6: (Un)Taming My Languages: Latina Girls Composing Juntos Within the Translanguaging Corriente

In this chapter, we describe Latina adolescent girls’ (grades 6–12) participation in Somos Escritoras, a writing and art workshop that invites them to use art, writing, and storytelling as tools of reflection and examination (Flores, 2023). We explore their composing practices through a translingual perspective of literacy in which focus is placed on the girls’ processes of negotiation and interaction to create shared meaning in socially and contextually dependent ways (Canagarajah, 2011). Within this co-constructed third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), we illuminate how Latina girls negotiated language, the intentional choices they made in their composing processes, and how they made meaning through storytelling, art, and writing. Within this third space, the translanguaging corriente was made visible through intentional linguistic choices by all participants. We argue that teachers and teacher educators must listen and observe the flow of their classroom composing and discourse and consider the historical and sociopolitical factors and language ideologies that continue to silence authentic languaging.