Identity texts as an analytic lens

The youth of South Vista wrote texts on their backpacks, clothing, and skin. They sent texts from cellular phones and over online spaces. And many authored and performed texts as youth emcees. These texts pulsed through the everyday canvases of youth space defining who was a member of particular groups and who was not in a textual argument of solidarity, exclusion, crossing, and sharing. This textual argument mirrored through the written word the processes of oral language at South Vista. I came to understand these cultural inscriptions as identity texts, an analytic category that allowed me to parse out the workings of various types of text while seeing them also as a whole textual system. I use the term identity texts to refer to youth space texts inscribing ethnic, linguistic, local, and transnational affiliations on clothing, binders, backpacks, public spaces, rap lyrics, and electronic media. These texts were bound together by three factors: they indexed identities as members of particular groups, they were unsolicited literacy acts not officially evaluated by school, and all youth at South Vista participated in creating them.