INTRODUCTION
Recent approaches and contexts in the study of
literacy
For a number of years, we have had available a well-developed
approach to the study of literacy as social practice. Adherents of this
perspective have criticized traditional accounts of literacy and
literacy acquisition as unitary phenomena with clear social and
cognitive consequences. Stemming from work in the ethnography of
communication (e.g., Schieffelin & Gilmore
1986), the New Literacy studies (e.g., Barton
et al. 2000), and neo-Vygotskian sociocultural theory (e.g.,
Scribner & Cole 1981), an alternative
portrait has been drawn of the nature of literacy. From these
perspectives, literacy is better characterized by taking into
consideration, at least, the six traits that Barton
& Hamilton 2000 have recently summarized: (i) literacy
should be understood as a social practice embedded and to be studied in
specific social events; (ii) there are different literacy practices
associated with different domains of life; (iii) power relationships
and social institutions make some domains and literacy practices more
visible and influential than others; (iv) literacy practices are
purposeful and embedded in larger cultural practices; (v) literacy is
historically situated; and thus, (vi) literacy practices change and new
forms are appropriated through daily sense-making.
Both contributing to and drawing on this transformation, there has
been an increase in the sites in which literacy is studied and seen as
relevant. Most research traditionally focused (and still does) on
formal educational institutions and their official practices as the
sites where literacy is acquired, and on bureaucratic (work and state)
institutions as the main arenas where acquisition needs to be displayed
efficiently (cf. Hull 1993). Other sites and
practices (such as families or literary literacy) were rendered much
less relevant or were considered only in relation to how they
contribute to the acquisition of literacy in other contexts (e.g., how
families support the acquisition of school-like reading and writing).
However, recent studies have complicated this scenario significantly.
Several reports have shown how, inside the above sites, multiple forms
of literacy coexist. Some of these practices run parallel to publicly
sanctioned uses of written language, such as “unofficial”
family literacies (Gregory & Williams
2000) or the “vernacular” writings that adolescents
circulate in schools (Camitta 1993). Other
literacy practices present in institutions may conflict with their
formal goals and are “proscribed,” such as the oral
spelling games practiced by African-American girls in school, described
by Gilmore 1983, 1986.
In addition, new spaces for literacy display and acquisition have
been considered in the process of uncovering the range of resources and
institutions available in local communities (cf. Silverstein 1998). Religious institutions and
after-school community programs for children and youth draw
researchers' attention for several reasons. First, although
religious institutions and community programs are settings of very
different kinds, when focused on children and youth they both can be
seen as intentional learning environments (McLaughlin 2000) – although the particular
goals and means to achieve learning across individual sites vary
significantly. Second, participating in both these settings requires
acquiring and displaying new forms of oral and written language, and
these forms are specially marked by the constraints of their particular
domains – whether religious language (Keane
1997) or the specific registers of different after-school
programs (the “languages” of science, sports, computers, or
art; see Heath 1998, 2001). Third, both religious and community
organizations have been instrumental in the political and social
mobilization of different social groups, especially in the case of
minority communities (these transformations are discussed for
Gitanos1
“Gitano” is the term
used to refer to the Gypsy or Romani communities in Spain. It is also
the term preferred by Gitanos to refer to themselves. Here we will use
“Gitano” and “Gypsy” as its literal translation
to refer to this community, since in Spain the term “Gypsy”
does not have the negative connotations that have been pointed out in
other European countries. As a very brief introduction, it is believed
that Gitanos first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th century
and since then have constituted an integral part of Spanish society;
yet have always been pushed to a marginal position in the social
system, experiencing throughout Spanish history different forms of
persecution and socio-economic exclusion that continue in contemporary
times. It is estimated (imprecisely, since there is not an official
census on the matter) that currently Gypsies comprise about 600,000 to
1 million persons distributed throughout Spain, with a presence in all
regions and types of localities, from urban centers to rural
communities.
below).
Religious literacy practices have been the topic of recent studies
that highlight several processes. Religious instruction has been
examined as a space for linguistic socialization (e.g., Schieffelin 1996, Tusting
2000). In these sites, children are socialized into a set of
moral and religious values through language (Aminy
2003) and are socialized to use language (e.g., to display new
genres and discursive practices associated with religious rituals) and
to interpret texts (e.g., the Bible) in specific ways (e.g., Zissner 1986, Reder & Reed
Wikelund 1993). The introduction of Christian religion in
non-Western “traditional” societies has been related to
cultural and social change and the development of new relationships
between local communities and Western agents and institutions (Duranti & Ochs 1986, Schieffelin 1996). In industrialized societies,
religious congregations formed by minority and immigrant communities
have been seen as sites for the construction of collective identities
and for the management of relationships with mainstream society
(Baquedano-López 2000, 2001).
Community organizations and their programs are also analyzed in
similar terms, especially when designed for minority and “at
risk” children and youth. In these programs, students with a
presumed history of school failure often develop and display rich
literacy achievements and develop new discursive repertories not
contemplated in other contexts (McNamee &
Sivright 2002, Cushman & Emmons
2002). Equally, participation in community organizations is
considered a form of social and individual mobilization by social
actors who, otherwise, have been pushed to the margins of the social
system (Fine et al. 2000).
Assumptions and shortcomings in the study of Gitano
literacy
Given this interest in community literacy in minority and
subordinated groups, it would seem that this should be a privileged
topic in the study of Gypsy communities. However, a review of the
available literature shows that this (along with many other aspects of
Gitano culture) is a clearly under-researched theme. This situation can
be explained by taking into consideration some broad assumptions
commonly held regarding Gypsy culture. These, in turn, have configured
the conclusions that are extracted from the little research that has
focused on literacy in Gypsy communities.
There is an often unarticulated pan-cultural assumption that Gypsy
culture is essentially oral and has not developed any role for written
language in its repertory or transmission (e.g., Smith 1997). In this context, literacy acquisition
is seen as an index of acculturation (San
Román 1990). Gitanos who are more literate are so because
they have engaged with non-Gypsy institutions such as formal education
and with literacy domains (e.g., press, written literature) that are
not internal to Gypsy culture, while “written culture seems
incompatible with traditional Gypsy culture. And, obviously, it has no
use or cultural support to stimulate it” (San Román 1990:114, our translation). From the perspective of
non-Gypsy Payo2
“Payo” is the term used by Spanish Gypsies to
refer to the non-Gypsy population, and we will use it to refer to the
majority Spanish, native segment of society.
agents, this is
often taken for granted. Consequently, concerns about literacy
acquisition focus on school-based initiatives and school literacy, or
on adult literacy and education. These programs have the goal of
securing Gypsy children's participation in a non-Gypsy institution
(formal education) or, in the case of adults, of providing resources to
move on to economic sectors traditionally not occupied by Gitanos.
