Mexican and Gringa Education Researchers: Surviving Oppressive Governments, Stories From a Mexican University

• In Event: Latinx American Scholars and Teachers Making the Decolonial Turn a Reality

Abstract

This paper examines the shared power and the ways two critical women faculty who educate future teachers crossed real and metaphoric boundaries toward the fraught labor of creating decolonial work and lives. Scholar A is an intercultural educator from a working-class background in Mexico who is research faculty at the Mexican State of Hidalgo’s most prestigious university. Scholar B is a white, working-class origin scholar whose work advocates for equity and border-crossing in a large public university in Atlanta, Georgia. Both are bilingual and raising their two respective children to learn to live in different countries and embrace intercultural realities; this child-rearing is just as important, if not more so, than their scholarship.

This work describes insights from 2017 to 2018 in Mexico regarding the survival of (un)truth through the lenses of a gringa conducting educational research after Trump’s election and a Mexican faculty specialist in intercultural education. The authors document making sense of how the vast majority of Mexicans have used survival strategies for generations to (dis)engage oppressive local and federal governments [where officially over 33,000 in Mexico are “disappeared,” a number others argue needs to be multiplied to reflect reality by a factor of six, (Gaviña, 2018)] as well as Mexicans’ clarity about the histories of their neighbor to the north (a clarity often lacking among people who are from the U.S.). This paper also document their year-long conversation as global educators working to make sense of shifting global conditions while educating about them, especially the assault on truth more newly emanating from the U.S. Both authors agreed with Peters (2017), about that the Post-truth era—It is not just influencing in politics; but also, in other aspects of life - like the case of education- “as a burning issue.” In this instance, both scholars argue that education has a fundamental role and responsibility in the development of a critical thinking based on sciences and traditional knowledge that are capable of fighting against the interrupted truth. Their conclusions point to the need for a global response rooted in a vision of the collective good, one in which various forms of meaningful education oriented toward the truth to thrive and survive.

The findings show how we thus shift toward not just imagined understandings, but the implications of all these taken together. Their comparative lenses are useful to cast into light realities that are otherwise potentially mystified, a common goal of colonization. For instance, while it was grossly uncomfortable for gringa scholar to discuss her bleak projection for the future of DREAMERs, at the same time the discussion was a massive relief. Instead of public forums in the U.S. where gringa scholar would worry about how to handle members who would talk about “illegals” and other dehumanizing depictions of migrants in the U.S., she instead got to engage in a truth-based understanding of why Mexicans uproot their lives to go to the U.S. as well as the kind of treatment awaiting them.

Authors

• G. Sue Kasun, Georgia State University

• Berenice Alfaro-Ponce, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo