Patriann Smith, Ph.D.

 

On this day, Wednesday, February 5, 2025, after almost two weeks of failing to fuel a fire for the sacred act of unboxing, I am finally daring to joyfully hold this beautiful Cambridge University Press book, “Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence” in my hands. Amidst the precarity of what seems like a suddenly blazing world, it nonetheless feels absolutely delightful to see my book for the first time, this book that helped to liberate my mind and free my soul — just absolutely thrilling.

With this arrival emerging against the backdrop of a world seemingly ablaze with anti-immigrant sentiment, “Literacies of Migration” takes its final step, at last — the birthing of a painted portrait of the literacies of Caribbean youth, marking the end of a rather tumultuous journey. It feels wonderful yet almost surreal to sit with and savor this joyful yet fleeting moment in time — the unapologetic celebration of a five-year-long creation that demonstrates how an inosans jan nwè germinates from the complex understandings of race, language, and immigration which intersect to undergird youth’s literacies.

As the precarious moments of 2025 continue to rapidly and unflinchingly unfold before our very eyes, signaling a continued and unprecedented return to a daunting precarity for so many immigrants racialized as people of Color in the US & across the world, it is fitting that I should now finally receive this timely and relevant portrait, on the heels of celebrating my 2023 Teachers College Press book, “Black Immigrant Literacies: Intersections of Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom,” winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Honorable Mention.

A Range of Holistic Literacies

“Literacies of Migration” emerges after an almost fifteen-year journey of relentless research advocacy for demonstrating how race, language, & immigration are intertwined. With Forewords by Dr. Allison Skerrett & Dr. Awad Ibrahim, and an Afterword by Dr. Ramón Antonio Martínez, this book — created for the most part while riding a musical wave — draws on the lived experiences of high school-aged young Black immigrants to paint imaginaries of racialized translanguaging & transsemiotizing, leveraged by teenagers across the Caribbean and the US. The Caribbean youth reflect a full range of literacy practices – six distinct holistic literacies – identified as a basis for flourishing. These literacies of migration encapsulate numerous examples of how the youth are racialized transgeographically, based on their translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes, both institutionally & individually — a direct product of the call for culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies and a response to the invitation to center translanguaging and raciolinguistics in researching students’ literacies.

A Heuristic of Semiolingual Innocence

Based on these literacies, I advance in Chapter 6, what I refer to as a heuristic of semiolingual innocence containing eight elements informed by the Black immigrant literacies of Caribbean youth – flourishing, purpose, comfort, expansion, paradox, originality, interdependence, and imagination – through which stakeholders & systems will be positioned to acknowledge the imajinè inosans as well as better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth. Ultimately, the heuristic supports a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence for Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth, as well as for all youth.

A Saint Lucian American Journey

Today, as I sit with this moment, savoring every minute of the arrival of this portrait and grateful for the endorsements from Drs. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Lesley Bartlett, and Wan Shun Eva Lam, I am at the same time heartbroken for my immigrant brothers, sisters, others, so many of whom have dared to dream, to fight, to wish, to imagine a better life for ourselves and for our children, only to face often insurmountable hurdles along the way.

Alas, as I explain in detail in Chapter 5 of this book birthed from the transnational literacies of Caribbean youth racialized as Black, I too, as a Saint Lucian immigrant to these United States who brought my daughter as a child from Trinidad and Tobago to these lands seeking what I believed then to be a better life, have wrestled with the bitter complexities of migration — complexities that require transcending an “either-or” and a thinking with the quantum possibilities of the “both-and.”

A Harnessing of Possibilities from our Shared Transnational Nativity

I urge us in these precarious times and as called for in Chapter 7 of “Literacies of Migration,” to be wary of simplified and dichotomous discourses surrounding the complexities of race, language, & migration. At the same time, let us not fail to be inspired by the beauty of our shared and continued hope for liberation — a hope reflected in the Saint Lucian-themed cover design of this book, mirroring a redemptive call for the building of a solidarity through literacies of migration steeped in transational nativity existing now across Black, brown, and all worlds.

As the destinies of our God-given shared humanity continue to be forged through the fires that require a harnessing of the fortitude anchoring our faith, there is no moment like the present for reinscribing the inosans defining students’ literacies, birthed from imaginaries of translanguaging and transsemiotizing that we all possess onto the landscape of what is soon to become a just and liberated world. #imaginèinosans #silencinginvisibility