Complementarily, from the perspective of Gypsies, literacy is
supposedly viewed as an instrument that is important exclusively to
transact with the majority group in economic, bureaucratic, legal, and
similar contexts. Further, this “restricted” use for
literacy highlights two properties regarding its social organization
inside Gitano communities. First, illiteracy is not a “social
problem” as long as each family or social unit has at least one
member who is literate and can play the role of mediator with
the Payo social system (see Baynham 1993 and
Jones 2000 on the notion of literacy
mediators/mediation). Second, this version of literacy apparently
is acquired mostly in adulthood and by informal means rather than
formally in school during childhood (Liégeois
1998).
Framing Gitano literacy in this way seems to have some parallels with
discussions regarding the introduction of literacy in indigenous
communities (cf. Duranti & Ochs 1986,
Reder & Reed Wikelund 1993, Schieffelin 1996) in which literacy, to some
degree, is considered an external technology introduced by external
agents. Eventually, these literacy practices are transformed and
considered internal to the community, but still it is possible to
consider a time before this contact and use of literacy took place.
However, in the case of Gypsies, since their arrival in Europe, contact
and transactions with other social groups has been a constitutive
element of their social life and a necessary (whether
“desired” or not) feature of the Gitano cultural repertory.
This difference requires a more dynamic theory of acculturation and
group contact that contemplates the range of practices and institutions
that social groups develop to manage their social boundaries and
exchanges (Mulcahy 1979, San Román 1990). This theory is even more
necessary because a feature of Gitano communities in Spain is precisely
that, in recent decades, important cultural transformations have taken
place. These transformations affect, among other things, the resources
and ways through which Gitanos construe their relationship with Payo
society and their role in the Spanish social system.
The establishment and development of new social institutions has been
instrumental to this change, and the literature highlights two
institutions as playing a key role: associative movements and the
Evangelist Church (San Román 1997).
These community organizations have been expanding strongly during the
past two decades and are seen as crucial sites for the development of
Gitano cultural expression and group identity (Abajo
1997; Méndez 2002, in press). In addition, they are institutions internal
to the Gitano community: They are sustained by Gitanos, are directed to
Gitano members (which does not preclude others from participating in them),
and are organized according to Gitano social principles and practices. Yet
often their goals, especially in the case of associations, refer to a
relationship with the larger social system regarding education, work,
housing, welfare policies, and so on, and to Gitanos' socio-political
advancement in a Payo-dominated society.
It is not possible to delve fully into the history and nature of
these organizations, but we predict that the development of new
institutions will require developing new skills and practices which
members of the community will acquire as they engage with these new
sites (Wenger 1998, Eckert
2000). New ways of using written and oral language are certainly
part of this new repertory. Further, after examining these uses of
literacy in the Gitano community, we hypothesize that the features
outlined above for Gypsy literacy will need to be revised.
Alternatively, literacy in these contexts becomes a culturally
supported achievement, relevant to a large proportion of community
members and intentionally transmitted in social occasions explicitly
designed for this purpose in these community sites.
The goal of this study is precisely to investigate this set of
questions and to examine the development and display of certain
literacy achievements of Gitano children in two community settings:
religious instruction classes (escuela dominical) organized on
Saturday mornings by the “Gitano” Evangelist Church (the
Evangelist Church of Philadelphia), and writing in an after-school
computer program organized several evenings a week by a Gitano cultural
association in the same locality. Our goal is to discuss the
connections between the discourse genres developed in each site as
forms of Gitano community literacy, in light of the theoretical points
that open this article – concepts which, to our knowledge, have
not previously been introduced in the study of reading and writing in
Gypsy communities. While the case we examine shows continuity with the
changes at the national level we have described above, the particular
forms and implications of our results are intimately tied to particular
social and historical changes in the locality under study. This level
of analysis illustrates several of the features that Silverstein 1998 has argued reflect transformations
in local linguistic communities. Specifically, the focus of our study
is on apparently new forms of entextualization. This definition of the
research problem draws on a set of theoretical tools developed in
recent linguistic anthropology, which will be reviewed in the next
subsection to close this introduction.
Genre, entextualization, and natural histories of
discourse
The research scenario outlined above (and further described below)
suggests that children and adults in this community are producing and
circulating a set of oral and written texts that are deeply intertwined
with the institutions and activities in which they participate.
Bakhtin's (1986) seminal work on
heteroglossia and genre highlighted the principle that all
utterances and discourse practices are historically embedded and
contain the ideological and formal resources of previous speakers and
community members. These resources are contained in speech genres,
which serve as flexible interpretive frames for communication
regardless of whether or not speakers are consciously aware of their
workings.
This conception of discourse invites one to question empirically what
allows texts to be produced as part of a specific sociocultural
activity, decontextualized or decentered from this
original context, and transposed and recontextualized or
recentered in a new context for different purposes. Work
drawing on the process of entextualization (Hanks 1989, Bauman & Briggs
1990, Silverstein & Urban 1996a)
delves into this set of issues. Defined in simple terms,
entextualization “is the process of rendering discourse
extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit
– a text – that can be lifted out of its
interactional setting” (Bauman & Briggs
1990:73). Indeed, as analysts and participants we are aware that
several of the texts and genre instances we engage with are recognized
as units and manipulated as “things” (Silverstein & Urban 1996b:1). However, it is
possible to proceed “backwards” and ask what allows this,
given that speakers may see it as a conspicuous feature of their
linguistic behavior. Bauman & Briggs (1990:75–77) outline what analytic points
could be addressed, roughly formulating complementary sets of
intratextual and extratextual questions. Potential elements in a text
that configure its entextualizability are its framing
(metacommunicative management), form (rhetorical design), function
(perlocutionary and illocutionary force), indexical grounding (of
person, time, and place), translation (across languages or modes), and
the emergent structure of this process. Potential elements in the
social system that sustain this process (facilitate or inhibit it) are
the institutional structures in which texts are inserted, the
legitimacy and authority of participants, the competence of speakers,
and the value system that organizes the relative status of different
texts.
