ Mexicans in the US, evidences what I call a process of self or imposed selective citizenship, variously termed by scholars as excluded citizenship (Castañeda, 2006), global erosion of citizenship or shrinking citizenship (Dobrowolsky, 2007), or as postcolonial politics of exclusion/inclusion (Kapur, 2007). Regardless of the terminology used, what we see in the case of migrants like Laura are individuals who spent most of their lifetimes in Mexico during the long period of State Party rule (1929–2000) during which they endured decades of adverse economic policies and political demagogy. As a result, many – like Laura – developed a deep distrust for the worlds of state, politics and public life in general. Tragically, as they migrate to the US, they seem to arrive in the host nation state accepting what I call their outcast condition, reinforced and enforced now by a legal system that criminalizes unauthorized workers (Berger, 2008) and sets new legal rules of excluded citizenship (Castañeda, 2006). Yet, unlike the migrants studied by Castañeda (2004) in California, those who live in the more conservative, rural and isolated Southern US seem to adopt an attitude of submission, of accepted inferiority as citizens. Not only Laura, but most of the migrants I have met and interviewed in southeastern states like Tennessee or North Carolina explicitly assert that they would love to have permission to work legally (in entry level or menial jobs) in the US. Yet none of them even suggests the fantasy of achieving the status of citizen in the US, not in the sense of legal citizenship, but in the political and cultural sense of being an equal member of this nation state, with full rights, full membership and full engagement in the polity (Oboler, 2004). Just like Laura, many think ‘I’d like to have papers to be able to travel and work’ (i.e. to be legally exploited); but they rarely say ‘I’d like to have papers to have equal rights, opportunities and interests in the sociopolitical and cultural affairs of this country’. From this perspective, Laura’s exclusion and self-exclusion from the right to have rights as a citizen in both countries

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(‘I have never voted, nor will I,’ in Mexico; ‘I am an illegal person,’ in the US) might be seen as a form of assuming an inferior status vis-à-vis other (full) members of a supposed community of free and equal people. Although this is rarely addressed in the literature of literacy studies, I take citizenship practices as a crucial dimension affecting the literacy development of postcolonial individuals, for literacy is at once a crucial condition and a result of citizenship. Individuals (self-)excluded from their right to citizenship are also excluded from the myriad of literacy practices demanded and afforded by sociopolitical participation. Citizenship practices afforded by both state and civil society create multiple zones of literacy development as reading, writing and speaking are the key tools to learn and enact a sense of citizenship. From this view, Laura’s story contrasts with the trajectories of equally or even less educated Mexicans such as Sofia, Adalberto or Saul (also profiled in this book) engaged in grassroots organizations and movements that fueled their sense of identity and public voice through literacy-mediated dialogues and actions. Appropriation Self-authoring sites and practices

Throughout her lifetime Laura has appropriated the words, discourses and practices of the most significant influences around her immediate social worlds: commercial TV and reading material at home; religious study also at home (with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and her mother). Like other individuals profiled in this book, she has been little exposed to and even less attracted by alternative and critical discourses that challenge her frames of reference. Across her lifetime, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have represented some of the few literacy sponsors (Brandt, 2001) that have presented different sets of beliefs and practices to her, including different literacy practices. Seen as intellectual and literacy sponsors, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have afforded different beliefs and literacy practices from the Catholicism practiced by her family in the past. In this sense they were more capable others (Vygotsky, 1978) which embodied an alternative discourse for Laura. Yet the role of this discourse in Laura’s development as a literate citizen is ambiguous. It was a critical discourse in that it helped her to critique society and politics; but also a non-critical discourse in that it didn’t lead to political participation; quite the contrary, it encouraged Laura to withdraw from engaging in political and citizenship activity. Ever since Laura was a young girl living in Mexico, she was attracted by the ideological discourses of transnational agents such as the media and a version of the Christian church. Instead of being socialized by

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school-oriented literacy, Laura became deeply captivated by media images and fantasies about the ‘American Dream’ (‘in Mexico they give you a lot of movies that show New York, Miami, California . . . they give you Disneyland, Disneyland, Disneyland on the TV. . . I mean, you create an ideal of the US. . . . So I always said: I WANT to know the US’) in a radical rejection of the political system and her right to citizenship in Mexico (‘I think to myself, why I should waste my time voting for people that are not even going to do what they promise? . . . I mean corruption will always be present in Mexico’). Even though this was uncritical, commercial material, she found it meaningful and used it as a lens to define desires and future plans that eventually came true with her migration to the US. She also used the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as self-authoring literacy tools, as she used (and still uses) their discourse to make sense of her life and to position herself as a distrustful and detached citizen (‘when you start studying with them [Jehovah Witnesses] you learn that you’ll never be ruled by a just government, for there is no just government except God’s . . . Jesus is the only one able to reach you . . . you have to expect him, and nobody else’). From a developmental perspective, Laura’s social, intellectual and ideological engagement with the religious literacy practices, mediated by and developed through her affiliation with an appealing and supportive literate community (the Jehovah’s Witnesses) shows evidence of literacy development not only at the level of skills (becoming a ‘better’, habitual or engaged reader) but, crucially, at the level of literacy for self-authoring. Paraphrasing her, every day that they (Jehovah’s Witnesses) taught her, she learned ‘more and more and more and more . . .’ but not just about reading strategies, or textual conventions of the book; not even about what she sees as the main learning goal of this practice (to learn about the word of God), but notably about herself and her own place in the world vis-à-vis social institutions and practices such as those demanded by the two nation states in her life (‘everyone thinks that the government will solve your problems, but that’s not the way it is. I think that the only one who is going to solve your problems is God, no one else’). Likewise, another of her most significant self-authoring literacy practices in her lifetime was the consumption (reading) for perhaps thousands of hours of media-based multimodal texts. From an early age, this kind of cultural text instilled images of the US which eventually developed into strong desires for Laura, such as travelling to the US (despite the fact that she knew very little of her own city and country), learning English, and achieving a ‘practical’ lifestyle (through home appliances such as laundry machines). In the end, as she said, she moved to the US not just for economic need but ‘first of all

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because of a dream that I had since I was a girl: I always wanted to know the US, always’. Literacy competence/skills

Laura has been able to cope well with all functional literacy demands throughout her lifetime, both in Spanish and English. In the US she did all the paperwork required to get a driver’s license, to enroll her children at school, to apply for jobs, to carry out financial transactions, to read street signs, to shop, to learn English, and so on. Clearly a functional literacy or basic education program would be of little use to her. She might benefit, instead, from higher education studies, specialized technical studies, or a critical education that encourages, challenges and equips her to broaden her intellectual, ideological and social horizons. Laura’s narrated history eloquently shows how both formal school and functional literacy fall short of creating learning spaces that enable and encourage the practice and development of self-authoring literacy practices. Thus functional or basic literacy is not the issue at hand. The power of ideological agencies such as the media or the church to appeal to and shape the desires, dreams, cultural practices and life decisions of economically and educationally dispossessed people is instantiated in the apparently private, particular and unique life history of an individual like Laura. ‘Her’ history suggests, instead, that hers is an instantiation, an embodiment in a concrete individual life course, of the powerful social and ideological forces (economy, state, media, church, school) that transmit disadvantage, instill cultural alienation, ideological conformism and political apathy, and shape social and individual histories at the same time. In short, her case illustrates the daunting struggles of a fragile individual who sought for meaning and made complex decisions in the middle of painful experiences of economic and educational deprivation, political disillusion and legal criminalization.

Pablo We have the right to remain silent Pablo

Pablo is 36 years old, has nine years of schooling and is an expert in house restorations. He was born in the state of Tlaxcala, in central Mexico. Along with thousands of other Mexicans he fled Mexico and arrived in the US in 1995, immediately after the financial crisis whose global consequences become known as the Tequila Effect. In some ways the story of Pablo and his family forms a window through which to look at the devastating personal consequences of these economic ‘earthquakes’.

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Beginning with separation from his family (his wife and children joined him one and two years later, respectively), he endured a hard-working life in the midst of the anti-Mexican climate found in his ‘host’ country. In 13 years he has remodeled over 300 houses and local businesses, and increased his expertise working for and with an Anglo architect. When I first met him, he opened up for me his ‘toy box’, as he calls his toolbox, where he keeps hundreds of different tools and instruments that only an expert like him knows which and how to use. In 2008, due to aggressive anti-immigrant policies, he remains fearful of going out and about in the streets, and is silently and anxiously waiting with his family – like thousands of other undocumented migrants – for better economic and political times. Constraints and available practices Poverty and marginalization in Mexico

Like the rest of my interviewees, Pablo’s inherited educational and economic capital is very limited. He describes his origins in this way: ‘I am from Huamantla, state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. Nobody in my family speaks the indigenous language, but I think we were indigenous three or four generations ago. I think that I am more indigenous than Spaniard because of the shape of my face.13 Here in the US they used to ask me if I was a Native American, because of my long hair.’ Pablo describes how the poverty of his childhood pushed him to get out and up: ‘My parents and grandparents were peasants; they grew corn and also made and sold coal. This is what we no longer wanted for us (. . .) so I was the only one in my family that studied more, but I only got to secundaria (9th grade), because we couldn’t afford further studies. We were from the lowest poverty in Mexico, so to speak, because we didn’t even use shoes when we were children. Our idea was always, how can I tell you? to climb, to climb just a little bit . . . to find a way of making some money and getting out (of poverty).’ As seen by US standards, Pablo and his family are low SES (socioeconomic status) people. However, seen from his own socioeconomic origins, he has made an enormous leap, as his present family live in a three bedroom house-sized traila in good condition and well equipped with furniture, appliances and commodities, such as a fitted kitchen, washing machine, heating system, large plasma TV, hi-fi sound equipment and two vehicles. Yet the journey to achieve this material well-being has included risking their lives by crossing the Bravo River and the Arizona desert, working for years in entry level positions, achieving mastery in his multifaceted trade, and living with fear as potentially deportable ‘illegal people’.

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School: Truncated desires

As for his memories of school in Mexico, Pablo highlights an unfortunate event that eventually led him to fail and ended his desire for further education: ‘I attended a public secundaria in Huamantla, but when I was a child I lost part of my (middle) finger because of a firework explosion. So I couldn’t play the flute well and my fellow students made fun of me. I felt embarrassed and tried to hide my hand. So even though I was a good student they failed me in music and chemistry. To pass those classes they gave me the option of repairing some school furniture, since I knew carpentry. I did it, and they gave me the secundaria certificate. I didn’t continue to high school; I have rather devoted myself to carpentry ever since then.’ Interestingly, Pablo’s half-forced and half-decided truncated schooling led him to his lifelong area of professional activity: carpentry as applied to house restoration. Self-authoring reading practices: Comics, the economy and the decision to migrate

Pablo’s decision to migrate to the US is the result of multiple threads, which originate and intertwine in different moments of his life. If growing up in extreme poverty triggered his desire to ‘get out and get up’, it was in the ‘stories of the last page’ in the comic books he used to read as a child and teenager that he found the words and images that symbolized for him a concrete and achievable way of getting out. G: Have you ever read books in your lifetime? P: Not exactly books, but just technical [manuals] about tools and things of my work. What I DID read was the Sentimental Book [a weekly comic book], which is what most people read at that time in Mexico. It is about stories of passion. But I think many of them were from real life, because they talked about people who came to the US . . . you know, the man is the first one who comes to the US, to earn the bread, so you leave your woman alone in Mexico and the feelings start to emerge, he he. So, since I was in secundaria I wanted to come to the US. It is the time in which you are most curious; when you want to try different paths. I still keep in Mexico those magazines that I read then . . . because I always had the idea of coming to the United States, and I wanted to learn English. Pablo’s narrative is a reminder of the powerful role of media images and stories at that period of a person’s life when amorphous desires turn into symbolized intentions (‘it is the time in which you are more curious;

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when you want to try different paths’). In Pablo’s case it was when his materially poor existence crossed with his awakening curiosity that the seemingly innocent practice of reading for ‘entertainment’ became a nodal instrument, shaping his own identity and crucial life decisions. In the next segment of the dialogue Pablo tells how the ‘stories of the last page’ appealed to him: P:

If you remember, on the last page there were stories of people who were already here (in the US) as braceros [temporary workers] . . . They were little novels, the Weekly Book and the Sentimental Book. G: Do you remember one of those stories? P: They would tell of how braceros arrived in the US already hired. And that they lived in awful conditions, in trojes, as they call them in Mexico, or barns. They slept directly on the floor, and the food the received [was bad], and all the time they had to work, and that part of their salary was retained supposedly for savings, and that they earned very little [. . .] This is what I remember . . . G: It sounds like they were not really happy . . . P: Yes, but those were the braceros, I mean because they just gave you little paragraphs, not the whole story. So this is why we were curious about how and where to work in better conditions, because our idea [Pablo and his brother] was to find a job and a place to live before coming [to the US]. And we saw and heard in that time that many were already coming, crossing the borders . . . and we just listened to, and also watched it on the TV . . . the images of people crossing the desert, the river and all that. Salient in this fragment of my dialogue with Pablo is that reading practices of commercial material were far more influential and memorable than school reading in the lives of people growing up in poverty, whose only role models were not real but virtual, not embodied in flesh and blood, but in the short written stories of people who had already migrated to the US. Strikingly, these stories of migrants enduring horrendous life conditions in the US did not discourage Pablo from his intention of going there. Yet this is due to the way they read those stories: they showed what they did not have to do, and made them think about how to do it: ‘So I liked to read all that, and we said with my brother: let’s go to the US! But how? We don’t know anybody there?’ Those were the times of Pablo’s youth. Years later, he struggled to make a living and survive under daunting economic conditions. When he finally achieved some stability as a specialized carpenter, the bust of the economic

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crisis of 1995 hit his personal economic state and he began a desperate search for jobs in newspapers: Q: When did you first come to the US and why? A: The flow of migration from Mexico to the US began with the devaluation [of the Mexican peso] in 1995. After this devaluation all the employment fell apart in Mexico and everybody began ‘I’m going to go the US’ . . . it was in 1995 that devaluation, when the president was this bald guy, the mouse-eared . . . this Salinas de Gortari. . . . I lived in Naucalpan (State of Mexico) and worked in Mexico City downtown. So my brother and my brother in law came earlier . . . after three months they called me: ‘do you want to come?’ G: What did you do? P: So I also read in a newspaper in Mexico, El Universal, where I used to look for jobs . . . I saw there several ads that read: ‘We need people to work in the US’, and it came with telephone numbers and all. It listed the jobs, like carpentry and all. So, I told my brother: ‘look here, more jobs, and this is safer for us to go.’ And he said ‘Okay, let’s go.’ Self-exclusion practices: Political distrust and citizenship (in the army)

The army is one of the few work and learning spaces readily available for young men who grow up, like Pablo, in a social milieu of extreme poverty, structural unemployment and poor schooling. Pablo joined the Mexican army for three years (1987–1991), and this was a defining experience of his formative years. His narrative on this matter is at once striking and revealing. It tells us of the origins of his self-positioning as a distant, cautious and critical ‘member’ in both Mexican and US societies. It also speaks of the emergence of a critical reading of the world that he later used to mediate his reading of print and media texts. As he narrates this out-of-school ‘educational’ experience, his voice holds a mixture of disappointment, fear and anger, coming from memories of an ‘educative’ experience based on brainwashing, humiliation and corruption. By the time he was 17 years old, Pablo took steps to fulfill his military service requirement. In Mexico this is a compulsory duty for men, in order to obtain the cartilla liberada, a document often required in workplaces, schools, or to get a passport. Pablo intended just to carry out his military service, but he was informed that they had positions available to enroll and work in the military: ‘They talk nicely to you, right? [. . .] but once you are in the army, earning a salary, you make the idea in your mind that it is a job, because this is what it is, a job, right? So after three months they tell you “you are done with your military service, will you stay or not?”’ Pablo

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decided to stay in the army. Because of the eloquence of his own words about this experience, I will transcribe next, at length, fragments of our dialogue, and I will afterwards introduce my own analysis and comments. Protecting civil people . . . just in theory P: You are privileged by being in the army. They send you to other states or towns, and in the evenings they take you to a bar, and you are served well, they offer you anything you want to drink, just because you are in the army. But you soon realize many things. For example they put you in roadblocks (retenes), and you are supposed to inspect every truck or trailer. But some tell you ‘we were already inspected’, and they pass, freely, until they get the border (Mexico–US border), directly, without being inspected. Of course they carry good ‘shipments’ [of drugs?]. What happens is that they have already paid to the top officials . . . G: What is the army expected to serve for? What do they tell you in the army? P: The theory the government gives you is that you are there to protect the civil state [estado civil]. The civil state is formed by all civil people, anything that is not part of the government. You are supposed to care for the civil rights, not the government’s. You are also expected to protect the integrity of the country, against invasions and natural disasters, right? But what I found in the army was . . . we never lived up to that; what I saw was just protection of the government [namás del gobierno] because there is a lot of social pressure [social protest] in Mexico. Do you remember the marches and all that? They send the police and everything is under the command of the army as well. G: Did you read about or directly experience cases like those? P: I experienced those cases, because look, in the state of Tlaxcala, where I was based in the army, there were demonstrations, I mean it’s people who are not rebelling, but they put pressure on the government because this is not taking care of things that they promised, right? So for example, the government is saying ‘I’m going to do this and this and this for YOU’, and once they are in power they don’t do it . . . this is why people start with this pressure on the government . . . Now, look, a protest is when a group of people start protesting; it is ONE group of persons. But pressure is when people from here and there and beyond [Pablo’s hand moves around the table]; it is pressure against the government because several groups of people are supporting each other. It is pressure because there are things that the government promised but didn’t fulfill, right?

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G: So, how does the government react? P: The reaction of the government is to send the army and suffocate all. I tell you, I think it’s the same in every country: the government promises but does not honor its word. I pause here in Pablo’s narrative to remind you about who is speaking: a man in his thirties who grew up in extreme poverty in central Mexico; who fled his country in 1995 after a devastating economic crisis; a master of sophisticated technical skills who has renovated over 300 houses of mostly White middle-class US citizens; officially defined as an ‘illegal alien’; the head of a family whose entire future is dependent upon the governments he is describing. Let’s continue: G: Did you ever have to participate in any action of ‘suffocation’? P: Not of violence, but yes, we were acuartelados [concentrated in a military base] when there was a problem in Mexico City, when Cardenas, the one who Mexico City’s majority wanted to become president14 . . . There were many. . . many people went to the Zocalo [Mexico City’s central plaza]. . . It seems that he lost the election, no? He lost, or he won, was this the reason? G: I could give you my opinion, but what do you know? P: Well, what we knew . . . Actually you don’t have information at all in the army. Only those at the top [los de arriba] have information [. . .] I mean they never let you know why you are being sent to . . . they just tell you ‘there is a problem there and you are going to do this and that.’ I mean you receive orders, but the one above you is the only one who knows . . . so all of us, at the bottom, just go like . . . I don’t remember the word . . . you just follow the others . . . G: Goats? P: Right! That is the word. You are just like a goat behind the pastor. You don’t even know what is expected of you. It’s what happened in Tlatelolco.15 Tlatelolco 1968 G: What do you know about that? What is your version? P: My version is that the students knew a lot about what that asshole Echeverria16 was doing. I’m not exactly sure of what happened, but it had to do with something that the students demanded17 . . . that’s why they did so in the plaza of Tlatelolco. They didn’t want the problem to grow bigger, because there would be reporters from different countries [because of the Olympic Games] . . . so they gave the order to kill them all. It wasn’t just to calm them down; they ordered to kill.

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They sent the army, but the army didn’t even know why. So I tell you, the army never know. In the army they just command you, and train you, and you are trained to kill, because this is what you are trained for. But they never tell you who or why. They just, ‘go and pacify those people’. And if the government gives the order to shoot, to use your weapons, you have to do it. And this is what they did in 1968 in Tlatelolco. The fucking government ordered the killing of all the people to silence them. Therapies P: So you are subject to the orders of the fucking government, but unaware. I think it is just theory and therapies that they give you in the army. They turn you into a destructive weapon, because they give you a lot of theories there, but just to protect the government. So if you are going to protect the government, and the fucking government is killing the people . . . that’s the reason for those therapies, they ‘work you’ [te trabajan] in the army. G: What are those therapies? Do they call them ‘therapies’? P: Yes, it is the word they use, because IT IS therapy. I mean in the army they teach you everything about the army and the government: what it is and how it works. I tell you, it is therapy because they try to change your mentality. I mean, with the therapies they, little by little, start changing your ideas, because you get them daily. It’s like a school: if they teach you something every single day, you’ll learn it, right? Even though you enter with different ideas . . . they tell you in these therapies: ‘you have to look after the government; more than if it was a member of your family’ [. . .] But they instill that with fear [lo meten con miedo], starting with the training, which is like it would be for animals, because they mistreat you, they beat you, they make you feel utterly miserable, they humiliate you. . . . When you enter the army they tell you that you are a filthy civilian, that you are worth nothing, because you feel fear. Then they punish you. This is just at the outset, right? They force you to clean their boots, to pick their garbage up . . . It is a humiliation for you . . . So it’s like they ‘work your head’ [te trabajan la cabeza] talking to you a lot about the government. You have to focus on what is the function of the army. You have to know all the names of the ministers and officials; all the people that you will look after. They show you their pictures and biographies. And you have to learn everything. And they take you outside [of the quarters] but they keep working on your head, they speak to you. These are the therapies. We still have academies.

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G: P: G: P:

Academies are like formal classes? They ARE classes. Is there a teacher? Books? No. There is a sergeant, or a staff [un cabo]; they study for six months at an academia. Then when they’re back they are prepared to talk to you. And they lecture you, but just about the army . . . so it is therapies also in the academies. I mean they work on your mind because, I believe, it is what makes you change [. . .] G: Why did you quit the army? P: Because I didn’t like the idea of an army that looks after just the government. And the people that you are supposed to look after, the civil people, well it’s not true because, as I told you, when there are demonstrations, what does the government do? Kill their own people. I don’t think this is ‘protection’. If you have to imprison or kill someone because the government tells you ‘these people are causing me trouble’ [me estan haciendo bulto], it doesn’t go with human rights, I think. So I didn’t like it and I resigned. Let’s stop Pablo’s story here. Does a story about a Mexican who enrolled in the army have something to tell us about literacy and learning issues? I am certain it does. First of all, while the narrative is not directly about literacy, it tells us about the struggles of a little-schooled person (i.e. a learner) to resist the (brutal) imposition of a set of meanings about his very status as a citizen of a nation state (a central goal of literacy education). He experiences this action within a state institution (the army), whose formal function is to defend the nation and its citizens. As a soldier he was exposed to training and teaching experiences largely devoted to forming and transforming their minds. Pablo understands quite well that this kind of work (through a pedagogy of ‘therapies’ and ‘academies’) was intended to educate their minds (‘they work on your mind because, I believe, it is what makes you change’). Secondly, this kind of language and literacy practice was one of those available in the context of his life. It appeared as a job opportunity, an ‘opportunity’, by the way, that is mostly available to extremely poor and little-educated people in Mexico. In other words, the kind of ‘education’ and training he received in the Mexican army was one of the most important learning experiences and orders of discourse available in his social life context. He would have liked to continue in school, but his family could not afford it. Instead, he had as a real option this training experience in the army that proved limited and even harmful as a learning context. Rather than encouraging the use of their minds to think and judge for themselves (the hallmark of an educated and literate person),

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‘learning’ here was aimed at indoctrination and blind discipline, at learning to follow orders while being deprived of information. While it was also a ‘pedagogy’ based on violence and humiliation, its symbolic and literate components were essential, as the main learning tool was language, used in this case to instill and mold ideas (‘with the therapies they, little by little, start changing your ideas’). Thirdly, his narrative also evidences critical thinking and possible sources of information and meaning that he appropriated and used to ‘read the world’ (Freire & Macedo, 1987) and to resist the sort of ‘education’ he was receiving. His knowledge about the events of 1968 (before he was born), as well as about US history and other topics, is evident and it suggests that he has exposed himself to information, possibly written. Finally, throughout his entire narrative about his experiences in the Army, Pablo conveys strong emotions of disappointment, anger and fear which tell us about his changing sense of membership and loyalty as a citizen of the Mexican nation state. In the end, his whole account might be read as the scream of fear and anger of a humble Mexican who realizes with horror, and from the inside, that the very state that is supposed to protect its citizens actually trains and uses the army to kill and silence them when they dare to make their own voices heard. As such, this narrative makes evident the contradictions of a historical process of simultaneous ‘education’ and violent repression imposed upon the Mexican population in colonial and postcolonial times. In this sense, the clear and articulated narrative of Pablo, powerfully explains why the poor working Mexicans are so silent . . . or, rather, reluctant to learn the language and the ‘literate’ manners of those who oppress them. Life in the US

Pablo finally dropped out of the army and sought new ways of making a living. Eventually he migrated to Mexico City, where he worked as a baker, carpenter, fierrero (person who shapes and installs metal rods for constructions) and welder. He stayed there until the economic crisis of 1994–1995 affected him and accelerated his decision to migrate to the US. After the daunting journey of crossing the Rio Bravo and the Arizona desert, Pablo arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was dazzled by the sight of this unknown world. Arrival: ‘This was like a new life to me’

Just like his wife Laura, who had fantasized about visiting the US ever since she was a girl watching US movies, Pablo also developed an early desire to go the US (‘I still keep in Mexico those magazines that I read then . . . because I always had the idea of coming to the United States’).

