Community cultural wealth and literacy capital in Latin American communities

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the literacy practices of the families and communities of first-generation college students in Latin America, and how community and family literacies can inform the understanding of first-generation college students’ identity and cultural values.

Design/methodology/approach
This transnational ethnography was conducted in local communities around three public universities in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. Participants included nine fist-generation college students and more than 50 people in their families and communities (i.e. relatives, parents and friends). Data gathering occurred at the university outside the formal space of the classroom, at home, and in the community. Data were interpreted through the lens of the community cultural wealth framework.

Findings
The author found that first-generation college students and their families and communities engaged in rich literacy practices that have been overlooked in policy, research, and media. It is argued that the concept literacy capital is necessary to acknowledge the critical literacy practices communities engage in. Literacy capital was manifested in these communities to preserve cultural traditions, to sponsor literacy practices and to question and resist unjust sociopolitical circumstances.

Practical implications
The findings of this study should inform a culturally sustaining pedagogy of academic literacies in higher education. Beyond asset-based approaches to academic literacies in Latin America, critical perspectives to academic literacies teaching and learning are needed that acknowledge the Latin American complexities.

Originality/value
These findings are significant because they unveiled how people in local communities were informed about the sociopolitical dynamics at the national and international scale that affected or even threatened their local culture, and how they used their literacy capital to react critically to those situations.

Full text

Community cultural wealth
and literacy capital in Latin
American communities
Lina Trigos-Carrillo
Department of Psychology of Development and Education,
Universidad de La Sabana, Chia, Colombia
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate the literacy practices of the families and communities
of first-generation college students in Latin America, and how community and family literacies can inform the
understanding of first-generation college students’identity and cultural values.
Design/methodology/approach –This transnational ethnography was conducted in local communities
around three public universities in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. Participants included nine fist-
generation college students and more than 50 people in their families and communities (i.e. relatives, parents
and friends). Data gathering occurred at the university outside the formal space of the classroom, at home, and
in the community. Data were interpreted through the lens of the community cultural wealth framework.
Findings –The author found that first-generation college students and their families and communities
engaged in rich literacy practices that have been overlooked in policy, research, and media. It is argued that
the concept literacy capital is necessary to acknowledge the critical literacy practices communities engage in.
Literacy capital was manifested in these communities to preserve cultural traditions, to sponsor literacy
practices and to question and resist unjust sociopolitical circumstances.
Practical implications –The findings of this study should inform a culturally sustaining pedagogy of
academic literacies in higher education. Beyond asset-based approaches to academic literacies in Latin
America, critical perspectives to academic literacies teaching and learning are needed that acknowledge the
Latin American complexities.
Originality/value –These findings are significant because they unveiled howpeople in local communities
were informed about the sociopolitical dynamics at the national and international scale that affected or even
threatened their localculture, and how they used their literacy capital to react critically to those situations.
Keywords Latin America, Higher education, Literacy, Community literacies, Family literacies,
Literacy capital
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This inquiry was originated as a response to the deficit approaches to college students’
literacy practices in Latin America (LA) that have permeated media, policy and research
during the twenty-first century. Every year, media report that university students “do not
The author would like to express sincere gratitude to the communities in Mexico, Colombia and Costa
Rica. Specially, the author would like to thank Miguel Barradas and the Universidad Veracruzana in
Xalapa, Maximiliano Prada and the Universidad Pedag
ogica Nacional de Colombia, and Silvia
Alvarado and the Universidad de Costa Rica. The author would also like to thank Dr James F.
Baumann, Dr Tony Castro and Dr Rebecca Rogers for their careful reading of the manuscript and
their insightful comments. Finally, this study would not have been possible without the daily support
and care of Charly.
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
3
Received 16 May 2019
Revised 28 September2019
Accepted 17 October2019
English Teaching: Practice &
Critique
Vol. 19 No. 1, 2020
pp. 3-19
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1175-8708
DOI 10.1108/ETPC-05-2019-0071
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/1175-8708.htm

know how to write”(El Tiempo, 2013) and they “have ‘poor’levels of reading and writing”
(El Espectador, 2016). In addition, official discourses in policy and programming for youth
across LA, “are often guided by deficit perspectives, inadvertently blaming youth and their
families for a lack of literacy skills”(Bartlett et al., 2011, p. 198). Some research in the area
has also substantiated deficit perspectives. According to Carlino (2013), for decades research
in LA focused on diagnosing what university students and professors could not do. They
assumed that written products made by college students had low quality and instructors did
not know how to improve these deficiencies (Gutiérrez and Fl
orez, 2011;Sánchez and Osorio,
2006).
There are three main limitations behind deficit approaches of university students’
literacy practices. First, these discourses are grounded in the assumption “that reading and
writing are singular, neutral, and objective skills that are learned through a progression of
ordered exercises and then transferable to any situation”(Kalman, 2013, p. 1). This
assumption ignores the ideological dimension of literacy, which affirms that “literacy is a
social practice”(Street, 2003, p. 77); literacy is rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity
and being and situated in social contexts. Second, these discourses tend to blame the
students and their families for national literacy test results, which fails “to acknowledge the
ways in which social structures, racial projects, and the existing economy and labor market
shape access to and use of literacy”(Bartlett et al.,2011, p. 198). Finally, there is the
assumption that students need to be socialized and acculturated into academic literacies
without consideration of the literacy practices students perform in their families and
communities. Although some researchers “have approached the disjunctures between home
and school through documenting funds of knowledge and restructuring the curriculum to
privilege local knowledge”(Rogers, 2002, p. 251), the relationship between literacy practices
and local communities in higher education is still understudied. For these reasons, research
adopting a critical perspective of literacy as a social practice is needed to understand the role
of community and family literacies in highereducation.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the literacy practices of the families and
communities of first-generation college students in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica.
Community and family literacies can inform our understanding of low income college
students’identity and cultural values to improve our teaching and practice.
Theoretical perspectives
Reframing community cultural wealth in the Latin American context
Yosso (2005) critiques interpretations of Bourdieu’s social capital theory that considered the
knowledges of the upper and middle classes as “capital valuable to a hierarchical society”
(p. 70), because they imply the assumption that “people of color ‘lack’the social and cultural
capital required for social mobility”(p. 70). Consequently, she proposes the alternative
concept community cultural wealth, which “is an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and
contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and
micro-forms of oppression”(p. 77). Yosso (2005) argues that the community cultural wealth
is nurtured through at least six forms of capital: aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic,
familial and resistant. Yosso has used the concept of community cultural wealth to reclaim
the value of mestiza cultural knowledges in the face of the privileged White American
culture.
However, in LA the upper- and middle-income mestizo ideology is the dominant one.
Mestizaje, which means both cultural and biological mixture between Spanish and
Indigenous, was a racial project structured by the Spaniards during the eighteenth century.
The aim of Mestizaje was to dominate and control the Indigenous’cultures. By the
ETPC
19,1
4

