Cultural Mentoring as Acompañamiento: Rethinking Community Cultural Wealth

In this article, Andrea Dyrness, Jackquelin Bristol, and Daniel Garzón explore how cultural mentoring with elementary students was enacted by undergraduate and graduate students from minoritized backgrounds attending a predominantly white university. They examine how these mentors engaged with a framework of community cultural wealth and borderlands pedagogies of acompañamiento in their interactions with their mentees and in their own and collective reflections. Using testimonies and ethnographic data, the authors illustrate participants’ mutual engagement in the ongoing struggle to make sense of and confront structural injustice and argue that acompañamiento illuminates the reciprocal, transformative relationships between university and elementary students of color in the shared process of developing their critical consciousness.