Decolonial Pedagogies With Youth: Queer and Trans Identities in Immigrant Communities

• In Event: 43.060 - Will the Truth Set Us Free? Queer, Trans, and Youth of Color Challenging Essentialism

Abstract

Educators working in support of queer and trans youth are encouraged to foreground identity affirmation when working with youth (Miller, 2016). In these efforts, adults – many of whom are queer or trans themselves – often fix youth into stable categories of identity, through which they restrict the types of support offered to youth. When working with young folks from immigrant communities who are living at the intersections of multiple cultural influences on their senses of self, it is essential that educators challenge dominant framings of queer and trans identities. It is important not to deny youth a sense of self, but to encourage them to explore the historical and regional production of identities themselves, in the interest of refusing the homogenizing and universalist narratives of U.S. queer and trans identities, which are often held up as the truest examples of identitarian freedom for gender and sexual difference (Lubhéid, 2005).

By exploring engagements with decolonial pedagogy (Deloria & Wildcat, 1991; Noroozi, 2015), critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), and autohistoria-teoria (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015), this paper will highlight the need for queer and trans adult educators to interrogate their own cultural assumptions regarding authentic or true identities. Drawing upon fifteen years of youth development work in public schools and grassroots organizations, the author explores the ways that decolonial pedagogy must necessarily engage with the simultaneous production of coloniality, race, immigration status, and more, while grappling with questions of queer and trans identity. Additionally, decolonial pedagogy is not only about addressing coloniality as a topic but is about engaging the legacies of colonization (that shape much of immigrant youth experience) through challenging colonial epistemologies, including relations to truth, time, place, binaries, hierarchy, universalism/totality, and spirit (Noroozi, 2015).

In addition to exploring the process of decolonial curriculum development - through developing the educator as a host-guest to learning experiences - this paper will also emphasize the importance of naming place and experience. Identities are profoundly shaped by the social and natural environments out of which they emerge (Deloria & Wildcat, 1991), and how youth experience identity is deeply embedded in their sense of place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). The researcher, in crafting pedagogical approaches to youth development work with queer and trans young people from immigrant communities, has drawn heavily upon their own experience as queer, mixed-race, mixed-gender, and descended from immigrants (including colonizing and colonized peoples in the Americas). This approach engages what Anzaldua (2015) has named autohistoria-teoria, or the social theorizing of personal history and experience.

This paper engages decolonial epistemologies and pedagogies in a political and historical moment in the U.S. when reality, truth, and identity are present in public discourse, yet rarely engaged meaningfully in spaces of learning for high school students. Drawing upon their unique situatedness in community-based education, the researcher will share curricula developed in partnership with queer and trans youth and will reflect on the slow labor of developing not only strong senses of identity, but strong senses of political and epistemological critique as well.

Author

• Mauro Sifuentes, University of San Francisco