Group Identity

In line with postmodern accounts of identity that emphasize its plurality and hybridity, Wallace (2008) claims that minority youth can express multiple identities through narratives with respect to not only majority cultural practices but their home experiences. Accordingly, Wallace (2008) argues that schools should support students’ identity assertion by avoiding cultural intrusiveness and stereotypes. However, such avoidance is often not guaranteed. In addition, minority youth may even confront stereotypes from communities and governments. As a response to these issues addressed in her ethnographic work on Latina youth gangs, Mendoza-Denton (2008) explicitly calls for attention to various aspects of the gang members’ subcultures, instead of readily overdramatizing their criminal tendencies. Following
Mendoza-Denton’s (2008) suggestion, I particularly argue for more consideration on minority youth’s distributed memory in order to deeply understand their cultural identities.
Distributed memory in the form of discourse and literacy practices, as Mendoza-Denton (2008) illustrates, allow researchers to look into the history of youth literacy and how one group’s literacy practices interact with those of other groups.
In other words, distributed memory can play a vital role in reflecting how minority youth identities emerge and evolve through cross-cultural interaction and negotiation. Mendoza-Denton (2008) specifies a series of discourse practices to demonstrate how linguistic forms contribute to creating distributed memory and establishing group identity. For example, the word game hablar en su may distinguish less fluent Spanish speakers from the group of fluent speakers, as its linguistic complexity increases. Apart from group identity expression, Mendoza-Denton (2008) suggests that individual identity can also be reflected in distributed memory, because everyone has a different recollection of past events. Thus, distributed memory can aid in “connecting individual identity to group identity and stabilizing it over time” (Mendoza-Denton, 2008, p. 180), thereby deepening our understanding of a group’s cultures and cultural
identities.
Similarly, Wallace (2008) finds that particular cultural identities are invoked to linking youth’s divergent memorized experiences with their curricular literacy practices. Especially when youth engage with school texts, fictionalized characters’ stories can speak to their real-life experiences. In Wallace’s (2008) observation, a boy from Sri Lanka thought the story in A View from the Bridge was realistic and felt related to the characters, because they went through similar difficulties while living abroad. What is even more interesting is that youth can consciously create distributed memory by imagining a shared history. As an example raised by Mendoza-Denton (2008), the Latina girl Agata determined willfully with her homegirls, that the movie Colors was their beginning reference point, which therefore influenced their belief about their origin, current lives and futures. Based on these facts above, it is clear that exploring minority youth’s distributed memory, in the form of discourse and literacy practices, can provide us with more insider knowledge about their cultural identities. Thereafter, we will be able to provide youth with access to more culturally relevant literacy practices that mediate in various identity expressions free of intrusiveness and stereotypes.