Manos que enseñan (Hands That Teach): Campesinas and Their Children Enacting the Pedagogies of Barbiar

• In Event: Reenvisioning Educational Experiences: Lessons From (Im)migrant Communities

Abstract

In this paper, I draw on a one-year ethnographic collaboration with migrant/settler campesina mothers in Yakama Nation (currently known as Central Washington state). I focus on the ways in which campesinas, as intellectual agents that know how to read and act in the world (Freire & Macedo, 2005), create conscious spaces within Western agriculture (a dominant system that continues to exploit farmworkers and their families) to participate and teach their knowledge in very intentional ways. I call campesinas’ knowledge sharing practices ‘barbiar pedagogy,’ which aims to show the barbiar (co-supportive) teacher-mother-role that campesinas take as they simultaneously work, teach, and care for each other and their children within the orchards/vineyards. The material that campesinas use to teach (and continue to produce knowledge) draws on specific references to their mothering, the land, and community to, in this case, teach/learn/care about life, farming, labor, pain, and lessons that consider prosperity and collective change. Central to their teachings is an experiential-learner-lead that is performed (by campesinas), embodied (by campesinas and children), and co-experienced via verbal expressions (by all listening). In unpacking ‘barbiar pedagogy,’ I draw on informal conversations and interviews with campesinas as well as my ethnographic participation/witnessing (Behar, 1996) in a cherry orchard and vineyard with campesinas and their children. I also reference Indigenous (Simpson, 2014; Ingersoll, 2016) and Chicana/Latina feminist (Delgado Bernal, Elenes, Godinez, Villenas; 2006) takes on pedagogy and education.

I share campesinas’ ‘barbiar pedagogies’ to provide a foundation to which we as researchers and educators can better honor campesinas, as not only mothers and “essential” workers, but as educators that through their literacies disrupt Western notions of intelligibility while creating meaningful relationships and educational moments that aim to humanize themselves and their families. I ask that we, as a scholarly community, acknowledge these literacies away from merely “cultural” knowledge. As such, methodologies for applying campesina frameworks within community and formal schooling lie largely in allowing campesinas to participate and lead in the articulation of their literacies and their embodied experiences that are crucial to understanding what it means to be within their communities and Western agriculture.
Given that I am engaging the voices of migrant/settler campesina womxn, it is important that I situate my work within larger theoretical frameworks like critical transnational feminism of settler colonialism (Patel, Moussa, Upadhyay; 2015). I recognized the need to do scholarly work that is political and that aims to disrupt and name the interacting multiplicities of power structures—settler colonialism and supremacies (capitalism, white and heteropatriarchy)—that hierarchically and violently organize how migrants are made/remade within settler-nation while continuously dispossessing Indigenous ways of being and relationships to land. Thus, I engage and write about the knowledge and creative educational practices of migrant/settler campesinas within Western agriculture with caution regarding how these stories can not only be misconstrued, but also how they can potentially become violently used towards the continuous elimination of Native Indigenous peoples’ (in particular Yakama Nation peoples) relationship and knowledge with the land.

Author

• Rosalinda Godinez, University of California Berkeley