This article draws on this analytical framework and examines a set of
verbal genres that could be tied to religious events and recognizable
oral practices in related settings, such as religious instruction
classes, and that reappear in written form in the texts produced in the
after-school computer classes. After we present the research methods
and outline recent social changes in the community of our study, the
analysis focuses on some of the intratextual devices that may allow
this entextualization to take place by consecutively examining a corpus
of texts from each setting. In the conclusions, this recentering will
be examined in relation to its sociopolitical context, specifically
focusing on what dynamics might explain this discursive permeability
among Gitano community contexts, and why this permeability fails to
exist in similar situations within the formal educational system.
METHOD
The results of this study are part of a larger project in which the
linguistic practices of Gitano children have been examined in various
community settings. Participants in this part of the study are the
children and supervising adults of the Gitano community of a small city
in mideastern Spain, which we will call Mid-City, who are actively
engaged in the activities organized by two institutions of the
community: a local Gitano cultural association, and the city's
Gitano Evangelist Church. In total, we have worked with around 30
children ranging from 5 to 13 years of age who participated in an
after-school computer program three times a week during weekday
evenings and in the religious instruction classes organized by the
Evangelist Church on Saturday mornings; of this group of children, some
participated in both activities and some only in one. Except for a
social worker who has been employed for several years by the cultural
association and was responsible for the computer classes, all other
adults were Gypsy community members voluntarily involved in maintaining
these activities.
During winter 2001, we paid a number of visits to the cultural
association's after-school programs, as a follow-up to a study
conducted during the previous summer. Initially we had not planned a
new data collection process; however, when we observed the children
working, we discovered that most of them were intensely engaged in
writing on their computers, and that the content of these writings
deserved analysis. As a result, the researcher and the social worker
saved several of the writings on disk as the children completed them,
and the researcher took field notes during a small number of visits to
the program that winter. In total, we recorded 38 texts written by the
children (several by the same child) throughout the year.3
The file was saved with the child's name
and age as identifiers. Also, the file information saves the date in
which it was created, so it is possible to trace the temporal relations
between related texts by the same child or group of children.
Also, as part of ongoing collaboration with this cultural association,
we conducted in-depth interviews with the president and social worker
of the association, compiled varied documentation on the institution
and the wider living conditions of Gitanos in this community, and had
numerous informal conversations with Gitanos of the community as part
of each of the successive periods of participant observation within the
project.
A first analysis of the texts showed that the most frequent themes
are religious in content, so we felt that their origin had to be found
elsewhere. Therefore, at the beginning of 2002, we made contact with
the Evangelist Church to discuss our interests and to establish a new
study site. The pastor and other adults of the church pointed out their
escuela dominical as a key site to be observed, and, in consequence, we
undertook a small ethnographic study of these religious instruction
classes between January and May 2002. In this part of our fieldwork, we
took field notes and made audio and video recordings of the classes,
gathered several documents used in these classes and/or related to
the church's activities, organized semi-structured interviews with
the children we identified as having participated in both settings, and
held several informal conversations with the adults regarding their
religious practices. Finally, this information was complemented with a
few visits to the church's regular evening services.
The written and oral texts were transcribed and edited using the
conventions and tools developed in ethnopoetics (Hymes 1981, 1996a) and stanza
analysis (Gee 1996), for both oral and
written discourse (Hymes 1996b). These
procedures build on classic conceptions of the poetic function of
language (Jakobson 1960) and follow largely
inductive criteria to uncover the textual organization of discourse at
multiple levels, organizing transcripts around two basic units: the
line/verse and the stanza. Given the differences between the types
of texts that have been analyzed, the specifics of edition and
transcription of each set will be discussed separately below.
GITANO CHILDREN IN MID-CITY: LOCAL CHANGES
AND SOCIAL OPPORTUNITIES
Mid-City is a small city situated in central Spain, in a largely
rural region. Like many old cities in Spain, it is clearly divided into
two sectors: the “historical center” with its narrow
streets, old houses, and apartment buildings, and a newer part that has
grown over the last century around this center. Gitanos have been
present in the province since the beginning of the 18th century, and in
the urban locality since the 1930s. Upon their arrival, Gitano extended
families settled in one of the “upper” peripheral
neighborhoods of the historical center, where, despite cultural
differences from their neighbors, they shared similar economic
activities (tied to agriculture, temporal employment and small-scale
trading) and multigenerational familial patterns. From this first
entry, Gypsy families began to spread out in the city, going to
“lower” parts of the center and then, at the end of the
1960s, to a newly built neighborhood in the periphery of the new
section.
This latter neighborhood, known as “the 300 Houses,” was
one of the first public housing initiatives of the city and was
primarily targeted at lodging Gitano and working-class residents.
Again, in this neighborhood, Gitanos settled in extended
multigenerational families and shared several social and economic
features with their Payo neighbors. By this time, agricultural
activities (except seasonal work) had lost ground in favor of
small-scale trading, with a minority of families finding employment in
local construction or service industries (occupations that are most
important to this day in Mid-City's Gypsy economy).
Finally, since the 1980s, Gitanos have primarily been settling in a
new sector of the city, known as San Pedro, in public housing developed
in this section during the past two decades. However, there are several
features that make this settlement substantially different from the
previous movements. Often, only the younger families move to this
sector; dividing the Gitanos of Mid-City in generational terms. The
vast majority of families in San Pedro consist of young parents and
their children and, at most, the grandparents (who, given the early age
at which Gitanos traditionally wed and have children, are often below
50 years of age). In turn, the 300 Houses is currently thought of as a
“neighborhood of grand-(great)-parents and elder people,”
where only a minority of Gitano children live – and these
children expect to move with their parents to San Pedro sometime in the
future. San Pedro, unlike previous sites, is not a peripheral and
socio-economically homogeneous district. Rather, it is one of the
growing parts of the city where an increasing number of
infrastructures, services, and commercial areas are found. Also, the
neighborhoods of this district combine modern single-family houses with
apartment buildings and public housing, allowing a wide range of
socio-economic conditions to coexist here.
