University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“It Was Like He Was Writing My Life”: How Ethnic Identity Affected One Family’s Interpretation of an Afro Latinx Text

Velez, LaTesha

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/113660

Description

Title
“It Was Like He Was Writing My Life”: How Ethnic Identity Affected One Family’s Interpretation of an Afro Latinx Text
Author(s)
Velez, LaTesha
Issue Date
2021
Keyword(s)
  • Family
  • Autoethnographic information
  • Literacy
Abstract
My research explored an African American and Puerto Rican family’s responses to the text Down These Mean Streets (2016), written by and about a dark-skinned Puerto Rican named Piri Thomas. I designed this research to explore the ways Afro Latinx readers in the Velez family found relevance in a text written by a dark-skinned Latinx author based on their own individualized racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural identities; in what ways their individual textual interpretations compared to those of other members of the same family; and how reading a text written by and about someone of similar racial/ethnic identity affected each reader’s own identity formation. The counter-stories provided by my family and the autoethnographic information about myself were used to interrupt the dominant narrative of a lack of early literacy among Hispanic families and add diverse perspectives to existing understandings of reader response theory. While it is important to foreground issues of race and racism in reader response analysis, I suggest an intersectional approach that incorporates multiple identities. Results suggest that while there were individual differences in how readers interpreted the text, most family members felt cultural validation after reading the text and experienced pride in the family tradition of the book being passed from father to child.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Series/Report Name or Number
Library Trends 70 (2). Fall 2021
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113660
DOI
10.1353/lib.2021.0022
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2021 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 70 (2) Fall 2021: Family Matters: Mapping Information Phenomena within the Context of the Family PRIMARY
Library Trends 70 (2) Fall 2021: Family Matters: Mapping Information Phenomena within the Context of the Family. Edited by Nicole K. Dalmer and Sarah Barriage.