beginning of the nineteenth century, the mestizos “were already an important social stratum
in the colonial society and were allowed the same kinds of work as non-noble Iberians”
(Quijano, 2000, p. 217). Meanwhile, Black and Indigenous people, who resisted Mestizaje,
received discriminatory treatment and were oppressed. In the twenty-first century, Latin
American Blacks and Indigenous still suffer various forms of racial oppression. Among
mestizos, there are also strong differences; upper- and middle-income mestizos and White
people have a higher status and access in society than low-income mestizos, who are
considered to have “deficient”cultures because they are closer to the Indigenous’ones.
Therefore, Black, Indigenous, and low-income mestizos have less access to economic and
political power. In this article, the community cultural wealth framework reclaims the value
of Black, Indigenous and low-income mestizos in LA.
Ideological model of literacy
Literacy is an integral part of the social practices of local communities (Barton and
Hamilton, 2012). Practice means “what it is that people do, and what they say about what
they do”(Gonzáles, 2006, p. 40). When we shift from a conception of literacy located in
individuals to the ways in which people use literacy in social groups, it becomes a
community resource.
Two key aspects of this model are the notions of literacy events (Heath, 1983) and literacy
practices (Street, 2003). Literacy events are any observable occasion in which a written text
is involved in social interaction (Hamilton, 2010). For example, a mother writes her
grandma’s recipe of tortillas to remember it and shares it with her siblings. Literacy
practices is a broader concept that involves, “the socially regulated, recurrent, and patterned
things that people do with literacy as well as the cultural significance they ascribe to those
doings”(Brandt and Clinton, 2002, p. 342). Literacy practices are culturally constructed; that
is, they incorporate literacy events with “the ways we understand, feel and talk about those
events”(Hamilton, 2010, p. 10). Further, “literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in
broader social goals and cultural practices”(Barton and Hamilton, 2012, p. 11), as when
recipe writing is indicative of the cultural practice of cooking as a form of preserving
cultural traditions and knowledge.
Family and community literacies
As Rogers (2002) explains, “family literacy practices are more than just ways of using
literacy and language in the home”(p. 351). Family literacy studies “explore the types of oral
and literate practices taking place in homes and neighborhoods, often with the expectation
that such study will benefit educators”(Cushman et al.,2006, p. 190). The use of literacies in
the plural indicates that, “literacy is not the same in all contexts”(Barton and Hamilton,
2012, p. 10). Literacies involve different media and symbolic systems; they are related to
different domains of life; and they change across cultures. Family literacies have been
usually studied at home (Barton and Hamilton, 2012;Heath, 1983;Taylor and Dorsey-
Gaines, 1988), and in the public domains of the school and the workplace (Pitt, 2000;Rogers,
2002).
The concept community literacies refers to the literacy practices in local communities.
Since I compared the social practices of communities across countries, I identified local
communities following these criteria: people in the community share a geopolitical space
(e.g. a country, or city), they share social and cultural values (e.g. people celebrate certain
holidays), they engage in communal actions (e.g. going to church, or attending the same
school) and they live at the same historical moment (e.g. the disappearance of 43 students in
Iguala, Mexico). In this study, community literacies correspond to those literacy practices
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
5