These transformations run parallel to changes in social policies
affecting Gitano communities and children. Over the past two decades,
the regional government has been developing social programs and funding
nonprofit private initiatives aimed at the social integration and
socio-educational advancement of marginalized communities such as
Gitanos. At the moment, in San Pedro, for a total Gitano population
below 1,200 members there are several social programs run by numerous
organizations which provide after-school support for children and
work-related training for youth. Gitano members have also been actively
involved in these processes. Since 1985 there has been a Gitano
cultural association (the one we have been working with), run by Gypsy
members, developing its own programs and using its resources for
similar purposes – and competing on equal standing with other
nongovernmental organizations for public funding of its programs. For
over a decade, this organization has had its own facilities in the 300
Houses, and for a few years it also had an office and site in San Pedro
where it developed several programs for children until economic
pressure made maintaining two sites unfeasible and the newer office was
closed.
Finally, as another visible Gitano institution, the Evangelist Church
has had a presence in the community for several decades. Traditionally,
worship took place in the homes of church members in small gatherings,
but in the 1980s the local Church of Mid-City was able to set up a
chapel close to the 300 Houses, and since then has been able to
maintain regular services and have an assigned pastor. Having a site
for worship has also facilitated the development of several
church-related public activities such as the choir, religious
instruction classes, or the gatherings with other churches that are
becoming increasingly important in the network of Evangelist churches
in Spain.
In short, Gitano children in Mid-City today are being raised in a
social environment substantially different from what was traditional
for Gitanos of the locality. Within Gitano homes, smaller
“nuclear-type” families are becoming more common. The
children live and participate in a community much more heterogeneous
and intertwined with the larger social and economic structure of
Mid-City; and the educational and economic expectations for these
children are also quite different from what was traditionally
contemplated. Finally, there are established and visible Gitano
community institutions (not just in symbolic terms, but with assigned
spaces, materials, and activities) where children participate and are
often the targeted audience of the institution's work.
Obviously, not all families and children participate in these changes
with equal intensity. Yet the current living conditions of the Gitano
community make available a number of resources that, if taken up by
Gypsy children, demand acquiring and displaying new skills and
knowledge, and adjusting to the demands of a changing social
environment. In this context, we focus on part of the discursive
knowledge that circulates across these community sites and that is
developed in the children who participate in them. Note, however, that
the characteristics of the community that we have outlined above may
make the case of Mid-City relatively different from other Gypsy
communities in urban contexts, especially in the larger Spanish
metropolitan centers. Nevertheless, to our knowledge there is not much
comparative research on Gitano children's discourse socialization
in the community, and so the generalizabily of our case remains an
empirical question to be answered with future studies.
VERBAL GENRES IN THE ESCUELA DOMINICAL
In the community of our study, religious sites are genre-rich
settings. Activities during church services (el culto) and
religious instruction classes are organized as successive sets of
verbal formats and activities that are clearly bounded, labeled, and
recognized by participants. Presentaciones
‘presentations’ and despedidas
‘farewells’ open and close religious events in both church
and classes. The culto is composed of verbal activities such as
alabanzas ‘hymns’, songs performed in chorus and
accompanied by instrumental music; dar la palabra ‘give
the word’, the reading of the Bible and comment produced by the
pastor or other religious leaders of the church (e.g., invited pastors
from other congregations or candidatos ‘apprentice
pastors’); and testimonios ‘testimonies’, in
which church members narrate personal experiences in which the work of
the Lord played a significant role in times of hardship and
precipitated a key episode in their conversion or faith consolidation
(cf. Jacobs-Huey 2003). The religious classes
have versions of hymns and giving the word, and also what participants
properly call escuela ‘school’, instruction on
religious matters organized by the teacher with “book and pencil
work” as supporting materials.
All these verbal genres are experienced with an orientation toward
performance in its “marked” sense, toward the display and
evaluation of verbal competence by participants (Bauman 1977, Bauman &
Sherzer 1989, Bauman & Briggs
1990). Speakers who produce elaborate instances of the above
genres are said to have a buena palabra ‘good
word’, and many verbal productions receive immediate interactive
feedback in the form of applause or praise at the end, or inserted
religious response cries (‘amen’, ‘praise the
Lord’, etc.). In the “negative,” if the instance is
perceived by the congregation as unoriginal (e.g., the orator instead
of improvising a prayer reproduces the verses of a known song), it may
be received in the pews with moderately disparaging comment.
Complementarily, speakers may “disclaim” their ability to
produce an instance of the genre (Bauman 1977, 1993), both to
avoid designation as speakers and to calibrate the possible assessment
that will be offered after their performance.
Presentations and farewells share all the above traits and will be
the focus of our analysis, since in the context of religious
instruction they clearly show a developmental progression across
children of different ages, and they are modeled and scaffolded by
adults in an explicit process of genre teaching and acquisition (cf.
Bakhtin 1986). Religious instruction classes
took place Saturday mornings approximately between 12:00 am
and 2:00 pm in the congregation's church, which was
opened specifically for this purpose. They were attended by a varying
number of children and several adults (male and female) responsible for
the classes: two or three women, one of whom was the responsible
teacher while the others acted as assistants, and two male adults who
supervised the activities and were primarily responsible for the
children's choir rehearsal, which also took place in these
classes. One of these adult males was a highly regarded pastor
candidate who also participated in the discussions during school,
served as an authority to maintain order, and, as we will see, was
often invited to open and close the session.
In the escuela dominical, presentations and farewells opened and
closed the event. When the classes began, once all the children were
inside the church and the teacher had turned on the lights, organized
the materials, and moved the front benches into a square, she asked the
children to form a circle (including adults), standing up, holding
hands, bowing their heads, and closing their eyes. Then she designated
two to four children to successively “present” the class,
or allowed one of the available adults to do that. At the end of the
class, after school, choir rehearsal and other planned activities were
completed, the teacher gathered the children again, reviewed the work
done during the morning (regarding both content learning and the
children's behavior), and gave instructions and reminders about
the events and work planned for the coming week. After this, she
organized the group in the same manner as in presentations and again
designated a set of children and adults to bid farewell to the class.
Then the group broke up and participants gathered their belongings and
left the church (which was closed and locked by one of the adults until
the evening) to go home on foot or by car, alone or in groups
accompanied by the adults.
Presentations and farewells are relatively brief instances of
discourse that can be generically characterized by a set of traits
relating to their rhetorical design, illocutionary content, and metric
structure, as summarized in Table 1.
