Abstract
Drawing from a year-long ethnographic study with fifth-graders from border-crossing families in the northeastern United States, I demonstrate how students reconfigure borders around languaging, literacies, and knowledge systems through their use of transgressive humor. Findings show how students engage this critical literacy practice to disrupt colonizing hierarchies such as English vs Spanish, United States vs Mexico, written vs. oral, and appropriate vs. inappropriate to create new, inclusive ways of languaging, doing literacy, and belonging within and across borders that traditionally rank and separate. I argue young students from border-crossing families are engaging important sense-making literacies through transgressive humor that should be centered in elementary literacy curricula.