performed by the people in the intimate space of home and in public spaces outside the
classroom. Most community literacies were recorded on campus(mainly outside classrooms;
i.e. cafeterias, building halls, libraries, etc.), where these students constructed community,
and in the neighborhoods where the students lived.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy
The concepts of community cultural wealth and community and family literacies align with
a pedagogy that not only recognizes the family and community literacies of Black,
indigenous and low-income communities and their culture, but also sustains them: A
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CPS). “CPS seeks to perpetuate and foster –to sustain –
linguistic, literate and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and
as a needed response to demographic and social change”(Paris and Alim, 2014, p. 93). In
higher education, CPS means that students access academic and disciplinary literacies
without renouncing to other critical literacy practices that are engrained in their
communities. In fact, academia must learn from the critical literacy practices that are
presented in this study and empower Black, Indigenous and low-income college students to
maintain and strengthen their community and family literacies.
Family and community literacies in LA
Extant research on family and community literacies in LA centers on how Black, Indigenous
and low-income mestizo communities interact with dominant literacy practices. Virginia
Zavala (2012,2013,2014) has studied from a critical ethnographic perspective the literacy
practices of Quechua communities in Peru, and how governmental policies affect the
cultural identity of the Quechuas. In her work, Zavala urges that policies and practices
should include Quechua culture and language as part of the Peruvian culture. In Brazil,
Marihno (2013) concluded that as the indigenous group Xacriabá increased relationships
with governmental institutions and the mainstream society, they had to face more demands
to assume dominant literacy practices that contradicted their cultural values.
Studies on family literacies have highlighted the rich practices of communities that have
been traditionally labeled as “illiterate.”In Argentina, Cragnolino (2013), in a study of
literacy practices among rural families, concluded that the spaces of literacy that were
configured in the life of the peasant families of Tulumba show a richness and complexity
that is often overlooked in educational environments that repeatedly qualify rural spaces as
“illiterate.”In Mexico, Kalman (2013) studied how fishers incorporated the use of GPS and
digital mapping to their traditional practices, and she concluded that scientists’
technological options and forms of representation in the fishing community “were
questioned, scrutinized, and integrated with other ways of knowing”(p. 78). In a study of the
literacy practices of Bolivian families in Argentinian schools, Feldsberg (1997) found that
Bolivians resisted acculturation by not fully adopting the literacy practices of Argentinian
schools. In an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of working families in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil, Castanheira (2013) concluded that the increase in written signs in public
spaces had implications for the kind of texts available. Families incorporated school
practices to their social life, and national education and curriculum changes reflected the
changes in family literacies.
Findings of studies conducted in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil highlighted
how education policies, particularly in higher education, ignored the social realities of people
from rural areas (Lorenzatti and Ligoria, 2015). These findings relate to this paper as most
first-generation college students in this study came from rural areas. In an ethnographic
study of the literacy practices in different social contexts of people with low educational
ETPC
19,1
6

level in Argentina, Lorenzatti and Ligoria (2015) found that they engaged in rich written
cultural practices through different media tointerpret the world and appropriate knowledge.
However, most studies recognized the need of more research that highlights the value of
communities who have been traditionally labeled as “illiterate”and their relationship to
education policy, curriculum and instruction. Particularly, studies about the family and
community literacies of university students should inform ways to integrate the traditional
communities’values into the university literacy pedagogy.
Methods
Researcher reflexivity
As a scholar who has experienced life as a mestiza in LA and as a Latina in the United
States, I challenged the insider/outsider dichotomy, or the membership roles as natives and
non-natives assumed by researchers (Naaeke et al., 2012). Intersectional and intersecting
identities played an important role when I established relationships with the communities
because I recognize my privileges as an educated mestiza. While I was sometimes an insider
as a Spanish speaker, I was an outsider as a Colombian or as a woman or as a scholar. As a
critical researcher, I was open to the knowledge and history participants brought with them,
and respected their values, beliefs and culture as I learned from them. My approach was to
recognize the complex social, cultural, political and economic issues of each community
while at the same time I constructed bonds of trust and confidentiality with each community
member (Denzin and Giardina, 2016).
Transnational ethnography
This transnational ethnography (Tsuda et al., 2014) was conducted in local communities in
Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica. In this design:
Transnationalism is more grounded in specific localities and places. In fact, oftentimes, the so-
called “transnational”connections between peoples in different countries are actually translocal,
since their transborder activities are not actually engaging the nation-state or the national, but are
commitments and identifications with very localized communities, family and kin, or institutions.
(Tsuda et al., 2014, p. 130)
This approach highlights how global processes are rooted and instantiated at local levels
and how transnational connections can be identified in local communities across Latin
American countries with similar histories and culture.
The countries were selected because each had a low percentage of higher education
enrollment (OECD) and were predominantly Spanish speaking. I conducted this
ethnography at the Universidad Veracruzana (UV) and local communities in Xalapa,
Mexico; at the Universidad Pedag
ogica Nacional (UPN) and local communities in Bogotá,
Colombia; and at the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) and local communities in San José,
Costa Rica. Selected universities were research-intensive, publicly funded and located in a
major city. Public universities were the focus of this study because first-generation
university students were more likely to find more opportunities of access and social mobility
in these institutions (Dalle, 2016).
I spent a month living and gathering daily data at each research site, during which I
observed and interacted with the focal participants and their families and communities.
Data gathering occurred at the university outside the formal space of the classroom (e.g. the
university library and cafeteria, halls of university buildings), at home, and in the
community. I assumed an ethnographic perspective to data gathering and analysis, which is
inherent to the ideological model adopted in this study (Lillis and Scott, 2007). This design
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
7

enabled me to compare the family and community literacies across participants and across
countries in different social contexts.
Participants
Participants included nine fist-generation college students (eight women and one man) and
more than 50 people in their families and communities (i.e. relatives, parents and friends).
Focal participants were selected through an open call in the selected universities; students
who met the selection criteria (studying at the selected public university an undergraduate
program in the area of education, being 18years old or older and being a first-generation
college student) and wanted to participate in the study signed an informed consent form
(Table I). Additional participants were selected as they were part of the communities of focal
participants and they went through the informed consent process with a waiver of
documentation to respect the oral culture of the communities. The participation of additional
participants flowed naturally as I interacted with people in families and communities using
ethnographic methods. For example, when I arrived to Augusto’s home, his mother engaged
in a conversation with me,showed me her books, talked about her interest for education, and
told me her story. This was a common pattern in all the homes and communities I visited.
All data were collected in Spanish and all the research procedures described in this study
were approved by IRB, including the informed consent with a waiver of documentation
process.
Data sources
I collected five sources of data to understand the sociocultural contexts where literacies as
social practices took place. The variety of data enhanced trustworthiness and the quality of
thick descriptions (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). First, I observed participants every day at
university, family, and community contexts. I documented these observations in
ethnographic fieldnotes, which included: methodological notes (to refine data collection),
descriptive notes (to provide the nuances of literacy events and practices), and analytic notes
(to record possible interpretations and ongoing analysis). Second, I inquired with
participants about the social practices associated with their literacy events and practices.
For example, when I asked Kasandra how writing happened at home, she brought a cooking
book. Then, I asked her about the meaning of the book to her family; and as she showed the
book to me, she explained how they used it and how this was part of a broader cultural
tradition. These informal interviews provided the opportunity to understand specific events
in context, and to investigate the values, meanings, and frequency of literacy practices.
Informal interviews occurred daily during ethnographic fieldwork and each one lasted
Table I.
Participants’
demographic and
descriptive
information
Participant name Country Age Semester at University Major
Nastia Colombia 19 4th Philosophy Education
Dulce Colombia 19 4th Philosophy Education
Lorena Colombia 24 4th Philosophy Education
Augusto Costa Rica 26 6th Social Studies
Kasandra Costa Rica 24 6th Educational Counseling
Lucía Costa Rica 22 6th Special Education
Alexa Mexico 19 3rd Educational Psychology
Mayrin Mexico 22 4th Educational Psychology
Noelia Mexico 20 3rd Educational Psychology
ETPC
19,1
8

