Learning Coalition, Finding Difficult Solidarities: Latinx Feminist Thought and Pedagogies of Intersectional Racial Justice

• In Event: “Politic Born of Necessity”: Latina and Latinx Feminists Remembering Genealogies, Imagining Futures

Abstract

This conceptual piece draws on Latina/x feminist thought to explore the relational and ethical dimensions of pedagogy and the politics of racial justice and highlight the role of testimonio and witnessing in the forging of difficult solidarities. I begin by sharing an autoethnographic journey as a university educator and scholar and how Latina/x and decolonial feminist thought has inextricably featured in questions of being/belonging, relationality, and politics of knowledge, including in ethnographic fieldwork with Latina mothers and US schools. Then, I explore my role as a researcher–participant in a current study of public sites of teaching and learning in one rural small-city community in the U.S. northeast. Through the co-responsibility that witnessing and testimonio demand (Oliver, 2001; see The Latina Feminist Group, 2001), my goal is to imagine common action in plurality and across diverse spaces of academia and community.

Across diverse sites, I examine pedagogies of coalition or coalitional praxis in the face of long-standing and frustrated efforts to address racialized exclusions and the violence of intersectional injustice. I focus on “difficult solidarities” to articulate a grounded and necessary tenuous form of relationality (Author, 2019). I draw on Maria Lugones’ (2006) idea of complex communication which contrasts with a “shallow sense of coalition based on coincidence of interests.” Rather than speak in broad terms or pre-suppose communication, Lugones moves us toward a demanding sense of coalition that requires the specificity, spatiality, and historicity of each’s journey. Instead of transparency, which is shallow, Lugones leverages the depth of opacity. In opacity, people work to share, figure out, and decipher each other’s testimonios and forms of resistance, and as well practices of joy and beyond-survival.

I draw on vignettes from an ethnographic study of four years detailing the teaching and learning that occurs outside of institutions of schooling. I collected observant participant data, interviewed dozens of public pedagogues, and witnessed BIPOC women’s testimonios at sites of public pedagogy that included festivals, workshops, teach-ins, protests, and community forums. I found that such sites compelled both hopeful and tension-filled conversations about intersectional social and racial justice, and about coalition and solidarities. I was drawn to Latina/x and decolonial feminist theories, and the work of Maria Lugones in particular, to describe how people worked on and worked out coalitions across difference, a process fraught with tensions but also rooted in imaginings of a more just social order.

This presentation concludes with thoughts about how my own journeys through Latina/x feminist thought informed the current study, and in turn, how public pedagogues in a small-city community continue to inform and impact my ways of doing Latina/x and decolonial feminist pedagogies.

Author

• Sofia A. Villenas, Cornell University