Internalized Oppression, Resilience, and Power en las Palabras: A Chicana Feminist Navigating Life, Pedagogy, and Practice in Higher Education
I was in my local county library two weeks ago with my middle child (who had recently received a “Kindness” award from his second grade teacher). We were about to check out with a handful of books when I saw a section near the front desk highlighting Women’s History Month. I didn’t initially notice the brightly colored sign attempting to proudly advertise this month dedicated to women; I noticed the books forward facing— calling out to me— The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Daughters of Latin America, an International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzman. I rarely check out books for myself anymore. I rarely find the time to read for pleasure. But this time was different.
Later that day, I opened Sandra Guzman’s anthology. It reminded me of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. And like This Bridge, Daughters of Latin America calls upon our ancestors, bringing forth voices of resistance, our foremothers recognizing and acknowledging our connection to the land, and a powerful force of reclamation. I opened to the Introduction to learn about the Daughters (the women of Latin America) represented in this volume, some of whom were “jailed, harrassed, murdered, forced into exile,” and all of whom “wrote and write to defy the very forces, structures, and institutions that sought and seek to erase and silence them.” As a woman who writes to find her voice in a male-dominated society, as an academic, as a mom, I felt comfort in knowing that I live and I breathe for the ancestors, and I wonder what legacy I will leave behind. Slowly flipping through pages, I land on Laura Esquivel’s “Before Noise.” She speaks to me with such wisdom, reaching out to me while I become ever more engrossed in her words, las palabras dancing off the page and into my subconscious. I block everything out and there is silence; only me and Laura remain. “I love silence. I love listening to it,” she writes. And I pause, sitting in silence for a moment, trying to listen and breathe. And I think about how silence can be deafening at times, especially when we are so used to the noise. Guzman goes on to explain how the Mayans described the universe “as nothing more than a resonant matrix and that if you could connect properly with it through the umbilical cord of the universe, you’d be able to obtain all the information you can in the span of a second” (71). The ancient Mayans held a strong connection to the land, and to the cosmos, one that feels so lost in such chaotic times.
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How I Found Chicana Feminism
Growing up, I never saw power in my own voice. I never felt empowered to make a difference in this world. I yearned for love and attention in a space that never fully healed from historical trauma. Often receding into myself, dissociating from the physical and mental pain of my reality, I was constantly in search of a sense of belonging. I didn’t realize in my youth that I would one day find this connection in Chicana feminism. I would one day find a home among other women of color who had taken back their power through written and spoken word, women like Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, whose seminal work, This Bridge Called My Back, continues to bring profound liberation and healing to women of color who relate across time and spatial reality. As Moraga tells us, “history is always in the making; while women of color and Indigenous peoples remain wordless in the official record. The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to ‘see’, what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what the body knows to be true” (xxiv). Moraga describes these embodied experiences as a “theory in the flesh” —one that liberates all women of color, allowing them to bring into existence, to make visible, the realities of their lives. I found myself immediately drawn to Moraga’s “theory in the flesh,” a shift in perspective, the “flesh and blood experiences” that reflect a reality that had always been overlooked in traditional U.S history books and English literature. I certainly did not receive this kind of liberating experience in my K-12 education. It would not be until years later (after college) that I would finally find a space of acceptance and belonging, among fellow women of color in my field of rhetoric and composition, and related disciplines.