between 15 min and 2 h depending on the context (approximately 90 informal interviews).
Third, I conducted a total of 27, 90-min, in-depth semi-structured interviews with the nine
focal participants; three interviews with each participant, one each at the beginning, middle
and end of data collection. All semi-structured interviews were audio-recorded and
transcribed in Spanish. These interviews contributed to understanding the participants’
interpretations of specific events and to delving deeper into their construction of meaning
around sociocultural practices. Fourth, I collected over 750 ethnographic photographs
(Hamilton, 2000) of the ‘typical’literacy events as an important source of data to document
the everyday. I also collected over 50 visual and written artifacts, such as texts and other
cultural objects in which literacy was manifested as a social practice. Finally, I kept a daily
journal of my reflections during ethnographic fieldwork.
Data analysis
For the data analysis, I used the a priori codes (Saldaña, 2015): literacy events, literacy
practices, and sociocultural practices. This inductive analysis has been used to trace from
literacy events to literacy practices to cultural practices (Barton and Hamilton, 2012;
Hamilton, 2010;Heath, 1983). This methodology is recommended to study literacy practices
from an ethnographic approach (Heath and Street, 2008;Lillis and Scott, 2007). I conducted
two separate processes of data analysis: one for community literacies and another for family
literacies.
First, I coded the data related to community literacies by community (Xalapa, San José,
and Bogotá). I described all the literacy events observed during fieldwork, recorded in
interviews, and captured in photographs and artifacts. For example, on October 28, 2014 the
academic community at the UV organized a celebration of Día de los Muertos; during the
event students created altars to commemorate their dead people with flowers, food, candles,
and colorful decorations. Among the activities around the celebration, students wrote
Calaveras –skull-shaped paper where students wrote poems dedicated to a known dead
person. Then, I observed other instances where people in the community wrote the same
kind of poems, and then I inquired into this practice with members of the community in
formal and informal interviews. I also wrote four analytic memos to detail each literacy
practice. Then, I organized in a table every literacy event, its correspondent literacy practice,
and the sociocultural practices related to them. In this coding phase, I found the following
codes: literacy for public denounce and student protest, literacy for critical consciousness,
functional uses of literacy, reading as a cultural practice and literacy in cultural traditions.
Second, I analyzed the family literacies of each participant’s family. In this stage, I
focused on the literacy activities performed at home. For example, in several occasions I
observed how Kasandra read fanfiction and manga in her free time. During informal and in-
depth interview, I asked her about the meaning she associated with fanfiction and the social
practices around it. Then, I created a table of these literacy events, its correspondent literacy
practices, and the social practice it was part of. In the analysis, I compared the description of
all literacy events and organized them into literacy practices; then, I tracked the
sociocultural practices every literacy practice was part of.
After the second round of analyses, I compared the most salient findings across the two
tables (community literacies and family literacies) and eight analytic memos. I looked at the
sociocultural practices where literacy played an important role, and the assets and capitals
nurtured through these literacy practices. I noticed the richness of the literacy practices, the
role of literacy sponsors, and how the participants and their families developed critical
consciousness aboutthe sociopolitical situations that affected them locally and globally.
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
9

After interpreting the data through the lenses of the community cultural wealth
framework, I started to explore another theoretical construct that could better provide an
account of what I found on the data: literacy capital. Then, I created an analytic memo about
the relationship between the concept and the findings. Next, I present how community
cultural wealth illuminates our understanding of the community and family literacies of
first-generation college students in LA.
To ensure trustworthiness, I used four criteria: credibility, transferability, dependability,
and confirmability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The methods used were: Prolonged periods of
participant observation and engagement, triangulation of data sources, expert and peer
debriefing, member check, researcher integrity through the use of memos and journals,
background information of each culture, audit trail, and systematicity of observations and
data collection.
Findings
I found that first-generation college students and their families and communities engaged in
rich literacy practices that have been overlooked in policy, research and pedagogy. I argue
that beyond the funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) these families and communities used
in daily life, they possessed a community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that allowed them to
resist deficit perspectives of their culture as well as the effects of cultural globalization.
In this study, first-generation college students and their families were low-income
mestizos who came from rural communities. In contrast with deficit views of their culture,
they developed an important community cultural wealth nurtured through what I
conceptualize as literacy capital, which is composed by the knowledges, practices and uses of
literacy in a community that allow people to maintaintheir culture and resist the influence of
the dominant power dynamics. There were at least three ways in which literacy capital was
manifested in these communities: first, literacy capital was used to preserve cultural
traditions; second, people in the communities served as literacy sponsors, or persons who
provided access to books and disseminated the joy for reading in the communities; and
third, through their literacy capital, students and their families engaged in literacy practices
that questioned and resisted unjust sociopolitical situations.
Literacy capital to support the preservation of cultural traditions
Local communities strongly maintained cultural traditions related to holidays or fiestas,
where religion, food, music, orality and dance were central. In this context, people’s literacy
capital was used to preserve their culture and resist the influence of cultural globalization
(Hopper, 2007). Traditional culture was not only engrained at the local communities but also
at the university as an integral part of the community. The celebration of the Día de los
muertos in Mexico is an example of how literacy capital supported the conservation of
cultural traditions.
Día de los muertos was celebrated at the university with altars decorated with food,
bread, flowers (cempasúchil), seeds, candles, and personal items of a known dead person.
During two days, people played music and danced in front of the altars while they shared
hot chocolate and tamales. These celebrations included reading passages during cultural
events and writing short poems dedicated to the dead called Calaveras on a skull-shaped
piece of paper (Plate 1). Calaveras are ingenious verses that are carefully thought and crafted
with humor about a person or a current event. It is said that each calavera represents the
rebirth of humans (Guerrero, 1998). The university community created poems about the
special treats of a known dead person or the circumstances around their death. The death
was metaphorically represented as a joyful skinny person who frequently visited the
ETPC
19,1
10

