ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the Baradian concept of relational causality to tell the story of Mauricito and his particular experience with the letter “s.” The intention of the chapter is to unsettle discourses of language and literacy as linear, cause-effect relations in which children are said to require prerequisites of rich written texts to “become literate.” Such configurations can produce assemblages of blame, lack, and deficit that are damaging to minoritized mestizo communities such as the one to which Mauricito belongs. Experimenting with a method of “storytelling with theory,” the chapter entangles memory, theory, writing, and analysis to configure Mauricito’s literacies through relational causalities of intra-acting materialities, affect, histories, and memories. For literacy educators and researchers, rethinking causality as relational in literacy events means highlighting our engagement and implication in those relations, and their capacity to participate in pedagogical change.