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And like his wife, who narrates her amazement when she first learned that all apartments in Nashville were equipped with a fitted kitchen, stove, microwave and other appliances (see Laura’s case study above), for Pablo the passage from media images and stories to the physically experienced US represented a tangible possibility of a ‘new life’, as he puts it: G: How did you imagine the US, and how was it when you first came? P: I imagined that it was like Mexico, about the same [. . .] But no, everything is different. It’s like . . . It’s exactly as if you arrived in another world, because it’s all different: more technology, everything more advanced [. . .] it has an impact when you arrive . . . G: What did impact on you the most? P: The first thing that impacted on me was everything: the way the houses are constructed, because all is made of materials; that they have air conditioning, which I never saw in Mexico, not even for rich people . . . the yards, that you don’t see in Mexico, I liked it a lot: everything green. So it was all . . . the way they work . . . everything has an impact on you, everything is new. I mean EVERYTHING, because everything is different, even the ways of working [. . .] because you work differently back in Mexico, with everything manual, right? You come here and use just electronic tools and all; things that I had never used in Mexico, maybe for lack of money . . . but you arrive here and yes, it has an impact because you do everything with machinery, whereas in Mexico everything is manual. I mean it is a big change [. . .] So, all of this was like a new life to me, a big change, I mean all in all: in the food, at work, in your lifestyle . . . all. As in Laura’s case, the sights and experiences of the material and technological differences between the US and Mexico deeply impacted on Pablo, to a point where he envisioned previously unknown life possibilities (‘all of this was like a new life to me, a big change’). Yet 13 years later, by the time I met him, Pablo’s perception of this ‘new life’ had changed, as he and his family experienced a social life of marginalization and discrimination in the US. Rights: ‘We have the right to remain silent’

Transnational migration scholars use the terms ‘bifocality’ (Vertovec, 2004) or ‘dual frame of reference’ (Guarnizo, 1997; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001), to refer to the ways migrants compare life experiences and situations from the dual points of view of their home and ‘host’ societies. As Lam (2009) argues, this notion is useful in understanding the perspectives of migrants as they navigate social relations and information

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sources from different societies. In this research on marginalized Mexican migrants, the exploration of the dual frames of reference among them is important to understand their sense of citizenship vis-à-vis each of the two nation states and how, consequently, they engage in citizenship discourse and literacy practices. With this idea in mind, I asked Pablo to compare and contrast Mexico and the US in terms of what he thought was the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ of each country. The next fragment of our dialogue reveals his perception of discrimination and exclusion in both nation states. P:

The best of the US is that you are able to work; and the worst is the discrimination that you suffer because of your illegal status [. . .] but I think that anyone who really wants to work and progress, will make it [. . .] Whereas in Mexico, well it’s the same; you think that there is no discrimination, but it’s the same, everywhere is the same . . . this is why we move to the US. The good thing is that in Mexico you are free . . .’ G: So in the US you have no rights because you are undocumented [mjm] but in Mexico you ARE a citizen, right? [yes] So what rights do you think you have in Mexico that you don’t have in the US? P: The only right that you have in Mexico is that you can go out freely, without hiding from the migra [immigration enforcement police]. That’s the only freedom, I mean that you are not shackled to the fear of the migra, because you are illegal. I mean this is the only form in which you are bound by [atado] here in the US. In Mexico, well it’s your country, you are free, come and go whenever you want. In the US you have always this fear of being caught and, what they do? They deport you . . . Nearly all Mexican migrants I have met in the US perceive a similar distinction: in the US they feel ‘caged’ or imprisoned but with opportunities to work and succeed ‘if you really want to’; whereas in Mexico they are poor and jobless but feel ‘free’. Yet, as the next fragment of my dialogue with Pablo shows, this dual frame of reference is quickly complicated as I further explored what rights he actually has in the US, and how this impacts on his and his family’s actual opportunities in the US. G: What do you tell your children? (about their opportunities in the US) P: We tell them that they are not born here, and we can leave at any moment; or that they can kick us out of the US, since we are not legals. G: What do they say?

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They had begun with this idea that they were . . . no, they never have had the idea that they are from here [. . .] So this is what we let them know: that we’ll have to leave one day, so that they refrain from thinking of staying here (para que ellos no se hagan la idea de quedarse acá). But they feel 100% Mexican [. . .] As a Hispanic it is an error to tell your children: ‘you are American’. That’s enough for them to believe it. For example my nieces: their parents tell them that they are American; one is, but not the other. So just imagine: if the migra comes and takes him, what a disappointment for him, right?, to feel that he is American, when it’s not true.

By self-categorizing himself as ‘Hispanic’, Pablo extends and generalizes his situation to that of a larger group of people. Strikingly, he draws powerful conclusions about how national identity and citizenship are at the center of their very futures. Not just adults, but also their children will have to make hard choices about self-positioning as members or not of each nation state. G: You just said that as undocumented people there are rights that you don’t and won’t have . . . P: No, mhm . . . G: So what do you think is the role or the place of Mexicans in the US? P: It’s like an adventure, nothing else. I mean you come and they can kick you out at any moment. G: Do you think that migrant Mexicans have rights in the US? P: I believe that we do have rights, as persons we have rights, even though we lack papers . . . G: What do you have rights to? P: Like when the police arrest you, you have the right to remain silent [. . .] I mean, this is a right that you have as illegal immigrant. Aaaaand . . . I think this is one of the few . . . maybe some services, because as an illegal you actually have no rights. This is why they deny you everything, like hospitals, or social security, or things like that. I mean they have no rights at all, but the insurance of God, ha-ha. As Pablo elaborated these striking revelations, Laura – his wife – anxiously took the floor to support her husband’s perception: L:

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Yes, because we cannot apply for food stamps for our children, since they are not from here. We can’t apply either to TennCare (health insurance for children in Tennessee) [. . .] So you think: ‘Well, I don’t want it for me, but for my children.’ Yet not even for them, because

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they are not eligible. It is in that moment that you feel yourself discriminated, and you say: ‘I think we should have the right at least to education and health, we should.’ Thus in sharp contrast to his initial amazement at the material differences between Mexico and the US, and his feelings that he would lead a totally ‘new life’ in the US, Pablo’s narratives – as much as his wife’s – give testimony to the still narrower opportunities to voice their thoughts (‘we have the right to remain silent’), to walk and travel freely (‘In Mexico you are free . . . In the US you have always this fear of being caught and . . . deported’), to access basic human and civil rights (‘as an illegal you actually have no rights’; ‘I think we should have the right at least to education and health, we should’). On top of all this, as Pablo told me in the next fragment of interview, he thinks that even when they are deported, they have to ‘purchase’ the right of being ‘voluntarily deported’: When they deport you, they give you the right to stay for a while to sell your goods. But you have to pay for this [right]. I mean they put you on jail and you have to pay 5000 dollars [to get out of jail]; then you have one month to leave the country voluntarily deported [. . .] so, it’s not the way they say, that the law protects you, that you have rights. I mean, these are rights, but purchased rights, aren’t they? Because you have to pay 5000 dollars [. . .] Was it this a right, they would not charge for it, would they? It is clear that Pablo’s narrative evolves. He starts by asserting that the key difference between both countries is that in the US anyone who really wants to succeed can make it. But as the dialogue evolves, he starts to draw a more complex and critical picture of Mexicans in the US as people with no rights, as second-class citizens, or in fact as outcasts just as he felt in Mexico. A (partial) list of details that account for his outcast condition in the US include: the deprivation and manipulation of information in mainstream media; the right to remain silent when detained by the police; the denial of health and other social services due to their ‘illegal’ status; the ‘insurance of God’ as their only protection; the need to instruct his children not to dream the American Dream; and even the need to ‘purchase’ the right to sell their goods before they are deported. In short, deprivation of rights, capabilities and voice seems to be the ‘normal’ condition of current ‘transnational’ Mexicans in the US. Available texts: ‘They teach you only about their nation’

Asked about his history as a reader, Pablo portrayed himself first as a reader of commercial material (comics, tabloids, etc.), but also as habitual

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reader of those magazines available at home which played an important role as sources of information about world affairs: I read a lot of the Impact [political magazine] back there in Mexico, because my dad did it too. It was just news, so that you knew what was going on around the world. Which is different, because here in the US, they barely . . . it’s like they teach you only about their nation, nothing else; not much about other countries [. . .] whereas in Mexico they do. All the magazines give you articles, pieces of history, news that you really care about [. . .] It’s like now, the Iraq war, in the US they give you just a little piece, whereas in Mexico I’ve seen articles [reportajes], and everything is deeper and more complete. I mean, I watch the news in English and then in Spanish, and there’s a lot of difference. In the US they give you about 20% of what’s going on, whereas in Mexico they give you around 80%, with articles, reports and all. Noticeable in this narrative is the way Pablo distances himself from affiliation into US society. He does this by using the third person plural to refer to ‘them’ (‘they teach you only about their nation’). But more importantly, while he seems to describe an act of appropriation of the reading practices and textual material available to immigrants in the US, he is in fact evidencing how the very texts and ‘information’ practices of mainstream US media are actually sites of national and ideological dispute. Despite his limited formal education and his potentially limited literacy skills, the limitations and manipulation of public information in the US are obvious to him. In this respect, his account can be read as both an example of US constraints on the availability of enough and trustable information, especially about other countries and about ‘news that you really care about’; and also as an example of how little-educated people can actually perform critical reading acts, despite their assumed ‘low’ literacy skills. Appropriated practices and discourses Self-authoring practices: Reading to resist and contest master narratives

During my dialogues and interviews with Pablo I came to notice the varied ways and contexts in which he has appropriated, reshaped and used print and media textual material to negotiate and self-author his own identity and his fragile place within US society. This is a recurrent finding in my research in both countries: self-authoring literacy, rather than functional literacy, is a crucial dimension of literacy in the lives of little-schooled and marginalized people, often portrayed by dominant public discourses

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as people basically struggling with everyday literacy tasks and, thereby, in need of ‘basic’, ‘functional’ or ‘survival’ literacy skills (Auerbach, 1989; Hull, 1993b; Farr, 1994). On the contrary, Pablo’s history is replete with counter-narratives (Andrews, 2002; McCarty et al., 2006) which emerge from self-authoring reading practices. Consider these examples. Reading the Bible to resist church dogma. Unlike most Mexicans on both sides of the border, included his wife, Pablo never trusted and engaged in any church. Interestingly, in order to face and find arguments to resist and contest the fanatic religiosity and constant preaching of his mother in law (a Jehovah’s Witness) and other people, he found it necessary to read and study the Bible on his own: G: Do you read or have read the Bible? P: I have read it, at least half of it. And I read it because here in the US there are many different religions, but they all fight each other as if they were politicians. They all want to grab you on their side, like political parties. So you don’t know which one to support . . . So I had doubts because . . . when they talk to you about the Bible, each religion gives you its point of view, but they are all different. So I came to the point of saying: ‘I had better read it by myself.’ And I began to read and read and read. So now I sometimes ask questions to them that they don’t know how to answer . . . [. . .] For example they tell you that if you are a member of a church, if you belong to them, they will help you, right? I don’t know if this is in the Bible, but they say so . . . Reading school textbooks to resist racism. Besides using literacy to resist and contest racism in the workplace, Pablo also uses his children’s textbooks to instruct them on how to resist and contest the racism they endure at school: G: Do you know the books that your children use at school in the US? P: Oh yes, they give them those books supposedly to learn the history of the US, of how it was created, its roots. Because they sometimes ask me why they are treated like that at school, because they are also discriminated [. . .] because they call them ‘undocumented immigrants’. And I told them: ‘yes, tell them that you are an undocumented migrant but that you are born in America; that you didn’t come from another country [continent]. I tell them so because I’ve been told the same, so I get curious and I read the books they bring from the school [. . .] So I tell them to also study, so that they don’t feel less than them, because as humans we are equal. I mean under your skin you have the same blood than them . . .

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Reading to respond to anti-Mexican voices. Like many Mexican migrants in the US, Pablo is frequently exposed to anti-Mexican and racist remarks. In the next fragment of interview he positions himself as someone who resists and contests these voices with literacy-mediated and informed arguments. Interestingly, his narrative takes the shape of an engaging dialogue between him and the real and imaginary detractors of the Mexicans in the US: P:

G: P: G: P:

G: P:

G: P:

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They say ‘they [Mexicans] want to recover their lost lands’. In fact we are here to work and go back home. But they see it differently: ‘they come to recover’, that’s what they say . . . Who says so? The Anglos, the gabachos. Where have you heard, seen or read that? There is a radio program of a university, Vanderbilt or Belmont, I don’t know. They show programs in the morning, about history, and the listeners call and are asked: ‘how do you see the situation of immigrants?’ And almost everyone says ‘they are coming just to invade us, to take our jobs’. [. . .] What would you respond to the radio listeners who call to say that Mexicans are invading? If I was in the radio station and could speak well in English, I would ask them: if you are mad at Hispanics or against indios – as they call them – why don’t you learn a bit of your own history? I mean about where they come from. So once they have recognized their own history, they call the radio station again and say what their feelings are about us, because they arrived here just like us, didn’t they? What part of their history don’t they know? They DO know it, I think because of the books they read . . . or maybe they ignore it, or they play the fool, because I’ve been reading my children’s books, and they give you the history of when the Irish arrived in America, and that they are supposedly more American than us. But if WE ARE American born, I don’t understand why they self-baptized themselves as the ‘United States of America’, and declared that there is no other American country but theirs. . . . That’s why whenever someone comes here they ask you ‘do you like America?’ ‘Of course I like it – I tell them – because I was born here.’ And they say ‘were you born here?’ ‘I wasn’t born in the US, but I was born in the American continent.’ And then I ask them: ‘Where were you born?’ ‘In America.’ ‘So what is America for you?’ ‘Well here, the US.’ And I tell them, ‘are you completely sure? You live in North America. Have you ever even read the history of the US? the history

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of how it was formed?’ ‘No, I haven’t.’ ‘There you go! Go read it and then come back to talk with me, because I do know how you arrived here. If nobody wants to tell you . . .’, and I start telling to them: ‘do you remember when you enslaved black people, and that you didn’t want to liberate them, and why they don’t like you, and who brought them here with no rights at all?’ . . . I have discussed this with my (Anglo American) boss. One day I asked him, ‘do you like America?’ and he said, ‘why do you ask me so? I am American.’ ‘Yes, but you came from Europe, didn’t you? And we have always lived here. You are the first ones who came to break the law by bringing slaves and killing the native Indians, weren’t you?’ Pablo’s narratives lend themselves often overlooked dimensions of what becoming literate and educated means. Seen from a Bakhtinian perspective, as Pablo speaks in the above narrative, multiple voices speak: the voices he has personally heard in face-to-face conversations or through literacy mediated dialogues (e.g. through books, radio stations, or TV screens). Thus, far from a single or monologic voice of a little-schooled ‘illegal worker’, his voice is multifaceted and heteroglotic from side to side, full of social and ideological voices, dialogues and accents coming and appropriated from literate sources. While he talked to me, as an interviewer, he was in fact re-enacting or performing dialogues and discussions that took place in varied moments and settings throughout his inner and outer lifetime. It is evident that many of these real or imaginary dialogues convey different ‘socio-ideological languages’ (Bakhtin’s term) experienced or appropriated by Pablo, and that he himself uses literacy (previous experiences of reading) to amplify and use his voice as a tool to negotiate his own stance in those dialogues. Thus becoming literate, from this perspective, involves the self-exposing and appropriation of textual material from oral, print and multimodal sources in order to self-position (Menard-Warwick, 2004, 2006) vis-à-vis authoritative discourses or master narratives.

Learning from Pablo’s Story Access Trajectory of practices

Coming from the ‘lowest poverty in Mexico’, Pablo’s family could not afford his education and he dropped out of school. Then he joined the army, thinking that this would be a good ‘job opportunity’, but rather experienced a training based on humiliating orders, brainwashing ‘therapies’ and biased reading practices (‘you have to learn the names of

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all ministers and officials that you’ll look after’), all of them intended to make soldiers feel no longer like defenders of the nation but protectors of the government, and to end up as mindless dummies trained to exercise political repression against their own people (González-Casanova, 2008). He dropped out of the army to avoid the risk of being used to ‘pacify’ other Mexicans, and engaged in a series of assorted jobs, but eventually succumbed to the weight of the economy (‘after the devaluation all the employment fell apart, and everyone began “I leave for the US”’). He left Mexico to pursue the ‘American Dream’. Yet, after his initial fascination with the ‘nice gardens’ and great technologies of the US, he realized that his (and his family’s) true opportunities as learners and citizens would actually shrink compared to those they enjoyed in Mexico: ‘as an illegal you actually have no rights.’ Pablo’s case counters the voices that portray Mexican migrants in the US as ‘illiterate’, ‘unskilled’ or ‘inarticulate’ due to their little education, limited English proficiency or ‘poor literacy’. Overlooked by these dominant and colonized discourses is a fundamental social reality of migrants in the US, like Pablo: they are either legally or actually excluded from the practices of citizenship. Their rights and spaces for public expression in this nation state are constrained to what is known in the legal jargon as Miranda rights,18 considered by Pablo to be one of the few rights held by ‘illegal people’. Thus, this context of transnational silencing, of people silenced in both Mexico and the US, gives rise many educational questions: is their key learning need a matter of individual skills or a matter of social access to a public voice and learning spaces? How can they become fluent, engaged, and ‘competent’ literate citizens of a democracy by being in position of state-mandated silence? Why should they invest (Norton, 2000) any effort into learning the language and literate manners of nation states where the very acts of public voice are either legally forbidden or politically threatening? How could they speak and write in a context where anything they say can and will be used against them? As people deprived of a public voice and political rights, segregated from the literacy-mediated public conversations of society, and excluded from citizenship (Castañeda, 2006) in the two nation-states they inhabit, should we describe them as global citizens or global outcasts? (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010). Appropriation Literacy development: From literacy skills to self-authoring practices

Pablo’s history reveals a constant search and appropriation of texts, ideas and other people’s words in order to develop his own consciousness

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and resist unconditional allegiances (Park & Wee, 2008) to dominant discourses (Gee, 1991, 1996), master narratives (Daiute & Lightfoot, 2004), or authoritative discourses (Bakhtin, 1981) which he experienced from agencies such as the church, army, or media. So, for example, to face religious dogma he read the Bible (‘I’ve read at least half of it . . . because here in the US there are many different religions, but they all fight each other as if they were politicians’); or to face racism and anti-mexicanism in the US he read textbooks and other sources (‘I’ve been reading the books of my children; they give you the history of when the Irish arrived in America, and that they are supposedly more American than us . . .’). As much as the other profiled individuals, he acquired these texts and discourses from sources which were near and available in his immediate social worlds: reading material taken home by his father, the school textbooks of his children in the US, and so on. Unlike others, however, he used the information and ideas found in these limited sources in a critical form: to respond to dominant discourses, and to position himself at a cautious distance from oppressive institutions and groups, such as the army or the church. In this sense, Pablo’s case problematizes dominant views of littleschooled people as ‘alienated’, ‘dependent’ and ‘unskilled’; a vision that still underlies policy agendas in developing countries. What Pablo eloquently articulates are the experiential sources of the distrust and disengagement of the marginalized in the institutions that demand them to become ‘literate’. His narratives are full of instances of the voices, texts and practices that truly interpellate and speak to him; texts and practices that actually support his struggles for survival, learning and growth against the odds. Thus, in tandem with recent research on minority, migrant or marginalized populations, I also seek to shift the attention from ‘functional’ or everyday literacy (e.g. Farr, 1994; Guerra, 1998) to the practices I and others call self-authoring literacy (Holland et al., 1998; Hornberger, 2006), also known as the literacy of identification (Menard-Warwick, forthcoming) or the literacy of self-reconstruction (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Vitanova, 2005). Just like the other profiled individuals in this book, Pablo has coped well with all the functional literacy demands of his everyday life, both in Spanish and English. Thus, from a developmental perspective his engagement and use of critical reading practices and lenses makes evident a path of literacy development at the level of literacy for voice and for self-authoring, rather than at the level of skills, which reinforces the idea that functional literacy or basic education would be of little benefit to people like him. His narratives: of growing up in extreme poverty; of envisioning how to ‘get out’ of poverty and envision a better future (through the reading of ‘stories

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of the last page’); of reading technical books to become a master of his trade; of witnessing with rage and fear how the Mexican government used the army to silence its citizens; of making hard life decisions in the face of economic crises; of starting again from zero and as an ‘illegal alien’ in terra incognita; of using the available texts in this foreign land to free himself from oppressive discourses . . . All these stories speak of the limitations of a skills-based approach to literacy development and education. The question for us as educators is how to help people like Pablo to move from resistance to broader access to public voice and action. He has certainly used a critical consciousness to question existing power relations and roles (e.g. the relations between the Mexican government and its citizens; or between ‘Americans’ and people born in America, like him). He has also re-examined (to a limited extent) his social identity as Mexican, as an ‘undocumented migrant’, or as Hispanic in the US); and he has sought out new kinds of information and knowledge. Yet his (self-)exclusion from collective spaces of inter-action has limited his ability and willingness to initiate action aimed at gaining greater control over resources of various kinds (Batliwala, 1993: 11), including the public expression of his thoughts through a broader repertoire of discourse means. Excluded citizenship and literacy Pablo’s narrative is informative of the deep distrust and disengagement that a large segment of Mexicans feel towards the nation state and its citizenship practices (see also the cases of Saul, Sofia and Alma in Chapter 3). While literacy development is often related to an increasing sense of citizenship, Pablo’s history shows that participation as an informed, committed and functionally literate citizen makes little sense in a nation state perceived not only as uncaring but even as hostile towards its citizens. Pablo never experienced protection from the nation state, and he has found the same in both nation states he has inhabited. Thus his evolving stance, as a person attentive of the sociopolitical issues of the world, but basically committed to work and take care of the particular well-being of his family, seems wise. Despite the fact that his skilful and productive work has benefitted thousands of people in both countries (i.e. it has made an economic contribution to both societies), he remains fundamentally excluded and self-excluded as a full member of the political communities of both nation states. He certainly does not engage much in activities directed to claiming a public voice or expanding his civil or political rights; thus, as many others, he has also excluded himself from the literacy demands, challenges and learning opportunities involved in a more active

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civil and political participation. Yet, he is particularly eloquent as he articulates his reasons for this self-exclusion, deeply rooted in personally experienced or directly witnessed forms of state-enforced silencing. Unlike his wife Laura, who explicitly withdrew from political citizenship in both countries on the basis of her religious faith (‘there is no just government except God’s’), Pablo’s personal stance is more complex. His strong disappointment with both nation states emerged as he experienced economic aggression and political repression in Mexico (the latter as a member of the army), and racism and discrimination in diverse parts of his everyday life in the US. Unlike his wife, he did not use the Bible and other readings to justify a withdrawal from political and civic participation, but self-authoring texts and practices that allowed him to make sense of and resist those experiences. Thus, just as he used the Bible to resist and contest religious proselytism, he used American History books to resist and contest American racism, discrimination and anti-Mexicanism in the workplace, the neighborhood and the US media. After such experiences it is doubtful that Pablo could see himself as a citizen with full rights and privileges in Mexico. And as a migrant in the US he and his family were not granted membership and rights either. He explicitly articulates the sort of ‘rights’ that Mexicans have in the US: ‘you have the right to remain silent’; ‘actually you barely have any rights’; ‘you just have the insurance of God’; ‘we tell our children not to dream the American Dream’; ‘I’d like to set up my own business, but I can’t have property in the US’; ‘I’d like to buy my own house, but I can’t because of lack of documents’. While he would like to gain legal permission to live and work in the US, he does not see himself as a full member of a political community (citizenry) that he perceives as ruled by lies and injustice. Thus, by the time I met him, Pablo and his family have fallen into an outcast status, or a kind of limbo that excludes them from true citizenship of either country. This finding is consistent with Castañeda’s (2004) research on citizenship practices among Mexicans in California. She found that Mexican migrants in the US are also neglected full membership in Mexico when they return to Mexico and try to exert their political and citizenship rights: ‘regardless of the fact that again and again, migrants have demonstrated their interest – through their political activism, identity and memory practices – as well as their investment – through their remittances – in Mexico, they are still excluded from full membership in the imagined community’ (Castañeda, 2004: 75). Thus, I use the term global outcasts in a similar sense to Castañeda’s excluded citizenship to account for ‘the citizenship of Mexican migrants [that] is incomplete, excluded by the two nations that migrants cross, namely Mexico and the US’ (Castañeda, 2006: 4).

