"Defend Yourself With Words, With the Knowledge That You've Gained": An Exploration of Conocimiento Among Latina Undergraduates in Ethnic Studies

• In Event: Critical Consciousness and Identity: The Benefits of Ethnic Studies Courses for K–16 Latinx Students

Abstract

This paper contributes and extends scholarship around ethnic studies by examining how two Latina undergraduate students who engage in ethnic studies courses at the university level experience a journey of critical consciousness while simultaneously highlighting the value of using conocimiento as a theoretical tool to examine this journey. Thus, we seek to further contribute to scholarship that demonstrates how ethnic studies courses that are rooted in the lived realities of students can enhance students’ critical consciousness.
Conocimiento (Anzaldúa, 2002) is central to understanding how knowledge is situated within higher education. The journey of conocimiento can be understood as a shift, a new way of thinking that pushes one to reflect on the self within sociohistorical and political realities. We bring Anzaldúa’s (2002) concept of conocimiento with Delgado Bernal and Aleman’s (2016) idea of transformative ruptures, “moments where a disruption of pervasive coloniality, institutional racism, and systemic inequity occurs” (p. 5). The authors, thus, argue that conocimiento has the potential to lead to transformative ruptures. Through this lense, the authors, consider how Latina undergraduates can be agents of sociopolitical change.
The authors conducted individual in-depth interviews with two Latina undergraduates enrolled in an ethnic studies course paying particular attention to the ways that conocimiento surfaced. Conocimiento provides a space to recognize how their reflections are located within larger collective narratives of Latinx schooling experiences and how the young women have the potential to understand processes of critical consciousness within ethnic studies courses. They rely on these reflections to consider broader implications for the benefits of ethnic studies courses and critical consciousness.
Providing excerpts from our interviews with the participants, the authors organize the findings into four fluid aspects of conocimiento to highlight the complexities of critical consciousness and how this kind of knowledge was supported within an ethnic studies course. The findings are: contradictions, internal shifts, bodymindspirit, and a call to action. We begin with the idea of contradictions because it is embedded in every aspect of Anzaldúa’s path of conocimiento and because it allows us to make meaning of the seemingly conflicting discourses the participants engage in. The second finding highlights internal shifts - the personal transformations of self that both students experienced. We follow with a discussion of the third finding, which emphasizes the bodymindspirit because Anzaldúa argues that the path of conocimiento involves one’s whole self. Finally, our fourth finding shares data that is interpreted through Anzaldua’s call to action—the praxis of conocimiento that moves internal shifts to external action.
For the two Latina participants the knowledge from their ethnic studies course brought about a process of critical consciousness that was supported and nurtured alongside other students of color. Using conocimiento, the authors identify how this consciousness was not an ending point to acquiring such critical knowledge, but was instead a fluid process that moves us towards transformative ruptures. Thus, contradictions, internal shifts, bodymindspirit, and call to action as aspects of conocimiento are capable of disrupting dominant ideologies, systems of oppression, and coloniality.

Authors

• Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano, University of California - Los Angeles

• Monica Gonzalez, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Dolores Delgado Bernal, California State University - Los Angeles