Content area
Full Text
Drawn from a longitudinal ethnographic study, this article elaborates the trajectories linking one undergraduate's extracurricular journaling to her school writing and her emerging identity as a journalist. This portrait of literate development highlights how our sense of ourselves as literate persons is forged in the interplay of multiple encounters with literacy, private as well as public, and how authoring a literate life means engaging in the ongoing work of reconciling the conflicts and synergies among them.
Anticipating her graduation from the urban high school she attended in Chicago, Illinois, Angelica Herrera (her real name)1 looked forward to pursuing her longstanding interest in, as she put it, "doing something with writing," and attending college was an important step toward that goal. After several months of filling out application materials during her junior year of high school, the thought that this dream might go unrealized due to her low grades and standardized test scores caused her no small amount of anxiety. In the following journal entry from August 2000, the summer after her junior year, Angelica expresses her fear that her plans might be cut short, and more importantly, that her voice might go unheard:
On top of it all, I'm stressing out over what school is going to believe enough in me to accept me. I'm afraid that if I don't get into a great school, the world will never hear Angelica Herrera. How do I prove I'm good enough for these schools if they don't know me? I mean really know me. My grades and ACT scores do not reflect how good of a student-person I am. How are they supposed to tell just how promising a student I am? How are you supposed to feel like it's worth going blindly into an institution where nobody cares how you contribute to the world? I pray somebody hears the honesty I am proclaiming in my words. If nobody listens, nobody hears the voices of the might-be-greats.
Just as she had done so many times before when dealing with her life's twists and turns, Angelica turned to her private writing, the self-initiated and selfsponsored prose, poetry, short stories, and song lyrics written in Spanish and English (and often combinations of both) filling the pages of the...