Abstract
Through Carmen Elvira’s testimonio as an adult, we explore how one’s multiple literacies and languaging dynamically shift through life stages. Carmen Elvira is a proud Mexican woman who moved to the U.S. nearly five years ago with her multilingual daughters and husband. In addition to the physical Mexico-U.S. border, she explores many cultures and languages in a transborder lifestyle nurtured by technology. Simultaneously both an ESL teacher and an ESL student, she blurs the lines we might place on one’s roles in language learning/teaching contexts. Through her testimonio, readers will see her resistance literacies emerge from a well of cultural pride and individual strength, how digital literacies allow her to language resistance, and how her cosmopolitan literacies intersect with and extend her languaging across borders.
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Notes
- 1.
We infer that “constance” is an example of Carmen Elvira’s first order languaging in English for “perseverance”, as she takes “constancia” from Spanish to create the cognate “constance”.
- 2.
Although we use the gender-nuetral term Latinx in English, Carmen Elvira prefers Latino.
References
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Babino, A., Stewart, M.A. (2020). Carmen Elvira: An Adult ESL Student (and Teacher) Newly Arrived from Mexico. In: Radicalizing Literacies and Languaging. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56138-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56138-3_7
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