When ‘literacy is a bennie’: researching contested literacies inbilingual youth radio Dana Walker a * and Deborah Romero b a College of Education and Behavioral Sciences , University of Northern Colorado , Greeley , CO, USA; b College of Humanities and Social Sciences , University of Northern Colorado , Greeley , CO, USA This paper presents findings from an innovative school-based youth radio project for Mexican immigrant students . We draw on ethnographic and discourse data collected over an academic year , including multiple data representations from video and audio recordings , radio production artefacts, interviews , and still images . We begin our discussion with a close analysis of a rich moment in the project brought-onby the collision of divergent and contested models of literacy . We then follow the thematic development of literacy across chains of events and contexts to understand how literacy was constructed and enacted in relation to language, identity , empowerment and voice . The findingssuggestthat although school community linked collaborations can give rise to contradictions and disturbance, such collaborations have the potential to become productive learning contexts for disaffected and underachieving students and their teachers . Keywords: youth media; discourse analysis; multi literacies; critical literacy; Latino education Elsa, teacher: So myfocus was empowerment. How can you find a voice, and a place in community? So, literacy is what we work on all the time with ‘em. And of course, I guess I’m just looking at it opposite ofyou. Empowerment, and wecan change it, empowerment is the big piece, literacy is the bennie . Aaron, radio staff: See, the whole time. I just kept on thinking literacy , literacy is really the big obstacle in terms of achieving that empowerment. This dialogue between Elsa, the language arts teacher , and Aaron, a trainer from a local radio station, tookplace during a staff debriefing of the youth radio project at La Escuela Bilinugu ¨ e Cha ´ vez/Cha ´vez Middle Schoolin a western state of US. Theexcerpt shows the efforts by participants to communicate their divergent definitions of literacy and to make sense of the goals and actions of the project. This debriefing was to become a significant moment for bothparticipants and researchers in that it provided insight into a disjuncture or clash inparticipants’ perspectives , that might not otherwise ha ve been visible . For although the various practices and perspectives on literacyformed an often-implicit basis for many of the plans and activities of the project, there was littleexplicit discussion about what exactly theseentailed. That was , until a staff debriefingfour months into the project whenparticipants began to ask question aboutthe goals of the project and specifically , *Email: Dana.Walker@unco.edu Ethnography and Education V ol. 3, No. 3, September 2008, 283 296 ISSN 1745-7823 print/ISSN 1745-7831 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17457820802305535 http://www.informaworld.com