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Chapter 5

Survivors

Chapters 3 and 4 presented case studies of individuals whose life trajectories are heavily oriented towards literacy for self-authoring, agency and citizenship, as well as people struggling for (or withdrawing from) voice and citizenship under transnational situations. This chapter presents cases of individuals growing up and living locally under extreme poverty. Paula and Felipe have spent their entire lifetimes in Iztapalapa, the most populated and marginalized area of Mexico City. They represent the ‘mainstream’ or majority of the people who live under deep social, physical and ideological confinement in the era of globalization. In Mexico, they represent the dispossessed and often little-educated people who are targeted by official adult and literacy education programs offering basic skills as a means to economic opportunity and well-being. In sharp contrast to the official colonizing perspective on adult education and literacy, I endorse Nelly Stromquist’s claim that while literacy may enhance economic well-being, ‘a prerequisite of literacy is some degree of economic well-being; if one is too poor, then one will be too busy subsisting and too weak to make his/her voice heard. Under these conditions, how can marginal [people] be enabled to develop citizenship?’ (Stromquist, 2006: 148). Because of socioeconomic constraints, access to literacy practices and intellectual resources is limited for all profiled individuals in this book. Yet the learning trajectories of those in this chapter eloquently illustrate the sociopolitical and economic forces that shape inequality and exclude many people from fundamental life opportunities and liberties. Rather than ‘illiteracy’, a further consequence of such profound marginality is the development of remarkably passive citizenship and conformist subjectivities. As the cases of Paula and Felipe show, despite their notable sense of humor, they both tend to fatalism and conformism rather than agency and activism. This kind of apathy was already described in Oscar Lewis’s

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classic book, Anthropology of Poverty (1959), which reports his ethnography of five Mexican families in the same area of Mexico City where Paula and Felipe have spent their lifetimes. Salient features of those individuals’ cases were their poor self-images as men/women and as school learners. Also, unlike the individuals profiled in Chapter 3, Paula and Feliciano’s literacy practices are heavily oriented towards functional transactions, entertainment, or information based on commercial media, rather than towards critical and reflexive self-reconstruction. Consistent with such literacy profiles, these individuals are also detached from civic and social participation, identifying with more traditional and conservative ideologies, and whose narratives mirror the dramas of extreme poverty, domestic violence, alcoholism and jobs of the lowest rank (e.g. scavenger, pork butcher, house cleaner or street vendor). As people whose lives are driven by the urges of daily subsistence and traditional ideological orientations, their narratives also express a common reluctance to transgress the authoritative discourses and practices to which most poor Mexicans have been exposed across their lifetimes. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, authoritative discourses are discourses of authority; that is, official or hegemonic discourses that circulate in the higher spheres of society, such as religious dogma, school versions of learning and reading, or media models of gender, race or class identity. The cases in this chapter suggest that transgressing these authoritative discourses, rather than acquiring basic literacy, is precisely the educational challenge for these individuals. And yet, despite this picture of extreme poverty, poor literacy and ideological conservatism, as postcolonial thinkers have noted (e.g. Canagarajah, 2002; Bhatt, 2005), we must call into question the construction, central to neo-colonial expert discourses, of postcolonial poor subjects as unthinking, unimaginative, incapable, inarticulate and devoid of life and literacy skills. The stories of these individuals provide rich evidence of this. Paula, on the one hand, embodies the huge sector of women still subjected to an overwhelming domestic captivity, male dominance and a sense of powerlessness. Felipe, on the other hand, represents the equally large sector of men engaged in a life of casual occupations and unproblematic perceptions about their identities and roles as men, citizens and workers. Yet both cases make it evident that rather than a problem of ‘poor literacy skills and habits’ (as it is commonly understood in public discourses), their key constraints to appropriate broader discourse and literacy practices are their lack of freedom and their limited access to more powerful and legitimate communities of readers, writers, thinkers and speakers. Yet no educational strategy for the poor is currently designed to grant

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access to such crucial learning resources: personal freedom and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Cases like those in this chapter also challenge the dominant productoriented approaches that treat literacy as the acquisition of decontextualized skills (Canagarajah, 1999). A crucial limitation of these is that they fall short of capturing and pedagogically addressing the ways in which even extremely poor and little-schooled people need and use literacy to selfauthor, self-construct or self-reconstruct themselves (Holland et al., 1998; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Vitanova, 2005; Hornberger, 2006; MenardWarwick, forthcoming).

Paula I love tragic stories; life is not pink-colored Paula

Paula’s unsettling story is full of drama: domestic violence, fear and extreme poverty. Yet her situation as confined woman, limited in her access to the world of work, education and literacy, is not exceptional but rather common among Latin American poor women as well as among Latino women in the US, as Rockhill (1987) and others have shown. Paula is 37 years old, but looks much older. She has spent her entire lifetime in Mexico City, enduring perennial domestic violence, heavy work journeys and economic hardship. By the time I met her, she spent her week by cleaning at four sites: Mrs Judith’s house (in the mornings); her own house (by midday); Aztahuacan Community Center (ACC, in the afternoons), where she worked as janitor; and Mrs Ale’s house (on Saturdays). I always saw her in the hallways, with a broom or a mop in her hands. Skinny and silent, Paula’s gestures showed both affliction and anger, but often shifted to curiosity as I went around interviewing people. One day, while I was interviewing someone else, Paula approached us. I asked her if she would like to be interviewed, and she replied ‘I’d like it, though I’ve never been interviewed, and I’m always crying’. She had been married for 21 years and had three children. While she might appear as a weak and unsociable person, she actually faced her hard and dramatic life with both courage and scorn. She succeeded in providing a home, food and education for her three children, the oldest of whom was already a university student. Paula, like almost every woman I talked to in Mexico City, spontaneously spoke about issues of domestic confinement and violence. Her history is, thus, an eloquent example of a reality poorly addressed by official education institutions and programs.

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Constraints and available practices Poverty and schooling

Paula was born in Mexico City and has lived in Iztapalapa since she was four years old. She is married to a volunteer ‘garbage man’ (a person who makes a living by collecting other people’s garbage for tips) with whom she has three children aged 12, 18 and 20. The eldest one is already a student of Economics at the National University: ‘I have no idea what it is for, but he is going to be an economist’, Paula remarks. Paula’s memories of childhood include poverty, domestic violence and family disintegration. She herself completed nine years of schooling, but none of her six siblings got beyond elementary school. Her parents, neither of whom finished primary school, got divorced when she was 13, and her mother took care of the six children by working as a seamstress: ‘we didn’t study because of lack of resources’. Despite their economic plight, Paula liked school: ‘I was a good student, with only As [excellent grades]. I had a great teacher of social sciences and I loved it. I liked math, Spanish and natural sciences, too. Why? I don’t know; I just liked them.’ However, her experiences of reading and writing at school are similar to those of most of my interviewees: reading limited to textbooks; writing copies, quizzes and rote exercises; no library research; no small group work; no personal or meaningful writing. Outside school, she remembers only once writing a letter to her brother who lived in the US. In the present she describes herself as ‘someone who is not fond of writing … I don’t write poems, nothing’, as well as someone who thinks that too much study is harmful: ‘of course you have to study for the exams, but only a little, because if you study and study and study, your brain gets atrophied’. Like many girls in poor urban areas, Paula got married straight after she finished secondary (middle) school: ‘I finished in June and I got married in August’. Far from her hopes of getting away from her family’s poverty and mistreatment, her marriage would repeat and amplify the story, because of the alcoholism and violence of her controlling husband. Available livelihoods: ‘I’m already rich!’

Paula began doing other people’s laundry when she was 20 years old. From then onwards, she engaged in a trajectory of casual jobs, pressured by the needs of day-to-day survival. These conditions obviously shaped and limited her opportunities to engage in educational activities. It is less obvious, however, how these material life conditions shaped her subjectivity: her sense of class and gender identity; her aspirations and expectations as a worker, learner and citizen; and her tastes and aversions as a reader, writer and speaker.

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In trying to sketch Paula’s material life world, I find her own words most eloquent. She describes the small and modest house inhabited by her and her family, that she built with her own hands and money: The roof is made of cardboard sheets. There is a room that I use as a bedroom for my two children. Then there is a kind of living room – supposedly – where I have my bed, my TV, and my little spot of hairdressing shop. There is also a kitchen [. . .] I assisted the mason. I remember that I was crying and crying because we could not finish and I was so tired. Everything is made of brick, stuck together very well because it took me a lot of work. We spent three months building the house, and I paid for it all, the mason’s work and the materials. When I first asked her what she did for a living, Paula defined herself as a todologa (all-doer): I am a todologa. Todologa means that you have to work outside the home. I work outside my house. Where? In a house. Which one? Mrs Judith’s house. I do her cleaning. Then I come back, I do my housework, I cook. Then I take my daughter to school and I come back here [Community Center] and do the cleaning … that’s why I tell you I am a todologa. At some point she informed me that her family’s monthly income was about 1000 pesos (US$100), which is far below the level of extreme poverty, referred to as ‘Level 1’ by the Mexican government (Cortés et al., 2002). The family had three income sources: (1) Paula’s work as a house cleaner and street vendor; (2) her husband’s work as unpaid garbage collector (‘his work is very dirty but honest’, Paula noted); and (3) they owned ten hens which laid eggs for food. How does this economy define consumption priorities and practices in her family? Everything we wear is brought by my husband from ‘up there’ [the garbage dump]. Look at these trousers, they have no holes. I just washed it and that’s it. I can’t be poor and delicate, right? I’d go naked! I spend by priority. For example, right now priority means roof and windows, not computer or clothes … I spent almost 20 years without purchasing a single pair of new shoes. My husband brought them to me from ‘up there’. I mean, my husband dresses me from up there, from the garbage, or from what people give to him. This kind of economy has shaped Paula’s sense of social class and occupational expectations to the point that she felt that making a living by

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selling orange juice in Mexico City’s streets would be the best way to become rich: G: If you could choose a job right now, what would you like to work at? P: [No hesitation] A stand of juices [in the street], because you make a lot of money with it. I spent three years in a stand of juices and I earned A LOT of money … Even with the crappiest stand, you take your cart, set up your shade, get out two buckets to wash the glasses, the bench to stand up and squeeze the oranges … I worked there for a year with my brother. Then he went to the US and left me alone with the stand. I tell you this: you make good money with a stand of juices. That’s why I used to make fun of the world; I used to say: ‘I am already rich!’ Poverty and literacy practices: ‘I love tragic stories … life is not pink-colored’

Paula’s life conditions of poverty, heavy work duties and domestic violence inevitably constituted the real frame in which particular reading practices evolved as meaningful and necessary, whereas others remained non-existent. The following extracts from our conversations eloquently capture the inextricable links between economic poverty, gender and class subjectivities and reading practices. G: What have you read in your lifetime, besides what you were required to read in school? P: What other books? Well, I have read a few ones, but no ‘cultural books’, no … G: What kind of books, then? P: Well I can’t remember what were they called but … it was a book about a young woman who was raped, something like Carry, but her name wasn’t Carry … G: How about magazines or newspapers? P: Magazines? I read Contenido [Reader’s Digest-type magazine], but only the tragic passages that are in there, nothing else. G: When did you read Contenido? P: About five years ago … G: Why did you start reading Contenido? P: Because they give them to me for free. They gave me a whole bunch of them in my previous work. I used to get there and wash a big pile of clothes. I cleaned the two bathrooms, the storage room, the other rooms, the garage, and they paid me 5 pesos (50 US cents). And I survived three years like that. By that time I used to go and tell them: ‘don’t you want me to wash your dishes? If you want, I’d do it just for

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a meal, a breakfast, but for me and my children!’. And yes, they gave you enough, until you got full! But I did PAY for it!! I did the beds, I swept, I mopped, I cleaned the kitchen, I cleaned the refrigerator, I washed the stove, I swept and mopped the kitchen, and sometimes the restroom. But, well, I used to do it and I said: ‘okay, at least we had a breakfast’. So, it was in there where they gave me the Contenidos. G: Have you worked doing other things before? P: Yes. I sold pictures, I sold clothes, I sold Stanhome [cosmetics], I sold creams, I sold juices, I sold … I mean, I tell you, I work as a todologa because, well the point was to get the meal, it didn’t matter how you got the money as long as you got it. At this point it becomes clear that such enslaving work and life conditions leave little room for rich, critical, or at least more varied reading practices and materials. Paula became a keen reader of Contenido not by choice but because it is what was available to her. She got ‘a bunch of them’ as a kind of ‘tip’ for her job as a house cleaner, whose payment was in fact a meal for her and her children. We see here the imperative logic of day-to-day survival (‘the point was to get the meal’), as well as her sociocultural self-distancing from what she calls ‘cultural books’. In the next passage she talks about her husband: G: How about your husband? What does he do? P: He iiiisss … what is he? What can I tell you he is? Mmm … he does work but … What is he? … He is a volunteer cleaner. I mean, he has his little garbage cart, but has no salary. He’s just around on his own … getting tips. G: Do you have children? P: Yes, and I support their studies. G: Why? P: Because my husband doesn’t … it’s like he loves swimming [drinking]. Look, this week, ONLY this week: last Friday he got drunk; on Saturday he got drunk; on Monday he got drunk; yesterday he didn’t, but today he did; I mean, how many days already? The only day he kept sober was on Sunday. Now, the days he gets drunk he doesn’t give me money, so just imagine … I WAS poor. G: WERE you poor? You no longer are? P: No, I’m no longer poor. G: What happened? P: Mrs Judith gave me a job, heh-heh. I work with her and with some acquaintances, and well the truth is that I don’t feel myself so poor with that.

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For how long have you had a job? A steady job? Since two years ago [she sighs, as if it was a long time]. How do you feel now? Richer, heh-heh … Well not that rich but you at least cover your needs. You were telling me that you like reading the Contenido for the stories … Oh yes, the tragic stories. I mean I like those dramatic ones, rather than love stories such as ‘they lived happy forever without problems’. I don’t even believe them because that’s not true. I mean life is not pink-colored. Stories like what? Well, for example, that the husband cheats on his wife, and she catches him, and what she’s going to do to him. … I love it. I like reading those, and I think ‘I wish I had the courage to do the same to this bastard’ [her husband], but I don’t. And look, I just read and I start crying. Why? Yes, because I’m very weepy … I mean I feel nostalgia, I’m very sentimental … wait, it isn’t nostalgia, or is it? I think it’s only sentimentality, because I remember what I have suffered and I start crying, heh-heh. What do you remember? The blows. What kind of blows? Well when my dad and my mom beat me … but real ugly. As a child? Yes, but also as an older girl. I was already 15 and they still beat me. But don’t think that they beat me just with a belt. They beat me with a horse whip. My mom sometimes battered me and left me bleeding … [sighs] no no, really ugly … and I really can’t forget it. Then I got married and, damn! I mean I was tired of my parents’ beatings, and now my husband’s!! He also beats me. But if my dad whipped me, this guy strikes me like a man [she closes her hands], like this: with his closed FISTS [she knocks one hand against the other]. He blackened my eyes, on this side [she points out parts of her body], here … tremendous kicks … [sighs] no no, and I endure all that, you see …

No wonder Paula loves ‘tragic stories’. Besides the availability of such reading material, she felt attracted to and certainly identified with stories

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and characters like these. As she explained, over the last 21 years, her husband has been one of her main issues – if not the main issue – in her life. In this respect, and unlike previous research on gender and literacy (e.g. Rockhill, 1987; Stromquist, 1994), in my work with Mexican women I found that husbands were not only unsupportive of their wives’ advancement, but often they represented the key barriers to the women’s education. In fact, in our second interview at ACC she warned me: ‘if my husband comes now and finds us here, he will beat the two of us’. In Paula’s case, which is not uncommon, her husband’s alcoholism, the low status of his job – as an unpaid garbage man – and his violence, have certainly been for Paula a key barrier in her access to learning spaces and resources. An important point to make here, though, is that this condition of extreme social and personal oppression does not result from ‘illiteracy’ or ‘poor literacy’. Paula is not just literate; she is a keen reader. Her key limitation is that, by being isolated from community and institutional resources, her literacy practices act more as forms of escape and refuge than as forms of empowerment. Strikingly, adult literacy education is neither meant nor organized to encourage and support the development of a sense of agency in people like Paula, but instead to teach them skills and competencies that cast them into the same social roles and status from which they need to get out. Paula feels that having a ‘steady income’ (from her own work) heals the situation a little, even though she acknowledges that there was a time at which she lost a lot of weight. Her weight fell as low as 30 kilos (about 60 pounds) with a height of 1.56 m (5.1 feet). Her current weight is 58 kg (116 pounds): ‘I was totally skinny; now I’m fat’. While she has struggled to gain respect from her husband, she acknowledges that ultimately ‘no matter how much you say “we are equals, we have the same rights”, well we have them, but they are physically stronger … so even though I now rebel and defend myself, he always wins … yes, my life has been kind of tragic’. ACC: A glimpse to get out from confinement By the time Paula was 27 years old and had been married for 10 years, a group of neighbors initiated plans to create the ACC – just half block from her home – and Paula had one of her few opportunities to go out of the house. She was invited to help clear the lot (a garbage dump) and afterwards to take care of the cleaning of the cardboard shack that initially housed ACC: ‘I hung out with Mrs Yolanda, with Dr Alicia, and … well I was there with the gossip too, helping to clean the site.’ By that time she had enrolled in and taken hairdressing classes for a year, but she left it

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because ‘I was poor, I didn’t have enough money to afford the classes’. A year later she went back to these classes, but offered her janitorial services in exchange for a tuition discount: ‘I had to pay, but less than normal because I helped with cleaning’. Significantly, like other interviewees in the local area, Paula also mentions Dr Alicia and Mrs Yolanda (community leaders) as the particular people who encouraged, supported and inspired her to free herself from the domestic world and to engage in community activities. I met Dr Alicia because she was my son’s teacher in La Garcita preschool. She was always like ‘let’s go and clean’, okay let’s go; ‘let’s plant trees’, okay, let’s do it; ‘let’s go to the Delegation because we don’t have water’, okay let’s go. So she and Mrs Yolanda invited me. Unfortunately, Paula’s engagement in ACC was rather short due to her husband’s refusal to let her go out of the home. Like many poor women in the area, Paula has lived in fact in a sort of captivity within the domestic and nearby local spaces. ‘It scares me going too far because my husband doesn’t let me out.’ Her participation in ACC has thus been basically peripheral, and only in short-term classes like hairdressing, handcrafts and aerobics, always combined with her cleaning work. Women’s workshop: A brief but significant experience By the time Paula was 32 years old, she was able to attend, for the first time in her life, a short lecture about gender issues. On that occasion, ACC invited an NGO called Defensoras Populares (Popular Women Defenders), staffed by professional women (doctors, lawyers, psychologists and anthropologists). Popular Women Defenders offered talks and workshops about health, gender and social issues. Paula attended only one session due to her husband’s control. Yet, what she heard in that single session was very significant to her. G: Have you ever joined a self-help group or something? P: No no, because I’m not allowed to go out … well one day they gave a talk about … it was a week dedicated to women. Some women doctors or who knows what … psychologists or something like that. And they gave you the talk, for example about how to deal with your teenage children, or how to prevent domestic abuse, or how to get along with your partner, and so on. One theme every day, for two hours; it was very good, but I took too long and he didn’t let me attend anymore.

