“Write Me Back!”: Diasporic Identities and Digital Media: Creating New Spaces for Writing in School

This chapter addresses the disconnect between inand out-of-school writing spaces. Drawing from a larger study of the writing of bilingual Latino immigrant youth in a middle school English language class, the author examines the epistolary community created through an exchange of emails with a group of first-generation Latino university students. The author draws on an ecologies of writing framework to explore writing and place-based identities and the notion of writing across digital and cultural communities in order to analyze the relational, locational, and collective work the students were engaged in. The chapter suggests implications for creating new spaces for writing in school, drawing on social and digital media to participate in imaginative and intellectual literacy work.