Education, organizing, and civic literacies in a community-based immigrant and workers’ rights organization

Situated within the rapidly changing context surrounding the November 2024 presidential election, in which immigrant communities faced increased surveillance, this 18-month critical ethnography explores the education, civic, and literacy practices of members of a primarily Latine community organization in the Northeast who are agitating for justice for immigrants and workers. This research broadens our understanding of the diverse organizing practices of a community space and how immigrant communities are transforming their civic landscape, pushing against exclusions experienced because of documentation, nation-state borders, and citizenship statuses. This dissertation is written as three papers. In the first, I explore the critical literacy practices of youth organizers from immigrant families who critique and reshape educational systems for college access that were not designed for their border-crossing realities. They engage biliteracies to create diverse multimodal texts that draw on subaltern knowledges to reenvision exclusionary systems and forge paths to higher education. The second paper examines the teaching and learning practices of a Workers’ Committee organizing for improved labor conditions and protections. Findings highlight how members from across the Americas draw on diverse backgrounds of political ideologies, resistance, border-crossing, and navigation of civic systems to inform a unique coalescence of organizing practices and pedagogies. This paper contributes a recognition of transborder knowledges to scholarship describing learning practices and knowledge production in social movements. The third paper focuses on six interviews with organizers in July 2025 who reflect on the political upheaval of the new presidential administration and their shifting perceptions of civic life and adapted organizing practices. Drawing on an altermundo civic literacies framework, I argue that a speculative lens is necessary to make sense of resistance and future-dreaming in a dystopian moment in which immigrant community members are criminalized and visibly pushed out of civic spaces. Together, these papers extend our understanding of the education, organizing, and literacy practices of transborder members of a community organization. They center the critical literacies and knowledge-making practices of youth and adult members across organizing spaces that push against structural exclusion from civic systems, with implications for researchers and educators across K-12 and community contexts alike.