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G: What do you mean, you ‘took too long’? P: I mean, he told me: ‘only for a shooort while’, but I stayed there for two hours, and he didn’t let me attend the next sessions … but it was very good, so I didn’t want to leave earlier, and I was not allowed anymore. Quite significantly, through this short event, Paula for the first time in her life saw a detailed representation of her own situation: Everything they said it was like they were reading your own life. They said: ‘parents are this way … teenagers are such and such … wives and husbands are such and such’, and I thought: ‘yes, everything they said is true; those are my children, that is my family, that’s my husband.’ Everything they said was exactly the way it is. However, Paula didn’t identify with another event organized by ACC, where college-educated women talked about famous women: Dr Alicia invited me to a women’s gathering. She said they were going to talk about Frida Kalho [painting artist] and no, I don’t care about that woman. Maybe Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz [poet and writer] but no, I don’t like it, that’s the truth. I think it’s a waste of time. I mean, I got to work. Working is the most important thing to me; if I come to the talk I earn nothing. Reading the TV and reading the world: ‘That’s YOU, Paula; that’s you’ While the practice of reading in Paula’s life seems to be limited in genre and function, this is not her only source of meaning and information. Like most people, Paula is not without access to the mass media networks, such as TV, radio and recorded music. These are certainly important information sources for her. Significantly, she strongly asserted that she neither had time for nor liked watching TV, yet she told to me with much detail various stories that she had watched on TV or listened to on the radio. P:

I tell you, I used to be POOR because I didn’t even have a TV. But I’m now half rich ‘cause I have a TV and a stove with an oven! For the TV I saved 100 pesos every other week (US$10) and I finally purchased it for Christmas. I paid 1000 pesos (US$100) for it. G: What are your favorite TV programs? P: I don’t like watching TV. Well I didn’t like TV news, because it’s just bloody people, accidents, violence, robberies, thefts … But lastly I want to be informed …

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G: Which TV news do you watch? P: I like El Mañanero [‘The Early Riser’; TV news hosted by a clown]. I hate it, yet they give you the news as they are. They don’t ‘wrap’ them, like others, which decorate the news with little flowers so that they look nice. G: What have you been informed about through TV news? What kinds of news are of interest to you? P: For example last Sunday, Fox [Mexican president] could not lift the flag in the celebration of May 5th. They put a very big and heaaavy flag, so they had to push a button to lift it, because it’s electronic. So the little Fox pushed the fucking little button and it didn’t work. He pushed it over and over, but it didn’t work. That’s something I watched in El Mañanero. G: How about economic or political news? P: I get bored with those news stories, they’re boring. G: What else do you watch? P: I like Woman, real life cases [TV theater], I never miss it. It has been on for 15 years, I guess. I used to watch it at 12 p.m., but yesterday they showed the last program because they already transmitted Martha Susana, which is a ‘talk show’ or something like that. But I don’t like it … I don’t like either Martha Susana nor Christina, nor Laura in America [talk shows]. I don’t like any of them because I don’t believe them. For example, the other day they showed a program about a man who cheated on his wife. I didn’t like it, but they used a lie-detector and he said he always went directly from home to work and back home. I thought ‘fucking liar’. But then they called upon his wife: ‘okay lady, now you come here to the liedetector’, and it turned out that it was the fucking woman who cheated on him: ‘how can you dress yourself so well?’, ‘well I have my savings’, then she got an electric shock and jumped – she had something in her head. ‘I love my husband very much’, and she jumped again, so he said ‘you are lying’. Then they put on the video where she was walking down the street with another guy who gave money to her and took her shopping and such and such … so I said: what nonsense!! I mean, those are the programs I don’t like at all. They are PURE falsity. Buuuuut, then they showed another one in which a man was very faithful to his wife; yet, because of this, she despaired and left him for another man … How should we interpret the fact that Paula declares not to like, or even hates, commercial TV, but at the same time provides detailed

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accounts of their content? In the same manner, Paula told me detailed radio stories: G: How about radio stations? P: I used to hear little gossips … There was a radio program where you called and exposed your case: ‘my husband beats me, he is a motherfucker, and such and such’. There was a psychotherapist and the presenter and another man who was a doctor in who knows what, and he said: ‘well, if he beats you, gives you no money, and mistreats you, why do you stay with him?’ ‘For my children.’ And they said: ‘For your children? Your children will shortly grow up and leave you’, ‘But, I –’, ‘no no, you are scared.’ So I started meditating myself: ‘won’t it be that I fear to be alone?’ because that’s true, my children will shortly leave me and I’ll be alone; and if he beats me he will continue beating me. Yes, it’s good to see those programs, or I am sort of a masochist because I like hearing the programs to see my reaction to them, ha-ha. Yes, I remember when I heard that program where the woman said: ‘my husband beats me, leaves me without food, and doesn’t ever let me out’, and I said to me: ‘that’s YOU, Paula; that is you’. Finally, Paula also talked in detail about the music she enjoys, and her favorite singers, such as Pedro Infante, Luis Miguel, Gloria Trevi and others. She even sang a passage for me from one of her favorite songs: ‘Ungrateful: don’t tell me you want me/don’t tell me you love me/don’t tell me you miss me/but you just keep me working.’ The aim of citing these narratives at length is to show the sort of cultural resources truly available and meaningful for a poor and marginalized woman. She draws on media texts of this type in order to elaborate on her own personal situation as a poor woman and abused wife. Strikingly, in Paulo Freire’s terms, we might say that she reads her life and worlds by reading texts of this sort (commercial TV, radio and print publications). While these practices could not be regarded as critical, they are certainly fundamental as sources of words and meanings that become incorporated into Paula’s inner and social life.

Learning from Paula’s Story Access Paula’s history is one example of the cases of millions of Mexican women who have endured a life of socioeconomic marginality together with domestic confinement and abuse. Ultimately, these circumstances

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have cancelled out the already limited symbolic value of her basic school certificate and have represent real barriers to her accessing social networks and literacy resources. In her classical study, Gender, Language and the Politics of Literacy, Kathleen Rockhill (1987) forcefully discussed the equation literacy = power, which has dominated the vision of both policy makers and academics in the field of literacy education. Drawing from a large study of Hispanic immigrant women in Canada, Rockhill concluded that: The politics of literacy are integral to the cultural genocide of a people, as well as the gendering of society. The construction of literacy is embedded in the discursive practices and power relationships of everyday life – it is socially constructed, materially produced, morally regulated, and carries a symbolic significance which cannot be captured by its reduction to any one of these. Literacy is caught up in the material, racial and sexual oppression of women, and it embodies their hope for escape. For women, it is experienced as both, a threat and a desire – to learn English means to go to school – to enter a world that holds the promise of change and, because of this, threatens all that they know. (Rockhill, 1987: 165) While individual learning and growth is not directly determined by economic and material life conditions, Paula’s case eloquently speaks of the oppressive weight of economic deprivation in poor people’s social and symbolic worlds, and reminds us that learning and literacy development are definitely constrained and shaped by socioeconomic forces beyond the control of individuals. Paula’s narratives in particular are perhaps one of the best portrayals of the material and symbolic life of marginalized people in today’s Mexican society, geographically divided in two national territories: Mexico and the US. As for Paula’s reading and writing experiences, these have been limited in their range of uses and genres. Yet it is evident that she cannot be labeled as ‘illiterate’ or ‘functionally illiterate’. She has incorporated as a part of her life the written and multimedia texts available and significant to her position as a housewife and domestic worker. She has, for example, engaged in reading practices dealing with her personal need for information, entertainment and reflection about her identity as a poor and mistreated woman. Besides best-selling novels such as Carry (the raped young woman) and the ‘tragic stories’ of the Contenido magazine, Paula had a subscription to Novedades newspaper, in which she liked reading the ‘gossips about artists’, the TV schedules and general news. She declared that she enjoys and ‘loves’ reading those stories.

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However, the limited range and nature of the reading practices in which she voluntarily engages cannot be considered separately from other discursive resources, which together constitute an integral whole. Her narratives reveal that the reading of books, magazines and newspapers, are for her just a link in a chain of culturally coherent sources of meaning, information and entertainment, such as TV shows, radio programs, songs and print media. While one could speculate about Paula’s possibly limited literacy skills and knowledge, from a lifelong perspective the fact is that she has only had access to activities and contexts where reading, writing and speaking tasks are demanded rarely, if at all. As a housewife and worker basically confined to domestic spaces, Paula has incorporated the symbolic resources available to those settings, such as media material, especially TV programs (e.g. talk-shows, news, TV theater), radio programs, newspapers and magazines. Thematically, she seeks information or entertainment related to women’s ‘dramatic stories’, trivia news (e.g. the failure of President Fox to raise the flag in a ceremony), and family relationships. Noticeably, unlike other people facing similar socioeconomic conditions, Paula never became a member of community groups (e.g. civic, political, religious), which has prevented her from accessing new roles and identities. Likewise, and strikingly, she could not remind any significant literacy or intellectual sponsor in her life. Unlike some others, while she met Dr Alicia and other community leaders, Paula never moved from peripheral participation into central forms of participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In Mexico, product-oriented (Canagarajah, 1999: 168) or autonomous (Street, 1984) approaches to literacy, which treat it as the acquisition of decontextualized skills, underlie the official discourses that simplistically portray the masses as ‘people who do not read and lack literacy habits and skills’. Yet Paula’s history provides compelling evidence that even people of the lowest socioeconomic status actively incorporate reading practices in their lives. Technically, therefore, Paula cannot be categorized as a ‘nonreader’ or as having ‘poor reading habits and skills’. Her literacy practices certainly bear functions and characteristics dependent upon her social position, activities and identity, which differ in fundamental ways from those of the educated middle and upper classes. More precisely, we need to assert that her literacy practices lack the prestige and legitimacy of those of the privileged groups. Self-authoring reading: Selective investments

In Paula’s particular case, reading practices are not separable from her identity and life issues as a poor woman, domestic worker and abused

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daughter and wife. It is her diminished and psychologically hurt sense of identity as a woman and human being that may better explain both her symbolic choices (e.g. ‘tragic stories’), and her cultural aversions (e.g. ‘cultural books’, or ‘important women’ like Frida Kahlo). As Norton (2000) posits, language (and literacy) learners are moved in their choices by a sense of investment rather than by an abstract motivation, and this investment in language practices (reading, writing, listening, speaking) is often highly selective: different languages and skills ‘can have different values in relation to learner identities’ (Norton, 2000: 11). Thus, rather than focusing on Paula’s more or less limited repertoire of literacy skills, we should look at how her practices cohere with her identities, values and needs. It follows that an education program seriously committed to creating zones of development (Vygotsky, 1978; Moll & Greenberg, 1990) for people like Paula should not resemble the limited textbook-based and teachercentered instruction still predominant in official literacy programs. She might benefit, instead, from involvement in active, supportive and dialogic learning experiences aimed at empowering selves and identities, such as those experienced by the cases in Chapter 3. Life skills and competencies

Another important strand of literacy and education policies that needs to be revised to the light of cases like Paula’s, is the competency-based programs that Auerbach has critically examined since the 1980s as embodying ‘one step forward, and two steps back’ (Auerbach, 1986). The starting point of these is a pre-given diagnosis of poor adults as lacking literacy and life skills and competencies. Yet Paula’s history compels us again to acknowledge that surviving a life of economic hardship, sub-employment, domestic abuse and addictions (her husband’s alcoholism), is not consistent with the idea of a person lacking life competencies at all. In spite of physical, social and intellectual captivity, Paula has been able to raise three children, to provide them with food, housing and even education. Her eldest son was already a student at the National University of Mexico, and none of them was engaged in gang activity, so common in Iztapalapa, the area of Mexico City where she lives. Furthermore, as a worker she had the initiative and ‘competence’ to set up a micro-business selling orange juice, which allowed her to get the money to build her own house. Thus, considering where she comes from, can we really assert that her main educational need is ‘education for life and work’? I do not think so. In my view she rather needs – urgently – assistance with justice (to rescue her from her husband’s hands), psychological and medical support for her and her children, a decent job, and support for her own and her children’s

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educational advancement beyond basic schooling. Ironically, Mexican education policies have been driven and committed for decades by World Bank mandates and agendas, committed not to educate the poor but ‘to make markets work better for the poor’ (World Bank, 2002). The value of a single case study such as Paula’s is that it powerfully counters the widespread assumption that poor and little-schooled people lack the skills and competencies necessary in today’s world. Paula’s history reveals the multiple ways in which little-educated and presumably ‘poorly literate’ people manage to make a living against all odds. Appropriation Resisting appropriation and acts of appropriation

Paula’s ‘insider’ perspective (the perspective of a woman growing up and struggling for survival in the midst of extreme poverty and extreme domestic oppression and violence) is, however – in a sense – a critical and scornful view of the cultural ways and values of the educated middle and upper classes. She rejects the ‘cultural books’ and the serious TV news that offers only ‘pink colored’ tales that misrepresent the real lives of the poor. She also makes fun of politicians, such as the Mexican president, as he ridiculously fails to operate a high-tech device to raise the Mexican flag in the central plaza (‘the little Fox pushed the fucking little button but it didn’t work; he pushed it over and over, and it didn’t work’). She implicitly laughs at the absurd plots of commercial magazines (about, for example, cheating spouses), yet she uses this textual material to symbolically project the anger invading her own life: ‘I read Contenido [Readers’ Digest type magazine]; I love reading the tragic stories that are in there … I love it, I like reading those, and I think: “hopefully I find the courage to do the same to this asshole [her husband]”. But look, I just read and I start crying.’ Thus, rather than simplistically characterizing Paula’s relation to literacy as a cognitive one in which the salient issues are incompetence, inability or lack of habits, we should look at issues of identity and appropriation. Her dramatic narratives and experiences reveal in particular two dimensions of appropriation at play in the lives of marginalized people: a postcolonial dimension (the subaltern’s resistance to appropriate colonizing and alienating practices and discourses), and a dialogic or Bakhtinian dimension (the difficulties of appropriating other people’s words as a means and marker to develop one’s voice). From the first, Paula’s relation with literacy cannot be seen with any certainty as an ideological or political rejection of or resistance towards dominant values and practices. Yet

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she implicitly expresses a cultural rejection of and resistance towards class practices and values, which she despises as unrealistic and distorting (‘good books’, ‘pink-colored stories’). And from the second, the Bakhtinian dimension, Paula’s narratives – their language, accent and style – evidently revoice the working-class social languages and voices that she has identified with and appropriated across her lifetime, and which are at the core of her self-perception and her self-positioning as a person unwilling to adopt and enact language, literacy and broader cultural practices that mean little to her, and represent, instead, the values and lives of people of higher economic and educational status. In summary, Paula should be seen primarily as a poor woman, subject to male control and violence, excluded from educational opportunities, and distrustful as a citizen, rather than as an ‘illiterate’ or ‘unskilled’ person.

Felipe Gregorio: Do you have good memories from your school years? Felipe: When I was in second grade there was a teacher named Tomasito… He was very strict. He hit us like this. He punished us with the blackboard eraser. And you know, that hurts a lot. Or he pulled our sideburns, or our ears. Yes, he was very strict, but he taught well. So that’s a good memory, isn’t it?

Felipe’s personal history (aged 50) might be seen as the ‘male side’ of Paula’s case. Like Paula, he has endured his entire lifetime under conditions of socioeconomic and educational deprivation. And just like her, he personifies the huge segment of the Mexican poor whose lives swing between survival urgency and social disengagement. Unlike other economically poor individuals I met in Iztapalapa, such as those profiled in Chapter 3, he never got involved in community groups or social activities beyond family and work, except for the three years that he spent as a boxer, a popular sport among the poorest men in Mexico City. Felipe’s history, therefore, exemplifies the situation of millions whose cultural and educational capital remain minimal over a lifetime, whose sense of agency is overridden by actual powerlessness, and whose sense of identity seems trapped in poor self-images rooted in experiences of poverty, poor schooling, odd jobs and addictions (he has been an alcoholic). The phrase ‘being nobody’, used by Felipe to describe himself, marks his self-perception as a worthless and low-status person. However, just as in the case of Paula, it would be also a mistake to think of Felipe as an ‘illiterate’, ‘unskilled’ or ‘incompetent’ person, which are still keywords in today’s literacy education official rhetoric. In fact,

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Felipe has coped very competently with the knowledge and skill demands of his diverse trades, such as grocery and pork-killing activities, where he has achieved mastery in their technical, knowledge and reading/writing demands. In this sense, his case is an illustration of the dominant functions of reading and writing among the very poor: tools for economic survival and personal entertainment, rather than tools for learning, voice and an agentive citizenship. Constraints and available practices Family and formal education

Felipe, aged 50, was born and has always lived in Iztapalapa, a large and overpopulated district in Mexico City. By the time I met him he made a living through two trades: as a car painting assistant and as a pork breeder/butcher/cook. Both trades are essential in the Iztapalapan economy and culture – the car renovation industry and the fiesta/carnival tradition which creates a year-round demand for carnitas (fried pork). His work trajectory includes many years as ‘scavenger’ (‘recycler’) in the city dump of Santa Cruz Meyehualco, and as a grocer in small grocery and liquor stores. While Felipe only finished the 8th grade, his level of schooling is higher than that of people like Sofia or Saul (Chapter 3) who did not even finish primary school (sixth grade) but who visibly achieved broader ideological, social and communicative horizons. Felipe got married 25 years ago to a woman who has been a life-long housewife. He had three children with her, two daughters and one son, aged 24, 22 and 19 respectively. The daughters married young and became mothers and housewives. The son works as a general assistant at a nightclub in Zona Rosa, a popular tourist area in downtown Mexico City. Felipe sees marriage as a ‘very hard’ experience (‘one has to cope with her’), yet as a conservative Catholic he endures it with a sense of fatalistic resignation: ‘What can we do? We got married in church and the priest said “until death separates you”.’ Felipe describes his family of origin as muy pobrecitos (‘very little poor’), none of whom completed elementary school. His father was a mason and his mother a housewife. Neither of them had more than two years of schooling. None of his siblings finished primary school either. By the time I interviewed him, Felipe’s oldest brother was a mason, the middle brother a bus driver, and his sisters were housewives. Similarly, in Felipe’s nuclear family no one has finished basic education. He personally attended secondary school but left in the 8th grade. His wife did not finish primary school, and none of his daughters finished

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secondary school. While his son did manage to complete secondary school (9th grade), he did not continue to high school. Strikingly, his attitude towards his children’s education seems to be very uncaring: With my first daughter I had much interest that she studied and became, I don’t know, whatever profession. But we organized her 15 años party,19 but right after the fiesta she ran away with her boyfriend. He stole her. So we were very disappointed, and we didn’t pay much attention to our second daughter: ‘if you want to study, do it; if you don’t want, don’t do it.’ The same with the boy; we didn’t pay much attention on his schooling … School years

As the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter shows, Felipe’s memories of his school years are not really good. Yet for some reason, perhaps because his out-of-school life was extremely hard and harsh, he still thinks that the mistreatment exercised by his teachers was a sign of ‘good and strict teaching’: When I was in second grade there was a teacher named Tomasito. He spent many years teaching there and, yes, he was very strict. He hit us like this [his hand gestures a blow] … he punished us with the blackboard eraser, he hit us like this [hits his finger tips with the other hand]. And you know, that hurts, a lot … or he pulled our sideburns, or from the ears. Yes, he was very strict. But he taught us well. So that’s a good memory, isn’t it? Despite such ‘good memories’, Felipe acknowledges not having done well at school. He failed in five classes as a secondary school student (math, English, history, geography and Spanish), which drove him eventually to drop out of school: To tell the truth, I didn’t do the things well, I don’t know why. I think it is because I didn’t like school very much. I see the subjects, for example English and math, as VERY hard. You know how hard math is … and English too. We can barely speak Spanish well he-he; but English, not at all! So that’s why we failed. This is why I rather stopped attending school. I told my mom: ‘what for? It makes no sense to keep attending school’. Unlike most of the people I have interviewed, Felipe does not argue economic reasons for dropping out of school. Instead, he overtly asserts his dislike for academic study, as well as his emerging interest in girls.

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F:

I only got up to 8th grade because I couldn’t study anymore … well the truth is that I didn’t like it much, so I was better off starting work. G: Did you ever have the desire or need to finish your secondary schooling afterwards? F: Nooo because … well the truth is that I began to like girls and, you know, it’s a waste of time with them, don’t you think so? yes or not? One is only thinking of her or them, rather than studying. Yes, they are very time-consuming. ‘To be someone’

As a little-schooled man, Felipe perceives a college degree as the means ‘to become someone’. He expresses this idea by talking about his own daughter, who dropped out of school when she got married: ‘we had many hopes that she would become someone. But no, she didn’t. She became nobody, nothing, because of her marriage’. Felipe expressed also, indirectly, this idea of ‘being nobody’ about himself, as he explained what it meant to him ‘to be someone’: F:

Our first daughter, we had many hopes that she became someone [but] she didn’t become someone because of her marriage … G: So what does it mean for you ‘to be someone’? F: Well, to be someone is for me the greatest thing, isn’t it? G: Like what? Who do you think are someone? F: For example a lawyer, yes … a doctor, a teacher … yes, well I think this is the greatest thing to me, ok? Whereas not being someone, I’m not interested in that … Not being someone is like any borrachito [little drunk man], isn’t it? This means to be nobody. As an alcoholic for many years himself, Felipe seems to project a devalued self-image when he says: ‘not being someone is like any borrachito [little drunk man].’ Adult education

While Felipe acknowledges his limited formal education, he has never committed himself to doing anything about it. He never enrolled in adult education classes, and finds it pointless to get a basic school certificate. It seems that he has been quite aware of and content with making a life through jobs where no school education is required. Asked if a secondary school certificate would be helpful to him, he replied: Well, it could be only for my person, because for the work … mmm … in my work they never required it of me. The truth is that I no longer feel like finishing it, no no, I’m already 50 years old. You see, it’s enough.

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Work and social participation Felipe never committed himself as a participant in either local organizations or in sociopolitical activities of local or national character. Yet he recalls having ‘cooperated’ on a few occasions in collective work, such as when they planted trees along a central strip: ‘They invited us to plant these trees and to sweep everything. And yes, I have cooperated’. Besides this, the practice of boxing seems to have been his only other contact with the outer world. Yet he left boxing because it fostered his desire for drinking: When I was young, at the age of 19, I practiced a sport, okay? It is called boxing. I took part in competitions. I won the first three fights, two by knockout and one by decision. It feels very good to win. You feel veeery happy, right? Yet it was there where I began to drink. The happiness you feel from winning makes you drink more and more. As for his trajectory of jobs, like many poor Mexican men, Felipe has largely held an unplanned sequence of odd jobs, driven more by survival need than by professional choice. Besides the need for a salary to get by on, it is hard to appreciate a sense of agency, coherence, or selection criteria in his work trajectory. As a child and youngster he worked as a scavenger in large city dumps. Once he turned 18 (the legal age to have a formal job) he started as a grocer in a series of small and middle-sized grocery and liquor stores, activities that he performed until the age of 43 (i.e. for 25 years). When he was 25, he became engaged in the trade of pork-breeding, killing and cooking, which he still practices at weekends and holidays. It was only three years ago that he got a different job, as a car painter’s assistant at a small auto body shop. Seen as a whole, Felipe’s work trajectory has lacked direction. It has been constituted by entry-level or service jobs, whose training and literacy demands have been minimal, except for his grocery positions, where he was in charge of keeping account books. Scavenger/recycler

As a child, Felipe, together with his brothers and father, worked as ‘recyclers’ in Santa Cruz Meyehualco’s dump, the main dump for Mexico City at that time: We were so poor that we had to go to the garbage dump in Santa Cruz Meyehualco. My father worked as a mason and, no, the money was not enough. We used to go there to get whatever we found. We picked up aluminum, copper, iron, glass, bones, carton, paper, what else? There were buyers and guys who weighed and bought all that material.

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My brothers and I normally spent half day in the dump and half in school, right? On Saturdays it was the whole day. Felipe worked in the dump from age 7 until he grew up and got a formal job at a liquor store. In spite of such conditions of poverty, Felipe remembers having had a pleasant and funny childhood, playing with his friends in the street. He remarks that his childhood was not so bad since his parents ‘barely hit us’. Felipe’s family continued to work in the dump until it was closed and replaced it with an ‘ecological park’ (with green grass and trees): Just as life develops, I think one has to progress too, right? So, since the dump no longer exists we cannot continue to work in there. We must look for something else, okay? We have to move onto another trade. Mason

At the age of 15, after dropping out of school, Felipe continued to work at the dump, but he also took a job as a mason’s assistant and performed it until the age of 18. He took this job because ‘once you turn 18 you can have a job in any business; but before 18 they don’t give you a job, okay?’ As a mason’s assistant, he worked on small constructions in Iztapalapa and nearby areas. Yet he remained an assistant, never developing mastery in the bricklaying trade. This is his description of his duties as a mason’s assistant: Well, you have to mix the materials [cement + sand + water]. You measure the amount of sand, then apply the lime with a little bit of cement, stir it well. You have to shape a little circle, like this [he makes a gesture with his arms], then you make a hole in the middle, pour water, and let it soak, okay? Then you stir it, and add more cement so that it gets stronger. Also, well you hand the bricks to the mason, bricks and mixture, and water, if he asks for them … Grocer

‘Once I turned 18 years, I went to a chain of liquor stores and yes, they gave me a job’. This way, Felipe started his main professional activity in his lifetime: he spent about 25 years as a grocer in small and middle-sized liquor stores. As with his other jobs, he got into this trade in a totally unplanned manner. G: Why did you seek a job in the grocery/liquor stores? F: Well, there was a sign posted in a small liquor store. I read it and said: ‘oh yes, they require assistants.’ So I asked the clerk and he sent me to the company offices.

