ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author set out to write an autobiographical narrative inquiry in order to unpack her own experience as a second-generation bilingual speaker and learner. She discusses narrative snapshots of religious practice from her own life, growing up Cuban and Catholic, and from a more contemporary Cuban-American teen, Rosaura, engaging in Christian literacies through bilingual readings of the Bible. The author focuses on the multimodal and transnational dimensions of their faith-related language and literacy practices, and discusses how the interplay of language and religious literacies fostered deeper cosmopolitan understandings of the world. Sociocultural approaches to literacy through a new literacies perspective can highlight the ways that youth use text, language, and media in meaningful ways as part of the social practice of their everyday lives outside of school. Exploring the language dimension of multimodal practices can also reveal the connection between the local and the global.
