Analytical Tropes as Methodological Traps: Implications of Chicana/o/x Scholarship Outside Education for Our Work in Education

• In Event: Speaking Back to Methodological Aphasia: Challenging the Foundations of Race and Coloniality in Critical Educational Inquiry

Abstract

While some areas in education such as Critical Indigenous Studies and Black Radical studies arguably have parallel cross over in educational work, it seems that the same porousness between Chicana/o/x & Latino/a/x Studies work outside education into education does not exist as robustly. Thus, I offer a brief review of this work, outlining implications for educational work, paying attention to the increased number of works that are striving to give voice to Indigenous migrants from Latin American in the U.S. schooling experience (See Alberto, 2017; Urrieta, 2017). Outlining common analytical tropes used in Chicana/o/x methodological approaches in education I focus on mestizaje and indigenismo (or indigenism) as points of inquiry here. What does this mean when we employ methodological approaches that adopt such type of analytical tropes in educational work? I suggest we need to move beyond oppositionality in our analytical tools towards a more productive incommensurablity in Chicana/o/x Studies. Here, Stoler’s (2016) work on duress moves us in this direction, pointing out that particularly conceptual conventions can get in the way, hampering “…our capacities to revision those histories and dislodge what we imagine we already know” (p. 8).

Cultural studies scholar Curtis Marez (2001) names the analytical trope common in some Chicana/o/x studies work that uses the related concepts of mestizaje and indigenismo that attempt to find genealogical connections to a “pre-Columbian past” in Chicana/o studies as an “ideological archaeology” (p. 267). As a result, he argues that seminal Chicana/o intellectual production such as Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit and Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness reproduce an “indigenismo of the antique”. By using the frames of archaeology and the antique, Marez (2001) critiques the propensity of Chicana/o studies to locate Indigenous ties to some vague “pre-Columbian past” that instead work to render contemporary Indigenous production and representation obscure. In these works, mestizaje is represented as the emergent product of such archaeology, or new identity, produced by a colonial context that, according to rhetoric scholar Gabriela Raquel Ríos (2016), emerges as the “new” subject, a more advanced state of being that necessitates a fixed Indigenous past (Miner, 2014), or what Alberto (2012) refers to as the “unchanging ruins of indigeneity” (p. 44). Indeed, as Contreras (2008) asserts, “Chicana/o Indigenism must be understood as yet another stage in the history of representation of Indians” (p. 9) because it is influenced by European and Anglo “regimes of representation” (p. 10), achieved through representations of pre-Columbian artifacts through museums, picture, and other texts outside of the context of a lived indigeneity. Arguably, in education when concepts of mestizaje and its correlate of indigenism are taken up analytically, they do so borrowing from an already existing symbolic order produced by colonialism (Contreras, 2008), a concrete manifestation of the ideological archeology Marez suggests above.

I am contemplating what it would mean for Chicana/o studies in educagion to leave behind concepts such as mestizaje as analytical tools/frameworsk because of the “imperial durability” attached to them that I believe renders them incommensurable with the complicated lives of students.

Author

• Dolores Calderon, Western Washington University