Artful Spaces/Safe Places: A Gallery Provokes Voices that Interrogate Common Narratives of Latino Immigrant Children

Abstract

What do Latino immigrant children’s voices say as they are provided a safe community space to be heard and soft clay through which to speak? Through art work, focus groups, gallery exhibitions, and filtering data (Peñalva, 2018) this critical ethnographic research (Madison, 2012; Merriam & Tissdell, 2016; Wolcott, 2008; Thomas, 1993) exposes the complex political nature of linguistic, cultural, and national negotiations in which Latino children and their families in this study engage daily. This work troubles stereotypic mainstream narratives (Dillard, 2012; Hooks, 1990, 1994; Janks, 2010) and points out the need for strong community/university collaborations to impact the excavation of deeper understandings of people in our neighborhoods. This ethnographic portrait of families, part of a larger study, involved the community director in an urban Spanish speaking church and faculty from literacy education and visual art at IUPUI. In this study children created clay objects called “hanging journals” during a summer program. These clay artworks acted as semiotic mediators (Kress, 2010; Pahl & Rowsell, 2012; Borgmann & Berghoff, 2005) for voices of this group—voices which routinely go unheard, or are devalued. In other words, the clay became a container for meaning and was imbued with life stories and memories of the young artists. Using theoretical frameworks from the fields of literacy and art, layered with ethnographic tools of observation, dialogue, reflection, interview, video, and analysis, the volume on these important and complicated voices was turned up to hear buried stories and to interrogate commonly accepted narratives that swirl around Latino immigrants and their families. This study provides a peek into the authentic narratives of children as they share daily navigation across national, cultural, and language boundaries and shows the power of the arts to communicate across contested spaces spaces of fear, tension, and resistance. This study embraces the necessity of authentic university/community collaborations as a two-way street to understand and empower Latino youth, to better prepare future teachers as agents of change, and to expose versions of immigrant ways of being and knowing that are misconstrued. Stacy: Are you all able to speak Spanish in school? Carla: Oh yes, we speak Spanish with our friends. Stacy: Really! So your teacher lets you speak Spanish at school? Carla: Well, we hide under our desks and that’s where we speak Spanish with our friends at school. Peñalva, 2016. Focus group with children from first generation, Latino immigrant families ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1 Borgmann/ Artful Spaces 6 Stacy has known Carla since she was born. Her parents are immigrants from Honduras, and have been members of the church (where the community center site of this research is housed) for many years. While she has worked among the Latino immigrants at this site for decades as a pastor’s wife and teacher, this was one of her first conversations with the children at the site as a researcher. The literal as well as the metaphorical impact of Carla’s statement did not go un-noticed. Here the voice of a strong, bilingual and confident little girl was being “shoved under the desk,” hidden, devalued, not welcomed in that school room. There was a strong disconnect between the community center and the school; between a place where immigrant voices were heard and welcomed and a place where native language and all the identity and family history wrapped up in that tongue were rendered unimportant and forced to be hidden. Subsequent research grew from this desire to hear and value the voices of immigrant children and their families—what would these voices say if they had a safe place to speak? How could the volume on these voices be turned up to understand their deep undertones, histories and nuances? SITUATING THE STUDY This paper, part of a much larger research study, explores how spaces can be created to truly hear voices of immigrant children and their families. The study strains to hear what those voices are really saying by examining the children’s artwork and the voices that flow from that work, and interrogates ways that academia and community spaces can work together to hear, value and learn from those voices. THE RESEARCHERS Stacy I was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in a monolingual, predominantly white, middle class world. Upon attending college, I met people from other countries who spoke other languages and had much different histories than mine. I married a man from Honduras, and went to live in the mountains outside the capital city of Tegucigalpa for 5 years. There I lived my life as “the other,” learning a new language and muddling through an unfamiliar culture. My two oldest sons were born there, and I watched with wonder as they learned two languages simultaneously and navigated the countries and cultures of their birth with apparent ease. This is where my curiosity began regarding the ways that people navigate daily across the borders of language, nations and cultures translingual, transnational, and transcultural. For the last 30 years I have worked in a church and community center where first generation Latino immigrant families congregate and form bonds, sharing histories, languages and struggles. In recent years I have worked among this group as the pastor’s wife and community director but also as a researcher, digging into stories they willingly share and trying to honor their voices—all the while in awe of their resilience and resourcefulness as they carve out a life in this country (Peñalva, Coggin and Medina, 2014; Peñalva, 2016). My stance as an advocate and partner with those who “come to a new awareness of selfhood, looking critically at the social situation in which they find themselves” (Freire, 1970/2009) is unapologetically evident in this research. ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1 Borgmann/ Artful Spaces