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Session A1

Un/Documented Literacies: Rewriting Cultural Citizenships in the United States
reviewed by Angela Castillo and Sally Chandler
angelacastillo86@gmail.com / sallywchandler@gmail.com

In the 1980s, work by Brian Street and other "new literacy" researchers challenged then current language theory by claiming that literacies, as opposed to one overarching literacy, were neither abilities nor skills, but complex social practices embedded in ideology and context. This claim changed both our understanding of what literacies do and our approach to studying them. It mandated in-depth, qualitative studies of relationships among individuals, communities, and literacy practices, and demanded that we reflect on how literacies are implicated within structures for power. Since that time, literacy researchers have conducted studies focused on how literacies are learned, valued, and used within many different communities and within a wide variety of contexts. Speakers for this panel contributed to this work characterizing how individuals learn, feel about, share, re-formulate, and participate in the many different literacies within human communities.

The panel focused on how literacies structure identities and relationships within cultural discourses for citizenship in the United States. Specifically, panelists discussed the following: how marginalized literacies can carry silenced perspectives across time and thus play a role in the (re)interpretation of history; how biliteracy can empower immigrants as they craft their citizenship identities; and how current assumptions about literacy instruction and citizenship foreground the importance of composition instruction, yet evade and misrepresent the inequalities literacy instruction can perpetuate.

Mira Shimabukuro: “Always Tomorrow's Seed: Cultivating Japanese American Activist Literacies”

From this window of despair
May Sky
There is always tomorrow.
- Incarcerated Issei poet Neiji Ozawa, translated by Violet Kazue de Cristoforo

Shimabukuro opened with a poem by Neiji Ozawa, a poet incarcerated as part of the U.S. relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II. This haiku, written in confinement but with a message of hope for tomorrow, embodied the talk's central metaphor where literacies can become messages sent to the future. The presentation emphasized the power of literacies to preserve silenced or "outlawed" perspectives so that they might be reactivated at a later time, in a tomorrow where they can effect healing for those whose lives and perspectives have been overrun. She reported that few people talked about what happened inside the American concentration camps after the war so that the role played by these literacies became particularly important. “In a socio-cultural and historical context shaped by both multi-sourced community silence and the textual ethos¹ fostered by epistemologies ‘firmly Western in nature,’ recovering text that embodies a more complicated history can become a powerful cultivator of contemporary activism,” noted Shimabukuro.

The body of the talk focused on two instances where the material nature of literacies served to document the enormity of the injustice imposed on citizen and non-citizen U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry as well as challenge the stereotype of the passive acceptance of this injustice by the prisoners.

The first discussion centered on the Heart Mountain Mystery Rocks. Discovered in a 55-gallon barrel after the war, the stones, each inscribed with a Japanese character, were donated to the Japanese American National Museum. Parents wrote names and thoughts on stones when children died; this writing was believed to help children move through limbo. Shimabukuro stated that “without the inscriptions, the stones would have been seen as something to be disposed, and cultural resistance has been ‘folded into’ the rocks via literacy. As such, literacy enables the resistance to be carried across time and space . . . [and] this redistribution cannot be underestimated.“

The second discussion centered on activities of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. In 1944, Nisei were reclassified as open to the draft. This initiative resulted in the formation of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, a group dedicated to articulating and resisting the injustice of this decision. Their manifesto preserves the members' perspective and their act of resistance. Shimabukuro noted the work of Scott Kurashige, a UM Amherst professor who integrates the history of the resisters into his teaching. She mentioned that some of his students have become activists, and she observed this transfer is an important part of how literacy cultivates activism across time.

The talk closed with an excerpt from a poem by Toyo Suyemoto, “Transplanting,” a piece which returned listeners' focus to the power of literacies to lie dormant when necessary so they can carry their message to the future:

''Oh, guard the exposed roots against
Untimely sun and wind:
Some other soil may prove
More flower-wise and kind.

So let a richer earth restore
What once had died in need
Strong roots will then respond
And bear tomorrow's seed.''

¹Collins, James, and Richard K. Blot. Literacy and Literacies: Texts: Power, and Identity. Cambridge, UK: University Press, 2003. Print.

Kate Vieira: “American by Paper: Portuguese-language Literacy and Assimilation”

In the second talk, Kate Vieira extended the panel's contemplation of citizenship and literacy through discussing three literacy narratives collected within the resident Brazilian and Azorean immigrant communities in Fall River, Massachusetts. Taken together, these stories illustrate how immigrants use bi-literacies to negotiate their citizenship in the United States.

