![]() ![]() My hope is that this experience will help my students recognize literacy as a force that can shape their lives in new and unexpected ways. Liliana’s story inspired us to think about the roles played by our access to education and money our mobility between regions, gender, and race and our citizenship status. ![]() Her story stimulated my students to think about the tensions between traditionally dominant “academic” literacies and Liliana’s vernacular narrative about her lived experiences, highlighting how literacy-the use of it, the search for it, and even the regulation and oppression of it-occurs in each of our communities and across national borders. Indeed, this project provides an opportunity for students from multiple backgrounds to see how Liliana’s journey was shaped by material conditions involving social, political, and economic factors. The book, which is in English and Spanish, provided the chance to include writing that many of our students (and instructors) might identify with from their first-generation, working-class, and/or multilingual backgrounds. This year at Texas A&M University–Commerce, I incorporated Dreams and Nightmares/Sueños y Pesadillas into our first-year writing courses. The Dreams and Nightmares/Sueños y Pesadillas project includes the book and a website, where a free teacher’s guide, including discussion starters, study units, and class projects can be downloaded. Liliana reminds her readers that her story is also the story of over 210,000 children who traveled alone to the US and were arrested by immigration. Once in high school, living with a loving foster family, Liliana decided to tell her story, and worked with Mark Lyons at New City Community Press (founded by NCTE member Steve Parks), to edit and translate her book, which is completely in her own words. Liliana Velásquez, author of Dreams and Nightmares/Sueños y Pesadillasĭreams and Nightmares/Sueños y Pesadillas is a memoir by teenager Liliana Velásquez, who at 14 fled Guatemala by herself to escape violence and poverty and endured a harrowing trip to the US, where she was captured in the Arizona desert and put in detention, then took two years to convince the US, courts to grant her asylum. Everything that was on my mind, all of my suffering and all of my dreams-my destiny-now are kept safe in this book.” ![]()
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