A critical discourse analysis of Gisela's family story: a construal of deportation,illegal immigrants,and literacy |
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| Authors: | Stephanie Abraham |
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| Institution: | Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA |
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| Abstract: | In this paper, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze a student's narrative about the arrest, incarceration, and deportation of her mother to Mexico. The student, Gisela, was a fifth grader in my classroom during the 2008/2009 school year, and I encouraged the students to collect family stories from their relatives. Gisela created this story, and she wrote and illustrated this with the help of her father, student peers, and me. I draw on Gloria Anzaldúa's constructs of nepantla and nepantlera, narrative analysis, and systemic functional linguistics to show how Gisela's construed this story to create a powerful and creative narrative that disrupted autonomous forms of literacy along with the excluding and damaging discourses circulating about immigrants in our community. |
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| Keywords: | critical discourse analysis narrative analysis critical literacy classroom discourse critical theory immigration |
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