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G: Did they have some requisites? F: Well, a birth certificate, a criminal background check … what else? … a letter from your school, two reference letters, and two photos, that’s it. Although Felipe was hired as an assistant, in time he became a manager in some of the stores. ‘I learned how to run the paperwork, so they made me shopkeeper’. He spent five years in the first store, but left it due to the constant assaults and robberies he suffered there. ‘I had to quit that job.’ Then he got a similar job, as a general assistant in a Conasupo store (small supermarkets for working-class people, subsidized with public funds), where he spent nine years. He left it and got a job at another grocery store in Central de Abasto in Iztapalapa (‘Central Supply’ is Mexico City’s largest deposit for produce coming in from the countryside), where he worked for several more years. As a store attendant, Felipe had three main duties: to dispatch merchandise to customers; to shelve merchandise; and to keep records and account books. The first task would basically involve taking spoken orders from clients and dispatching products, which sometimes involved the reading of written orders: ‘it is about serving the client: he gives you a shopping list and says “can I have this please?” Okay, you say. Then you go get the merchandise from the pantry, bring it and hand it to the client, whether in a cart or just right there, in the hallway.’ The second task (shelving products) is described by Felipe in these terms: ‘you have to supply the shelves with groceries, to arrange them well, to make them look neat and organized, to clean them and label them with prices, according to the boss’ instructions.’ It was the third task, ‘the paperwork’, that demanded the most intense reading, writing and calculating tasks. He describes it as follows: You have to keep the books; it is called hoja de arrastre [dragging sheet], right? There, you record the amounts, what gets in and what gets out. That’s why it’s called dragging sheet, right? I mean, it is about sales. You write down everything, everything … and all the expenses too, you record them there. In Felipe’s opinion, learning to keep the ‘dragging sheet’ was not so easy. It took him about a year and a half to learn this activity, which depends heavily on the accuracy of arithmetic calculations and the very process of record-keeping: Yes yes, it’s hard because you must know several things. For example, to calculate the bills, when you receive them you must know how to

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note them down well in the dragging sheet, I mean the sale’s price, okay? Then, if the price gets up, you must record all the differences too, with the increases. Alcoholism and traditional values

Besides arithmetic and book-keeping skills, Felipe learned about liquor in this job: ‘Yes, I learnt everything about groceries and liquors, like table wines and most kinds of wines, types of brandy, vodkas, gins, whiskies, cognacs … I know all that very well.’ The inconvenience was that through this activity he became a heavy drinker, and eventually an alcoholic: Unfortunately, yes, it was there, in the grocery and liquor store where I began to get the bad habit … I started to taste them and I was already getting a bad habit. At any small fiesta or whatever celebration: ‘let’s have a drink’. It was no longer one but two or three. You do not stop. Yes I had to quit that job. Afterwards I sought for another job but, to tell the truth, I was already an alcoholic, okay? So I got a job in Conasupo, where I spent nine years and I kept drinking. After working hours we got out and continued drinking, my workmates and me. Then I left Conasupo and worked in Central de Abastos, for five years, but I still continued drinking, I mean I used to combine work and drink. … I was an alcoholic, a drinker, for about 19 years. While he was aware of this addiction, he never tried to recover from it through a self-help group like AA. He thought those groups were only for drinkers who had passed a certain limit in their addiction. ‘No no no, I didn’t get so far … though I eventually attended some AA meetings. It is only talks that they give you. They say that one must stop drinking, that drinking is very bad, and all that stuff. But they never confined me there. I didn’t get that far.’ Felipe was encouraged by his family to join a AA group, but he rejected the idea that he had fallen ‘so deep’. Instead, at some point he agreed to ‘swear off’ (stop drinking) before the Our Lady of Guadalupe,20 a very important religious icon among the poor: My relatives just made insinuations. So, to tell the truth, I felt the need to swear off. I told my wife: ‘you know what? I’m going to swear off’. We have a small Guadalupe Virgin here in Aztahuacan. As you know, we are very attached to her. So I went to ask where the Guadalupe Virgin was. They gave me the address and I immediately went to swear. I told my wife: ‘look, I’m going to swear for five years’. And yes, I resisted. Now I seldom drink.

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Pig farmer and butcher

Along with his work as a grocer, Felipe began to perform his other main trade: pig farmer, butcher and cook. ‘I have another job, which is as a pork butcher, right? We cook them for parties. We cut the pig very well into pieces and we dispatch it. We sell the meat here, to the neighbors.’ Felipe began this trade at the age of 25, thanks to his friend Juliancito, who taught him the skills required. After his lengthy and detailed descriptions of the different aspects of this trade, it became clear to me that this has been one of the areas in which Felipe has gained ample knowledge and expertise. Consider three aspects of this activity: pig breeding; pig butchering/ cooking; and pig reading (i.e. pig-related literacy). Pig-farming. While his main business has not been farming but butchering, Felipe breeds little pigs at home. Growing every pig takes between 8 and 12 months, and once they are ready to be killed, he sells them for 1500– 2000 pesos (US$150–200). Besides buying the pigs, the main investment required by his livestock micro-industry is to provide food for the animals. He explained to me that urban farmers in Iztapalapa feed the pigs on something called escamocha, ‘feed’ made from leftover food: G: How do you feed them? F: When they are still small, we give them food [industrialized food]. Then, we start feeding them little by little with leftovers, which are known here as escamocha, right? food which is actually leftovers from restaurants. G: Where do you get the escamocha from? F: There’s a man in Santa Martha who supplies it for us. He collects the leftovers that restaurants set apart in cans. So he brings the cans and sells them to us for 80 pesos [US$8] each one. They are cans of 200 liters [211 quarts]. While one might assume that livestock breeding is an activity subject to strict sanitary and tax regulations, Felipe informed me that there is no such a thing in Iztapalapa. In fact, people do not have to cover one single requirement to run these businesses, an eloquent example of the chaotic (i.e. uncontrolled) nature of the informal economy in Iztapalapa: G: Is there any kind of sanitary control by the Ministry of Health? Do they require you to have any kind of license or permit in order to breed and kill pigs, or to sell carnitas? F: No no no no … they have never come here to bother us. G: You do any paperwork to run this business?

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No, because … since we are bien pachangueros [fond of parties] around here, they don’t come to inspect. They already know that these are traditions, don’t they? For example, on December 12th, the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, many people kill their little pigs …

For Felipe, carnitas is a great business due to the strong tradition of carnivals and fiestas in Iztapalapa. He says that at least every other week people hire him for this kind of job, and the demand gets heavier by the end of the year. Yes yes, there are many fiestas. Everything starts with the Day of the Dead [November 2nd], then Our Lady of Guadalupe, then Christmas, then New Year’s Eve, then The Three Kings [January 6th], then Valentine’s Day [February 14th], okay? … What else? Oh yes, there are parties like baptisms, birthdays, three-year presentations, 15 years, weddings … humm there’s a whole bunch of fiestas. Sometimes we cannot even meet everybody’s requests and have to say ‘I’m already hired. I have no time’. Pig-killing and cooking. While Felipe is one of the people with the most limited literate experiences among all those that I have ever interviewed, the next passage of our conversation shows his outstanding oral competence as he describes in a coherent, detailed and sequenced manner the complex process of pig killing and carnitas cooking. I quote it at length to provide the reader with a good sample of the thinking and speaking capabilities of people often cast and thought of as ‘illiterate’, inarticulate, dumb and ignorant in dominant public discourses: G: What do you need to know in order to kill and cook a pig? F: Weeeell, you buy a new rope, they are called lias or ropes, okay? Then you tie very well the pig by both feet and the hands, so when you pull the rope the pig falls down. Between two people you pull the rope very tightly, okay? Then you fasten the feet against the hands with a hook, you hook the feet with the hands and restrain the pig very well, okay? while the other person pierces it, kills it … G: You must know where to pierce it, don’t you? F: Yes, it is in his left arm, okay? here, like this [he signals his armpit], you pierce it and put a pot to gather the blood that comes out from there, I mean from the heart. The blood is used for moronga [black pudding], yes. Then you boil water, very hot, and wrap the pig with a sack. Then you apply hot water on it and start peeling it with a tool that looks like a peeler, called castrator, you peel it like this [moves his hands and whistles] sh-sh-sh, until it is very clean.

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G: You mean the hair or the skin? F: Right, only the hair, all its hair. Then you buy some little Gillette razors, for the smallest hairs, and you shave it well, you pluck them well. Afterwards you wash the body very well, until it is very clean, the cleanest you can, okay? Then you open it from here [signals his chest], from the chest, and you remove the blood that still remains in the huacal [thorax]. The blood is used to prepare moronga. Then, once you are done with the blood, you wash the whole body very well, while it is open, you must wash it completely, all the way to the feet. Then you remove the tripas [gut], all the offal, and you wash them well to prepare the moronga. G: How do you disinfect it? F: With lemon and salt, only the gut and the stomach. Then you rinse it carefully and you are ready to start breaking it in pieces, cutting it into pieces, tearing it into pieces … the skin, you flay the body very well, I mean the skin, okay? The skin is used for cueritos [small skin pieces] for parties. Or you can prepare chicharron [crackling], what the client wishes, okay? G: Do you also prepare the carnitas [fried pork]? F: Yes yes. In advance of the day of the party the client tells you: ‘I’m going to need carnitas by this hour’, Great!! So you calculate the time well and you put it to cook at some hour. One says: ‘about three, three-and-a-half hours’, that’s what cooking carnitas takes, okay? G: How do you cook them? F: In a big pot with the lard of the same pig. You must add its ingredients, everything it needs. Then you start tasting it: if it has enough salt or if it needs more; if it needs more water to reduce the salt or whatever. Then you cut some small pieces and invite the assistants and the guests to taste them, and they say if it’s already good, or if it needs more salt or something, okay? Far from the common idea that little-schooled people are illiterate and inarticulate, Felipe’s lengthy, detailed and sequenced explanation of his trade shows him rather to be a person who is able to display literacy behaviors. According to Heath and Mangiola (1991) literacy behaviors: . . . are key to academic literacy and include the ability to provide sequenced explanations, logical arguments, grounded interpretations and abstract analysis. (Heath & Mangiola, 1991: 41) While Felipe’s talk about his pig butchery trade took place outside of any academic context, his explanation certainly exhibits, at least partially,

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the literate behaviors Heath and Mangiola identified as key to academic literacy. This remarkable facility and ability with oral language among little educated Mexican people was also noticed and documented by UC Berkeley anthropologist Stanley Brandes in his ethnographic work on a Mexico City-based Alcoholic Anonymous group. In his detailed description of the group meetings, Brandes described his amazement at the verbal ability of these little-schooled men: Despite the lack of schooling, they could all speak with apparent ease for fifteen uninterrupted minutes or more. Moreover, they expressed themselves with clarity, straightforwardness, and, in a few cases, oratorical verve [. . .] It seemed that, had they been allowed, they could have gone on talking forever. They appeared sublimely self-confident and in control. (Brandes, 2002: 12–13) It becomes clear that linking little-schooled people to illiteracy and ignorance is but a reductionism, useless for understanding their real learning potential and, thus, the kind of educational interventions needed by this population. Pig-writing (carnitas-based literacy practices). Writing lists of ingredients to prepare carnitas, along with filling out job applications, have been Felipe’s most relevant writing experiences throughout his lifetime. Sometimes his clients want to personally purchase the items for the preparation of carnitas, Felipe explains. In these cases he writes detailed shopping lists for them. G: In which situations have you had the need to write something? I mean to fill out forms, to write a letter, or whatever you remember writing in your lifetime? F: Well only when I filled out my job applications, and when I do the shopping lists with the items needed to kill or cook the pigs. That is the only thing that I write, nothing else, the ingredients that we need to kill and cook the pig. G: What do you include in those lists? F: Well first, in the upper part of the sheet I write down the date, right? to make clear that neither the client nor I forget the date; I write it down. Then the ingredients for moronga and the ingredients for carnitas, so that the person, I mean the man or woman owner of the pig, go buy them for me. G: Like what? What do you need? F: For moronga we need onion greens, okay? also cumin, garlic, oregano, spearmint. What else? … tree chili, dry chili, salt. Some people like it

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with peanuts. So I write down ‘peanuts’, and anything they want me to put on it. Then I give the list to the person who hires me to prepare his carnitas. Hojalatero (auto body repairman)

While Felipe worked for most his life as a grocer and pork butcher, three years ago his work trajectory took a turn, as he took a job as an auto body repairman’s assistant. As usual, he did not take this job as a deliberate choice, but was drawn to it by the need to make a living. In this process two contingencies were played out. First, the store in which he was working went into bankruptcy and he was fired. Second, as he was walking down the street he noticed an advertisement: G: How did you get into the auto body repair trade, if you have worked in totally different areas? F: Hojalatería (auto body repair), yes … well they fired us in the Central de Abastos. They cut a lot of personnel, so I was walking down the street when I saw a sign: ‘assistant required’. Then I knocked at the door and said, ‘what kind of assistant do you need?’ ‘I need an assistant of hojalatería.’ ‘What is the job about?’ ‘Do you know how to sand cars?’ I said ‘no, not well; I have a notion but not well well.’ ‘Okay, come in.’ In performing this job, Felipe not only learned a range of manual technical skills, but also the specialized language required to talk about the tasks, car parts, tools and materials involved in the process of fixing and painting old or damaged cars. Much as with the pork butchering work, he provided me with a detailed description of this trade. For example, in the next passage he describes the tools necessary for the task of pounding out dents on wrecked cars: You have to know all the tools well, right? because there are lots of tools in this job. For example, there’s a hammer called a fixing hammer, which serves to pound out the dent. There’s another piece called tas or dale, it is a squared tool. There are also spanners. As you know, to disassemble a car you need lots of spanners of varied measures. So we have to know them well to carry out the job faster, otherwise you have to try one by one to see if it fits the nuts. It’s easier if you know the tools; it’s faster. Again, Felipe learned this trade through apprenticeship with an expert repairman, rather than through formal instruction: ‘I was taught there, on the job. They told me how. They explained to me very well how to do it. So I learned it step by step.’

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Reading practices Felipe’s history as a reader could be characterized by three themes: (1) the incorporation of both reading and writing practices has been very limited over his lifetime, yet he has clearly developed the written and oral competence demanded by his various trades; (2) As a reader, his main experiences have been of two kinds: the reading of textbooks at school, and the reading of tabloids and comics at home; and (3) as a writer, Felipe’s experiences have been limited to instrumental texts (e.g. filling out forms, job applications, lists of ingredients). As for his reading experiences, Felipe mentions three main activities over his lifetime: (1) reading sports papers and tabloids; (2) reading comic books for entertainment and leisure; and (3) work-related reading (instrumental reading). (1) Newspapers. When Felipe was boxing (aged 19) he used to buy and read Esto (‘This’), a popular sports newspaper, usually read by working-class men: ‘When I was young I liked Esto a lot; I bought it for the sports. One of my brothers liked it a lot too; he bought it often’. Besides Esto, Felipe has also traditionally read La Prensa (‘The Press’), a famous tabloid specializing in sensational crime stories, designed for mass consumption. Interestingly, reading La Prensa has been a rooted tradition in Felipe’s family of origin, which constituted the community of readers which gave him access to this particular reading practice. G: For how long have you been reading La Prensa? F: Well, for nearly my whole lifetime. My parents used to buy it daily, and we still buy it often; they like it. My mother likes it because it brings news about thefts, about crimes, and all those things. Yes, they are interested in all that … Felipe also explained that he likes reading the newspaper to stay informed about the economy and employment in Mexico (‘to know what happens in the world’). Yet it seems that he holds, in fact, rather misinformed opinions about these topics. He thinks, for example, that there are work opportunities in Mexico: G: So how is the employment in Mexico? F: Well, there is work; yes there is work [employment]. It’s just that, to be honest, right now young people are on the wrong road, like drugs. I was struck by the unproblematic way in which Felipe sees his own history of odd jobs and his newspaper-’informed’ views about employment in Mexico. He seemed to read the word but not the world, to use Freire’s famous

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phrasing. In particular, his views about blaming young people for their joblessness (‘they are on the wrong road’) sharply contrast with Sofia’s (see Chapter 3) critically informed views about the economy and work (‘there are people who claim to be Catholic or whatever religion but live in apathy, they say ‘just me, me and my family. But their families are not really well because if there is no employment, there won’t be for their families either’). These are, therefore, two contrasting ways of being literate. (2) Comic books. Felipe’s leisure and entertainment needs are basically satisfied through TV and radio. He especially likes TV sports (boxing, wrestling), old Mexican movies and children’s comedies (e.g. El chavo del ocho: The Boy in Apartment 8). Yet, he complements these practices by reading commercial comics and magazines which, he explained, constitute the kind of reading material available at home. G: Do you also like to buy and read comics or short stories? F: [categorically] Yes, like ‘Capulina’, ‘The boy of the eight’. . . what else? Kaliman … ‘The Cowboy Book’ … there was one that, it still exists … it’s called ‘The Thousand Jokes’, which is all about jokes or sex stories, I mean just … just girls, naked girls … yes undressed. (3) Work-related reading. These reading practices have been already exposed in the sections about Felipe’s work trajectory: job advertisements and applications, product labels and accounting records, for example. (4) Books. When asked about book reading, Felipe categorically assured me that, apart from the textbooks he read as a child at school, he has never read another book in his life. G: F: G: F:

Have you read books? Books? Yes, do you remember having read novels or other kinds of books? Books, only those at school, in primary school, nothing else. No, being honest, I’m not interested in them, right? because I have no time.

I further asked him about reading the Bible, since he declared himself a Catholic believer and churchgoer. Yet he said he did not read the Bible or any other materials as a part of his religious practice. G: F: G: F:

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Do you go to church? Yes, yes yes I like going to church. And don’t you read the Bible or something at church? Well they barely ask us to bring the Bible … We are Catholics, so it’s only about hearing the mass, praying and just praying, only that. But no, they don’t require us to use the Bible.

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Learning from Felipe’s Story Access Poignant poverty

If individual history is social history, Felipe’s history updates the history of generations who have met the world through contexts of deprivation, social illnesses and meager educational experiences. Felipe’s life, dramatically bounded by poignant poverty, survival occupations, poor school experiences, addictions, sociopolitical disengagement and poor self-perceptions, is not just his history, but a transgenerational history ‘inherited’ from his parents (unschooled rural immigrants in marginal Mexico City, engaged in survival activities) and which he, in turn, has transmitted to his own children (underschooled youths, engaged in survival activities in today’s Mexico City). His narratives reveal not only an isolated individual with limited knowledge and skills (fixable through ‘basic education’), but the systematic constraints of larger segments of people whose educational aspirations have been dismantled over generations of deprivation, not only for education resources but even for the means of sustaining life. From this perspective, that of a person whose life is engaged in immediate survival tasks, education is hardly seen as either a possibility or a necessity. Conversely, as Felipe’s case shows, traditional cultural resources become highly valued, appreciated and appropriated by the poor. Felipe’s narratives, in particular, revolve around a steady faith in religious practices and icons (such as La Virgen de Guadalupe); around his fondness for cathartic traditions (e.g. fiestas, carnivals and drink); and around the traditional reading practices of his family (e.g. reading tabloids). All these are key cultural resources inextricably tied to his transgenerational ways of being, believing and surviving through occupations such as scavenging at city dumps, and pork farming and butchering. Agency

Felipe’s life history illustrates, therefore, the strikingly limited sense of possibility of a person growing up and living under the urgency of the need to survive. His accidental trajectory of odd jobs (scavenger, mason, grocer, pork butcher, auto body repairman) references the constraints imposed by his socioeconomic context, but also his limited sense of agency21 to make decisions about his professional life (most of his work trajectory was decided more by need and chance than by a sense of selfdirection). From Felipe’s narrative one gets the sense that he offered little resistance to both his life circumstances and the most popular and conservative discourses that justify them (e.g. traditional Catholicism). Thus,

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rather than an ‘adult with limited literacy skills’, what his biography shows is a person with a visible sense of conformity (getting along with reality as it is), a person whose learning potential is bounded not only by his lack of literacy skills but centrally by a poor self-image (of ‘being nobody’), leading to self-exclusion from broader ideological and educational possibilities. Appropriation Language and literacy

Strictly speaking, Felipe is not an illiterate. The reading and writing practices relevant to his worlds of work, family and leisure are present in his narrative, and he performs them quite competently. Thus, he has effectively incorporated the literacy practices available and demanded of him in his social worlds. Moreover, as his detailed description of the pork killing/ cooking process shows, he seems to have an impressive command of oral language. We can assert, then, that he uses literacy as his life demands him to; yet his critical uses of literacy (literacy to decode and reflect upon the world) seem rather limited, compared to other informants whose socioeconomic backgrounds are similar and whose schooling levels are even lower (Felipe finished the 8th grade; others less than the 6th grade). Yet, rather than a problem of limited literacy skills, the key limitation in his appropriation of broader language and literacy practices was his limited access to more powerful or prestigious communities of readers/writers/speakers. For example, his reading practices evolved through his contact with the only communities of readers available to him: his family (from whom he learnt to read sports and tabloids, TV magazines and comics), and his workplace communities (from whom he learned to read commercial labels, purchase lists and advertisements; as well as arithmetic calculations and book-keeping tasks). Unlike other poor and underschooled informants, Felipe’s participation in secondary communities and activities beyond his narrow worlds of family and workplaces (city dump, grocery and liquor stores) has been very limited, which has prevented him from access to broader social conversations (discourses, ideologies, texts). This becomes evident through his narrative about himself, which – unlike the ones from other littleschooled informants – draws upon a visibly narrower and more conservative range of voices or discourses such as, for example, the gendered discourse that ‘girls are very time-consuming’ (to justify why he left school), or the religious discourse of ‘we are very attached to the Virgin of Guadalupe’ (to explain how he slowed down his drinking habit). While

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these discourses have allowed him to justify decisions or overcome problems (like alcoholism), they do not challenge his beliefs, nor encourage him to learn new things (e.g. ‘we are Catholics, so it’s only about hearing the mass, praying and just praying, only that; but they don’t require us to use the Bible’). In contrast, Sofia, Saul, Alma or Adalberto, who are also people with little schooling, talk about themselves by drawing on a variety of discourses and life experiences, such as discourses of personal dignity, love and discipline for work, democracy, social justice and commitment, religious congruence, etc., which they acquired through social participation and interaction with intellectual sponsors (leaders, mentors, fellows). Implications for education

Could we conclude from Felipe’s case that basic literacy skills and basic education are the most important things that people like him need in order to grow and to learn? While his personal trajectory is unique – as all personal trajectories certainly are – his case makes me wonder what contribution traditional literacy and basic education programs make in the life of a person with such narrow social, ideological and even geographical horizons. It seems reasonable, instead, to think of educational experiences explicitly aimed at broadening his ideological horizons, at reconstructing his devalued self, and at encouraging the construction of a stronger and more critical identity as learner, thinker and citizen. While dominant discourses on adult education and literacy emphasize the need for ‘basic skills’, Felipe’s history eloquently reveals other and more fundamental educational needs among those excluded or self-excluded from formal education. I am particularly thinking of the need to develop one’s sense of agency. Yet our sense of agency grows as we engage in broader social worlds, take on new roles and expand our repertoire of symbolic tools, namely our oral and written language, knowledge systems, and moral and religious beliefs. In other words, development can be seen as a transition from performing a position to consciously authoring one’s place in the world, and education as the enterprise of creating more conscious and active agents. Consequently, what people like Felipe truly need to develop is not precisely his basic literacy skills, but his sense of agency, his sense of value as human being and his voice and responsibility as a citizen.

