“We Are More Than That!”: Latina Girls Writing Themselves from Margins to Center

Abstract

In this article, I center the voices and experiences of Yazmin, Valeria, Guadalupe, and Monet, four escritoras that participated in Somos Escritoras, a creative space for Latina girls (grades 6–12) that invites them to share and perform stories from their lived experiences using art, theater, and writing as tools for reflection and examination of self and world. For two weeks, these escritoras created art and composed personal stories from their lives that addressed the tensions and contradictions at the intersections of age, language, culture, and ethnicity they navigate daily as Latina girls. For my inquiry, I explored the following questions: How do Latina/Chicana girls use writing and art to describe their experiences, histories, and identities? What can we learn from their voices? In their embodied art and writing, the girls wrote toward the foundation that their mothers had paved for them through their hopes and dreams, sometimes deferred. Rewriting narratives of self, the girls drew on creative acts to examine their lives and reclaim their experiences. Theorizing the future, the girls construct a world for themselves rooted within the stories and voices of their ancestors and those of the writers, poets, and storytellers whose writing has carved out a place for us in the world. Their words offer important perspectives into the ways that we design spaces and literacy curriculum that centers their intellectual, cultural, and gendered ways of knowing and being as important resources for teaching and learning.