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 gave language to something I had not yet been able to name: the condition of living within contradiction, of inhabiting spaces where categories fail and meaning is negotiated rather than fixed.

Together, these ideas altered how I understand teaching and learning. They moved me away from seeing the classroom as a site of transmission and toward seeing it as a site of encounter—where knowledge is not delivered but emerges through relationships, histories, and tensions that are already present. They also complicated any easy notion of inclusion. Belonging, in this frame, is not something granted by institutions. It is something continuously negotiated, often under conditions that do not fully allow it.

I carry these ideas into my work, but not without questions. The world in which I teach feels increasingly shaped by closure—hardening borders, heightened suspicion of migrants, narrowing definitions of who belongs and on what terms. In that context, I find myself returning to hybridity not as a settled concept, but as an open problem. What does it mean to speak of fluid identities and border crossings when movement itself is restricted? When the conditions that once made hybridity visible are under pressure, or even denied?

These are not questions I can resolve. If anything, they mark the limits of what these frameworks can do when taken out of their original contexts. And yet, those limits do not diminish their value. They make visible the stakes of the present moment. They remind me that belonging has never been simple, that knowledge has always been contested, and that teaching has always taken place within larger systems that shape who can move, who can speak, and who can be heard.

To write this is not to claim these traditions, but to acknowledge the ways they continue to shape how I think and teach. Their work does not offer answers I can carry intact into my own context. What it offers is a set of commitments: to attend to what learners already know, to remain alert to the conditions that structure belonging, and to stay with the tensions that emerge when those conditions shift.

I return to these texts not because they resolve my questions, but because they keep them alive. In that sense, carrying them forward means less about applying their ideas and more about continuing to ask, in each new context, what it would mean to teach toward belonging—even when belonging itself feels uncertain.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (Eds.). (2006). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Routledge.

Sepúlveda, E. III. (2011). Toward a pedagogy of acompañamiento: Mexican migrant youth writing from the underside of modernity. Harvard Educational Review, 81(3), 550–573.