As I reflect on what it took to get here, I recall my undergrad experience at a small liberal arts college in California’s Central Valley. As an undergrad English major, I found myself drawn to classes that seemingly presented a diversity of experiences— courses titled “World Literature” and “Caribbean Literature” called to me. Arms outstretched, yearning to feel something more than I had ever felt in my youth and adolescence, I stumbled through early adulthood with uncertainty. In retrospect, it’s clear that I was searching for a place and space of belonging. When I finally found Gloria Anzaldua early in my teaching career (in an anthology reader for First Year Composition), I found a connection to a past that is indeed a part of my history, a narrative that I had always yearned to uncover, even before I knew it was there. And I wondered why I had never encountered her in college— both as an undergraduate and graduate. I was searching for a connection to a past that I had never known. I could relate to Anzaldua’s feeling of straddling the border. While her borderlands identity surrounded her both geographically in the Southwest, and internally, as a member of a border culture that struggled to feel accepted on either side, my borderlands identity had always been internalized as a space of confusion, uncertainty, and conflict. I am Mexicana on my mother’s side and Anglo on my father’s side. Throughout my life, I have felt something was missing. I could not name this feeling until I found Anzaldua and Chicana feminism. I realized that I had been inhabiting a space on the margins of what it meant to be Mexican and what it meant to be American. I felt that I didn’t belong. This is where I center my work and my newfound identity as a Chicana feminist. Extending the theoretical framework of prominent feminist scholars of color, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga, Adela Licona, and others, I bring myself to the classroom and to institutional spaces with pride knowing that my ancestors fought for my body to exist, to breathe life into my very being. Many of my students come from a similar ancestral past. They are first generation college students, native Spanish speakers, dreamers, undocumented students who sit in silence, cautious, anxiously searching for a sense of belonging. “Is it safe to speak?” “What if I’m wrong?” “I need to do this for my familia.” I can only imagine the thoughts running through their minds, the pressure to succeed. In recent years, I have made a conscious effort to shape my pedagogy around voices of those who have been historically marginalized in our nation. In doing so, I’ve also acknowledged how my own story, my own life experience, has shaped who I am in academia. Because of the internal conflict of identity that I have felt most of my life, I have continued to search for a place of belonging. As a woman who does not fit into one culture or another, one who did not grow up with strong ties to cultural or ethnic identity, I found myself searching for some sense of where I fit in, because unfortunately, we learn that we should assimilate into societal expectations of what we should be, based on racial perception—and by extension, racial and ethnic stereotypes. My students write of these same experiences in their narrative writing projects. I give them the freedom to write from their own experiences, reassuring them—your story matters; your voice matters.
Many of my students walk the halls of academia carrying their marginalized identities, their borderlands consciousness, unaware of the power in their voice. Many of my students have been made to feel inferior for not writing according to standard academic English. Many of my students are poets and artists and neurodivergent thinkers, but have been made to feel that there is only one way to think and write in academic spaces. As a Chicana feminist, I have come to see my classroom as third space site, with potential for shared understanding and community, a “borderlands space” where all of my students feel accepted for their diverse ways of knowing and meaning-making. As Adela Licona describes them, borderlands spaces are “material narratives,” or spaces that have “histories, contested histories, and they are continuously productive of new stories, stories in the making, that are contested” (13). Licona notes that the borderland or “third space” is a space of “rhetorical struggle and of shared understanding or conocimiento” (13), a lived reality for the womxn of color. For the minority, for the oppressed, and for all women, especially those whose knowledge and experience in the world is undervalued due to their perceived inferiority in a White, male dominated society, the struggle to break from cultural and societal norms remains. Anzaldua points out that “[c]ulture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture. Culture is made by those in power” (17). In American society, the dominant paradigm is reflected in our history of oppression of all peoples of color by those in power, historically White males. Thus, when we as educators actively work to highlight women of color voices, voices of the historically marginalized and oppressed, and to promote the inclusion of women of color bodies in spaces such as academia, that have traditionally been for the privileged, we open space for liberation within the classroom. We open space for our students to share their stories, to actively take part in writing their histories into being, to make visible what was once invisible in institutional spaces. When we reimagine the classroom as a space of liberation, a space free from rhetorical violence for students of color, a space where the lived experiences of womxn of color and other historically marginalized peoples are valued and respected, we liberate ourselves from the confines of institutional oppression and colonized thinking.