Vieira began with Cristina's story. Cristina came to America legally from Brazil. Like many immigrants subsequent to the Immigration Act of 1965, Cristina came at the request of a relative who was a legal resident and who petitioned for her to come to the United States. Although she arrived as a child and learned to speak English in grade school, Cristina left formal schooling in the 8th grade and went to work cutting curtains in a local factory. She married at 21 and later worked caring for the elderly. The reading and writing in her daily life and work had not been difficult for her. When Cristina decided she wanted to become a citizen after 31 years of living in the United States, however, she found that passing the written examination for citizenship was a challenge. She passed on her fourth try and was very proud of her accomplishment and even kept a copy of it. At the same time, Cristina declared that she was “only American by paper,” emphasizing that this citizen self was a representation in writing, a self who was recognized as a citizen of the United States but who was separate from the self that belonged to the Portuguese speaking community.

Vieira then connected Cristina's narrative to the story of Rafaela, an immigrant from the Azores. The two women met through the apartment building where they both lived and became friends. Rafaela was an illegal immigrant and, after five years of searching for a way to secure citizenship, found a path to legalization through marrying her boss from work. Cristina helped her friend and her fiancé fill out the forms to petition for citizenship through marriage, and she translated between Cristina, who spoke only Portuguese, and her husband, who spoke only English. Cristina also wrote an affidavit to testify to the validity of the proposed marriage, and perhaps the most moving slide in the presentation was the photo of this document. Carefully written and re-written, this letter was powerful testimony to Cristina's awareness of the power of writing, to her commitment to her friend and to her community, and to her determination to overcome the tyranny of paper through making it work for her own purposes. In contrast to Cristina, Rafaela used her native Portuguese and her connections to English speakers (Cristina) in the Portuguese community to leverage citizenship.

The third narrative presented another relationship between literacies and citizenship. Marcio, an illegal immigrant from Brazil who lived and worked in America for eight years, did not have a legal pathway to citizenship. Legal representation of his behavior positioned him as someone who has broken the law—a criminal—but he did not believe in this representation. Instead, Marcio used teachings from the church and the Bible to justify his presence in the United States. He interpreted the Bible as saying that God's law is more important than the law of the country, pointing out that the Bible says to treat the immigrants well, since the Jews were immigrants to Egypt. In this way, religion enabled Marcio to craft a worldview that had room for him in it. Vieira played a clip of a song Marcio wrote about his experiences in this country, of leaving those he loved, and of losing strength but never forgetting God. According to Vieira, Marcio commented that, "It wasn't even me who wrote this song. This song is my life. It is my story."

Vieira concluded by pointing out how each of these stories challenges us to re-imagine connections between literacies and what it means to be an immigrant.

Amy Wan: “In the Name of Citizenship”

In the final presentation, Amy Wan discussed how the term “citizenship” is used in composition instruction. This discussion grew out of a larger project that examined “the relationship between citizenship and literacy through a historical study of citizenship and literacy training programs from the early 20th century United States.” She began by observing the positive associations between literacy instruction and the creation of a more literate, more fully participatory citizenship. After reviewing the range of invocations of literacy as essential to “good” citizenship issued by everyone from basic writing instructors and critical literacy pedagogues to the new President, Wan observed that these moves position writing instruction as constituting broad cultural significance, as nourishing or improving the quality of citizenship, and bolstering or justifying the incorporation of instruction in new literacy technologies. Wan then made the point that the persistent invocation of literacy instruction as underpinning effective citizenship has created an essentially superficial understanding of what real-world relationships between literacy and citizenship might be. That is, the connection is assumed as important—making literacy instruction essential, even urgent—however, this nature as well as the implications connecting literacy and citizenship remain largely unexplored.

Wan's observations took on particular force as she considered how the rhetoric of Composition Studies invokes and represents the “participatory citizenship” it claims to create. As she commented, “This conception of citizenship does not fully integrate the idea that students come to the classroom with differing access both to cultural and legal forms of citizenship.” She then pointed out that the current “approach to participatory citizenship . . . assumes the possibility of neutral participation skills,” and as argued by Wan and illustrated by the two previous talks, this is clearly not the case.

Wan concluded her talk by suggesting that “to make citizenship's relationship to status [we understand] literacy as a mechanism of citizenship . . . a channel through which the rights and obligations and resources of citizenship are accessed. . . . By thinking about citizenship as a flow of resources and literacy as one of those resources, helping students become "good citizens" becomes connected to making them competent and successful in other measures beyond participation.”

Works Cited