Generic traits of oral presentaciones and despedidas in religious
classes.
A presentation or farewell is composed by improvising a set of lines,
which are often begun or closed with a reference to God with one of
several alternative tokens (‘Jesus’, ‘Father’,
or ‘Lord’), and built by developing and recycling a number
of syntactic constructions. These presentations/farewells, in their
oral version, center on a limited set of verbal actions directed to God
(illocutionary content), which may be realized in one line or over a
set of lines in which the same basic act is elaborated. Although we
have no evidence that the actions that may be performed in
presentations or closings should be restricted to what appears in the
corpus we have gathered, these seem to be limited to three kinds of
verbal tasks: thanking God, asking God to bless (bendecir)
various people, and asking God to cure various people. In terms of
content, the recipients of these actions to be performed by God can be
those immediately present in the class (the teachers and the children),
other known community members who are personally named or identified by
role (‘the pastor’, ‘my family’), or segments
of society at large who are prayed for (‘the sick’,
‘the poor’, ‘the good’, etc.). The following
example, produced by José Luis, the adult pastor candidate, is
an elaborate instance of the genre as a farewell:4
The oral texts have been edited in lines/verses using
intonation as the primary criterion, organizing each tone unit into a
line. Lines may be reorganized later to unify what are clearly first
parts or endings of a single predicative structure. Verses have been
grouped into stanzas following semantic criteria or by using clear
parallelisms as boundaries of stanzas. To facilitate the readability of
the transcripts, symbols have been kept to a minimum and words have
been transcribed conventionally, although certain phonological
variations may be present in the participant's speech. Possible
transcription of unclear speech is shown in brackets, and
non-transcribable fragments are written in rough groups of XX per
syllable. Mid-line pauses are indicated with (.). In the English
translation, brackets are used to supply morphological information that
is necessary to understand the Spanish version. Verses are measured
following conventional Spanish literary metrics and are counted into
syllables, which are blended if successive words end and begin with a
vowel. The total count is indicated in brackets in the right-hand
column.
In this example we have a rather long text organized in four stanzas,
in which José Luis builds elaborate “thankings” and
“requests for blessings” of three sets of participants: the
children attending classes (stanza A and the second part of stanza D);
the adults and himself, who are first cited in general in stanza B and
then named in particular in stanza D, as those responsible for the
religious education of the children; and us, the researchers, as
visiting observers, in a mild instance of proselytizing (stanza C).
Structurally, this adult speaker is able to produce fluently a
combination of rather long and shorter verses in which improvised
verbal formulas are recycled in different versions and grammatical
forms (e.g., lines 10, 11, 12). Finally, he contextualizes several of
his lines and stanzas with a varied set of referential tokens for God,
such as Señor ‘Lord’, Padre
‘Father’, and Jesus.
As an adult and authorized figure in this religious setting,
José Luis produces instances of the genre that serve as a model
for the children of the community. In this way, some of the older and
more competent students in the class are capable of performing
presentations and closings that make use of the templates that have
been provided by adults, as is the case of the girl in example (2), a
presentation:
This presentation contains several of the elements pointed out above
that we saw in adult performances, but, as expected, in simplified
form. The explicit illocutionary content is reduced to thanking, and
the same parties as in the first example are mentioned: herself and her
fellow students, both present (line 2) and absent (line 8), the
researchers (line 6), and the adult women in charge of the class (line
4). In this case, Meli's thanking is made from the perspective of
the children, and she simply thanks the Lord for the presence of the
teachers. This contrasts with José Luis's perspective as an
adult, where he thanks the Lord for providing him and the other adults
with the capacity to educate the children (1, lines 7–9). Also,
throughout her presentation Meli, of the available alternatives, only
uses one token to refer to God (Señor). Finally, as a
complementary activity to thanking, in her presentation she asks the
Lord to ‘keep in the hollow of his hand’ each of the
participants. This is a complete formula that allows for little
improvisation and internal variation, and that appears in the prayers
and songs of the congregation. In this case, Meli produces three
couplets (lines 4–5, 6–7, and 8–9) in which the
second part is the canonical formula and the first part successively
mentions the different constituencies of the class (the adults, the
visiting researchers, and the children who have not come to class).
Given this development, while the overall presentation has a compact
design in comparison to the adult version, the degree of personal
elaboration is reduced.
Meli was one of the more competent children in the class, yet even
the youngest students in the class (4 or 5 years of age) were
encouraged to participate and produce their presentations or farewells.
These instances may be fully scaffolded by adults, as in the following
farewell performed by César, who closed the class that morning:
In this instance, the usual components are reduced to a minimum. The
farewell is reduced to two instances of thanking; the first of which
one of the teachers (Ester) breaks down into three segments to be
repeated by the child, and it contains only one token for God. However,
there are two aspects of this presentation that are relevant. First, it
is a collective construction by a child and an adult, so the
perspective it adopts in relation to its interlocutor is common to
both, as opposed to the adult- or child-produced instances, which we
have seen develop distinct participant frameworks (Goffman 1981) between all the mentioned parties and
the performer's interlocutor (i.e. God) (cf. Keane 1997). Second, there is an explicit
assessment of the child's achievement, a move that helps to index
the marked nature of this speech and explicitly to insert the children
in a developmental path.
To restate what has been said so far about presentations and
farewells, they represent a recognizable genre in the community that is
associated with a number of religious events and practices in which
they play a specific social role. Formally, presentations and farewells
can be characterized by a set of flexible rhetorical and content
features that allow members of the congregation to improvise specific
instances of the genre. Further, although all these instances share the
traits that allow them to be recognized as part of the same generic
framework, there are important variations among instances that reflect
broader social processes among the participants implicated in their
production and reception. Speakers vary in the competence they display
in the genre depending on both age and institutional role in the
community (children, adults, students, teachers, pastor candidate,
etc.). Within the escuela dominical, different classes of participants
emerge – adult teachers, students, and observing researchers
– and this distribution is reflected in the different positions
that individual performers construe as members of one segment in
relation to other groups of participants and the performer's
supernatural interlocutor. In short, while some “general”
generic elements allow for production in a wide range of social events,
the particular social conditions and relations in effect on these
occasions also determine the specific traits of each generic
instance.
This combination of textual processes may explain the varying
characteristics that were displayed in texts of religious content
produced by children in a very different social setting, to which we
turn in the following section.
