Chicana Womanist Perspectives on Curriculum

• In Event: Womanist Curriculum Perspectives and Possibilities

Abstract

When the younger sister of Isabel Nuñez was an undergraduate student at UCLA, she tried to take a Chicano Studies: not join a club, take a class. On the first day, the instructor asked everyone to introduce themselves. When the sister admitted that she did not speak Spanish, the other students told her that she was not a Chicana and made her cry, and she dropped the class. The protective older sibling (and the professor) in Isabel wishes could go back there and tell that class they were wrong, since Chicanos are by definition persons of Mexican descent born in Aztlan, or the part of the United States that was once Mexico (Hurtado & Gurin, 2003). More than that, she wishes she could host a little seminar on hybridity for that group of students, who were clearly unfamiliar with the most important defining feature of Chicana womanism.

As a Chicana professor of education, Isabel traverses a landscape that is somewhat alien and unwelcoming (Anzalduá, 1987)--the Academy. However, in the field of curriculum studies, her positionality is a gift, as hybridity—of identity, of perspective, of thought—facilitates even deeper and richer inquiry into this most fluid of educational endeavors. Despite the worrisome drift toward standardization signaled by the Common Core State Standards, it is ultimately a multiplicity of meanings and approaches that will provide the most valuable insights into what is worth knowing (Schubert, 1986).

Isabel’s forebears are the Mestizas of Mexico, themselves a hybrid of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Spanish colonizers, who brought with them European blood and European religion (Castillo, 1994). Her spiritual mother is La Malinche, the native woman who, as interpreter, advisor and lover to Cortez, bore the conquistador his first son and the nation her first Mestizo. Her spiritual grandmothers are Tonantzin, the Earth goddess of the Aztec empire, and la Virgen de Guadalupe, the Madonna who appeared to the Mexican boy Juan Diego.

As a Chicana, Isabel is also a child of the United States, itself a multicultural and multiethnic blend of origins, languages and histories (Takaki, 1993). As a member of a dominated subculture of the new homeland (Pérez, 1993), in this context alone negotiations among identities are complex (Saldivar-Hull, 1991). This is not her only context, however, and she is fully at home in neither (Anzalduá, 1987). The Chicana is the cultural hybrid of two distinct hybrids. And she is a woman—with all of the fluidity and chaos of the archetypal feminine (Estés, 1992)—to boot.

Isabel brings to the project of curriculum this complexity and chaos, and it hurts her soul to see the rigidity and standardization of the learning in our schools. Chicana womanism offers a perspective that would free us not only of the Euro- and ethnocentric curricular approaches of “traditional” schooling, but also of the essentialist paradigms of identity politics, like those of UCLA in the 1990s, when the borders of “Chicana” were rigidly policed.

Author

• Isabel Nunez, Concordia University - Chicago