ABSTRACT
In applying Anzalduan frameworks to metonymy, metaphor, and mythologies, we unearth implicit messaging in common language about transnational youth in order to re-appropriate this rhetoric for a new consciousness. This chapter centers around the testimonios of four transnational individuals who share stories of developing multilingual and multicultural strengths while growing up, when others looked down on them. The authors’ critical discourse analysis exposes multiple directional, spatial, and other conceptual metonymies, metaphors, and myths that act to position transnational youth as having problematic identities. Left unquestioned, these deficit-based narratives get repeated, normalized, become invisible to scrutiny and to convert into the new truth discourse about these youths. Following Anzaldúa’s call to create and recognize a new language and a new consciousness, this chapter concludes with an exercise in semiotically dismantling existing myths with new ways of talking about and thinking about transnational youth.
