Reading and Writing la Línea: A Learned Shared Grammar of Border-Crossing Across Platform Ecologies

This study examines how transfronterizx commuters—individuals who reside in México and regularly cross into the U.S. for work, education, or family responsibilities—in the Tijuana–San Diego border region use a publicly accessible Facebook group to coordinate their everyday border-crossings under conditions of surveillance and uncertainty. Grounded in an understanding of literacy as a socioculturally organized practice and a platform ecology framework, I conceptualize border-crossing as a socially distributed literacy practice that is learned and organized across the physical and digital spaces of the border region. Through digital ethnographic observations, the study illustrates how the institutional organization of the border informs commuters’ collective sense-making within a Facebook platform ecology. Specifically, the findings document how this platform ecology mediates a learned shared grammar of border-crossing that is consequential to how commuters collectively navigate uncertainty and surveillance at the border. This study contributes to literacy and border scholarship by reframing border-crossing not as an individual or rote process, but as a literacy practice unfolding within a platform-mediated ecology. This reframing invites a more expansive understanding of transfronterizx communities, their histories of participation, and their cross-border lives. In doing so, it extends literacy scholarship beyond school-based contexts by leveraging a sociocultural lens to reconceptualize border-crossing as a transfronterizx literacy practice unfolding across interconnected physical and digital ecologies of the border region.