The Colonial Difference Along the Rio Grande: Implications for Educational Equity

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Abstract

I propose to consider how the charge of educational equity in relationship to a critical place inquiry, as proposed by Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, might help us envision justice with land as an integral component that takes seriously occupation. I wish to understand how thinking about schooling through a lens of occupation in settler colonial societies such as the U.S. might illuminate problematics often overlooked. To do this I look to the places where colonial difference —the manner in which colonial projects order difference (Colonizer/colonized, center/periphery, settler/Indigenous) in unique ways across the Americas—manifests within the same geographic location that is marked by two nation-states.
As a scholar-activist located in both education and ethnic studies, I often consider such occupations in my work. In this paper I thus explore the larger scope of what it means for scholars who do work in social justice education to consider occupation—centering a border-land context—and asking, how does occupation preclude and/or make possible deep engagements of justice and schooling? Centering the border-land, I argue, offers a compelling portrait of the complexity of doing such work because it makes messy the parameters of approaches such as settler colonial studies that alone might not be enough to articulate the historical and contemporary legacies of multiple colonialisms in places such as the border lands.
Mignolo’s notion of border thinking offers a roadmap, suggesting how the colonial difference manifests within the same locations (Whites/Mexicans, Hispanos/Indios, Settler/Indigenous). Border thinking originates “. . . from the local histories of Spanish legacies in America.” Similarly, Jodi Byrd’s thoughtful vision of Indigenous studies as a robust area of inquiry in dialogical engagement with other places (such as Palestine) or the circulation of Indigeneity (across borders), implicates subsequent theorization, research, and practice. Hence, in this paper I explore the locations where nation states meet and how this informs theorizing and practice in relationship to the possibility of educational equity.

Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (London: Routledge, 2014). 2015
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chatterjee 1993;Mignolo 2000
Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs. 2000
Ibid., 66. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 66
Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Jodi Byrd, “Red Dead Conventions: American Indian Transgeneric Fictions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, ed. James H. Cox and Daniel H. Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 344-357.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, Western Washington University