Working at the Crossroads A Guide for Border Crossing

2020

Community college transfer student Pronouns: She/They Introduction This paper is an ethnographic case study that provides critical reflections on the strategies employed by ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM) that respond to particular constraints and opportunities pertaining to labor and cost, including operations, acquisition of equipment, funding, and collaborative initiatives for community engagement. This case study will posit labor and cost solutions against a background of scarce resources as well as forge new ideas for community-engaged and justice-based recuperation methods in academia. In particular, this paper reflects on the way IXeM expresses a rasquache defiance that is situated within digital cultural studies and the larger movement of community-based archiving, as well as in the interrogation of traditional (Anglo, heteropatriarchal-centric) archival authority. Building from cultural theorists like Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I've developed the term digital rasquachismo to frame IXeM's strategies that decenter dominant paradigms. Before I jump into this work, I'd like to address my positionality and inherent power and privilege in order to reconcile my social location with the work I'm doing with IXeM, establish the principles that guide this project, and craft my identity as a researcher, graduate student, and cultural worker. I'm currently a PhD student in Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University, located on occupied Tongva land, also known as Los Angeles County, California. I am a U.S. citizen, middle-upper class, cis-gendered, mixed-race, and a woman. My mother is an immigrant from rural Mexico of Indigenous Tarahumara Rarámuri, European, and Arab descent and my father is a U.S. citizen and white settler of Anglo descent. I take responsibility for the structures that have afforded me unearned privileges by continuously reflecting on the role I play in reinforcing structures of oppression and by committing to dismantling such systems of domination in my research and cultural work by actively listening and collaborating with participants, and responding to community needs in a way that doesn't inflict further harm or suffering. My work is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-imperialist, antihomophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-ableist, anti-violence, pro-Palestinian, pro-environment, and intersectional.

History, 2022

How do you preserve the history of a neighbourhood undergoing change? How do you honour its residents and their legacy of lucha (struggle)? How do you uplift the voices of community members, students and researchers of colour in the museum world? In this joint reflection, members of the Los Angeles Boyle Heights Museum (BHM) reflect on their collaborative endeavours to research, preserve and celebrate the multiethnic history of this Los Angeles (LA) neighbourhood. As a research, exhibition and educational project led by professors, graduate students, undergraduate students and community members, the BHM team uses a horizontal leadership model to uplift and tell the stories of a neighbourhood. The BHM team members discuss the various approaches they use to build confianza -trust -among themselves and within US Latinx immigrant

In this article, we share findings from a critical qualitative study aimed at better understanding the ways that language, history, and geography mediate our work and identities as educational researchers. As scholars whose particular sociocultural and political histories are often absent in scholarly discussions about language and education, we use the intergenerational sharing of testimonios as both methodology and narrative development to gain a deeper understanding of experiences involving the learning and use of English that influence our academic careers. We theorize our experiences as resisting erasure and contribute to Latina epistemology scholarship and critical educational research about Puerto Ricans in the United States. Moreover, we forward the concept of funds of knowledge as a professional practice. Telling our stories and developing mentoring networks is necessary for our individual and collective functioning and wellbeing as scholars; it cultivates solidarity as a means of thriving in the academy.

2001

This article is both a discussion of public history and an exploration into the lack of Latinos in museums and humanities positions where culture and identity are collected and presented. Public history and museum studies make up a list of invisible careers for Latinos and people of color. While this is less true now than a few years ago, the number of people of color in both fields is still alarmingly low. At the same time, the exploration into the linkages between public history and museum studies is an attempt to demystify and take certain lingo from contemporary culture out of these vocations. This article also calls for the need to examine the role of the independent scholars and curators in the process of presenting culture and history.

US Latino & Latina Oral History Journal, 2020

Abstract:This standing feature highlights Project Coco, a 2018 collaboration between the authors; high school teacher of Mexican American studies, Joel Rodríguez; and high school students in El Paso, Texas. The authors discuss the various components of Project Coco–El Día de los Muertos, oral history workshops, history lessons, and altar creation. Following students' responses to the project, the authors suggest that Project Coco is an act of reclamation.

2001

Over the 30 years of their existence, studies of Latinos/as in the U.S. and the field of Latin American Studies have emerged largely as divided disciplines. That is, despite what would appear to be similar sensibilities including comparable criticisms of Western hegemony and the neocolonial practices of the U.S., as well as the political, economic, and cultural displacement of similar populations, the two areas of study have more often regarded each other as competitive colleagues rather than complimentary practices. In the following study, I examine the nature of the two disciplines paying particular attention to the political context surrounding their formations and the foundations of their discursive frameworks. I examine changes to these disciplines in the methodological and ideological shifts surrounding the emergence of empirical and postmodern studies, and the relationship between these theoretical shifts and the expansion of globalization. Finally, I conclude with a discussi...

Journal of First-generation Student Success, 2021

This critical ethnography highlights how first-generation Latinx undocu/DACAmented collegians who are members of a social and advocacy student organization at a public, historically white institution in the Southwest, U.S.A develop a scholarship and peer-mentoring program for other students with liminal legal statuses. The theoretical connections that guide this study are social and navigational capital and seek to answer how these collegians use these forms of cultural wealth to develop different campus support services for their peers. The findings from this study reveal how these organizational members use their cultural capital to organize and network with various stake- holders to develop a scholarship for undocu/DACAmented students, in addition to applying for and obtaining grant funding to commence a peer-mentoring program. This study highlights the agency exercised and assets these first-generation collegians bring to college and offer institutional agents recommendations to support them better.

This article explores the role of the podcast, Block Chronicles, in contributing to Latinx education issues via its a role as a form of public pedagogy. The authors situate their work in experiences within urban spaces such as Los Angeles, CA and the south Bronx, NY, while also making links to rural/semi-rural towns in the New Latinx south. Testimonio scholarship is used as a methodological tool that informs theorization and the data collection/interview process. Implications are made related to how frameworks around public pedagogy informs the development of podcasts and how they can positively impact the experiences of Latinx students. Further, this work extends bounded notions of urban education by articulating a more hybrid take on the historical experience of Latinx communities. As such, we take into account the historical role of migration and settlement across urban-rural contexts and seek to explore how these multiple cultural worlds convene and redefine place, history, and schooling. Keywords Latinx education · Public pedagogy · Urban education Currently, the national level political climate centers a series of assaults against the knowledge, opportunity pathways, and dignity of Latinx communities. From anti-immigrant rhetoric, to the toxic roller coaster policy circus around undocumented students, dehumanizing forces continue to provide challenges toward equitable outcomes for Latinx students. Interestingly, as these attacks take place, it is often the

Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 2023

The activism efforts of Latinx students from the 1960s to 1990s at Michigan State University preceded the current resources available to Latinxs on campus today. Guided by transformational resistance, university library archival sources are used to showcase various activism efforts demonstrated by these collegians. Some include a grape purchasing boycott, a sit-in, and a massive library book check-out protest, which all collectively played salient roles in the development of transformational changes for Latinx students. Recommendations from the findings are provided to advance future research and practice for institutional agents in working for and alongside student activists versus against them.