ABSTRACT Street’s (1984) concept of “ideological model” advocates for the plural character of literacy, validating all models of writing. From this perspective, marginalized literacy practices are as legitimate as dominant literacy practices, despite being socially stigmatized. In this article, I aim to investigate in what ways the literacy narratives of two adult students transgress social and linguistic norms. I employ a narrative analysis methodology that incorporates the discursive, situated and performative nature of the stories (MOITA LOPES, 2021) I analyze. At the social level, access to reading and writing is, for the students, a subversion of imposed norms that deprived them of the right to education. As women who migrated from the northeast to the southeast of Brazil in search of better living conditions, returning to school and learning to read and write are acts of resistance that challenge the status quo. At the linguistic level, the students reaffirm their enunciative intentions by transgressing the standard norm of the language, expanding the possibilities of meaning in their texts through the subversive use of punctuation and deixis. The outcomes emphasize the need to recognize the students’ literacy journey as a social criticism against insufficient policies on the provision of quality education for all. Furthermore, the outcomes point to the need for language teaching and learning approaches that recognize non-institutionalized models of literacy as valid knowledge that enhances and enriches language learning, minimizing the abyssal line (SANTOS, 2010) between orality and literacy as well as between school and non-school knowledge.