community. People’s literacy capital was used to preserve a cultural tradition that has
indigenous ancestry and is part of the Mexican identity.
While the local communities in Xalapa celebrated Día de los Muertos, people in Naolinco,
a town located 30 km. north of Xalapa, resisted the homogenizing effects of cultural
globalization (Hopper, 2007). People not only celebrated for five days Día de los muertos,
including la cantada (a night of music in the streets and the cemetery), but also resisted the
celebration of Halloween. Around the town, people hung on windows and doors
announcements that reclaimed Día de los muertos as part of the national Mexican identity
and rejected Halloween as part of their culture. Yosso (2005) defines resistant capital as
“those knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges
inequality”(p. 80). In this case, literacy, cultural and resistant capitals were used to preserve
their community cultural wealth and oppose the imposition of Halloween as a shared
cultural tradition by global networks (Hopper, 2007). Messages on announcements stated:
“Respect our traditions. #Say No to Halloween,”“Halloween is not part of traditions in
Naolinco. If I respect yours, you respect mine!”
Dear tourist: you visit us, I ask you the huge favor of respecting our tradition. In Naolinco, we
celebrate the Day of the Dead and la cantada. Please, say no to Halloween (Plate 2).
These literacy practices constituted a form of resistance and preservation of an important
Mexican tradition.
Another example of literacy capital as a form of community cultural wealth is the
conservation of gastronomic traditions through recipe notebooks. In Costa Rica, women
created recipe notebooks that were shared with relatives, and gave in inheritance to children.
In these practices, literacy was not the center of the social practice but a support in the
conservation of cultural identity. In Kasandra’s family, her mother created a notebook with
traditional recipes of Costa Rican food titled Recetario. She collected clippings of recipes and
wrote recipes of cultural tradition such as “Grandma’s Pumpkin Dessert”(Plate 3). Kasandra
and her sister created another notebook where they transcribed every recipe from their
mother’sRecetario; every time they cooked a recipe, they wrote on the back of the page: the
Plate 1.
Example of calavera
poem
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
11

date, the amount made, the number of portions obtained, and the time spent to adjust the
recipe to the desired amounts. The recipe notebooks also included important traditional
knowledge about cooking procedures and techniques. In this way, Kasandra and her sister
preserved the gastronomic legacy of their family, which constituted a form of community
cultural wealth.
In conclusion, first-generation college students and their families and communities used
their cultural, resistant, and literacy capitals to preserve their cultural traditions and to resist
the homogenizing effects of cultural globalization.
Plate 2.
Poster on a window
in Naolinco
Plate 3.
Recipe notebook with
“Grandma’s Pumpkin
Dessert”
ETPC
19,1
12

Literacy capital and the role of literacy sponsors
In the three local communities some individuals promoted literacy practices among
communities, or literacy sponsors. At first, the students had internalized the deficit
discourses about their literacy practices and thought literacy was not important in their
communities. Alexa stated: “in my family nobody likes reading and it is unusual that they
have books or buy books just because they want to read.”That perception was similar
among participants. However, they also recognized the role of literacy sponsors in their
communities.
Within families, literacy sponsors cultivated the joy and habit of reading. In Mexico,
Mayrin’s father promoted reading at home among his children asking the oldest siblings to
read to the youngest. Mayrin described:
My sisters and I say to our brothers, “Come, read, and tell me what you understood.”Because
when my father stays at home, he says: “You not only read, you should understand what you are
reading”or “listen to what your sister is reading.”
As a result, Mayrin liked reading literature, one of her sisters liked reading and writing
poems, and her oldest brother composed song lyrics. Noelia’s mother, a housemaid, was an
avid reader of novels, magazines, and books of general interest. In Colombia, Nastia’s father
instilled the pleasure for reading at home. And in Costa Rica, Augusto’s grandfather
cultivated the reading habit since he was a little boy; his grandfather read on a constant
basis religious stories or stories with pictures to his children, grandchildren, and great
grandchildren.
In this communities, literacy sponsors also played an important role in building literacy
capital. Although access to books was limited, literacy sponsors found free books in the
Internet or bought used books for the community. In communities where literacy resources
were scarce, public libraries were an important resource. All nine focal participants enriched
their literacy capital through frequent visits to the public and university libraries. As
Augusto stated, “for those who like reading it becomes very entertaining [...] I think the
library helps a lot.”The library offered access to books and reading spaces that otherwise
would be extremely limited for low-income students. In Bogota, Lorena went every Saturday
to a public library with her friends:
We always need books, so we make a plan [...] then we all write the name of the books on a sheet
of paper, and whoever goes to the library brings the books.
In Xalapa, the UV has a central library, popularly known as “USBI,”where students
spent hours reading, searching information and doing assignments. The USBI was a
place where people also gathered to engage in cultural practices such as reading aloud,
discussion groups, and workshops. Therefore, it constituted a community cultural
wealth.
Contrary to the popular belief, students enjoyed reading and writing. In Mexico, Alexa
wrote personal essays under a pseudonym, Mayrin read literature specially drama and
poems, and Noelia liked reading novels and self-realization books. In Colombia, Nastia wrote
short stories and read about sociology and history, Dulce also enjoyed reading about
aesthetics and writing personal letters, and Lorena liked reading literature and writing short
poems. In Costa Rica, Kasandra read manga and fanfiction, Augusto liked reading history
and literature, and Lucía read novels.
Over time, these students also became literacy sponsors among family, friends, and the
community. For example, some served as literacy sponsors at the public libraries. Dulce
described her involvement:
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
13

