Chicano/a Activist Scholarship at the Interstices of Community Self-Determination: Toward a Raza Research Methodology

• In Event: Roundtable Session 108
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Embodied in Community: Activism, Service, Relationship

Abstract

Using autoethnography as strategy, I narrate, reframe, and problematize the spaces that I have occupied as a Chicano scholar. Through narrative I seek to unearth the memory of colonizing spaces and their embodiments within university research settings. Reframing my own passage into grassroots struggles in urban Los Angeles, I delineate the spaces and practices of action-oriented research undertaken within grassroots spaces and organizations. In particular, I focus on how community-based research is mediated within two campaigns led by a teacher-led grassroots organization, the Association of Raza Educators (A.R.E.): the South Central Los Angeles Elementary campaign and the Education Not Arms Coalition campaign. I conclude with a working framework for a Raza Research Methodology.

Author

• Miguel Zavala, California State University - Fullerton