Borders shaped like broken glass
I stand con la voca cerrada
My heart racing
I’m screaming inside
Pero no one’s around
Through jagged edges I crawl
Blood-stained
Esta tierra knows no boundaries
Buried deep within
Beneath torment and rage
I stumble
Making my way through a surface
Unlike anything I’ve ever known
The border has me
The margins grip me and take hold
No soy de aqui ni de alla
But in this space
Where no one can find me
Donde nadie puede encontrarme
Historically, in the Euro-Western consciousness, the embodied experiences of women of color have been that of exclusion, of subordination, of oppression. Thus, it is necessary and important to uncover stories of women of color, stories such as those highlighted in Daughters of Latin America, that have been hidden away under the white power structure in our nation. These experiences inform our understanding of the need to challenge existing paradigms. As has been made evident in recent years, the lived experiences of women of color, passed down through stories told from generation to generation (oral tradition), and in writing through poetry, prose, and testimonios that represent a collective body of knowledge, are still not valued as part of the dominant narrative of our American history. This body of knowledge is still seen as separate from the mainstream; theoretical frameworks from womxn of color are still recognized only as specialized curricula in many spaces. While we have made progress—women of color and trans women serving in government, women of color teaching in top institutions, and publishing in prominent scholarly journals—we are still faced with a constant barrage of questions. We are faced with questions about the validity of our experiences; we are faced with the reality of living with our very being called into question. And to a great extent, due to the deeply embedded institutionalized racism and sexism within our nation, we are faced with our own self-doubt. Narratives, lived experiences of womxn of color are still pushed to the margins, on a boundary somewhere between known (or legitimate) and unknown (or feared). As Gloria Anzaldua (1980) writes in her “letter” to las hermanas, “the dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women though we have many in common. We don’t have as much to lose—we never had any privileges. I wanted to call the dangers ‘obstacles’ but that would be a kind of lying. We can’t transcend the dangers, we can’t rise above them. We must go through them and hope we won’t have to repeat the performance.” Though women of color have suffered more intensely at the hands of the white patriarchy, they have ingrained in their descendants the resilience to tie themselves to a new history still being written. As I tell my students, we are all a part of this history, a history always and ever in the making.
Situating Third Space Chicana Feminism
Candace de Leon Zapeda writes, “As a theoretical consciousness, Chicana Feminism recognizes the lived experiences of difference such as race, culture, nation, class, sexual orientation, and gender. As a pedagogy, it reflects on the interrupted discourse of the academy and invites the marginalized to participate in the study and rewriting of their fragmented histories” (Zepeda 138). Seeing the space of the writing classroom through the lens of Chicana feminism allows us the freedom to challenge dominant narratives. we must therefore, continue to shift the way we see ourselves and our students in the space of the writing classroom, and in the university as an institution of colonial power. My friend and mentor Iris D. Ruiz has argued that “[a] critical analysis of history calls for examining previously excluded historical accounts, or, rather, a historiographic perspective which considers historical accounts of particular populations, preferably those not focused upon traditional histories.” She further suggests that this “historiographic method searches for the silences or the blind spots in the narration of past events and asks, ‘what is missing?’” (150). These “blind spots” are the histories (or narratives) of our nation that too often get overlooked. This question “What is missing?” remains ever present in my consciousness and manifests in my pedagogical approach. As we as educators continue to grapple with the direction our nation is currently heading, it is imperative that we find ways to include research and writing in our classrooms that draws upon the lived experiences of the historically marginalized. As just one possibility, I share with you my semester research project, which I require of all my Freshmen Composition students: “Multimodal Research Project: Making Arguments for Diverse Audiences.”
As I continue to navigate higher education as a woman of color, and as a feminist, I wonder: How do I teach? How do I live? How do I breathe in such challenging times, when all I want to do is escape? But I resist and I stay strong. Como las muxeres who came before me, las Chingonas who live in the present fighting, and those who will come after me. As I continue to explore a critical consciousness of my borderlands identity, I aim to reach beyond dominant, normative practices informed by Euro-Western rhetorics, and toward a counter-hegemonic approach to teaching writing that recognizes the lived experiences of people of color. Constantly searching for a sense of meaning, for an identity, for something I could relate to—as a woman often seen as racially ambiguous. I acknowledge my privilege as an educated woman. As a Latinx, as a Chicana, mixed White and Brown, as someone who grew up feeling detached from a sense of cultural identity—this internal conflict, this struggle, among other physical and mental traumas I have suffered—has contributed to the strength I have built up within myself. This internal struggle, over the years has given me the courage to seek out a sense of belonging, to feel connected to those who have struggled as I have. This borderlands identity that I carry with me is ever-present in my writing classroom and in academia.
My very being, the very being of womxn of color in academic spaces is a political act. When we write ourselves into being, make visible our lived realities and embodied experiences, we liberate ourselves and our students. There is no fear of being silenced in this space. Our truth and our reality can never be denied. We exist… and will continue to exist.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th edition, book open faced down on desk
References
Anzaldua, Gloria, and Cherrie Moraga, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., Suny Press, 2015.
de leon Zepeda, Candace. “Chicana Feminism.” Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy.
Licona, Adela. Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. Suny Press. 2012.
Ruiz, Iris D. Reclaiming Composition for Chicano/as and Other Ethnic Minorities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