Well, you go to the library and as a philosopher you read a text that people don’t know [...]Itis
like introducing philosophy to common people, or as Sartre said: “To bring philosophy to the
streets.”
Other times, she volunteered to read aloud or to explain political texts to children. Other
students promoted reading within their families; Augusto read every day to his younger
sister and his niece, Lucía read to her sister, and Mayrin did the same with her seven
siblings. Finally, other students were literacy sponsors among their friends; for example,
Nastia and Lorena exchanged books with friends.
In summary, first-generation college students and their communities enriched their
literacy capital through social practices promoted by literacy sponsors. They provided
access to books and facilitated social practices to increase literacy capital among the people
in the local communities.
Family and community literacies as forms of resistance
People in local communities were not ignorant about the complex sociopolitical situations
of their countries and abroad. In Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica, people used their
resistant and literacy capitals to read, write, engage in critical conversations and create
opportunities for social action. Even though community and family literacies had
sometimes a functional purpose (i.e. reading a prescription or a legal document), other
times they fostered critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) about sociopolitical events. For
instance, Nastia’s father enhanced his daughter’s critical consciousness using their
literacy capital, and students at UV and UCR used their literacy and resistant capitals to
protest against oppression.
Nastia’s father, Joaquin, worked as a street candy vendor. They lived in one of the
poorest neighborhoods in Bogota and had very limited material resources. However,
Nastia described her father as a chess, mathematics and history fan. He also read the
news and was up to date on global and national politics. Nastia said, “You ask
anything to my father and he knows.”When Joaquin did not understand something,
he looked for more information at the dictionary or at an encyclopedia they bought in
installments. Nastia highlighted how “investigative”her father was and how much he
influenced her thinking. Instead of lecturing Nastia about what he knew, he asked her
questions or launched a sudden statement followed by: “Go and investigate! Am I
saying a lie? Because I could be telling lies.”He probed her. During ethnographic
observation, Joaquin showed me his collection of books and bills, and carefully
explained to me the origin and history of some bills. He also shared maps and special
books that he preserved with care. Nastia referred to her father as an “intellectual.”
Over time, Nastia developed a critical consciousness about her social reality and she
was committed to her education at a personal level. As she said, “I am more committed
to what I do, what I say, and what I think.”Nastia and Joaquin used their literacy
capitals to be critical thinkers, and through that, they also challenged deficit views of
“uneducated”people.
In Mexico, using their literacy and resistant capitals, students reacted critically to
the disappearance of 43 students from a normal school (institution for teacher training)
in the city of Ayotzinapa. First, on the walls of the university, students created a
bulletin board in which they displayed the daily news about the students’
disappearance; students not only read the news, they interacted with and responded to
them in different forms that included writing, public review of the news, and critical
discussions. These practices were not part of the formal curriculum. Plate 4 shows an
example of how students used their literacy capital to respond to and interact with the
ETPC
19,1
14

news. Sometimes, students created cartoons; other times, they wrote a paragraph as a
response, or hold critical conversations. Students also displayed a three-part banner
with the image of each of the 43 disappeared students, their name, age and the logo “No
one more”to demand no more disappeared students.
Second, students organized a rally in protest for this violent event and to reclaim justice
to the national government. Some of the banners and posters said: “We express our
solidarity with the 43 disappeared students,”“We demand to the government the immediate
appearance of the disappeared students,”and “They wanted to bury them, but they did not
know we are a seed.”Students also collected material resources to send to Ayotzinapa in
support of the students’families. Although Mexican students were afraid, as they expressed
in several occasions, they used their resistant and literacy capitals to demand justice and
respond critically to violence against students.
In another event in Costa Rica, in June 2015 students organized a rally to protest against
the cutbacks to university scholarships. For one day, almost 3,000 students, administrative
personnel, and faculty prepared banners and posters to resist the reduction of public
funding for scholarships. Among the messages they displayed that day, students wrote:
“Stop attacking the scholarships,”“Cutting back in education is like saving in progress,”
“Students should be in the classrooms but when the situation requires, they should be on the
streets (Rodrigo Facio).”University officials and different associations supported the pacific
protest, but students led the major organization of the event.
Although Costa Rican people defined themselves as “quiet, calm, and easy going”or
“pura vida”(pure life), they also have a history of resistance. In Costa Rica, public university
students were called “chacletudos”(those who wear sandals as a reference to poor people).
However, the students were proud of their universities, of their commitment to social justice,
and of their collective identity as public university students. They constructed literacy and
resistant capitals to act as political subjects and to develop critical consciousness about their
social realities.
Discussion
In this study, I investigated the literacy practices of the families and communities of first-
generation college students in LA that nurture their community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005),
and how community and family literacies can inform our understanding of first-generation
college students’identity and cultural values. I found that, as Yosso (2005) recognizes, the
community cultural wealth of some students “most often go unacknowledged or unrecognized”
(p.70).InLA,deficit views of college students are used as a form of racism and discrimination.
Deficit thinking positions Black, Indigenous and low-income mestizo students and families in
disadvantage because their knowledges and skills remain undervalued.
Plate 4.
Bulletin board on
wall in a university
hall in Mexico
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
15

