This article reports on my attempt to use storytelling as an entry point into academic discourse in a learning community designed to meet the learning needs of ESL students who recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Based on research suggesting a correlation between academic success in a second language and first language literacy skills, this learning community linked an ESL course to a Spanish composition course for native speakers. Storytelling constituted the cornerstone of an ethnographic partnership established in order to create a "place for students' self" within Academic Discourse and to inform the translingual pedagogical alliance formed with the Spanish instructor. I will discuss the impact this approach has had on students' success indicators and ways in which it can be implemented in other teaching contexts.