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Politics

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Chapter 6

Literacy Politics and Policies

Unless accompanied with cultural knowledge, personal drive, political motivation, or economic opportunity, literacy does not lead the writer to make the essential leap from literacy to being literate – from knowing what the words say to understanding what they mean […] The transformation of literacy skills into literate behaviors and ways of thinking depends on a community of talkers who make the text mean something. For most of history, such literate communities have been elite groups, holding themselves and their knowledge and power apart from the masses. Shirley B. Heath (cited in McLaren, 1988: 215) If you’re going to educate people for work you’re going to educate them for a false idea because there’s no such thing as work these days. So you’re educating them just to keep them quiet. Edie Woolie, literacy student at Lee Centre, London (cited in Mace, 1992: 6)

Few People, Pervasive Contexts While this book focuses on marginalized Mexicans, they are clearly just one part of a global story that involves the movement of people alongside goods (Westwood & Phizaclea, 2000). Therefore, the book actually examines the key barriers faced by our modern lower castes everywhere: not only ‘limited literacy skills’ but a systematic lack of the freedom to speak, act and make choices about their lives. However, the cases of some individuals in the previous chapters alsoyield evidence of amazing processes of an increasing sense of selfawareness, agency and critical thinking, achieved through participation in grassroots movements of the kind that have sprung up all over Latin America from the Cold War era to the present. Just as in Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil or Colombia, we have witnessed in Mexico a brutal suppression of movements for democracy, economic justice and national sovereignty. 179

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As a result, we can observe the emergence of local groups and movements no longer inspired by revolutionary ideals, but by an assortment of hybrid ideologies, practices and goals, such as spiritualism, alternative medicine, religious progressivism or fundamentalism, political and community activism, democracy, local autonomy, consumerism, reading promotion, Zapatismo, unionism, media and online escapism. Interestingly, the social history of these groups and movements is actually embodied and enacted in the individual histories, such as those presented in Chapters 3–5. Therefore, drawing on the formal research presented in this book as well as my lifelong membership and contact with marginalized Mexican communities, I believe that it is these groups and practices, rather than formal schools, that grant poor people fuller access to broader conversations, intellectual sponsors, powerful discourses and decolonizing literacy practices for voice and agency. While their narratives reveal the significance of such groups and practices in the affirmation or reconstruction of empowered identities, they also show that, precisely because of their educational exclusion, poor people are also vulnerable to powerful agents such as media companies, religious sects or state institutions, which instill and enforce individualism, comformism, alienation and escapism.

‘Old’ Practices in the WWW Era Now, what do the stories of a few little-schooled and marginalized Mexican individuals have to tell us about the educational problems and needs of millions around the world? While individual cases seem to speak of unique learning trajectories, they in fact reveal powerful globalizing forces that are shaping not only financial markets, but also language, literacy and learning policies and economies. To be sure, there are good reasons for the scholars to rethink and re-conceptualize the nature of language and literacy in the present global era. Not just academic fashions but actual social, geopolitical and technological changes around the globe are shaking up past conceptual models and vocabularies. Centrally, we are witnessing: the fall of the grand narratives and social utopias; the dislocation of the sense of national identity; the rise of a new post-industrial and global capitalism; massive migrations from the former colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America to former metropolitan centers in Europe and North America; the consequent spread of multicultural and multilingual encounters; the simultaneous claim of global and ancestral identities; and the explosion of the internet and new digital technologies as revolutionizing modes of communication, education and social networking

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(Reich, 1992; Drucker, 1993; Castells, 1996, 2000; Gee et al., 1996; New London Group, 1996; Gee, 2004; Gonzalez-Videgaray et al., 2009). Contemporary scholars strive to invent terms that best capture the diverse and hybrid nature of such 21st-century symbolic economies and their educational implications, especially in the field of language and literacy education. A linguistic device to capture this complexity is the proliferation of terms prefixed with multi, cross, or trans, as in multicultural, cross-national, multimodality, multiliteracies, transcultural, or multilingual (e.g. New London Group, 1996; Lo Bianco, 2000; Lam, 2006; Hornberger, 2007; Pennycook, 2007). At the heart of these efforts is a legitimate interest in advancing the foundations of the design of socially inclusive social and educational futures (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). One of the pioneering efforts within these developments is that of the New London Group (1996), calling for a pedagogy of multiliteracies. Recognizing that production of commodities is no longer the central means of economic accumulation, these scholars argue that it is rather the design of new identities, affinities and networks that provides the central means of profit accumulation in today’s new capitalism. Other scholars (e.g. Kress & van Leewen, 1996, 2001) speak of a New Communicative Order, one which demands new management skills, computer literacy and interpretation of icons, signs and visuals. Along the same lines, literacy scholars have also advanced the concept of multimodality to signal the multiplex nature of literacy and communications in the new media age (e.g. Kress, 2003; Street & Lefstein, 2007; Jewitt, 2009). Finally, others concerned about indigenous language maintenance, such as Nancy Hornberger (1989, 2003), have proposed a model of the continua of biliteracy to overcome old binary oppositions such as global–local, oral–written, reception– production, standard–non-standard which have largely characterized research, policy and education in the fields of bilingualism and literacy. Considering this scholarly furor about re-conceptualizing the changing nature of language and literacy learning in postmodern terms, why should we care about people whose stories rather speak of traditional issues of survival, marginalization, poor schooling and little or no access to today’s multiplex, multimodal and digital literacies? Drawing on the life stories of postcolonial Mexicans I suggest that, despite the newness of this high-tech postindustrial world, the ‘old’ postcolonial world is still here, perhaps just as poignant and widespread as the world wide web. As James Gee reminds us, ‘The old capitalism did not disappear; it still exists as a foregrounded formation in the developing world and as a backgrounded formation in the developed world’ (Gee, 2004: 279). As a result, Gee himself, a leading scholar in the movement of

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New Literacy Studies, argues that the old literacies coexist today with the new literacies. Likewise, US scholars Arnetha Ball and Sara Freedman warn educators not to forget that the images of our times are not only those of high speed travel and technology, but also the disturbing images of refugees or displaced persons, of hungry children, or of masses on the move with nowhere to go. Just like the disturbing work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, Ball and Freedman write, these images are not the typical media images of globalization, yet they speak of the 21st century divides ‘between the haves and the have nots, between those with place and those who are displaced, between those with access to high speed travel and technology and those who have little access’ (Ball & Freedman, 2004: 3). In a similar fashion, literacy scholar Glynda Hull articulates in a powerful piece of writing a sharp vision of our present times: We live in challenging times. Violence and terrorism, local and global inequities of an extreme kind, a failure of institutions and leaders to protect and guide, and a palpable sense that differences in ideologies, values, and allegiances separate us quite insurmountably even as we are witness as never before to each other’s realities such is our unsettled, unsettling world. (Hull, 2003: 4) Thus, much of that well intended conceptual work might seem to fall again into the realm of the prescriptive. It creates the illusion that we all are really in a new world where practically everything is changing fast: economy, work, technologies, social networking, teaching and learning, time and space. The question is, who is the ‘we’ that has access to the ‘new’ element in expressions such as new global economy, new technologies, new multicultural societies or new multiliteracies? Drawing on my research and my own lifelong membership of marginalized communities of Mexicans in Mexico and the US, I observe that most poor Mexicans still engage in ‘old’ literacy practices. Yet it is fair to write the word ‘old’ between quotation marks, for these old practices still express modern forms and meanings of resistance and struggle in the era of new, postindustrial and high-tech capitalism. Thus, in stark contrast to the scholarly fascination with the lingo of the new-multi-cross-trans, the developmental stories of concrete individuals force us to look back at the descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive. And the key descriptive and unresolved issue in the literacy development of the historically subjugated groups is their perennial struggles for voice. They might have access to computers and the internet; they might have crossed national borders (legally or illegally); they might be consumers of cultural products of the new knowledge-based economy (e.g. DVD movies, videogames, iPods or

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mobile phones); they might even have learned how to speak English as a foreign language. Yet they still remain lower castes and voiceless citizens, if they are citizens at all. In the US most Mexicans are not citizens but illegal aliens; in Mexico they are not full citizens but second- or third-class citizens; in our globalized world they (we) appear to be global outcasts. Furthermore, the stories of flesh-and-blood marginalized Mexicans powerfully reveal the limited interactions and intellectual resources available to the majority of the world population today in both the former colonial peripheries and the new ‘third-world-ized’ North America and Europe. Thus, their stories speak of the kind of material and symbolic resources available to people whose lives are a never ending struggle for survival in the midst of a materially precarious existence: exclusionary institutions, criminalizing laws, survival occupations, impoverished schools and teachers, and alienating ideologies and practices. This is the pervasive ‘learning environment’ not only for the few individuals profiled in this book, but for most of the world population today. Paradoxically, despite the ‘old’ nature of the literacies practiced by marginalized individuals officially labeled as illiterate, unskilled or semiliterate, case studies of actual individuals make it evident that their practices are more diverse and complex than the normative definitions of literacy allow us to think. Thus, paraphrasing language human rights theorist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, we may say that literacy policies as they currently exist in countries like Mexico and the US may also lead to literacy genocide, for they seek to generalize and legitimize certain practices, while implicitly delegitimizing and invalidating others, quite often those that are most important and powerful in the lives of the poor.

Overcoming a Naïve Worldview While they represent only a tiny slice of the troubled lives of most Mexicans, the portraits in Chapters 3–5 nonetheless reflect patterns, issues and themes widely occurring and recurring on both sides of the Mexico–US border. A common feature among these individuals is that they all are contemporary descendants of colonized native peoples. While none of them belongs to a present indigenous group (i.e. no one is a native speaker of an Amerindian language), they all are mestizos, perennially excluded from the literate communities and the elite groups that hold themselves and their knowledge and power apart from the masses, as Heath reminds us in the epigraph above. However, the extent and nature of their intellectual, ideological, personal and literacy development is fatalistically determined neither by socioeconomic nor by

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educational exclusion. Individuals with little education, such as Saul or Sofia (in Chapter 3), or Pablo (in Chapter 4) have achieved not only functional literacy (which they have), but also grown as critical thinkers and literacy users. They all read texts to critically read the world and negotiate their place in it. Sofia, for example, told me about a course she took in a grassroots organization: I took some courses at Antonio de Montesinos Center. In these, we carried out analysis of reality. We had to read more, to stay informed, to analyze what is happening on the basis of newspapers and copies of books about local analysis, the types of churches, the way people live, what they think. This is local analysis: how the people live their religion, their faith. Then you have social analysis, which mixes religion with politics. It is not possible to separate religion from politics; Jesus also did politics … yes, those courses are very good, mhm. In the same manner, I learnt from Saul, Sofia, Pablo and others about powerful literacy experiences in their lives; experiences that go way beyond the official versions of literacy which conservatively define and regulate it as consisting of basic decoding skills or functional documentary reading skills. In stark contrast to these authoritative but narrow versions of literacy, the lives and the stories of little-schooled Mexicans reveal what should be obvious: as human beings they are perfectly capable of learning, of transforming their identities as individuals and citizens, of developing critical literacy and thinking habits as long as they have access to true learning spaces where they can engage in literacy-mediated discourse practices under the guidance of ‘more capable others’ (Vygotsky’s term). Some of them, like Pablo (a former soldier in the Mexican army and an immigrant to the US) have even developed critical literacy behaviors, moved by the necessity of responding to and resisting derogatory and criminalizing discourses that cast Mexican immigrants in the US in the roles of illegal invaders. In other words, these are stories of poor people who have overcome a naïve worldview; who have developed a strong sense of agency; and who have appropriated counter-hegemonic discourses to question master narratives (political, religious, educational, gendered, etc.). These stories teach us crucial lessons that not only complicate our notions of literacy, but represent, as Paulo Freire never ceased to repeat, the decolonizing popular forces which challenge and threaten the established authority of conservative educational reforms and language policies that over the last six decades have sought to attune the education system with market-driven economic agendas, guaranteeing the suppression of these forms of education.

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Challenging Classificatory Practices To date, UNESCO is still one of these conservative agencies with a regulatory influence over the meaning of literacy education in most ex-colonial nations. Significantly, on its website UNESCO sets out an explicit definition of literacy (Figure 6.1). Yet its answer to the question ‘Why is literacy important?’ is reminiscent of the old litany of literacy as a magic passport to personal empowerment, human development, educational opportunity, poverty eradication, gender equality, peace and even democracy. Paradoxically, while the state’s differentiation between literates and illiterates represents itself as a policy concerned with the education of the poor, this classificatory practice is in fact a powerful tool of educational segregation that further deepens the gap between social groups whose unequal access to the knowledge economy has nothing to do with an ability to decode the alphabet. Literacy scholars (e.g. Graff, 1979; Levine, 1982; Hull, 1993; Gee, 1996) have long since challenged these colonizing myths about the fantastic powers of (this version of) literacy specifically designed for the poor descendents of the colonized peoples. A landmark article along these lines was Gender, Language and the Politics of Literacy, by Canadian scholar Kathleen Rockhill (1987), which eloquently articulates this criticism. In her research with Hispanic immigrant women in the US, she found that their key barrier to learning and growth was neither illiteracy nor a personal lack of motivation, but the confinement that pervaded their lives. Rockhill thus challenged the dominant idea that literacy learning depends upon individual capacity and motivation: With the provision of ‘opportunities’ [to overcome ‘illiteracy’], success is dependent only upon individual capacity and motivation. This is the litany that pervades the literature of adult education. Literacy becomes a basic prerequisite to equality, to individual success. As such, it becomes a commodity, an object, an ‘it’ to be acquired. (Rockhill, 1987: 158) Why is literacy important? • •

•

Literacy is a human right, a tool of personal empowerment and a means for social and human development. Educational opportunities depend on literacy. Literacy is at the heart of basic education for all, and is essential for eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy. There are good reasons why literacy is at the core of Education for All (EFA). A good-quality basic education equips pupils with literacy skills for life and further learning; literate parents are more likely to send their children to school; literate people are beer able to access continuing educational opportunities; and literate societies are beer geared to meet pressing development.

On WWW at hp://www.unesco.org/en/literacy/literacy-important/. Accessed 16.9.2009.

Figure 6.1 UNESCO vision of literacy

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Just like Rockhill in the 1980s, I have found that similar structural barriers obstruct the educational and literacy growth of poor Mexicans in the 2000s. Still more disturbing is the evidence that even marginalized and little-schooled Mexicans have been able to make ‘the essential leap from literacy to being literate – from knowing what the words say to understanding what they mean’, as Shirley Heath puts it. What sort of life experiences, intellectual and ideological influences, and community based (i.e. out-of-school) pedagogies account for such powerful forms of agency and literacy development? What kind of cultural resources for learning make a difference in the individual literacy development of poor people? On the basis of the cases presented in the previous chapters, I next revisit some of the key themes addressed in the literature. My aim is to elaborate on how intellectual and literacy development are enabled or constrained by the nature of the activities, communities and symbolic resources available to postcolonial subjects. To do this, I focus on key experiences and patterns that, beyond the scope of individual biographies, push and/or hinder the intellectual, literacy and personal growth of people whose lives are heavily shaped by the larger geopolitical issues of survival, education, life choices and marginalization.

What is ‘Success’ in Language and Literacy Learning? In modern times, particularly in recent decades, scholarship about language and literacy learning has experienced a major shift from a cognitive to a social perspective. The ‘mainstream’ cognitive view, in which learning was seen as a process of ‘acquisition’ taking place within the minds of individual learners, has increasingly been attacked and replaced by sociocultural, ecological and postcolonial views that see learning as a process of being socialized in social practices that are as diverse as the social groups that populate the world (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 2003). Thus, the mainstream view explained language and literacy learning as an evolutionary change from a beginning state A of incompetence to an ending state B of competence or proficiency. In other words, learning was judged by the acquisition of the rules of a given language or script. Pedagogical interventions based on this view typically involved the cognitive characterization of the ‘expert’ (the proficient or ‘native’ speaker/reader/writer), followed by the description of the evolutionary process from the initial state of incompetence to the final state of proficiency (the process of ‘acquisition’) (Kramsch, 2002; Larsen-Freeman, 2002). From this dominant explanatory model of language learning, successful learners were thought to be those who acquired the proficient or ‘native-like’ ways of a target

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language. In a similar manner, becoming literate was understood as the acquisition of a set of neutral technical skills and rules for the use of a target written language (Hull, 1993). In other words, success in matters of language and literacy learning has been largely understood as the mastery of an idealized target oral or written language, usually equated with the language of the ‘native’ speakers/ writers. Yet this paradigm is in crisis today because the very ideas of a unified and unproblematic ‘target language/literacy’ and a ‘native speaker/ writer’ have been challenged by researchers working from sociocultural, dialogic, ecological, postcolonial and linguistic rights perspectives around language and literacy learning and policy (e.g. Pennycook, 1998, 2007; Canagarajah, 1999, 2005; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000, 2004; Kramsch, 2002; Hornberger, 2006, 2007; Spolsky, 2008). These scholars have forcefully argued that language does not exist as a unified, autonomous and abstract entity, but rather as a diverse set of forms and practices belonging to social groups variously positioned in linguistic markets (Bourdieu, 1991; SungYul & Wee, 2008) regulated by power relations at local, national and global levels. From this view, language learning always entails the appropriation of the language of the other, and there is no such thing as a ‘national language’ or a ‘mother tongue’ or a neutral and universal ‘literacy’, but a complex system of hybrid and often competing or conflicting language varieties and practices that belong to specific groups, unequally positioned in the structure of social hierarchies. ‘Native’ English speakers, for example, have a completely different appreciation and recognition of the English spoken and written in countries such as the US, Great Britain, India or Belize. Still more divergent is the appreciation and acceptance that European Americans have of the English spoken/written by AfricanAmericans, Mexican-Americans or Native-Americans in the US. The point here is that language is not only a means of communication but also a central means of personal and social identity. Hence social actors, and especially the historically subjugated groups, are not necessarily willing to become ‘native speakers’ of the language of the (oppressing) other. There is often resistance to language/literacy learning, not just cognitive difficulties. Thus, oral and literate language practices are often – if not always – used as strategies of resistance, self-assertion and distinction (Pennycook, 2003; Lee, 2004). From this perspective, learners of a language or literacy face not only psycholinguistic or affective challenges, but also ideological dilemmas of allegiance, competence and authenticity. As Sung-Yul & Wee (2008) explain, language users do not necessarily want to look and sound ‘native’. Rather, they often intentionally alter, distort, mix, mispronounce or misspell the language in order to sound authentic (themselves, rather

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than the dominant other), and to maintain their loyalty to their own racial, ethnic, national, or social-class groups or communities. Thus, learning one’s mother tongue, or learning a second language or learning a written language always involve decisions about what variety of the language or the oral/written practices are intended to be taught and learned. It follows that the previously unproblematic assertion that learning English meant simply the ‘acquisition of proficiency in English’ was problematized by questions such as what and who’s English is or should be the target (e.g. British, American, Australian, Indian, South African)? And what variety within those ‘national’ versions of English should be the target (e.g. African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American)? So, for instance, in the teaching of English it was often assumed that one would learn ‘English’. Now, you have to specify if the English to be taught will be that of Oxford, Australia or India. In contrast to this historically dominant paradigm, paradigms have emerged in recent decades like the ecology of language (Kramsch, 2002; Hornberger, 2003; Spolsky, 2008) and linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). These paradigms argue for the need to make explicit the issues involved in the historical relationships between languages and language varieties in the historical horizons of postcolonialism, imperialism and globalization (Pennycook, 1998, 2007; Canagarajarah, 1999, 2005; Morgan & Ramanathan, 2005; Ramanathan, 2005a, 2005b).

Colonizing Language and Literacy Policies What does ‘becoming literate’ mean at the present time and how do education policies attempt to regulate this? In answering this question we cannot forget that education and language policies have historically been at the heart of colonialism and neocolonialism. Colonial policies in Mexico (1521–1821), for example, regulated many aspects of social behavior, including racial segregation (establishment of a legal system of castes), and access to literacy and education. Likewise, right after the war of independence from Spain (1810–1820), the new state worked towards the creation of a national identity through a policy of alphabetization and castillianization.22 The very creation of a school system was thought to be a strategy to instill the symbols and rituals of the new postcolonial nation, and to homogenize a population who spoke dozens of native indigenous languages through the compulsory teaching of Spanish-based literacy. Precisely in opposition to this history of linguistic and educational colonization, current research and theory on language and literacy is concerned with issues of language ecology and linguistic rights. While much of this work revolves around spoken language (e.g. around the loss,

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maintenance or revitalization of minority and native languages), these debates and theorizations are relevant to understanding the regimes which attempt to standardize and regulate the learning and uses of literacy. One of the central tenets in this perspective is that, in a world where linguistic diversity and the rights of historically dominated groups is increasingly recognized, language homogenization policies built around the constitution and maintenance of national states are in crisis and decline. From this standpoint, learning a language, just like learning certain literacy practices, is not only an educational practice. It may potentially be a practice of cultural domination or even linguistic genocide (Hornberger, 1998, 2006; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; McCarty et al., 2006; Spolsky, 2008). In a recent review of language policies in former colonies, Spolsky eloquently states: … decisions concerning the language of instruction have been the major cause in Africa and other former colonies of the downgrading and extinction of minority languages. Similarly, pressures are now developing in Asia and elsewhere to introduce English into primary schools, either alongside the local language or replacing it as medium of instruction […] In South America, the destruction of indigenous languages was virtually guaranteed by Spanish refusal to admit them into the educational system […] By definition, however, any language management is the application of power coming from authority, and has totalitarian overtones. (Spolsky, 2008: 2–4) In the case of the literacy development of the historically marginalized groups in Mexico and other postcolonial countries, it is taken for granted that they are illiterate people, hence the educational policy is often driven by the goal of turning them into literates. There is neither consideration nor questioning regarding the target language or literacy. As the stories in Chapters 3–5 suggest, these individuals often get involved in practices beyond functional literacy, which is the kind of literacy commonly regulated by educational policies. The stories demonstrate, for example, the occurrence of critical practices involving higher order and critical thinking processes – practices usually overlooked or neglected by dominant literacy discourses and policies. Assuming that the incorporation of individuals into the monolingual national state is the relevant goal, literacy policies often rely on prescriptive and narrow definitions of literacy, support top-down educational approaches, and promote functional literacy programs. Ultimately, these policies position learners as acquirers of skills that are useful for basic functioning and for accepting predefined roles and identities. What alternative projects oppose or contest this dominant trend? In the next and final chapter I will try to find some answers to this question.

