Blurring Material and Rhetorical Walls: Children Writing the Border/Lands in a Second-Grade Classroom.

Spurred by burgeoning racist and xenophobic immigration policy and rhetoric, we analyzed the writing of seven second-grade children about their experiences of living connections that span the United States–Mexico border. Informed by research on children’s testimonios in literacy classrooms and Anzaldua’s concept of the border/lands, we drew on feminist and critical poststructuralist theories to examine how children’s writing rhetorically and aesthetically engaged with the affective, political, and ideological dimensions of borders and the rhetorical and material violence of hostile policies. Methodologically, we conducted close readings of children’s writing, tracing how they disrupted boundaries, including those constructed both physically and ideologically across nations and between concepts, identities, and feelings. This analysis underscores children’s keen insights into their political and personal worlds, the importance of writing pedagogies that invite children to engage with the personal and polit...