This document summarizes a seminar on multicultural texts and voices held at Universidad Católica de Salta on June 6-7, 2014. It discusses a research project on identity and migration in English-speaking discourses led by a team of researchers. It also covers concepts from Henry Giroux's work on border pedagogy, including accessing multiple cultural codes and perspectives to appreciate how texts represent different ideological interests. Finally, it discusses ideas around cultural identity and the in-between space that migrants occupy during identity construction.

1. Seminar
“Multicultural Texts and Voices”
(R.R. 345/14)
Universidad Católica de Salta
06 y 07 de junio de 2014

2. Proyecto de investigación
Consejo de Investigaciones de la Universidad Católica de Salta
Identidad y migración
en discursos anglófonos
(Res. Rec. Nº 560/11)
EQUIPO DE INVESTIGACION:
ALEMAN, MARIA JOSE
COMPANY, SUSANA MARIA
IRRAZABAL PAZ, FERNANDA
LOUTAYF, SOLEDAD
MICHEL, MARIA MARTA

3. Border pedagogy
Giroux states the need to be open to
different voices and traditions, in an
ongoing attempt to eliminate forms of
subjective and objective suffering, so
that the act of communicating and
living extends rather than restricts the
creation of democratic public
spheres.
H. Giroux, Border Pedagogy as Postmodern
Resistance (1991)

4. Border pedagogy offers students the opportunity to:
 access multiple cultural codes, experiences, and
languages
 become media literate in a world of changing
representations
 access the knowledge and social relations that
enable them to read critically
 appreciate how texts express and represent
different ideological interests
 regard texts as social and historical constructions
 analyze texts in terms of presences and absences
 read dialogically through a configuration of many
voices

5. students as border-crossers
cultural borders historically
constructed and socially organized
with rules and regulations
borders of meaning, maps of
knowledge, social relations, and
values are negotiated and rewritten
as the codes and regulations become
destabilized and reshaped.

6. “coming to voice”
engaging in discussions of cultural
texts, drawing upon one’s personal
experience, and confronting the
process through which ethnicity and
power can be rethought as a political
narrative that challenges racism as
part of a broader struggle to
democratize social, political, and
economic life.

7. multiple positions and experiences that
allow teachers and students to speak in
and with many complex and different
voices.
many voices are allowed to speak to
initiate students into a culture that
multiplies rather than restricts
democratic practices and social relations
as part of a wider struggle for
democratic public life.
H. Giroux

8. Cultural Identity
Cultural identity, is a matter of
'becoming' as well as of 'being'.
It belongs to the future as much as to
the past.
It undergoes constant transformation.
It is subject to the continuous 'play' of
history, culture and power.

9. In-betweeness or liminality
A threshold from where one gets on and
off during the process of identity
construction.
The space where migrants move with the
freedom of reinventing themselves.
(Kral, 2009)

10. Pat Mora (b. 1942, El Paso,
Texas)

12. Día
El día de los niños, El día de los libros/Children's
Day, Book Day
April 30th and every day of the year
In 1996, author Pat Mora learned about the
Mexican tradition of celebrating April 30th as El
día del niño, the day of the child. Pat thought,
“We have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Yes!
We need kids’ day too, but I want to connect
all children with bookjoy, the pleasure of
reading.”
http://www.patmora.com/whats-dia/

13. “Immigrants”
by Pat Mora
What is an immigrant?
Who is an immigrant?
What associations does the
word bring about?

15. Immigrants
Pat Mora
wrap their babies in the American flag,
feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie,
name them Bill and Daisy,
buy them blonde dolls that blink blue
eyes or a football and tiny cleats
before the baby can even walk,
speak to them in thick English,
hallo, babee, hallo,
whisper in Spanish or Polish
when the babies sleep, whisper
in a dark parent bed, that dark
parent fear, “Will they like
our boy, our girl, our fine American
boy, our fine American girl?”

18. The immigrant has been made into something
resembling an alien. He is an example of the
undead, who will invade, colonise and
contaminate, a figure we can never quite
digest or vomit.
Unlike other monsters, the foreign body of the
immigrant is unslayable. Resembling a zombie
in a video game, he is impossible to kill or
finally eliminate not only because he is already
silent and dead, but also because there are
waves of other similar immigrants just over the
border coming right at you.
Hanif Kureishi, The migrant has no face, status or
story, The Guardian

19. Others only have the power we give them. The
immigrant is a collective hallucination forged in our
own minds. This ever developing notion, like God or
the devil, is an important creation, being part of
ourselves, but the paranoiac, looking wildly around,
can never see that the foreign body is inside him. Of
course not: when the world is divided so definitively
into the Hollywood binaries of good and bad, no one
can think clearly. Hate skews reality even more than
love. If the limits of the world are made by language,
we need better words for all this. The idea of the
immigrant creates anxiety only because he is
unknown and has to be kept that way.
Hanif Kureishi, The migrant has no face, status or story, The Guardian

20. Look, don’t identify me by the size and shape of my body, my social
class, my job, my gender, my ethnicity, my sexuality, my nationality, my
age, my religion, my education, my friends, my lifestyle, how much
money I earn, the clothes I wear, the books I read, where I go shopping,
the way I decorate my house, the television programmes and movies I
watch, my leisure and sports activities, the car I drive, the music I listen
to, the drinks I like, the food I eat, the clubs I go to, where I go on holiday,
the way I speak or my accent, the things I say, the things I do, or what I
believe in. I’m just me. OK?’
Culture and Identity. Published by: Mohammed K AlShakhori on Sep 23, 2013

21. “Legal Alien” by Pat Mora

22. Legal Alien, by Pat Mora
Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural,
able to slip from "How's life?"
to "Me'stan volviendo loca,"
able to sit in a paneled office
drafting memos in smooth English,
able to order in fluent Spanish
at a Mexican restaurant,
American but hyphenated,
viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,
perhaps inferior, definitely different,
viewed by Mexicans as alien,
(their eyes say, "You may speak
Spanish but you're not like me")
an American to Mexicans
a Mexican to Americans
a handy token
sliding back and forth
between the fringes of both worlds
by smiling
by masking the discomfort
of being pre-judged Bi-laterally.

23. LET’S “TECH IT UP”!

24. Tagxedo

25. Wordle

26. Edmodo

27. THANK YOU!