IMMIGRANT IDENTITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE: PORTRAITS OF SPANISH-SPEAKING YOUNG MEN LEARNING IN A COMMUNITY-BASED SETTING

Currently the United States is home to a large and increasing immigrant population. Many of these immigrant students use community-based programs for their educational needs. Despite the large number of immigrant students who currently use alternate resources, such as churches and community centers, for education, adult language learners in nonacademic settings remain understudied. Today's students need language and literacy skills along with specialized skills required by the current globalizations of marketplaces. Community organizations providing language and literacy services to immigrants need a better understanding of clients and how to provide the experiences that will allow their students to participate in the modern workforce and society. This is a qualitative ethnographic study that follows nine Spanish-speaking adult males through one portion of their lives as recent immigrants. Using a sociocultural definition of literacy and portraiture as a method of analysis, this study looks at data obtained from classroom assignments, digital stories created by the subjects, and online social media to investigate the performance of identity across literacy events. Analysis supported the existence of complex, hybrid, and situated identities for students. Identity performance differed across literacy events and the inclusion of digital stories and online social media provided evidence of identities not present in traditional classroom activities