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Chapter 7


Realizaron la labor They performed the work de desunir nuestras manos Of splitting our hands y a pesar de ser hermanos And even though we were brothers nos miramos con temor We looked in fear at each other Pablo Milanés (Canción por la Unidad Latinoamericana) Anybody who thinks realizes that democracy doesn’t mean much if people have to confront concentrated systems of economic power as isolated individuals Noam Chomsky, 1987: 334

White Minds, Brown Hands Poor levels of literacy and school failure are pervasive phenomena among Mexicans on both sides of the Mexican–US border. Why do Mexicans, as a group, seem to consistently fail to engage in intellectually challenging, literacy-based pursuits? For many years educational researchers in Mexico, included myself, have been documenting our educational failures: students’ miserable learning environments and experiences; teachers’ unstoppable decline in work and professional conditions; curriculum and materials designers’ disappointment with the teachers’ ‘misuse’ of their brilliant ideas; and national and international agencies’ confirmation of our regression in nearly all learning indicators, especially in reading and writing (see, e.g. Hernandez-Zamora, 1997, 2006; OECD, 2005; INEE, 2006). In this book I have sought to document the ways in which learning and literacy are systematically hindered in the lives of postcolonial Mexicans, either by the forces of economic deprivation or by the very nature of our educational strategies and institutions. Yet, I have also shown that even in the middle of such a disturbing landscape, some people are still able to experience what education and literacy are truly about: a means to raise

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their consciousness, achieve a voice and self-author their lives, in spite of and even against governments and institutions in both Mexico and the US. It is of particular importance for me to look at concrete cases of effective and powerful learning and literacy development, which often take place among individuals engaged in grassroots organizations and movements. This is a key finding that counters the mainstream visions of literacy and development. It is grounded in actual histories of individuals who bear testimony of the sorts of learning experiences that truly support the growth of agency, self-authorship and voice among members of today’s subservient castes. They are experiences that qualitatively and substantively differ from the inefficient and domesticating forms of official education. Through this work, I have ultimately sought to provide evidence of concrete experiences of people growing up against the winds. They are live testimonies to both the key barriers faced by the poor to learn, grow and become literate, and the central means by which some of them realize their potential as thinkers, speakers and literate persons. In order to understand the conflicting process of becoming literate, I have used the metaphor of Western literacy as a kind of mask that not all individuals and groups can put on comfortably or, rather, that not all groups are given the chance to try on comfortably. At first sight it might appear that literacy is a mask better worn by White people, who are often perceived by the native people as talkative and theatrical, prone to extensive verbal performance, self-sufficient and ‘smart’ (e.g. Basso, 1974; Scollon & Scollon, 1981). The fact is that under asymmetric power relations, most people tend to (or are enforced to) silence themselves, and Mexicans are no exception. Moreover, our long history of military, economic, cultural and mental colonization has forced us to become listeners rather than speakers, readers rather than writers, recipients of other people’s ideas and identities rather than designers, authors and actors of our own. Literacy might certainly be a powerful selfauthoring tool, but becoming literate demands access to literate communities. And as Shirley Heath reminds us in the epigraph above: ‘for most of history, such literate communities have been elite groups, holding themselves and their knowledge and power apart from the masses’ (Heath, 1986: 215). As a result, even at the turn of the 21st century, intellectual and symbolic work remains the realm of white minds equipped with sophisticated knowledge, language and literacy tools, whereas most enslaving manual and labor work remains assigned (or enforced) to brown hands.

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Romanticized Poverty Perhaps this is why Mexicans, particularly the poorest and least educated ones, are said to be and perceive themselves to be ‘people of few words’. Paradoxically, some Western scholars might see cultural difference and resistance to cultural assimilation in this silence. Yet, I agree with Dyson when she claims that to write a text is to write a place for oneself in the world (Dyson, 1997). How can we create our own place by remaining silent? It is thus striking that academic discourses so often romanticize poverty as an equally rich but culturally different learning milieu.23 In the last decades in particular, education and literacy scholars have extended their focus of study to encompass schools and out-of-school settings and practices. Yet they have often framed the study of language and literacy learning within cultural rather than within sociopolitical relations. With the well intended purpose of explaining the systematic school failure of minority and subordinate groups, ethnographic studies in education have often opposed the notion of cultural difference to ethnocentric and racist notions of cultural deficit. Through fine-grained accounts of the communication patterns and cognitive styles of ethnic/racial minorities, these scholars have argued that rather than genetic or cultural inferiority, what these groups face are differences, discontinuities or mismatches with mainstream school culture. In this book I have departed from such cultural relativism which implicitly or explicitly assumes that various cultures are just ‘different’ but equally ‘rich’ and ‘complex’ as learning environments. And I endorse Levinson and colleagues’ (1996) claim that, despite their contributions, these studies have downplayed the social and historical forces responsible for the reproduction of ‘cultural differences’ in and out of schools. By neglecting to emphasize how communication styles and cognitive codes ‘were the cultural practices of variably empowered groups, historically produced within relations of power, the cultural difference approach tended to essentialize the cultural repertoires of minority groups’ (Levinson et al., 1996: 43). A poignant outcome of such approaches is that, by focusing on microcognitive processes and face-to-face interaction, culturalists and cognitivists alike have often constructed romantic images of the trees while dismissing the forest. They conclude, for example, that even survival activities involve ‘complex’ thinking and learning processes. Thus, if starving children sell coconuts on Brazilian streets, or under-schooled adults paint luxurious mansions in Mexico City, or indigenous girls in Mexico take care of market stalls instead of attending school … it is not

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their futureless lives that matter but their ‘complex mental strategies’, their ‘traditional learning arrangements’ or their ‘learning styles’ (e.g. Carraher & Schliemann, 1983; De Haan, 1998; De Agüero, 2002). These fine-grained accounts of the communication patterns, cognitive styles and literacy practices of non-European populations have certainly cast doubt on racialized representations of poor people as illiterate and incompetent. Yet it is also true that mostly affluent and White researchers tend to interpret nearly any experience in the oppressive lives of subordinated people as ‘learning’. In stark opposition to these visions, I argue that these groups’ cultural practices and repertoires are not only sources of rich funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2005), but also sites of imposed discipline, cultural assimilation, ideological colonization and psychological alienation. The stories of concrete individuals in this book yield evidence that the marginalized often become fervent consumers of pre-manufactured cultural goods, desires and colonized self-images. Moreover, many of them build desires and even serious life plans (such as migrating to the US, or choosing English names for their Mexican children) on the basis of an uncritical consumption of church, media and state propaganda. Education itself would not be a necessity if the economically dispossessed would not pervasively engage in such schemes of deceit, cultural alienation and self-inferiorization. We need, thus, to be cautious about romanticizing and celebrating the deprived life contexts and cultural practices of the poor as inherently ‘rich learning environments’. A poignant fact often overlooked by both culturalists and cognitivists is that in today’s global economies of knowledge and literacy there is a growing polarization between knowledge and service work (Reich, 1992; Lankshear & O’Connor, 1999), as well as new global forces of economic marginalization that structure unfair educational opportunities for allegedly ‘culturally different’ groups, which are in fact modern and global lower and upper castes. Likewise, scholars of culture and cognition also tend to celebrate the out-of-school survival activities of the poor as ‘culturally specific learning environments’ (e.g. Rogoff, 2003), while dismissing the legitimating and enabling role still played by the educational system. In other words, although they are culturally significant, diverse out-of-school learning experiences such as gang, church, entertainment or survival reading and writing practices count for very little when the dispossessed wish to gain entrance to larger social worlds and conversations, practices and institutions. Ultimately, by focusing on mental processes or local face-to-face interaction, researchers often leave untouched key policy issues, precisely those at the heart of the economic and political agendas that structure educational

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inequality at national and global scales. So, for example, by disempowering teachers and schools to make decisions about their diverse students’ cultural legacies and learning needs, conservative business-oriented policies in both Mexico and abroad are pushing thousands or millions out of the education system. While nearly all analysts in Mexico claim that this is an evidence of the ‘failure’ of neoliberal economic and education policies, I contend that this is not a failure but a true success of economic and education agendas deliberately intended to dismantle public education and impose corporate-driven, teacher-proof education models. In Mexico, only a few brave educators have dared to risk innovative learning projects against all odds (e.g. Cámara, 2006). Many of these new experiences are yet to be documented, operate with little or no institutional support, and have even had to defy official policies in order to exist. Increasingly hostile policies make it nearly impossible to attempt any deviation from the official credo and control over curriculum, pedagogy, materials and testing. Some schools have even been physically destroyed, their teachers and students beaten and jailed, and the pedagogical experiments dismantled, as the Canadian film ‘Grain of Sand’/Granito de Arena (Friedberg, 2005) shows so eloquently. The successful outcome is that millions keep migrating to the North America, not only to search for economic opportunities, but also in the hope of an education for their children. Tragically, most migrants will soon learn that they and their children will remain ranked at the bottom of the educational and economic systems in countries like Canada and the US.

Isolated Individuals versus Concentrated Powers In contrast to the North American landscape of isolation and segregation, Latin American history has shown that thinking people have always been organized people, not isolated individuals. Yet isolating poor individuals as workers and learners is a key essential condition to guarantee their dependence and subordinate role as lower castes in the current global market-driven economy. While scholars often miss this reality, artists such as Pablo Milanés poetically capture it in songs such as the one cited in the epigraph to this chapter. In other words, social organization is the last thing or the last ‘skill’ that economic and education planners desire for our 21st century subservient castes. Quite the contrary, the dream of the experts is to train people to fit into the economic system as it is, which would be made impossible by teaching them how to organize and think for themselves, how to act independently, how to write their lives and histories, and how to design their very futures.

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Ultimately, economic development and social justice rest on a fundamental condition: national and individual freedom and independence. Yet free action and thought has always been considered antithetical to conservative education policies; hence curriculum designers do not usually consider creating individuals who think for themselves as a learning goal. Perhaps creating individuals who do not know how to be submissive (i.e. who think for themselves) is inconsistent with education agendas aimed at satisfying market needs. We must not forget, however, that only a minority among the subaltern poor can trigger a politicized sense of agency, that is collective resistance and action aimed at constructing spaces of freedom, democracy and critical learning. For the vast majority of impoverished people, economic terror has made escape through the media and casual occupations their only means of dealing with global frustration. Although they are crucial components of democracy, education and literacy mean very little to isolated people who are confronted by the concentrated powers of global neocolonialism and economic terrorism (Figure 7.1). Just like democracy, education and literacy will mean something in the lives of marginalized individuals only ‘if people can organize to gain information, to have thoughts for that matter, to make plans, to enter into the political [and economic] system in some active way, to put forth programs and so on … [otherwise] it’s like having the choice between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola’ (Chomsky, 1987: 334). In Mexico and most Latin American countries literacy and basic education programs are the only state-sponsored option left to the huge segment of our populations excluded from higher education. Yet these programs begin with the premise that poor people are unskilled or illiterate as individuals. Thus, while they are designed to target and ‘fix’ individuals, in practice our concentrated systems of economic power leave little or no room for people equipped with the restricted knowledge and literacies provided by such programs. This is why as educators and citizens we need to ask questions about the political character of educational strategies and Economic terrorism Economic terrorism is not a metaphor. Unlike the Great Depression of 1929, the present ‘economic crisis’ (permanent in Latin America since the late 70s) has been deliberately created through the violent imposition of a monetarist economic program whose outcome is a paradise for the big investors and an economic inferno for the masses. In Mexico, its central goals were the elimination of the state as regulatory agent, the dismantling of the social responsibility of the state (the product in Mexico of a revolutionary war that took over 1 million lives in the early 20th century), the control of inflation at the cost of massive unemployment and miserable real wages; and the privatization and foreignization of all strategic industries and financial institutions. (Villarreal, 1984)

Figure 7.1 Economic terrorism

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programs: who gets access to what kinds of knowledge and literacies, through which pedagogical practices, and within which networks and institutions? As Luke and Freebody (1997: 10) write, ‘these are not simply local matters, negotiable or constructed in classrooms independently of larger forces and configurations of power’. This is why Paulo Freire, a lifelong Brazilian thinker and educator, always questioned the supposed political neutrality of literacy education: It is thus impossible to deny, except intentionally or by some angelic innocence, the political aspect of education. The basic problems of education are not strictly pedagogical, but political and ideological. … For this reason, whenever I have had to deal with the problem of adult literacy programs, as now, I have never reduced it to a set of techniques and methods … being able to read a text requires a ‘reading’ of the social context from which it stems. It is not enough to know mechanically the meaning of ‘Eve saw the vineyard’. It is necessary to know what position Eve occupies in the social context, who works in the vineyard, and who profits from this work. (Freire, 1975: 198) The personal histories of flesh and blood marginalized Mexicans in this book can be seen, therefore, as portraits of the terribly restricted nature of their actual life conditions as they provide contexts for personal, intellectual and literacy growth. These stories move us to question what it means to educate the poor, from the perspective of the national and transnational economic and political elites: how resources are allocated, who defines what the poor must know and ignore and how. But these stories also reveal the perspectives of unrecognized agents who are enacting alternative educational and social projects. Therefore, a key finding of this research is that in order to grow, learn and become literate, poor people have had to drop or defy official education models that restrict their sense of intelligence, agency and competence, and engage in community-based groups which give them access to social conversations and roles to expand their knowledge, ideological horizons and sense of identity from one of individual failure to one of collective strength.

Education for Voice and Agency What should change in education? Suggestions for educational practice cannot be made in the absence of a key premise: ‘literacy education’ in ex-colonial countries is not defined, in fact, by its content (literacy), but by social class, since official literacy programs have historically targeted poor people, excluded from formal basic and higher education, and have always

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been linked to broader sociopolitical and economic agendas. Thus, in defining what should change, educators, policy makers and researchers must unavoidably position themselves at some point between the main approaches that have dominated the practice of literacy education: programs intended to provide poor people with the skills and knowledge necessary to participate in current society as it is (conservative approach); and projects intended to empower people to transform themselves, their communities and the larger society (transformative approach). The first approach, also identifiable as the ‘mainstream’ or Unesco approach, fits the agenda of current market-driven economic policies. It is advanced by top-down national adult and literacy programs created by small teams of ‘experts’ in charge of designing the appropriate curricula, delivery means (usually mass textbooks and computers) and evaluation instruments (usually standardized multiple-choice tests). The selection of content (a key aspect in these programs, since pedagogy is left nearly untouched), is guided by criteria of ‘relevance’, ‘usefulness’ or ‘immediate application’. It follows that only content which is ‘useful’ in the adults’ daily lives is relevant, often restricted to their present and personal experiences. The success of these programs is typically measured by the number of certificates issued yearly, i.e. face-saving statistics for budget justification and international comparison purposes. The design and practice of these programs is currently governed by an instrumental rationality according to which education must be in tune with and completely functional for the world of business (Hull, 1993; Tennant, 1997). Illustrative of this approach is the official adult education system in Mexico, and the survival skills ESL programs in the US. The second approach, which may be called transformative (Cummins, 2000), emerges from diverse local and global initiatives committed to a vision of a new social order being created, based on principles of socioeconomic justice, gender equity, local autonomy, linguistic and cultural diversity, and human dignity. It is embodied in the work of local groups in North and Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, whose education projects are typically designed through collaboration between socially committed think thanks,24 grassroots organizations and local participants. A common feature of these projects is that literacy and education are not seen as goals in themselves, but as necessary components of broader projects for democracy, sustainability and empowerment. Central to these initiatives is both the content to be learnt (decided autonomously by the organizations themselves), and the way it is learnt, usually through horizontal pedagogy relations, joint activity, guided practice, critical inquiry, collective projects and literacy-mediated critical dialogues. Learning in projects of

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this kind is not measured by standardized tests but observed in the growth of participants’ self-confidence as learners and social actors. Literacy is not understood as the mere acquisition of a technical skill but as a political project of constructing one’s voice. The stories of the profiled individuals in Chapter 3 provide accurate examples of educational experiences based on these principles; their contact with groups like Movimiento de Salud Popular (Popular Health Movement), Comunidades Eclesiales de Base (Grassroots’ Ecclesial Communities) or Defensoras Populares (Popular Women Defenders) has been crucial in their personal histories of social, intellectual and literacy growth. There have also been critical education experiences in other parts of the world, with the Mahila Samakhya (Women’s Collective) experiment with rural women in India (Nirantar, 1997) or Mpambo Multiversity in Uganda (Wangoola, 1995) being among the most powerfully articulated in theory and practice. The case studies in Chapters 3–5 strongly suggest that, for people whose opportunities at regular school have been limited and poor and whose present lives are so limited in freedom to speak, act and make choices, the starting educational point cannot be basic knowledge and skills, which reinforce their sense of incompetence, deficiency and inferior social status. Popular educational thinkers and practitioners around the world (e.g. Wangoola, 1991, 1995; Stromquist, 1994; Freire, 1997; Nirantar, 1997) have also insisted that the education of colonized groups, subject to historical forms of domination and misseducation, must explicitly address critical issues in their lives as dominated groups, and seek to empower them by expanding their intellectual horizons and their sense of agency, voice and competence. An Indian report about the work of NGOs with South Asian women eloquently makes this point: … the process of empowerment really begins in the mind, with the glimmers of a new consciousness which questions existing power relations and roles … the empowerment process is one where external agents facilitate women [or poor people] to find a ‘time and space’ of their own, and to re-examine their lives critically and collectively. They enable women to look at old problems in new ways, to analyze their environment and situation, recognize their strengths, alter their self-image, access new kinds of information and knowledge, acquire new skills, and initiate action aimed at gaining greater control over resources of various kinds. (Batliwala, 1993: 11) ‘External agents’, in this quote, refers to committed individuals and grassroots organizations which make a difference in the intellectual development (‘the glimmers of a new consciousness’) of poor people. As the

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cases in Chapter 3 show, the stories of concrete people reveal both a quest for broader intellectual horizons (beyond basic skills), and the crucial role of concrete agents who support these pursuits. Alma, for example, a poor woman in Mexico City, talks about the encouragement and support she found from groups of organized women in the community, which allowed her to expand her worldview, life horizons and self-perception as woman and citizen: They were women with decision … I liked that because I thought: ‘how nice is that we women participate, help each other, and realize that the authorities are not above us but that they DEPEND upon us. We are not ‘simple housewives’, as those licenciados used to tell us. We are not ignorant. Perhaps we don’t have a degree, but we DO HAVE the capacity as well. Or Sofia (Chapter 3), a woman with incomplete primary education but whose participation in political and alternative health groups taught her a big truth: ‘We all know. We all have knowledge. We just have to gather in order to donate it to others.’ Even Pablo (Chapter 4), the former Mexican soldier who migrated to the US, explicitly recognizes the key role that the army places on shaping the minds of the young militia in order to change them: ‘… they lecture you, but just about the army … I mean they work on your mind because, I believe, it is what makes you change.’ While this kind of training is aimed not to empower but rather to alienate, it is striking the way Pablo grasps and understands this simple truth: they work on your mind because this is what makes you change. In short, the stories of these people officially categorized as ‘people in need of basic skills’, arguably demonstrate that the process of empowerment certainly begins in the mind.

Decolonizing Literacy By the time I was a teenager in Mexico City (1970s–1980s), I was involved in social organizations and movements committed to democracy, economic justice and social equality at local, national and international levels. Some of them practiced solidarity with similar movements in other Latin American countries, ruled in those years by US-backed military dictatorships. For me, this was a crucial experience not only of sociopolitical participation, but also of intellectual and literacy growth. Coming myself from the large segment of ‘introverted’ and unarticulated Mexicans (see Chapter 2), I often felt captivated by the smart, courageous, informed and well articulated ideas of many of our compañeros (fellows, comrades), who

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were not just students or teachers, but also factory workers, peasants, community activists, unionists, ordinary men and women who were committed and capable. Many of them were people of limited formal education, who had grown up and lived under deep marginalization, just like my own family. And yet they had become active and critical citizens, capable thinkers, articulate speakers and intelligent readers and writers. In other words, they had appropriated literacy as a means to speak up (to express themselves), to speak against (to resist oppression), and to speak with (to dialogue with others) (Flower, 2008: 78–79). That is, they developed and appropriated literacy as a practice of voice, and as a tool to selfauthor their place in the world. How did they achieve this? Since those formative years I have never stopped wondering what it was in the lives of those marginalized, alienated, unschooled and colonized subjects, like my own relatives and neighbors in the shanty town of Neza City, that truly encouraged and supported their passage from silent ‘shyness’ to articulate voices. While I have developed some intuitions since then, my recent work as a researcher has enabled me to identify problems and posit questions, grounded in both theory and fieldwork. As a point of particular importance, I now believe that language and literacy educators working in postcolonial or neocolonial contexts should examine key issues, such as: what sort of learning experiences move people from passivity to activity, from silence to voice, from self-devalued images to empowered selves, from submissive subjugation to active citizenship? What is the difference between grassroots-based and state-sponsored forms of education? What makes grassroots organizations powerful spaces for the construction of self-authored selves and active citizens, as opposed to the often inarticulate, uncritical and submissive graduates of the education system? Beyond the myriad of subtle ‘pedagogy’ differences between popular and official forms of education (analyzed in Chapters 3–6), there is a key point on which they differ. They diverge in their intellectual and social purpose. Whereas official education aims to educate people to acquire skills and habits to fit and function in society as it is (unjust, organized in castes, individualistic, market-driven, etc.), the aim of alternative forms of education has always been the decolonization of minds. As Paulo Freire powerfully articulated, the goal of a true education is not to put the world in the students’ minds, but rather to support them so that they actively enter into the world. As an intellectual project, decolonization is rooted in postcolonial theories. These deal with issues of cultural identity in countries that once were colonies of other countries, especially the ex-colonies of European powers such as Britain, France and Spain (Said, 1994; Loomba, 1998; Pennycook, 1998;

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Young, 2003). It focuses on the dilemmas of national and cultural identity after colonial rule; on the ways in which the knowledge about the colonized has been generated and used to serve the colonizer’s interests; and on the ways in which the colonizer’s science and literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonized as culturally inferior and perennially deficient as users of the colonizer’s language (Mignolo, 1995, 2000; Collins & Blot, 2003; Jimenez & Smith, 2008). Decolonization, therefore, involves the use of postcolonial theory and the colonizer’s language itself (i.e. oral and written English, Spanish, Dutch, etc.) as a means for the formerly colonized peoples to write their histories and revoke colonial legacies and regimes of truth (Canagarajah, 1999, 2005; Mignolo, 2000; Dussel, 2002, 2004). Yet decolonization has also been an ongoing historical project of economic, political and cultural autonomy and self-determination by the colonized peoples. Latin American history is, in this sense, a long history of decolonizing struggles that date back to the 16th century’s resistance to the Spanish conquest, and have continued throughout the history of social movements against the rule and legacies of imperialism and neocolonialism for the last five centuries (Valcarcel, 1982; Ribeiro, 1985; Galeano, 1987). These struggles started with the indigenous uprisings in colonial times (1521–1821), and continued with the independence wars during the 19th century, the resistance to US imperialist invasions in the 19th century, and the revolutionary movements of the 20th century (e.g. the Mexican, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions). In the 20th century, decolonizing projects have been also undertaken by nationalist governments such as those of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1950s), Joao Goulart in Brazil (1960s), or Salvador Allende in Chile (1970s), all of them committed to nationalist reforms and – thereby – overthrown by US-plotted and backed military coups. Finally, in the post Cold War era (1980s–2000s) we have seen the emergence of new social actors and movements in Latin America that still seek socioeconomic justice, human rights, self-determination and autonomy. Perhaps the best known case is the Zapatista uprising in the state of Chiapas, Mexico in 1994 (Castells, 1996: Vol. 2), but there are also countless grassroots organizations and movements currently active in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and other countries (Diaz Polanco, 1997; Foweraker, 2001; Vargas-Hernández, 2005), though their very existence and educational significance is barely known. Hence the importance of the personal stories of individuals like those presented in this book, whose narratives precisely reveal how this social history is embodied in personal histories. In the particular case of Mexico, implicit or explicit in the individual stories are key historical processes such as the ‘dirty war’ or counterinsurgency war during the so called Cold War, as well as the neoliberal economic

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strategies imposed since the 1980s, which have left millions economically dispossessed and have boosted massive waves of migration to the US (as the stories in Chapters 3–5 testify). Ironically, whereas political repression in Mexico and Latin America has targeted mostly organized and educated people (e.g. university professors and students, artists and social leaders), the economic attack has targeted virtually all the rest of the unorganized and politically ‘decapitated’ working class population. Thus, everyone’s story in this book is somehow an embodiment of this larger social history of political repression, economic aggression, popular resistance and educational exclusion. Their (our) narratives are, therefore, stories of the personal consequences of dislocating economic, ideological and political forces, but they are also stories of a desperate search for knowledge and meaning that may restore a minimal sense of self-worth and personal agency, and help to spell the end of conformism and fatalism. Social history and personal history are, thus, inseparable dimensions in the learning trajectories of particular individuals in ways that still demand further exploration. History in Person (Holland & Lave, 2001) is a key source in which to study the interplay between social struggles and changing practices and identities. This is especially needed in the former colonies, where ‘illiterate’ and under-schooled people are not simply individuals who ‘lack the necessary skills’, but entire groups of survivors and descendents of a long-lasting chain of atrocities that started with conquest and colonization, continued with postcolonial ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ policies, and persists today with ‘market-friendly’ neoliberal economic strategies that are producing ever deeper human devastation, hopelessness and unhappiness. We certainly cannot change our colonial past, but we should be able to define our futures. Yet, against the credo of our present technocracies, that categorically dictate basic and computer literacy (global capitalism demands online shoppers, after all!) as the educational solution for our ‘illiterate’ majorities, I still argue that what our individuals, communities and whole nations need is an education which helps us to recover a sense of dignity as human beings, and an education that serves us to reconstruct and reinvent our cultural roots, our local economies, our native wisdom and savvy, and our potential as learners, thinkers and creators. A literacy education, in short, that feeds our desire and capacity to dream with our very future.