RELIGIOUS WRITINGS IN A COMPUTER
AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAM
As we have said, Mid-City's Gitano cultural association has been
working over the past 15 years for the social, political, and
educational advancement of local Gypsies. It is a small institution
chartered as a nonprofit organization, with very few paid employees,
and it develops two main lines of action. On one hand, it serves as a
base of advocacy and consultation for most political affairs that
affect Mid-City Gitanos, such as housing policies, schooling measures,
and social programs. On the other hand, it organizes and runs publicly
funded socio-educational programs designed for adults, youth, and
children. While all programs share a central concern for the
educational and economic advancement of Gitanos, the specific design
and implementation of programs vary each year to meet changing
political priorities in funding and the human-resource and economic
pressures that the association always confronts. During the years we
have worked with the association as part of our research project, three
programs have been implemented for school-aged children: a summer
school program, an after-school computer program, and a home-study
support program.
Computer skills programs have been developed for some time by the
association to provide Gitanos access to new technology, and, in the
case of youth and adults, skills that might facilitate their entrance
into the labor market. However, as explicitly expressed by the social
worker in charge of these programs, computer classes (especially those
designed for adults) also have a goal of general literacy acquisition
and development. Both these goals have been con-tinued in the
development of the after-school program for school-aged children, as
evidenced in the fact that children's main activity during the
class sessions was writing.
The educational approach in the program for children was rather open.
Classes took place on three weekday evenings per week; the children
were allowed to enter and exit the program freely, and were only
reprimanded or invited to leave class when their behavior was
excessively disruptive. Participating children, around 20 students on a
regular basis, organized in pairs, groups, or individually in front of
computers and worked freely with different software. The children would
ask the social worker to turn on the computer and run different
programs depending on what they intended to do (e.g.,
‘play’ with a CD-ROM, ‘paint’,
‘write’). By far the most frequent activity was writing,
which usually took place in word processing or painting software.
Children wrote freely on their computers, and their texts were
corrected and edited by the available adults only when the children
requested. Some of these texts were saved or printed out (which allowed
for further development on later occasions), while others were erased
at the end of the session or when the program was closed and the
computer turned off.
The content and structure of the texts varies significantly, ranging
from ritual insults and personal letters to texts of exclusively
religious content, which has allowed us to establish a preliminary
classification based on different generic traits (Cano et al. 2002). In terms of content, the most
frequent references are to religious themes, which appear in 37% of the
texts. An initial analysis of the texts, applying the accumulated
knowledge of verbal activity in religious contexts, shows that
presentations and farewells in fact provide the main generic grid for
religious written texts. However, these writings are not a simple
transcribed version of oral presentations/farewells; they show a
number of particularities, summarized in Table
2, that complicate the text-context relationship.
Generic traits of the written texts with religious references in the
after-school program.
Religious writings share with the oral versions a rhetorical
structure based on parallelism, the contextualization of lines with
formulas, and a textual organization that can be divided into
lines/verses and stanzas.5
Written
texts have been organized into lines following clause structure and
different forms of semantic, syntactic, or rhetorical parallelism. The
“natural” alignment of texts has been considered accidental
and determined by the configuration of the page on the word processor.
Punctuation has been subordinated to the first criteria, and all
spelling and case choices have been maintained. In the English
translation, brackets are used to indicate instances in which
nonstandard constructions appear by producing “equivalent”
deviations. Several of the original texts use multiple colors in their
lettering, but its role has been postponed for a possible later
analysis, since the theoretical tools we are currently using have not
developed insights into this feature of writing.
However, they
involve a much wider range of illocutionary acts – including
declarations of love, commitments, requests for forgiveness, and
explanations – that do not appear in the oral
presentations/farewells. Also, in texts that must be seen as
instances of generic hybridization, we have writings of religious
content in which the author identifies himself or herself as well as
other acquaintances (by name, surname and other personal information)
or blends religious formulas with canonical elements of other genres,
such as letter closings. Finally, the written texts combine verse
constructions that vary in length and are contrasted within texts; but
in comparison to oral versions, the lines seem to be much more
regular.
6 In any case, given the
controversies surrounding criteria for verse analysis and the fact that
we are comparing two different sets of texts produced in different
modes and edited through different criteria, discussions regarding
contrasts in verse structure should be considered
tentative.
The following text, produced by Talia, a 7-year-old girl, shows how
some of the features of oral presentations/farewells are
entextualized in the written texts and intertwined with other generic
frameworks:
This text shares several of the features that we discussed in the
previous section. It is limited to two discursive actions –
requesting a cure and thanking – which in form are produced in a
way very similar to the instances discussed above (compare line 6 in
this example with lines 8–9 in ex. 3). The participants in these
actions are God (lines 1–2), who continues to be the direct
interlocutor, an anonymous segment of society, ‘the sick’
(line 3), and more immediate beneficiaries such as herself or her
family (lines 4–5). However, the full text is opened and closed
with devices that are not easily associated with the generic frame we
are familiar with. The opening ‘for god’ (line 1) makes
explicit the intended interlocutor, an explicitness that is obviously
redundant in a formal religious activity and that never appears in oral
versions. The opening could also be seen as a device typical of the
personal letter genre. This second possibility becomes relatively clear
with the closing of the text, where Talia completes her text with a
highly personal and informal formula (line 7) and “signs”
her writing (line 8).
In short, this text combines features of two separate genres:
religious openings/farewells and personal letters (cf. Guerra & Farr 2002). These genres are heavily
grounded in oral and written modes, respectively. Among other things,
this determines the degree to which different participants are made
explicit in the texts. In an oral routine within a religious event,
both the final interlocutor (God) and the author (the speaker) are not
problematic, and thus their participant roles do not have to be stated.
In contrast, in a written text (a potentially permanent record)
produced in a nonreligious context, these roles need to be established
explicitly, both in terms of the designated addressee
(‘for’) and the author (signature). Further, children not
only signal explicitly these differences in their texts, they also have
different notions of the social consequences and uses of each type of
text. Specifically, in the interviews several children explained that
letters are written to ‘print out and send in the mail to
someone’, while religious texts are written for ‘oneself to
keep and express what one feels’. Thus, when conventions from
nonreligious genres are inserted in texts with religious content, it is
clear that it is the former that are subordinated to the latter, since
the practical uses of each type of text are very different. However,
writing occurs in a context which potentially favors interpretive
ambiguity (regarding the situation and participants involved in the
texts), which, in this case, is resolved through this hybridization
Children's sensitivity to these variations shows that they are
developing working distinctions among modes of transmission (oral vs.
written) and the constraints of different communicative situations.
