Primary and Secondary Discourses

Discourses are something that everyone deals with on a daily basis and there is a wide variety o0f them that it can be a little tricky to understand. The two Discourses that caught my attention were primary and secondary Discourses. Both these factors play a key role in my daily life, as well as for others, but through these Discourses I was able to obtain a liberating Discourse and also build my own identity kit. Gaining a secondary Discourse was great because it allowed me to see more perspectives and gain more values than those given by my mothers, it also caused a drift between us as the years went by.

Everyone starts off with a primary Discourse, which is initially given to us through our parents and family, in other words it is what we obtain from our initial interactions. For example, I got my primary Discourse from my mother and close family members because I was raised by them and they influenced me because my interaction with them was all I knew.

Gee mentions how growing up, our primary socialization affects our worldview the most and that is particularly true because it is sort of our foundation. No matter how many other Discourses we acquire over time, we will always be brought back to our primary Discourse. I do not believe that it is necessarily the most important Discourse we acquire, but instead it is the starting point, but throughout further interaction each of us acquire a secondary Discourse and so on.

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Just as a primary Discourse is acquired through our initial interaction which is gained from our family, it is only logical for a secondary Discourse to come after which is gained through our community and social interactions outside of the home such as school and church. “After our initial socialization in our home community, each of us interacts with various non-home based social institutions-institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (Gee, 8). We all gain new ideas, languages, and attitudes through our secondary interaction according to Gee and this helps each of us get a broader perspective about life because we get influenced by others outside of the home. As mentioned by Gee, “Each of these social institutions, commands and demands one or more Discourses ND we acquire these fluently to the extent that we are given access to these institutions and are allowed apprenticeships within them” (Gee, 8). Secondary Discourse challenges us to go beyond our primary Discourse because not everyone that we interact with will have the same values and mindset as us so we are required to be more open and through these new and different interactions, we start to gain new Discourses that often times contradict our primary Discourse and help us gain new knowledge and become more diverse.

Throughout the years as I started to gain my primary and secondary Discourses through my family, friends, community, church and school, I started to build my own identity kit that combined everything that I learned from my different Discourses and was able to gain a liberating Discourse. Gee brought up the idea that a primary Discourse can never be liberated literacies because they are initial and contain only themselves and therefore can never serve as a meta-knowledge. This is true because a primary Discourse is only our initial knowledge and interaction so we know nothing else but that Discourse, but as we start gaining a secondary Discourse we start learning more and gaining new perspectives as opposed to just having the ones provided by our families.

Once you have both a primary and secondary Discourse you can start to think for yourself and start to gain your own beliefs which is why a secondary Discourse is liberating but a primary is not. As I started to build my own identity kit with the help of my primary and secondary Discourse, I started to see shift between me and my moms ideas and that is particularly because her Discourses differed from mine, she was still accustomed to what she was taught in Mexico and did not want to break away from that and refused to adopt new ideas and Discourses from the U. S like I have. We are constantly in disagreement, but I refuse to remain in my primary Discourse where I was taught traditional customs from my moms Hispanic community, part of me will always have them because I am proud of my heritage, but I also grew up in the U.S which has entirely different customs so just as I am Hispanic, I have also been Americanized. I want to break away from Hispanic stereotypes and build my own identity despite it conflicting with my mothers.

The way I deal with finding a balance between my secondary and primary Discourse is through code-meshing. According to Young “Code meshing blend dialects, international languages, local idioms, chatroom lingo, and rhetorical styles of various ethnic and cultural groups in both formal and informal speech acts” (Young, 67). Growing up my first language was Spanish and I grew up around people who used slang Spanish terms and it was not until high school where I realized that I did not know the proper Spanish. My teacher brought up how native Spanish speakers always find it tough to learn the proper Spanish because they grew up around learning the improper Spanish from our parents, since most Hispanics who grew up in Mexico did not get a proper education. I noticed that this is true because me and my other native classmates would say things that were incorrect because they were not “proper” but they were correct to us because that is how we grew up hearing and speaking it. We would often find ourselves correcting our teacher and disagreeing with her. Another way that I would code mesh was using both English and Spanish when speaking or texting friends because my mom only knows Spanish, but I am constantly conversing in English at school, amongst friends, around my community and with my brothers. This would of course anger my mother because she would not know what I was saying so that it why my brothers and I must only conversant in Spanish around her unless we want to get the evil eyes from her.

I still use aspects of my primary Discourse that were given by my mother, but school, my friends and social media have given me a broader view of life. Through my secondary Discourse, I have gained new attitudes and values that I try and filter into my primary Discourse. Gee mentions how filtering conflicts with your primary and secondary Discourse (15). This is accurate because my mom dislikes when I filter in my secondary Discourse because she does not agree with the values that I gained outside of the household because it makes her feel like I am going against her teachings and refusing her authority. Conflicts between both Discourses are mainly seen when I refuse to listen to my mother because she is very small minded in certain topics and refuses to modernize. For example, I have grown to have more feminist views and I believe that a female can be an independent, successful women without the help of a man, but she is stuck in ancient times and believes that every woman should get married and be a good household wife and the fact that she refuses to accept that these are new times drives me crazy.

Despite primary and secondary Discourses differing, one thing they have in common is that helped in shaping my identity kit. My mom may not agree with my use of filtering and code meshing, but I refuse to be bound to my primary Discourse because I want a liberating Discourse. The fact that I have a secondary Discourse and act differently now because of it causes a shift between us, but at least I have not completely moved away from my primary socialization because it will always be my foundation so I have found that the solution to avoid conflict between my mother and I is to use my primary Discourse around her, it may not be completely practical but so far it seems to work. I understand that change can be difficult, but I just wish that my mom would be more open minded about things and allow me to have a liberating Discourse. Filtering primary and secondary Discourses can cause conflict but it is something that must occur in order to have a liberating Discourse and it allows us to be able to build our own identity kit.