Escuelita de Paz y Justicia: Decolonizing Pedagogies for San Antonio’s Westside

• In Event: In Pursuit of Racial Justice: Contesting State Violence With a Pedagogy for the People

Abstract

Funded by a campus/community partnership between a R1 Hispanic Serving Institution in a majority Chicano city and a well-established non-profit that provides arts and cultural programs that foster political consciousness and builds solidarity via a feminist and queer leadership framework--the Escuelita--a community school--held its first class last fall. The Escuelita was designed as an intergenerational, multi-racial, multi-gendered, and anti-racist/sexist/homophobic/ xenophobic/classist co-constructed learning space. Its participants met weekly to engage with local elders, community organizers, healing practitioners, cultural bearers, and activist scholars in order to nurture agents of change who pursue intersectional solidarity and healing; advocate for cultural preservation; and invest in the civic and political health of their communities. This presentation maps the evolution, mission, and goals of this decolonial educational site; overviews the tensions faced executing its ideals amidst state-sanctioned oppression; and offers tools for implementing a community-centered pedagogy.
This paper places the Escuelita experience in a tradition of Chican/x struggles, transformative pedagogies such as educación popular, and decolonial and radical feminist thinking. Escuelita pedagogies engage with everyday and structural issues that marginalized communities of San Antonio’s Westside face, mobilizing frameworks such as intersectionality, radical self-love, and decolonial place-based pedagogies to create justice and bien-estar. Actively listening to participants’ lived experiences of social and political discrimination and exclusion, led Ecuelita facilitators to organize a direct action against the most repressive Texas legislature bills in recent history, a slate which furthers racism, classis, sexism and homo/transphobia. This direct action is an example of the ways grassroots organizing inspired by radical pedagogies can embody resistance and contribute to social change.
This case study is based on auto-ethnographic reflections of weekly curriculum planning meetings, the class sessions attended, news discourse about legislation impacting race-based pedagogy and curriculum, and reflections written by Escuelita’s facilitators.
This paper relies on ethnographic observations from Escuelita planning meetings, Escuelita sessions, newspapers articles, and relevant literature review.
The co-construction of Escuelita curriculum revealed opportunities and roadblocks at the micro and macro levels. These issues became evident when Escuelita participants faced eviction, police violence, health crisis, and gender violence. That facilitators grappled with how to accommodate and support students in difficult circumstances and organized direct actions serve as testament of the kind of decolonial pedagogies Escuelita seeks to embody. Reflecting on the positive outcomes and the tensions that emerged in this community-campus collaboration sheds light on the importance of fostering environments of trust and accountability. It calls for a mutual recognition of our positionalities, power hierarchies and shared visions of community-centered pedagogies.
The case study of this campus-community partnership documents the complex challenges state-driven systemic injustice pose, even when abundant resources, funding, expertise, and shared goals drive a community-centered pedagogical project, which include: the emotional labor and toil that occurs when naming structural oppression as its material reality actualizes in the lives of the student participants; the disruptive nature of power differentials between campus and community stakeholders; and the sustained epistemic violence that marks the formal and informal educational history of this state.

Authors

• Sonya Maria Aleman, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Carolina Arango-Vargas, University of Texas - San Antonio