ABSTRACT
The authors use the story of a young man and Wallace, a community elder, to illustrate what they mean by community literacies and to show how people in one community read the word and the world. The story is the extreme example of a heated confrontation that involved a call to the police, yet the moment was still used purposefully to change attitudes and behaviors. The authors were struck by how calmly the customers reacted to the confrontation, evidenced by how they continued to engage in their routine transaction behaviors, which the research team felt reflected the phenomenon of normalized violence in their community. About midway through the meeting, the authors began discussing some tensions that existed between community members and university researchers. The conversation moved to talk about standing with the community in what community members referred to as a "war zone".