While the above contrast can be seen as a byproduct of established
generic conventions, children can also use oral/written
distinctions for much more expressive purposes, as in the following
text authored by a 10-year-old boy:
In this text, Luis Ángel continues some of the discursive acts
that we have seen so far but does so while simplifying the verse
design. The text develops a central statement, which is recycled
several times (lines 1, 3, 9, 11), accompanied by a complementary act
which is also repeated (lines 4, 12), and by relatively fixed religious
formulas (lines 5, 10) in which he also identifies himself. More
relevant to our discussion, the texts contains a metalinguistic stanza
(C) in which Luis Ángel explicitly discusses capitalization, a
problem restricted to the written mode, as a way to organize a
hierarchy between God and himself and to establish his subordination to
the higher being. In other words, the child draws on an established
written convention and infuses it with theological meaning for his own
expressive purposes in the text.7
Regarding children's understanding and use of written
conventions this text is illuminating. Luis Ángel restates a
norm but only partially implements it, since his name is written in
lower case but none of the tokens used for God is written or begun in
upper case. Also, this text is one of the most deviant examples in
terms of nonconventional word segmentation. However, the original was
written in a painting program, and the final result may be a product of
screen formatting, different use of keyboard keys, etc., and thus may
be difficult to interpret in terms of metalexical skills.
Finally, in the corpus of religious written texts, although
presentations/farewells are the main generic resource, other verbal
formats present in religious contexts are entextualized in this new
context. Some children incorporate full lines of songs and hymns or
exploit established maxims of the Evangelist Church (such as Dios
es amor ‘God is love’, an oft-repeated statement that
also appears printed in church banners and bulletins), producing hybrid
texts of several religious genres. Also, children may draw primarily on
other, single religious verbal formats. In the following example, an
11-year-old boy produces a relatively long text that is grounded in
‘giving the word’ (the sermon) in the church
service:
As an instance of writing, the text opens with a title (which in the
original is presented in boldface, centered in a single line and in
much larger font than the rest of the text), a resource grounded in
print conventions. As an instance of giving the word, the text exploits
the more cryptic religious discourse regarding conflicts between good
and evil and God's presence. It is only in the central part of the
writing (stanzas C and D) that Antonio turns to more immediate matters
addressing possible co-members of a congregation, who are referred to
as ‘brothers’ (line 9), and speaks broadly of the human
faults that need to be overcome (which from the child's
perspective are making fun of others, drinking, smoking, and using
drugs).
The interesting aspect of the rhetorical stance of this text is that
it develops in a direction opposite to what is recurrently stressed
during religious instruction. The teacher and other adults in the class
appreciated children's broad references to God, good and evil, and
human faults, but they also insisted that children speak and pray about
“little things” and establish connections with their daily
lives and specific problems and needs (with families, friends, school,
etc.) (cf. Moore 2003). Further, such a
concern for the specifics of daily lives and the establishment of
connections between religious beliefs, the Bible, and members'
immediate concerns is a fundamental trait in the growth of the
Evangelist Church among Gitanos at a national level (Méndez, in
press) and is reflected in the content and structure of the verbal
practices that constitute religious events.
To summarize the discussion of this section, children's texts in
the after-school computer program draw on varied resources including a
set of established discourse genres developed in an oral mode in
religious settings – most prominently,
presentations/farewells. However, their recentering in a written
mode in the program can not be seen as a simple transcription, since
the previous generic frameworks undergo several important
transformations in the written instances. First, children build hybrid
texts that draw on diverse genres, both religious and nonreligious, and
that are socially grounded equally in oral and written modes. Second,
children exploit, tacitly and explicitly, features of the written mode
for their own rhetorical and expressive purposes. This process, while
it does not show that the children generally master standard written
conventions, does indicate that they have established important
distinctions between the oral and the written codes (cf. Blommaert 1999). Finally, children show sensitivity
to the new participation frameworks that permeate writing in the
after-school program in which the relationships and identities of
authors, designated addressees, and overlooking readership (those
present in the after-school setting at the time of writing, and the
full set of unspecified readers who may access the text if it is
stored) are diluted.
In combination, these analyses of genres in two contexts and the
interconnections between them have a series of theoretical consequences
that, first of all, require that we revisit several assumptions
regarding literacy among Gypsies. The findings also have implications
for a final topic that we want to develop in the conclusion: our
understanding of Gitanos' performance in formal education, and of
how linguistic practices are embedded in larger institutional and
social systems.
CONCLUSIONS
The results we have presented suggest the need to reconceptualize the
portrait of literacy in Gitano culture that we presented in the
introduction. Reading and writing have sanctioned roles inside the
community, and Gitanos have organized for themselves different
institutions in which literacy plays a fundamental role. Important
elements of these literacy practices, most notably religious literacy,
do not have the immediate function of transacting with non-Gypsy
institutions and segments of the social system. Currently, acquiring
and displaying these literacy practices is something that is expected
of all or the majority of members of the community. This expectation is
strengthened in the case of religious literacy, since Evangelist
theology places great emphasis on individual reading and interpretation
of the Bible (an interpretation that is scaffolded by religious
leaders). Consequently, the Gitano institutions that we have examined
have developed spaces and occasions explicitly and intentionally
designed as literacy instruction events. Children, as developing
members of the community, are the targeted participants of these
events.
