Dándoles sus flores: giving women of color their flowers through art and archiving

• In Event: Archives as Resistance: Understanding Archive as Curriculum and Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Purpose & Overview
Grounded in the work of community organizers and activist movements, Ethnic Studies has historically represented a political resistance to erasure of BIPOC histories and provided an exemplar of culturally sustaining pedagogy (de los Ríos, 2015). Despite its liberatory past, the current surge of bans on books, critical race theory and Ethnic Studies, have subjugated educators and youth alike. Within K-12 Ethnic Studies, there is a need for research that explicitly focuses on Black and Latina girls and archives. Thus, this research is inspired by indigenous and feminist practices that emphasize relationality and process, where we move intentionally through “slow archiving” (Christen & Anderson, 2019) and cariño (Valenzuela, 1998; Lomeli, 2020). This paper explores how a high school Ethnic Studies classroom co-created an arts-based women of color archive rooted in a Black and Chicana feminist praxis (hooks, 1994; Anzaldúa, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998).
Theoretical Framework
Conventional archival practices often “emphasize an end product over the process and knowledge embedded in the materials themselves" (Christen and Anderson, 2019, p.110). Through a shift to emphasize how we create and preserve, we ensured the creation of this archive was youth led and participatory. This work is also rooted in the ARC of Ethnic Studies (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2014), where the archival process and artifacts are Accessible to the community, Relevant oral histories about community members, and Community members and spaces as sites of knowledge beyond the schooling space.

Methods/Data Source
Data consists of student created visual testimonios, digital stop motion collage art pieces paired with the most compelling moments from a series of oral histories. These visual testimonios were showcased at a local Black owned business where community members, including those interviewed, interacted with the final art pieces. The archive continues to collect stories and is showcased at art festivals.

Inspired by critical fabulations as “historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record” (Hartman, 2018), I explore how youth’s visual testimonios are critical fabulations that resist erasure and disrupt what is seen as worthy of preserving and studying. Next, I use platicas (Delgado Bernal et al., 2023) to analyze how centering vulnerability, somatics, and healing are part of the feminist archival praxis --- a praxis of storytelling con cariño.

Findings
My analysis showcases: 1.) how we can nuance CSP, Ethnic Studies curriculum, and archives, by beginning with the art-based oral histories of women of color and positioning girls of color as knowledge producers, and 2.) how centering art, somatics, and cariño allows for a transformative healing experience that legitimizes decolonial contributions to archives and thus, decolonizes materials and literacies valued in the classroom.
Significance
It behooves us as educators and educational researchers to consider how youth can not only engage with archives, but also how curriculum can be designed and implemented as an anti-colonial and feminist praxis. In doing so, we emphasize that what we archive, who is an archivist, and how we archive becomes what is meaningful and valued across generations.

Author

• Wendy Barrales, New York University