This article investigates the use of oral narratives by a 7-year-old Mexican born girl (Isabela) participating in small group literature discussions in a bilingual 2nd-grade classroom in the U.S. over a year. The study is grounded in sociocultural and critical perspectives and uses narrative and transactional theories to understand literacy events.

Considers how gender, identity and literacy are entangled and mutually constitutive. Concludes that social experience, desire, proximate others, and the ways in which children can draw upon these in the classroom are aspects of the situated condition that deserve more prominence in literacy and identity research.