An Influence-Centered Homage: Reading Toward Belonging
I don’t remember a single moment of discovery. It was more iterative than that—circling around questions of literacy, culture, and language education, returning again and again to the problem of belonging. In that circling, certain voices kept reappearing. Sepúlveda’s focus on acompañamiento. The work on Funds of Knowledge by Moll and colleagues. And through Moll, my first sustained encounter with Anzaldúa—whose writing I have returned to more than once, each time finding something that had been waiting for me. What these thinkers offered was not a method I could simply apply, but a reorientation. Sepúlveda’s work re-enforced what I was already witnessing in my own classroom: learners were not as lacking, but as already in motion—already navigating complex crossings shaped by history, migration, and power. The Funds of Knowledge framework shifted where I locate expertise, asking me to recognize the dense, often invisible knowledge carried in households and communities. And Anzaldúa gav...