Composing Teorías: Latina Girls Cultivating Their Worlds Through Art, Writing, and Storytelling

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

Abstract

Objective
I center my experiences and learnings working alongside Latina girls (grades 6-12) as participants in [Program Name], a summer writing and art workshop designed for Latina girls that invites them to use art, writing, and storytelling as tools to examine their lives and worlds. Program Name is rooted in the embodied theories of Black and Chicana feminist scholars, writers, and activists, Audre Lorde (2007), Gloria Anzaldúa (1999), Patricia Hill Collins (2009), and the Latina Feminist Group (2001). They used writing to define themselves, rewrite false narratives, and unearth silenced stories.

Theoretical Framework
A “theory in the flesh” serves as an overarching framework for my work alongside girls in [Program Name]. As a second-generation Chicana, I witness the ways that our histories are connected and part of a larger legacy. Bringing my full self to this work and centering young Latinas’ embodied stories calls for a “theory in the flesh” that makes space for, honors, and embraces us fully. According to Moraga:

A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity… (p. 19)

I weave together a theory in the flesh with research conducted alongside Black and Latina girls in which they joined en comunidad to examine their lives and build new worlds (Brown, 2013; Garcia & Gaddes, 2012; Muhammad, 2014, 2015).

Methods and Data Sources
In data collection and analysis, I drew on Delgado Bernal’s (1998) concept of “cultural intuition,” which acknowledges the insights I carry through my personal and professional experiences. Located in the Southwest, the program is facilitated by a university faculty member, teacher candidates, and classroom teachers, who all self-identify as Latina women. [Program Name] exists within a sociopolitical context prevalent with book bans of BIPOC stories and discriminatory LGBTQIA policies. Across eight summers (2016-2023), I collected girls' written and oral testimonios, ethnographic interview transcripts, and field notes of our collective work documenting our transformations of self and community. I coded all data by hand using descriptive and invivo coding methods (Saldaña, 2016).

Results
In their embodied art, writing, and storytelling, girls examined their lives and reclaimed their experiences, composing new narratives. Through their creative acts, girls constructed a world for themselves rooted within the stories of their ancestors and those of the writers, poets, and storytellers whose writing had carved out a place for us in the world.

Significance
The voices of Latina girls provide important teorías into how they construct the meaning of their lives. Our girls come from a legacy of poets, storytellers, artists, and activists who have cultivated and nurtured this in them. If we are to leverage the knowledges and literacies of Latina girls, we must start by seeing and hearing them and learning from their visions – of who they are and who they are becoming – ending histories of erasure and invisibility in classrooms and society.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, University of Texas at Austin