Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body: Living and Learning in a Corporal Landscape of Resistance, Regeneration

• In Event: 14.025 - (Re)Claiming Bodies Marked by Institutional Oppression and Trauma: Teachers and Youth Raise Their Voices

Abstract

Curriculum is the knowledge or ‘truths’ that govern and make meaning of our lives (Greene, 2009; Malewski, 2010), “connected to what we can do and who we are and…[what] we care about” (Grumet, 1989, pp. 14-15); however, dominant-culture curriculum is often constructed within Eurocentrism and Cognitive Imperialism distancing knower from known (Battiste & Youngblood Henderson, 2000). I aim to theorize a resistant, healing, regenerative curriculum of embodied wholeness, a Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body, whereby marginalized Mexican/Mexican-American (Mexicana/o, Mestiza[1]) youth may find dignity and academic preparation to dismantle inequity (Acuña, 1988; Levins Morales, 2001).

Perspective(s)
A curriculum situated in the Mestiza/o Body stands as ethical commitment to an expressly feminist subjectivity which may lead men, women, and children toward more equitable futures (Godinez, 2006). I situate this work within the 3rd World Feminist call for reclamation of ‘mestiza/o’ and the racial mixing that is ‘mestizaje’ from the colonizer’s gaze (Forbes, 1995); herein, the collective Body of La Mestiza stands as unifying, mutable Brown consciousness transcending borders and categorization without subsuming difference (Sandoval, 1998). Centering the collective Brown and Mestiza Body as the site of knowledge may challenge dominant curriculum and offer especially Mexicana/o youth a means of reclamation for selves marked foreign Other (Cruz, 2006; Rodríguez, 2014).

Mode of Inquiry
According to Malewski (2010), curriculum is an, “object that cannot be struggled with empirically…[but] as living in a language and therefore as a subject” (p. 7). This critical curriculum study engages a Chicana/Latina Critical Feminist (Anzaldúa, 1987; Trinidad Galván, 2015) and Curricular Reconceptualist lens (Pinar, 2009; Slattery, 2006) to critique the epistemological hierarchies still dictating mainstream productions of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Smith, 2012; Springgay & Freedman, 2010). Conducting analysis across decolonizing, Indigenous, and indigenous-heritage Chicana/o/Latina/o epistemologies and critical curricular frameworks (Cajete, 1994; Godinez, 2006; Martinez, 2010; Martinez-Cruz, 2011; Urrieta, 2016), I theorize curriculum as embodied language of knowing which centrally positions oppressed, silenced People(s) as bearers of wisdom.

Findings
The physical and metaphorical landscape of the Mestiza/o Body offers curriculum rooted in the intellectual, survival legacies of Indigenous and indigenous-heritage People(s) who have long resisted oppression and erasure. Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body displaces Eurocentric curriculum of scripted, detached proceduralism (Apple, 2006) through connectedness to heavy histories, resilience, and the joy/pleasure/intimacy/pain that comes from sensing our way through the world. Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body reclaims a collective marked Mexicana/o Body and being (Delgado Bernal, 2007; Gaspar de Alba, 1998) as living language and speaking subject where resistance, healing, and regeneration are made flesh (Hurtado 2003) in the cellular coding systems of the body itself.

Scholarly Significance
A Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body engages educators and educational researchers in critical dialogue surrounding dominant, hegemonic curricular constructs and calls for curriculum bound in the physical and lived realities, epistemologies, ontologies, cosmologies, and survival and resilience legacies of Mexicana/o youth and communities as a means toward hopeful educational and social futures.

Author

• Mia Sosa-Provencio, The University of New Mexico