Re-Reading Student Texts: Intertextuality and Constructions of Self and Other  in the Contact Zone

Abstract

This article examines a student poem about a common gendered experience in Guanajuato, Mexico, which was written by a student in a creative writing group I led during a one-semester study abroad program I direct for CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange). The article posits Guanajuato as a contact zone where Mexican culture and US culture meet in myriad ways on a daily basis. It introduces the notion of intertextuality to complicate the typical way we might read the text. After looking at one possible US interpretation that might be given to this piece, it tries not to discredit it, but to de-privilege it as the only possible interpretation. The article does this first by opening up several interpretive possibilities within the text and, second, by taking the student text into the wider interpretive domain to look at what the local other is also expressing textually in the midst of intercultural contact. It considers two types of local texts: a t-shirt genre that is currently popular and the ubiquitous bar flyer handed out on the streets of Guanajuato. I attempt to show that everyone in this contact zone resists being constructed by the other, and that everyone writes his or her identity into the social context. By considering the student text from another perspective, and from a less common theoretical point of view, the article argues that we can destabilize our own complacent way of knowing, bring other perspectives into our understanding, and model the type of learning in which we hope our students engage.