Decolonial Advocacy in the Struggle for Ethnic Studies in Texas: Foucault, Chicana Feminist Epistemology, and Liberating Ways of Knowing in State Curriculum

• In Event: 31.040 - Critical Ethnic Studies Praxis in an Age of Expansion

Abstract

This paper draws primarily from the work of the K-12 Committee of the NACCS Tejas Foco (a statewide chapter of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies) that has monitored and coordinated the work of Mexican American scholars who are advancing Mexican American Studies (MAS) and Ethnic Studies in the state of Texas at the K-12, public school level before the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). After a four-year battle for curricular inclusion in the high school curriculum, the Texas SBOE decided unanimously in favor of MAS on June 13, 2018, resulting in an unprecedented, historic victory for the NACCS Tejas Foco K-12 Committee and allies.

This essay draws from Foucault and Chicana Feminist Epistemology to make the larger argument that the current push for Ethnic Studies that is taking hold nationwide is part of a grassroots movement that seeks ultimately to decolonize knowledge and its correlated ways of knowing (epistemology) and being in the world (ontology). This is a decolonial project that must, of necessity, confront governmentality and technologies of power, in order to carry forward a progressive agenda for inclusion in state-level curriculum.

This decolonial project draws from Foucault (1980, 1984, 1991) to craft a genealogy of knowledge that spells out the “relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics” (1984, p. 56) by a self-described social movement that delivered this historic victory in Texas. This genealogy of knowledge extends explanatory power through Chicana Feminist Epistemology scholarship (e.g., Calderón, Delgado Bernal, Pérez Huber, Malagón, & Vélez, 2012; Sandoval, 2000) and post-colonial frameworks that allow me to simultaneously engage such key concepts as “coloniality,” “de-colonization,” and “the colonial matrix of power” in order to both anchor the success of the K-12 committee and advance the “decolonial advocacy model” as its implicit framework.

In short, this model emanates from Foucault, Chicana Feminist scholarship and postcolonial scholars like Quijano (2007), Mignolo (2007), Maldonado Torres (2008), and Lugones (2010). Collectively, they help me to identify means and ends with respect to the role of decolonial advocacy in fostering radical subjectivities while crafting a humane, decolonized, Earth-conscious vision of liberation that Ethnic Studies potentially represents (Morris, 2003; Perez, 1999).

Author

• Angela Valenzuela, The University of Texas at Austin