Transnational Voices: Spanish Heritage Students' Digital Multimodal Narratives From The US-Mexico Borderlands
Please note that this defense will be held via Zoom. If you're interested in attending, please email torrescirina@arizona.edu.
Dissertation Title: Transnational Voices: Spanish Heritage Students' Digital Multimodal Narratives From The US-Mexico Borderlands
Dissertation Committee: Dr. Beatrice Dupuy (Chair), Dr. Chantelle Warner, Dr. Borbala Gaspar
Dissertation Abstract: Spanish heritage language learners in the United States must navigate their bilingual histories, linguistic identities, and cultural experiences within educational settings that too often view their language practices as deficits rather than assets. Although scholarship in Spanish heritage language education has examined identity formation, language ideologies, and critical pedagogies, relatively little research has explored how heritage learners represent their own linguistic and cultural histories through compositional choices in digitally mediated, multimodal contexts. This dissertation addresses this gap by examining how Spanish heritage language learners in two intermediate and advanced university-level courses represented the US-Mexico borderlands through digital multimodal composing. It also explores the semiotic choices that shaped these representations, and the successes and challenges students encountered in the composition process itself.
The study was conducted during Spring 2021 in an entirely online context at a large public research university in the southwestern United States. Twenty-six students enrolled in SPAN 323 (Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Learners) and SPAN 343 (Spanish Phonetics for Heritage Speakers) participated voluntarily. Using grounded theory and social semiotics, I analyzed three data sources: brainstorming questionnaires, final digital multimodal projects completed by the students, and written reflections submitted after project completion. Three case studies of individual students served as the primary sites of in-depth semiotic analysis.
Findings across the three research questions revealed that students consistently portrayed the US-Mexico borderlands as a space of multilingual identity, intergenerational resilience, and cultural negotiation. The three case studies demonstrate that platform selection, visual orchestration, and intermodal layering functioned as motivated expressive decisions through which the students engaged critically with the language ideologies that shape their self-perception as heritage speakers. Students’ reflections show that digital multimodal composing generated heightened emotional engagement, increased creative agency, and a significant epistemological shift in which personal histories and bilingual repertoires were repositioned as legitimate academic content. This study contributes to scholarship at the intersection of heritage language education, multiliteracies pedagogy, and multimodal semiotics by demonstrating that when Spanish heritage language learners are positioned as designers of their own linguistic and cultural knowledge, digital multimodal composing becomes a pedagogically transformative practice that affords forms of authorship, critical engagement, and self-representation that traditional academic writing rarely makes possible.