All these transformations should be seen as evidence of cultural
change, and thus, previous conceptualizations of Gitano literacy need
not be judged as incorrect but rather can be put in historical
perspective. One among the several factors that may account for this
process of cultural change is, indeed, contact and exchange with
majority non-Gitano society. However, this contact cannot be seen as an
addition to Gypsy culture, since transacting with the majority group of
each territory in which they have historically settled should be seen
as a constitutive element of Gypsies' cultural repertory. What has
changed, especially as a result of the political and ideological
mobilizations of recent decades, is the terms under which these
transactions are going to take place. Redefining this relationship
requires Gitanos to build new competencies, such as those we have been
discussing. Furthermore, because Gitanos are a part of the social
system, transformation in this community requires transforming the
totality of the social system and the role that the majority group has
built for itself in this system. These ideas blend well with current
debates at a national and international level regarding the role of
Gitanos and other Romani communities in the nation-state, yet we have
also seen how these transformations take local forms. These
transformations at the local level are configured by, among other
things, the housing patterns, kinship structures, and urban policies
that determine Gypsies' local social ecology, their access to
resources, and the types of contact that take place between Gitanos and
Payos daily. Further, these factors have been shown to be determinant
in either inhibiting or sustaining the development of community
institutions (churches, associations, etc.) and social networks. In the
case of Mid-City, the historical developments we discussed at the
outset seem to have allowed rather favorable conditions for these
processes to take place (at least in comparison to other cities of the
region or localities of similar size in the rest of Spain) –
which is not to say that Mid-City Gitanos do not still face many
disadvantages and forms of discrimination in the social system.
We consider that these general statements have powerful implications
for discussions of Gitano culture and the practical socio-political
applications that may derive from this portrait. The argument outlined
above could be supported by several pieces of evidence that we have
been observing and gathering for the past few years, of which the
particular forms of entextualization presented here are only one part.
Yet the specific nature of these results does have relevant
implications for our understanding of processes inside formal
education.
We have shown how Gitano children acquire a set of verbal practices
associated with specific domains and are able to transpose these in new
forms in different settings. This is possible because the children and
other community members are able to establish continuities between
different social settings and find this circulation of textual
practices across varied contexts legitimate. Several factors contribute
to this in the case under study. As suggested already, Mid-City's
Gitano community has a relatively small and close-knit population in
which all members have knowledge of one another and are related by
different kinship, neighborly, and economic ties. Institutions such as
the cultural association and the Evangelist Church play important and
uncontested roles in the advancement and maintenance of this collective
identity and social ties.
In practical terms, the leaders of each institution work in close
contact and support each other in common causes, such as access to
public resources and facilities or the dissemination of Gitano culture.
For example, the president of the cultural association is an active
member of the Evangelist congregation, and his political oratory is
infused with religious references. In turn, the teacher of the escuela
dominical, who is also a social worker, was a speaker in a seminar
organized by the cultural association for educators working with Gypsy
children. It is the same pool of children who participate in the
educational programs of each organization, and several of the children
who participated in the Saturday morning religious classes have also
been actively involved in the educational activities of the cultural
association (e.g., summer school and computer classes). As an
illustration of these interconnections, to facilitate participation in
both institutions, the hours of the computer after-school program were
set not to interfere with the evening church services. In short,
children are provided with opportunities to learn valuable skills and
feel legitimated to circulate and transfer these skills to different
community contexts.
When we consider what role schools might play in this matrix, all
available evidence suggests that the “circulation” is
interrupted there. None of the discourse and literacy skills that we
have documented seems to have any presence in schools, even in a
transformed and adapted version similar to what is seen between the
escuela dominical and the after-school program. Alternatively, the
prevalent educational discourse regarding the educational competencies
of Gitano children is infused with deficit explanations that stress
children's lack of cultural resources, familial support,
motivation, and basic skills. Consequently, the instructional
adaptations geared toward Gitano children are of a compensatory nature
and often are translated into a curriculum that stresses narrow,
mechanical literacy skills.8
Admittedly,
in this part of the research project we have not observed these
children inside schools. This characterization is developed from the
available literature (e.g., Enguita 1999),
other work by ourselves (Martín & Poveda
2002) and, most immediately, by observations and conversations
with teacher-students, teachers, counselors, and supervisors that were
part of our daily work in the School of Education and Humanities of the
regional university. Many of these students and professionals work with
the very same participants whom we have studied out of school, and they
almost never contemplate or consider possible the achievements that we
have observed (see Varenne & McDermott
1998 for a more general statement on similar
issues).
Although all adult Gitanos we have worked with underscore the
importance of formal education for the socio-economic advancement of
their community and children, they also openly state that Gypsy
children's experience with the educational system is very
complicated, and that many things would have to change for Gitano
students to find themselves on equal standing with their Payo peers. In
an in-depth interview, the president of the cultural association
clearly stated this position: Schools are not prepared to receive
Gitano children; Gitano culture (from the historical contributions and
references to national culture and history to day-to-day arrangements)
is ignored and remains invisible in the educational system. Under these
conditions, the daily requirements of compulsory education are seen as
an imposition on Gypsy children – and these children often
respond to this imposition by disengaging from the objectives and
procedures of formal schooling.
Of course, similar arguments regarding cultural conflict and
discontinuities among minority students in schools have already been
reviewed extensively (Ogbu 1994, Mehan 1998). Available theories build explanations
that range from general cultural adaptive oppositional strategies to
mismatches in the interactional patterns developed outside and inside
schools. In the case of our data, we believe the fundamental question
is legitimacy. It is not difficult to imagine ways in which the oral
and written practices that we have presented could be adapted and used
productively inside schools to advance Gypsy students' success in
schools. However, the value of these achievements is being
systematically ignored, if not disparaged.
Currently, schools strive to develop and maintain connections with
community organizations such as parental associations, libraries, civic
organizations, and museums. Equally, even though the Spanish political
system upholds the separation of church and state and Spanish public
schools are not confessional, the Roman Catholic Church occupies a
privileged position in the educational system, both through formal
Catholic religion classes available during school hours and through the
conspicuous presence of Catholic celebrations in the curriculum and
school calendar. The possible participation of the Gitano institutions
we have been discussing is clearly underdeveloped, and, in this case,
they are doubly discriminated against – as ethnic minority and as
members of a minority religion. In short, these contributions are not
given the legitimacy necessary to participate on an equal standing and
proportionally in the network of community-school exchanges that are
built and maintained daily among members of the majority social group.
Consequently, any transformation of current conditions would require
and precipitate changes in the social and institutional order of the
schools and the community, as well as in the daily interactional order
of educational exchanges (Heller 1995, Heller & Martin-Jones 2001).
In conclusion, to return to the opening concepts of this paper, the
decentering and recentering of texts that we have presented is embedded
in larger socio-political dynamics as well as grounded in
discourse-internal features. Therefore, any extension of the textual
trajectories of instances such as those we have examined would have
implications both for the generic frameworks of the texts and for the
social order in which they are inserted.
