English Education - Volume 52, Issue 3, 2020

In this article, we examine fugitivity and fugitive literacies as they are enacted by transfronterizx youth—young people who cross and experience life on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. Through a community-based literacy project located on the border between El Paso, Texas, USA, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, this article focuses on storytelling and multimodal creation, what we refer to as multimodal cuentos. Findings illustrate the ways in which Chicanx/Latinx transfronterizx youth exhibit, build, and sustain their ways of resisting white, Western, hegemonic definitions of literacy through communication and creativity. We theorize the notion of fugitivity on the border and share potential implications for language and literacy education for Chicanx/Latinx border crossers.

Guest Editors’ Note: The Fugitive Literacies Collective is a constellation of critical scholar-friends of color assembled from the 2016-18 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (CNV) cohort. The Collective is committed to resisting hegemonic academic norms and mores. Our members think, study, write, and publish together in an intentional effort to irradiate the knowledges, complexities, and tensions that percolate when possibilities for the real or fictive liberation of historically marginalized and dehumanized persons and communities are embraced as desirable and worthwhile purposes for educational research(ers). The Collective seeks to embody and animate humanizing approaches to the intellectual labor of scholarship by enacting collaborations that honor a horizontal approach to the co-construction of knowledges while also highlighting literacies that break from educational practices that are inextricably rooted in anti-black, racist, and colonialist ideologies. This special issue of English Education features work from a fraction of the collective that theorizes and illustrates fugitive literacies by variously examining ways of knowing and meaning-making practices across multimodalities. The issue opens with an introductory editorial written by CNV cofounder Carol Lee that sets the stage for the ensuing critical conversations. To borrow from the Combahee River Collective, this issue is our proclamation to the world that we choose—and are ready for—a lifetime of work as freedom-seeking scholars of liberatory literacies.