In this article, I argue that the concept literacy capital is necessary to acknowledge the
critical literacy practices communities engage in. While the concept linguistic capital
(Yosso, 2005) recognizes “the intellectual and social skills attained through
communication experiences in more than one language and/or style”(p. 78), it is essential
to highlight the literacy practices of communities that are often deemed as “illiterate.”In
this article, literacy capital is defined as the knowledges, practices, values, beliefs and
uses of literacy or printed text in a community that empower people to maintain their
culture and resist the influence of dominant discourses and institutions, along with other
forms of capital. The theoretical framework of literacy as a social practice (Street, 2003)
provides an analytical tool to unveil the complexity and richness of literacy practices that
students, families and communities perform. People in the studied communities not only
used literacy practices for functional purposes, they also developed critical consciousness
to react to situations of injustice.
I found that people in the local communities of Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica
nurtured their community cultural wealth through: (a) the preservation of traditional
culture and knowledge using literacy and resistant capitals; (b) the role of literacy
sponsors as promoters of literacy capital in the community; and (c) the use of literacy
capital to react and protest against forms of oppression that affected the local
communities in LA.
These findings are significant because they unveiled how people in local communities
were informed about the sociopolitical dynamics at the national and international scale
that affected or even threatened their local culture, and how they used their literacy
capital to react critically to those situations. People in the communities were not passive
actors but instead active political agents. It is also noteworthy to notice how the public
university as a social institution was considered as part of the community because it
defended the interests of those who have less access to resources in LA. The people from
the university community, including administrative personnel, faculty, and students,
used their literacy and resistant capitals to counteract forms of oppression against
students.
These findings should inform a culturally sustaining pedagogy CSP (Paris and Alim,
2014) of academic literacies in higher education. Beyond asset-based approaches to
academic literacies in LA, we need critical perspectives to academic literacies teaching
and learning that acknowledge the Latin American youth complexities (Trigos-Carrillo,
2019). College students who live in poverty don’t need to be acculturated to the academic
literacies of the disciplines they study, they need to be empowered to critique the
disciplines and adapt them in ways that are meaningful to their communities. For
instance, the concept of literacy sponsors moves away from the idea that mainstream
literacies are the preferred forms of literacy capital (Brandt, 1998). Literacy sponsors who
are part of the communities do not aim at literacy appropriation but at literacy
sustainability.
Moving research forward in literacy education, we should consider how literacy capital
and community cultural wealth inform the understanding of literacy practices of
communities who have been historically disenfranchised in global societies. In addition,
critical sociocultural perspectives of literacy should aim for a comprehensive analysis of
literacy across social contexts and its relationship with social, cultural, economic and
political structures within which students are immersed in LA. We need to overcome the
belief that all students are homogeneous, and that literacy works in the same way for all
students independently of their social, cultural, racial, ethnic or economic conditions, to
work towards socially just pedagogies in higher education.
ETPC
19,1
16

References
Bartlett, L., L
opez, D., Mein, E. and Valdiviezo, L. (2011), “Adolescent literacies in Latin America and
the Caribbean”,Review of Research in Education, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 174-207.
Barton, D. and Hamilton, M. (2012), Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community,
Routledge, London.
Brandt, D. (1998), “Sponsors of literacy”,College Composition and Communication, Vol. 49 No. 2,
pp. 165-185.
Brandt, D. and Clinton, K. (2002), “Limits of the local: expanding perspectives on literacy as a social
practice”,Journal of Literacy Research, Vol. 34 No.3, pp. 337-356.
Carlino, P. (2013), “Alfabetizaci
on académica diez años después”,Revista Mexicana de Investigaci
on
Educativa, Vol. 18 No. 57, pp. 355-381.
Castanheira, M. (2013), “Indexical signs within local and global contexts: case studies of changes in
literacy practices across generations of working-class families in Brazil”, in Kalman, J. and
Street, B. (Eds), Literacy and Numeracy in Latin America. Local Perspectives and Beyond,
Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 95-108.
Cragnolino, E. (2013), “Access to written culture as part of the social reproduction strategies of
rural families in C
ordoba (Argentina)”, in Kalman, J. and Street, B. (Eds), Literacy and
Numeracy in Latin America. Local Perspectives and Beyond,Routledge,NewYork,NY,
pp. 38-51.
Cushman, E., Barbier, S., Mazak, C. and Petrone, R. (2006), “Family and community literacies”,Research
on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change, pp. 187-216.
Dalle, P. (2016), Movilidad Social Desde Las Clases Populares, CLACSO, Buenos Aires.
Denzin, N.K. and Giardina, M.D. (Eds), (2016), Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the
Politics of Knowledge, Routledge, New York.
Denzin, N. and Lincoln, Y. (2005), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research,3rded.,Sage
Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
El Espectador (2016), “Investigaci
on deja ver el “pobre”nivel de lectura y escritura de “primíparos”del
País”, available at: www.elespectador.com/noticias/educacion/investigacion-deja-ver-el-pobre-
nivel-de-lectura-y-escr-articulo-617982
El Tiempo (2013), “Escritura, la debilidad de los estudiantes”, available at: www.eltiempo.com/archivo/
documento/CMS-13240395
Feldsberg, R. (1997), “Fronteras socio-culturales: usos y prácticas de lectura y escritura de alumnos de
la comunidad boliviana en la escuela pública argentina y en el hogar”,Lectura y Vida, Revista de
la Asociaci
on Latinoamericana de Lectura, Vol. 18 No. 3.
Freire, P. (1970), “Cultural action and conscientization”,Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 40 No. 3,
pp. 452-477.
Gonzáles, N. (2006), “Beyond culture: the hybridity of funds of knowledge”, in González N., Moll L. and
Amanti C. (Eds), Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and
Classrooms, Routledge, New York, pp. 29-46.
Guerrero, A. (1998), Calaveras y Altares de Muertos en la Tradici
on Popular Mexicana, Universidad
Aut
onoma de Nuevo Le
on, Mexico.
Gutiérrez, M. and Fl
orez, R. (2011), “Enseñar a escribir en la universidad: saberes y prácticas de
docentes y estudiantes universitarios”,Revista Magis, Vol. 4 No. 7, pp. 137-168.
Hamilton, M. (2000), “Expanding the new literacy studies: using photographs to explore literacy as
social practice”, in Barton D., Hamilton M. and Ivanic R. (Eds), Situated Literacies: Reading and
Writing in Context, Routledge, London, pp. 16-34.
Hamilton, M. (2010), “Literacy in social context”, in Hughes N. and Schwab I. (Eds), Teaching Adult
Literacy: principles and Practice, Open University Press, New York, pp. 7-28.
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
17

