Letter Writing as a Healing Tool: The Affordances of a Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Praxis

• In Event: Critical Race Feminista Methodologies in Educational Research

Abstract

Objective
Heeding Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2012) call to cultivate, “new theories with new theorizing methods,” this article articulates the contours of a Critical Race Feminista Epistolary Praxis (CRFEP; Escobedo & Camargo Gonzalez, 2022). The CRFEP, a writing-based methodological intervention nestled within anti-racist and social justice traditions, fosters opportunities for Women of Color (WOC) to communicate, in writing, their resistance against the historical legacies and contemporary manifestations of racialized and gendered oppression. The author addresses the following questions: (1) What constitutes a CRFEP in education research? And (2) What does the empirical application of a CRFEP look like in scholarship that centers Chicana/Latina education across the pipeline?

Theoretical Frameworks and Methodology
A CRFEP stands in alignment with Critical Race theories and Anzaldúan Chicana/Latina Feminisms (CLF). Whereas Critical Race theories offer tools to name and combat issues of racialization and systemic oppression, CLF provide the theoretical tools for Chicanas/Latins to heal from the traumas of structural oppressions and to imagine new possibilities for an alternative reality that affirms their ways of knowing and being. As methodology, a CRFEP is guided by five contours that characterize its application. These principles foreground that a CRFEP: (1) Is theoretically grounded in a Critical Race Feminista tradition, (2) Honors research collaborators as co-writers by uplifting their creative productions in a move to center those Women of Color voices historically silenced in the research process, (3) Is a racially microaffirmative (Solorzano & Perez Huber, 2020) tool that centers a care imperative and offers a textual space for potential healing, (4) Calls on Chicana/Latina women to pen themselves and their everyday life experience into existence for the purposes of historical recovery, and (5) Embodies a humanistic praxis sustained by researcher reciprocity, reflexivity, and vulnerability.

Data Sources
This paper draws qualitative data from two studies that examine the teaching and learning processes that unfold between 19 Chicana/Latina mothers and daughters who attended U.S. colleges and universities at times that overlapped. Data presents in the form of 17 individual pláticas (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016), 11 group pláticas, and 46 epistolary writings.

Findings
Findings reveal a CRFEP uplifts a textual platform for Chicanas/Latinas to exert a literary presence and facilitates a transformative process of healing for WOC epistolarians. That is, a CRFEP sees the potential for personal letter writing to be therapeutic in nature by leaning into the liberatory possibilities that come with penning WOC stories into existence. Thus, letter writing, as methodology, affords a space for Chicana/Latina women to enact agency, and to speak back to systems, structures, and individuals that perpetuate their educational disenfranchisement.

Scholarly Significance
This paper illuminates deeper commitments and re-imaginations of Chicana/Latina experiences within and beyond a higher education context. In alignment with the AERA 2024 call for thoughtful reflexivity in the pursuit of educational transformation, this paper uplifts a critical methodology that, “positions research [as] a solution in dismantling racial injustice and constructing educational possibilities,” for Women of Color across temporalities and geographies.

Author

• Cindy R. Escobedo, University of California - Los Angeles