Intersectional Coalitions: Testimonios of Research and Advocacy in the New Era of Division

• In Event: Research and the Politics of Division: Re/Building Coalitions for Racial Justice Leadership and Advocacy in Education Across Communities of Color

Abstract

In this work we reflectively ask what is the promise of this counterspace of Black and Latino intellectuality and solidarity using testimonios? As associate professors in educational leadership and policy, one as a Latino at leading research HBCU, and another as an Afro-Latina at an urban research institution serving multiple communities, the authors contend that much is needed in achieving a greater promise through strategic solidarity. Given that, this paper will examine how black and brown communities can use their own narratives as a vehicle for mobilizing and organizing in educational platforms via testimonios. Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona (2012) described how testimonios are used within educational research:
“Unlike the more common training of researchers to produce unbiased knowledge, testimonio challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. These approaches have resulted in new understandings about how marginalized communities build solidarity and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity.” (p. 363)
Expanding on historical moments of solidairty, Paul Ortiz (2018) in An African American and Latinx History of the United States emphasized that international solidarity was an idea that came out of the mass insurgencies and social movements against slavery, and later, Jim Crow; battles where citizens of Mexico, Haiti and other Caribbean and South American countries also struggled against white supremacy. These agendas, at times, are the moments when Dr. King’s 1968 words to Cesar Chavez resonate “Our separate struggles are really one” Martin Luther King Jr. to Cesar Chavez, telegram, El Malcriado, vol. 2, no. 4. King further wrote, “The plight of your people and ours is so grave that we all desperately need the inspiring example and the effective leadership you have given.” Chavez wrote and thanked him, explaining that the “solidarity of black and brown brothers is essential to our common struggle for justice and dignity. Your active commitment to brotherhood as a way of life is a sign of what we are trying to create in this country.” These exchanges provide comfort in our communities and give us hope that our communities would overcome the injustices being served.
The authors note that as they cross back and forth in Black and Latino spaces, common themes often manifests themselves in within group conversations that is a haunting to our Promised Land: “They are dividing our very limited resources”, “They choose them over us”, “They use them to drive a wedge against us”, and other similar race politics for competing resources or access. Further, binary assumptions on race to understand oppression fail to consider the systemic and varying histories of oppression that are at best parallels. For those of us that engage across these parallels and varying historicities, like the authors, we have come to understand that the solution to the entire system of oppression is solidarity in order to get to the Promised Land.

Authors

• Soribel Genao, Queens College

• Cristobal Rodriguez, Arizona State University