Heath, S. (1983), Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Heath, S. and Street, B. (2008), On Ethnography: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research,
Teachers College Press, New York, NY.
Hopper, P. (2007), Understanding Cultural Globalization, Polity Press.
Kalman, J. (2013), “GPS technology, map reading, and everyday location practices in a fishing
community”, in Kalman J. and Street B. (Eds), Literacy and Numeracy in Latin America. Local
Perspectives and Beyond, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 69-80.
Lillis, T. and Scott, M. (2007), “Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology
and strategy”,Journal of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 5-32.
Lincoln, Y.S. and Guba, E.G. (1985), Naturalistic Inquiry, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills.
Lorenzatti, M. and Ligoria, V. (2015), Educaci
on de J
ovenes y Adultos y Educaci
on Rural: Aportes Para la
Formaci
on de Futuros Maestros, UniRío, Argentina.
Marihno, M. (2013), “The local and the global in literacy practices in ‘traditional communities’”,in
Kalman J. and Street B. (Eds), Literacy and Numeracy in Latin America. Local Perspectives and
Beyond, Routledge,New York, NY, pp. 19-37.
Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. and Gonzalez, N. (1992), “Funds of knowledge for teaching: using a
qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms”,Theory into Practice, Vol. 31 No. 2,
pp. 132-141.
Naaeke, A., Kurylo, A., Grabowski, M., Linton, D. and Radford, M. (2012), “Insider and outsider
perspective in ethnographic research”,Proceedings of the New York State Communication
Association, Vol. 2010 No. 1, p. 9.
Paris, D. and Alim, H. (2014), “What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy?
A loving critique forward”,Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 84 No. 1, pp. 85-100.
Pitt, K. (2000), “Family literacy: a pedagogy for the future?”, in Barton D., Hamilton M. and Ivanic
R. (Eds), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context,Routledge,NewYork,
pp. 108-124.
Quijano, A. (2000), “Coloniality of power and eurocentrism in Latin America”,International Sociology,
Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 215-232.
Rogers,R.(2002),“Between contexts: a critical discourse analysis of family literacy, discursive
practices, and literate subjectivities”,Reading Research Quarterly,Vol.37No.3,
pp. 248-277.
Saldaña, J. (2015), The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, Sage, Los Angeles.
Sánchez, J. and Osorio, J. (Eds), (2006), Lectura y Escritura en Educaci
on Superior: diagn
osticos,
Propuestas e Investigaciones, Universidad deMedellín, Medellín, Colombia.
Street, B. (2003), “What’s“new”in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and
practice”,Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 77-91.
Taylor, D. and Dorsey-Gaines, C. (1988), Growing up Literate: Learning from Inner-City Families,
Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
Trigos-Carrillo, L. (2019), “A critical sociocultural perspective to academic literacies in Latin America”,
Íkala, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 13-26.
Tsuda, T., Tapias, M. and Escandell, X. (2014), “Locating the global in transnational ethnography”,
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 123-147.
Yosso, T. (2005), “Whose culture has Capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural
wealth”,Race, Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 69-91.
Zavala, V. (2012), “Dilemas ideol
ogicos en torno a la educaci
on intercultural bilingüe: el caso de la
lectura en quechua”,Revista Peruana de Investigaci
on Educativa, No. 4, pp. 77-105.
ETPC
19,1
18

Zavala, V. (2013), “El quechua en las escuelas urbanas: nuevas posibilidades y viejos desafíos”,Tarea.
Revista de Educaci
on y Cultura, No. 84, pp. 28-33.
Zavala, V. (2014), “An ancestral language to speak with the other: closing down ideological spaces of a
language policy in the peruvian andes”,Language Policy, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 1-20.
Further reading
Bernard, H. (2011), Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches,
Rowman Altamira, Oxford, UK.
González, N., Moll, L. and Amanti, C. (2005), Funds of Knowledge, Mahwah, NJ.
About the author
Lina Trigos-Carrillo is a Professor at the Department of Psychology of Development and Education
at Universidad de la Sabana in Chia, Colombia. She obtained a PhD in Learning, Teaching and
Curriculum with emphasis in Literacy/Reading Education from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Trigos-Carrillo was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the “Strengthening Equity and Effectiveness for
Teachers of English Learners”(SEE-TEL) Project and the Campus Writing Program of the
University of Missouri from 2016 to 2018. Her areas of expertise include immigrant and refugee
families, pedagogies for emergent bilinguals, critical academic literacies, family and community
literacies, and the geopolitics of knowledge in multiliteracies. Lina Trigos-Carrillo can be contacted
at: lina.trigos@unisabana.edu.co
For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website:
www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm
Or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com
Community
cultural wealth
and literacy
capital
19