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Notes

1. I deliberately use the terms ex-colonial and neocolonial to signal the powerful historical consequences of colonialism and imperialism in the current educational predicament of our countries. The literature on postcolonialism reveals the ideological nature of terms like ‘developing countries’ and ‘Third World’, coined after WWII to justify the new politics of subordination and neocolonization of the former colonies (Esteva, 1992; Said, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Loomba, 1998; Viola, 2000; De Rivero, 2001). For economy and convention, the term ‘developing countries’ is used, but always as a synonym of ex/neo-colonial countries, to avoid the overuse of ‘so-called’. 2. Matrix is a dream world, put before our eyes to prevent us from watching the real world outside the dreams . . . according to The Matrix, a film directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski (1999). 3. International Seminar, Reading: From the Intimate to the Public Space. XXIV Feria Internacional del Libro Infantil y Juvenil. México City, 11/16/2004. Published as Pobres pero leídos: La familia (marginada) y la lectura en México (Hernandez, 2005). 4. Statistics for people aged 20–24 attending higher education in other countries are: Finland, 83.8%; South Korea, 78%; USA, 73%; Spain, 59%; Argentina, 48%; Uruguay, 36%; Mexico 19%. Source: UNESCO. 5. A detailed account of the Templo Mayor massacre can be found in The Broken Spears (Leon-Portilla, 1992a). The Spanish version of the book (La vision de los vencidos: Crónicas indígenas de la conquista) describes in these terms the slaughter of Templo Mayor: ‘Al momento todos [los españoles] acuchillan, alancean a la gente y les dan tajos, con las espadas los hieren. A algunos les acometieron por detrás; inmediatamente cayeron por tierra dispersas sus entrañas. A otros les desgarraron la cabeza: les rebanaron la cabeza, enteramente hecha trizas quedó su cabeza. Pero a otros les dieron tajos en los hombros: hechos grietas, desgarrados quedaron sus cuerpos. A aquéllos hieren en los muslos, a éstos en las pantorrillas, a los de más allá en pleno abdomen. Todas las entrañas cayeron por tierra Y había algunos que aún en vano corrían: iban arrastrando los intestinos y parecían enredarse los pies en ellos. Anhelosos de ponerse en salvo, no hallaban a dónde dirigirse’ (León-Portilla, 1992b). 6. The book by Kevin Bales (1999), Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, provides shocking accounts of contemporary forms of slavery in Asian, African and Latin American countries. 7. In 1982 José López Portillo was the presidential candidate for the PRI, the party that ruled Mexico for over 70 years. 8. The PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution) was formed in 1988 out of a massive movement against fraudulent elections. 203

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9. Valentin Campa was a lifelong working-class leader and communist militant, until his death in the 1980s. 10. Ruben Arde is an activist and political leader, and was Delegado (Mayor) of Iztapalapa by the time I interviewed Sofia. 11. For example, while the publishing industry in Mexico is in crisis, I was informed by booksellers in eastern Mexico City (the poorest and most populated area) that sales of books on esotericism, astrology and metaphysics are rising. 12. Dr Alina was a physician, local leader and director of AHC by the time I met Alma. 13. ‘Mestizo’ is the term officially used in Mexico since the war of independence from Spain (1810–1821) for the postcolonial Mexican ethnic identity. It is understood as a blend of indigenous and Spanish blood. 14. In the presidential elections of 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was the candidate for a coalition of center-left forces opposing the old regime of the State Party which had ruled Mexico since 1929. Millions of voters mobilized for months so that the government acknowledged the triumph of Cardenas, neglected in favor of the official candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who nevertheless was eventually proclaimed winner. This major political event recurrently appears in the stories of the people I interviewed in Mexico (e.g. Sofia, Alma and Saul). 15. On 2 October 1968 (two weeks before the Olympic Games in Mexico), the army forces massacred hundreds or thousands of people in the plaza of Tlatelolco, Mexico City. The event is officially acknowledged today as a part of the so-called Mexican ‘Dirty War’ against social movements and political groups from the 1960s to the 1980s. 16. Luis Echeverria was Minister for the Interior in 1968, the year of the Tlatelolco massacre, and Mexican president from 1970 to 1976. He is the only top official still alive who has been put on trial for genocide, though he was declared innocent in 2009. 17. The student movement of 1968 demanded an end to the military occupation of some university campuses, a stop to the political repression of students and other social actors, and the elimination of an article of the Penal Code that established the crime of ‘social dissolution’. 18. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the historic case of Miranda v. Arizona, declaring that whenever a person is taken into police custody, he or she must be told four things before being questioned: (1) you have the right to remain silent; (2) anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law; (3) you have the right to an attorney; and (4) if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. 19. It is traditional for socioeconomically marginalized Mexican families to organize a big and usually expensive party when a girl turns 15 years old (15 años or Quinceañera), even if the parents spend their life savings in one day. 20. To swear before Our Lady of Guadalupe not to drink for a certain period of time (e.g. six months, one year, etc.) is a common practice among Mexican alcoholics who reject joining an AA group. 21. Understood here as the power to act purposively and reflectively upon one’s life and world (see Chapter 2).

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22. Castillianization: the imposition of Castillian Spanish, the dominant dialect of Spanish spoken in the period of the Spanish Empire in America. 23. Special thank go to Spanish anthropologist Fina Carpena for her passionate insights on this matter. 24. Think tanks are bodies of specialists who work as a research organization providing advice and ideas on specific problems (economic, social, legal, educational, etc.); in this case it refers to independent, non-profit organizations, whose goal is to support local/grassroots initiatives for social change.

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Index Subjects African-American – Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Barack Obama 41 – English 187, 188 – history 41 – people 105, 106 agency 9, 23, 32, 52, 55, 56, 68, 69, 71, 76, 78, 84, 86, 90, 94, 141, 149, 158, 162, 173, 175, 179, 180, 186, 191, 195, 196, 198, 202 Anglo-Americans 17, 32, 35, 105, 120, 135, 136 appropriation (of language, literacy and discourse practices) 9-11, 23, 31, 32, 44, 52, 55, 56, 69, 70, 80, 83, 97, 100, 114, 117, 133, 136, 137, 157, 174, 187 asymmetric power relations 27, 36, 96, 191

– development /growth 30, 55, 95, 96, 159 – new communicative order 181 – patterns 34 – repertoire 111 – situations 26, 55 cultural and linguistic loss 38 cultural difference theory 192 cultural practices 30, 44, 119, 158, 192, 193 cultural practices (as sites of discipline & assimilation) 7, 28, 44, 192, 193 colonization & decolonization 7, 28, 31, 44, 188, 191, 193, 200, 201, 202 cultural alienation 7, 10, 30, 44, 119, 193 decolonizing – forces/projects/struggles 24, 184, 201 – literacy practices 180, 190, 199 – theory/research 30, 32 democracy 13, 21, 57, 77, 84, 98, 137, 175, 179, 180, 185, 190, 195, 197, 199 digital literacy practices & technologies 7, 100, 180, 181 discourses – counter-hegemonic, counter-narrative 77, 107, 184 – dominant 138, 175 – master narratives 41, 133, 136, 138, 184 – secondary discourses 69, 70, 84, 96, 97

Bakhtin theory – authoritative discourses 76, 138, 142 – dialogical theory 9, 22, 157 – ideological becoming 85, 97, 98 – voice 22, 96, 136, 157 Bourdieu theory – cultural capital 14 – linguistic markets 33, 187 – social reproduction 116 capitalism/capitalist 4, 14, 17, 33, 63, 72 – global capitalism 31, 73, 80, 180-182, 202 castes (system of) 9, 20, 21, 39, 179, 183, 188, 191, 193, 194, 200 citizenship (selective, excluded) 116-118, 123, 130, 131, 137, 140, 200 citizenship and rights theory – rights as benefit 41 – rights as choice 41 Ciudad Neza /Neza City 13, 200 colonial Mexico 39, 128, 201, 202 colonizing representations of the illiterate 6, 12, 30, 193 communicative – competence 33, 35, 96, 119, 167, 171, 186

education for voice and agency 196 English linguistic imperialism 111 ex-colonial (world, countries, nations, regions) 3, 5, 8, 16, 18, 32, 93, 185, 196 freedom (and lack of) 8, 9, 18, 41, 43, 72, 130, 142, 143, 195 freedom to speak 179, 198 gender issues 8, 11, 13, 31, 52, 56, 81, 82, 84, 85, 96-98, 142, 144, 146, 149, 150, 154, 174, 184, 185, 197 globalization 17, 23, 49, 55, 141, 182, 188 glocal 14, 15, 16

219

Decolonizing Literacy Index

220 grassroots movements/organizations 49, 67, 83, 117, 179, 184 identity/roles of competence 56, 61, 75, 78, 196, 198 immigrants 12, 16, 33, 36, 38, 100, 116, 131, 133, 134, 135, 154, 173, 184, 185 – anti-immigrant policies 104, 116, 120 indigenous languages 188, 189 knowledge economy 9, 185 language – acquisition 34, 37 – and identity 35, 36, 37 – and literacy genocide 183, 189 – dilemmas 33, 38, 43, 187 – diversity 189, 197 – ecology 186, 187, 188 – learning theory 186 – national language 155, 187 – policies 184, 188, 189 – policies and neo/colonialism 202 – rights 183, 187, 188 – socialization research 33, 37 – success (in learning) 34, 186, 187 – varieties 187, 188 Latin America 15, 17, 18, 24, 27, 28, 32-34, 57, 62, 75, 101, 116, 143, 179, 180, 194, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202 life history 10, 13, 26, 43, 66, 119, 173 – history in person 21, 23, 71, 202 linguistic assimilation 28, 31, 36 linguistic genocide 189 linguistic markets 33, 187 linguistic minorities 34 literacy – agendas 4 – and asymmetric power relations 27, 36, 96, 191 – and bilingual literacy 34 – and citizenship 5, 7, 8, 11, 19, 20, 23, 32, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 72, 76, 97, 117, 141, 159 – and excluded citizenship 139 – and gender research 149, 154, 185 – and identity 9, 19, 30, 32, 33, 34, 38, 43, 49, 51, 52, 69, 70, 78, 86, 89, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 114, 117, 122, 133, 140, 156, 157, 158, 187, 188, 196 – and new technologies 7 – and rights theory 41 – as mastery of secondary discourses (J. Gee) 69, 70, 84, 96, 97

Decolonizing Literacy – as practice/struggle for voice 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 40, 41, 55, 72, 76, 112, 117, 128, 132, 135, 137, 138, 141, 157, 159, 180, 182, 191, 196, 198, 200 – as self-authoring tool/practice 9, 38, 40, 41, 51, 52, 61, 94 – as self-display 34, 35, 41, 42, 107, 168 – becoming literate 9, 32, 39, 42, 70, 72, 136, 187, 188, 191 – behaviors 71, 168, 184 – biliteracy 181 – critical literacy 21, 67, 71, 84, 115, 184 – essay literacy 35 – functional (i)literacy 7, 11, 21, 35, 39, 40, 51, 52, 83, 94, 97, 119, 133, 134, 138, 139, 142, 154, 184, 189 – genocide 183 – literacy myth 185 – literacy UNESCO definition 23, 185, 197 – literate identity 32 – literate/illiterate 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 40 – powerful literacies 5, 9, 83, 142, 182, 184, 191 – skills 3, 21, 96, 133, 134, 137, 142, 155, 156, 174, 175, 179, 185 mande usted 39 Mexican-Americans 187, 188 multiliteracies 55, 181 multimodal(ity) 51, 97, 118, 136, 181 nation state 10, 19, 20, 38, 40, 42-44, 52, 101, 116, 118, 127, 128, 130, 131, 137, 139, 140 Native American 33, 35, 120, 187 native languages 14, 18, 28 native literacies 28 native Mexicans 29 native (indigenous) peoples 14, 17, 18, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 136, 183, 191 native speaker/writer 36, 37, 38, 49, 109, 110, 183, 186, 187 New Literacy Studies 34, 182 polarization (knowledge & work) 3, 193 politics of representation 3, 6, 12, 30, 193 powerful discourses 9, 55, 56, 75, 83, 180 powerful learning experiences 51, 56, 68, 81, 82, 83, 84, 191 postcolonial /postcolonialism 7, 9, 10, 20, 21, 31-34, 38, 39, 42, 52, 71, 72, 116, 117, 128, 142, 157, 181, 186-202 postocolonial & ex-colonial countries/ world 3, 5, 8, 16, 18, 32, 93, 185, 189, 196 postcolonial subjects 10, 21, 31, 42, 52, 186

221

Index postcolonial theory 200, 201 public sphere 19, 20 public voice 40, 41, 117, 137, 139

sociocultural theory 9, 69, 94, 186, 187, subtractive bilinguism 36 subtractive schooling 37, 38

reading 8, 28, 83, 95 – critical reading 63, 75, 76, 84, 107, 123, 133, 134, 135, 138 – reading habits 5, 6, 7, 30 – reading materials 5, 51, 67, 68, 81, 96, 108, 114, 117, 138, 147, 148, 154, 155 – reading practices 11, 49, 57, 61, 62, 64- 66, 68, 79, 80-84, 92, 97, 100, 101, 113, 115, 118, 122, 133-140, 144, 146-148, 151, 153-159, 171-174 – reading promotion 5 – self-authoring reading 121, 133-134, 155 right to speak 20 Robinson’s Crusoe English lessons 111

to speak as citizen 9, 27 transnational literacy practices 107, 113 transnational Mexicans 11, 13, 20, 23, 36, 38, 100, 101, 109, 132 transnational migration scholars 129 transnational silencing 137

self-inferiorization 31, 193 silence /silencing /silenced/silent 8, 12, 17, 20, 22, 25-27, 32, 34, 35, 39, 42, 82, 83, 119, 120, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 137, 139, 140, 191, 192, 200 – state-enforced silence 140 – transnational silencing 137

voice – and silence 32 – public voice 40, 41, 117, 137, 139 voiceless (people, castes, citizens) 8, 12, 23, 32, 40, 42, 183 World Bank 3, 5, 23, 157 Writing (practices) 8, 25, 27, 28, 32, 34, 51, 63, 64, 68, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 117, 144, 154, 155, 156, 159, 164, 169, 171, 174, 190, 193 – letter-writing 64 – petition-writing 63 – pig-writing 169 – pre-Columbian writing systems 34

Names Abercrombie, N. 41 Abbott, J. 15 Achbar, M. 15 Anderson, B. 20 Andrews, M. 41, 56, 76, 134 Auerbach, E.R. 39, 134, 156

Brandes, S. 169 Brandt, D. 117 Briggs, C. xi Brill de Ramírez, S.B. 56 Bruce, S. 41 Bruna, K.R. 100

Bakhtin, M. 22, 40, 51, 76, 84, 85, 96, 97, 138 Bales, K. 19, 203 Ball, A. 182, Baquedano-López, P. 39 Bartlett, L. 23, 69, 70, 100 Basso, K. 191 Batliwala, S. 139, 198 Bayley, R. 33, 38 Baynham, M. 96 Berger, J. 116 Bhatt, R.M. 142 Blommaert, J. 22 Blot, R.K. 33, 69, 201 Bogdan, R.C. 51 Biklen, S.K. 51 Boone, E. 34 Bourdieu, P. 14, 33, 116, 187 Bowles, S. 115

Cámara, G. 62, 194 Canagarajah, A.S. 15, 16, 31, 55, 56, 142, 143, 155, 187, 201 Carpena-Mendez, F. 6 Carraher, T. 193 Castañeda, A. 19, 41, 116, 137, 140 Castells, M. 181, 201 CEAAL 23 Chomsky, N. 13, 18, 190, 195 Cole, M. 23 Collins, J. 33, 69, 201 Cope, B. 181 Cortés, F. 145 Cumming-Potvin, W. 70 Daiute, C. 138 Davis, A. 41, 72 De Agüero, M. 193

222 De Haan, M. 193 De Rivero, O. 7, 15, 16, 17, 203 Diaz Polanco, H. 201 Dobrowolsky, A. 116 Drucker, P.F. 9, 181 Dussel, E. 201 Dyson, A.H. 21, 40, 192 Edelsky, C. 30 Erickson, F. 93 Escobar, A. 203 Esteva, G. 7, 203 Fanon, F. 30, 34 Farr, M. 23, 39, 40, 51, 134, 138 FEMOSPP 18 Ferreiro, E. 40 Florescano, E. 29 Flower, L. 9, 27, 200 Foweraker, J. 201 Freebody, P. 196 Freedman, S. 182 Freire, P. 14, 23, 30, 40, 99, 128, 184, 196, 198, 200 Friedberg, J. 194 Galeano, E. 7, 16, 201 García, O. 100 Gee, J.P. 8, 23, 30, 69, 70, 83, 84, 96, 97, 138, 181, 185 Gintis, H. 115 Gonzalez, N. 193 González-Casanova, P. 137 Gonzalez-Videgaray, M. 181 Gowen, S.G. 4 Graff, H.J. 185 Greenberg, J.B. 44, 156 Guarnizo, L.E. 129 Guerra, J. 23, 39, 40, 138 Hall, A.M. 30 Hall, K.D. 4 Hansen, J.G. 69 Heath, S.B. 30, 35, 51, 168, 169, 179, 183, 186, 191 Hernandez-Zamora, G. ix, x, xi, xii, 5, 18, 30, 31, 190, 203 Higgins, C. xi Hill, S. 110 Holland, D. 40, 51, 69, 94, 138, 143, 202 Hornberger, N.H. 22, 25, 27, 33, 100, 138, 143, 181, 187, 188, 189 Horton, M. 23 Hull, G. 23, 30, 94, 134, 182, 185, 187, 197

Decolonizing Literacy INEA 14, 67 INEE 190 INEGI 14 Jewitt, C. 181 Jiménez, R. 7, 23, 28, 34, 100, 201 Kalantzis, M. 181 Kalman, J. 40 Kapur, R. 116 Kramsch, C. 186, 187, 188 Kress, G. 181 Kumar, R. x Lam, W.S.E. 15, 100, 129, 181 Lankshear, C. 9, 23, 41, 76, 193 Lantolf, J.P. 138, 143 Larsen-Freeman, D. 186 Lave, J. 30, 69, 70, 71, 155, 186, 202 Lee, J.S. 187 Leonard, A. 15 León-Portilla, M. 7, 203 Levine, K. 185 Levinson, B.A. 192 Lightfoot, C. 138 Liu, J. 69 Lo Bianco, J. 181 Loomba, A. 200, 203 López, L.E. 30, 34 Luke, A. xi, 196 Luther King Jr., M. 9 Lytle, S. 23 Mace, J. 179 Macedo, D. 128 Mangiola, L. 168, 169 Marcos, S. 6, 16 Martin, H. P. 9 Martínez-León, N. 28 McCarty, T.L. 33, 35, 36, 41, 56, 76, 134, 189 McDermott, R. 4 McGinnis, T. 23, 100 McLaren, E.L. 179 Menard-Warwick, J. 39, 40, 43, 44, 116, 136, 138 Mignolo, W.D. 7, 34, 201 Miller, J. x Miyoshi, M. 16 Moll, L. 44, 156 Morán, L.R. 40 Morgan, B. 15, 188 Nirantar 198 NLG 55, 56

223

Index Norton, B. ii, iii, xii, 10, 11, 14, 36, 137, 156 Oboler, S. 116 OECD 3, 23, 190 Ogbu, J. 30, 33, 36 Ong, A. 19, 42 Ortner, S. x Park, J.S-Y. 33, 138 Pavlenko, A. 138, 143 Pearson, D.P. 4, 31 Pennycook, A. ii, iii, xii, 31, 111, 181, 187, 188, 200 Peters, M. 41, 76 Philips, S. 35 Phizaclea, A. 179 Ramanathan, V. xii, 15, 30, 31, 188 Reder, S.M. 96 Reich, R.B. 9, 31, 181, 193 Ribeiro, D. 201 Robertson, G. 41 Rockhill, K. 143, 149, 154, 185, 186 Rockwell, E. 14 Rogers, A. 40 Rogoff, B. 23, 30, 70, 93, 186, 193 Rubinstein-Ávila, E. 100 Said, E.W. 200, 203 Sanchez, P. 23 Sarroub, L.K. 15, 23 Schecter, S. 33, 38 Schumann, H. 9 Scollon, R. 30, 34, 191 Scollon, S. 30, 34, 191 Sharkey, P. 115 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 30, 33, 183, 187, 188, 189 Smith, P. 7, 28, 34, 201 Solis, J. 56

Spolsky, B. 187, 188, 189 Street, B. 30, 97, 155, 181 Stromquist, N. 141, 149, 198 Suarez, M.H. 14 Suárez-Orozco, C. 30, 100, 129 Suárez-Orozco, M. 30, 100, 129 Sung-Yul, J. 187 Tennant, M. 197 Torres, R.M. 4 Valcarcel, C.D. 201 Valdés, G. 37 Valenzuela, A. 30, 37 Van Leewen, T. 181 Vargas-Hernández, J.G. 201 Vasconcelos, J. 29, 30 Vasquez, O. 23, 93 Vertovec, S. 129 Villarreal, R. 195 Viola, A. 203 Vitanova, G. 40, 138, 143 Vygotsky, L.S. 71, 80, 83, 84, 115, 117, 156 Wangoola, P. 7, 16, 18, 198 Warriner, D.S. 100 Wee, L. 33, 138, 187 Wenger, E. 30, 69, 70, 71, 83, 143, 155, 186 Westwood, S. 179 White-Kaulaity, M. 28, 30 Wong Fillmore, L. 30 World Bank 3, 5, 23, 157 Wu, Y. 115 Yearley, S. 41 Young, R. 29, 201 Zentella, A.C. 23, 29 Zotzmann, K. 15

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Decolonizing Literacy: Mexican Lives in the Era of Global Capitalism (Critical Language and Literacy Studies, Volume 8)

Literacy in American Lives

Precursors of Functional Literacy (Studies in Written Language & Literacy)

Communication, Language and Literacy

Developing Language and Literacy 3-8

Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy (Rotledge Studies in Literacy)

Language and Literacy

Brain Research in Language (Literacy Studies)

Boys and Literacy: Exploring the Issues (Language and Literacy Inaction)

Women, Literacy and Development: Alternative Perspectives (Routledge Studies in Literacy)

Raising Standards in Literacy (Language and Literacy Inaction)

The Idea of English in Japan: Ideology and the Evolution of a Global Language (Critical Language and Literacy Studies)

Critical Literacy Critical Teaching: Tools for Preparing Responsive Teachers (Language and Literacy Series)

Handbook of Language and Literacy: Development and Disorders (Challenges in Language and Literacy)

Teaching English, Language and Literacy

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Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures (Literacy Studies)

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Language and Literacy in Science Education

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