ABSTRACT
This article looks closely at how the process of artmaking linked to social critique unfolds in one community-based educational setting in Latin America. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with a community-based popular education organization in the northern desert of Mexico, the article examines the pedagogical uses of poetry, music, and other modalities to disrupt dominant discourses about what it means, in this case, to be “Mexican.” At the center of the paper is an analysis of the “espina y jugo” (thorn and juice) metaphor, which refers to the outside and inside of the desert cactus. I argue that the processes of meaning-making and signification underlying the enactment of this metaphor represent a pedagogy that is oriented toward collective identity-building and social action. The enactment of such collective identities, forged in and through acts of multiliterate and multimodal engagement, can be interpreted as a pedagogy of the “new social movements of grassroots orientation” (Escobar, 1992b, p. 421).
