Sobreviviendo sin sacrificando: An Intersectional Testimonio From a Tired Mother-Scholar of Color

• In Event: 79.044 - Education in the Trump Era at the Intersections of Latinidad y Discapacidad: Unraveling and Resisting the Ideological Braid of Neoliberalism and Nationalism

Abstract

Objectives
Through the proposed merging of the Departments of Education and Labor, the Trump administration has demonstrated its concern to promote the neoliberal agenda through the creation and commodification of human capital. In this context, the total and rate of productivity of individuals are used as measures of success. However, how does this focus on productivity affect the lived experience of a disabled scholar in academia? How does dis/ability (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013) intersect with race/ethnicity, gender, and motherhood to impact their career trajectory? This paper is a testimonio of a Latinx mother-scholar trying to work and finish a doctorate while managing a chronic condition (fibromyalgia).

Theoretical framework
In this paper, the author employs DisCrit (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013), LatCrit (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001; Huber, 2009), and academic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Walker, 2009). She shares her distinct lived experience as a Brown Latinx mother-scholar with a dis/ability to reveal how racism, sexism, and ableism are woven into the culture and discourse of higher education institutions, contributing to a knowledge apartheid (Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002).

Methods
Testimonio, a method developed in Latin American Studies, was used. In explaining the history of the testimonio as method and how her own understanding of it changed with her work with her research participants, Huber (2009) surmises that testimonio is “a verbal journey of a witness who speaks to reveal the racial, classed, gendered, and nativist injustices they have suffered as a means of healing, empowerment, and advocacy for a more humane present and future” (p. 644).

Data sources
Data collection comprised reviewing research field notes and personal journal entries as well as reflective writing. Using a cyclical intuitive process of testimonio informed by intersectionality, DisCrit, LatCrit, and academic capitalism, the author uses examples from her life to theorize a narrative of sacrificio that pervades academia and negatively impacts dis/abled Latinx scholars.

Results
The author reveals how the neoliberal university encourages Latinx scholars to perpetuate and intensify a narrative of sacrificio (sacrifice) that is already embedded within the Latinx culture. She connects intersectionality with scholarship that explores the “embodied realities” of working at a neoliberal university (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1245), where bodies are commodified, objectified, and valued by what they can produce. These bodies are sacrificed in one way or another for the good of the university. Dis/abled Brown Latinx bodies, in particular, are deemed disposable and, oftentimes, suffer higher consequences via the fragmentation of the mind, body, and spirit, or the creation and acceptance of multiplicity (Ong, 2005).

Significance
By allowing the narrative of sacrificio to consume our lives, we reify colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism within our institutions. Therefore, we need to collectively advocate for slow, “care-full” scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015) and embodied practices (Shahjahan, 2015), and we need to reflect on how we individually and collectively feed into the narrative of sacrificio. Ultimately, for Brown Latinx scholars, self-care is communal care, knowledge preservation, and survival.

Author

• Lisette Esmeralda Torres-Gerald, Nebraska Wesleyan University