Reclaiming Latinx Blackness: Everyday Afro-Indigenous Spiritual Practice as History Pedagogy

• In Event: Centering Students' Racialized Experiences: Shifting Paradigms in History Education

Abstract

History education about AfroLatinx identities and experiences presents a site of potential resistance to the Eurocentric pedagogical paradigms that prevail in teaching and learning. Educational spaces compel AfroLatinx students to attend to the intersections of their Blackness with migration status, language, colorism, geographical location, and other facets of their identities, often without support. This chapter reframes the intended outcomes and instructional strategies used in history pedagogy by offering AfroIndigenous spiritual practice as a type and means of knowledge formation. The authors use Afrocentric Research Design (Hlela, 2018) as a heuristic through which to offer ideas for designing learning environments and experiences that are in tune with the sociohistorical and contemporary specificities of some AfroLatinx student experiences. This approach, rooted in African knowledges, rests on liberatory practices developed, implemented, and bequeathed by Afrodiasporic peoples in spaces marginalized by historical and contemporary society.

Everyday spirituality is one way AfroLatinx communities make meaning and develop a sense of belonging; therefore, an approach to teaching and learning that is rooted in AfroLatinx everyday spiritual practices can reflect and affirm AfroLatinidad (Cortes, 2021). When students investigate how AfroIndigenous spiritual practices have been vilified and criminalized in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere, they can expand their notions of how power, policy, and perception can interrupt the agentive practice of spirituality. Young AfroLatinxs can then “dream” possible pasts and futures that affirm their identities and perspectives on formal history.

This chapter introduces educators and education researchers to a model for teaching through/with and about AfroIndigenous spiritual practices to defy the Eurodominant conceptions of knowledge, expose Afrodiasporic histories, and promote possible AfroLatinx futures. History teachers invested in creating environments that reflect a nuanced Blackness to students can re-mediate (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016) the space where learning history happens. This requires adding tools to the learning ecology or physically changing spaces to position Blackness at the core of instructional design. Such re-mediation necessitates careful planning, thoughtful organizing, and creative improvising. History educators must step outside the conventional roles of a teacher vis-à-vis students to design Black-engaged learning environments. They may, for instance, create a proleptic learning ecology where shifting and fluid ways of being and knowing blur the lines between past and future iterations of AfroLatinidad.

AfroLatinx spirituality normalizes knowledge that is inherited and passed on through shared practices. One way this happens is through ancestor worship—venerating and consulting the dead to be enlightened with knowledges and perspectives about the past, present, and future. AfroIndigenous spiritual practitioners believe that, through dreams, “the desires of the spirits are communicated to the living”; dreams create opportunities to connect with our spiritual lineage (Moreno Vega 1999, p. 340). Borrowing from the ways AfroIndigenous spiritualities privilege inherited knowledges, teachers can allow knowledges and ways of being not recognized by Eurocentric epistemology, including those presented in dreams, to have a meaningful place in the classroom. Dreams then become one of several forms of collective memory, narrative construction, and/or perspective-taking and can be considered a valuable source of historical meaning-making.

Authors

• Eliana Castro, University of Vermont
  Presenting Author

• Krista L. Cortes, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author