Leading from the Middle: Reflections of a Nepantlera Navigating Identity and Supporting Students at La Casa

• In Event: Shaking the Table: Centering the Voices of Identity Center Practitioners

Abstract

What does it look like to “lead from the middle” as the director of a cultural center? Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2015) concept of nepantla, the author reflects on various ways to lead from the middle, while navigating the complexities of working with diverse students, administrators, faculty, and staff – each of whom have specific expectations of the responsibilities of a cultural center director (Campbell, 2022; Harris & Patton, 2017; Pedota, 2024). While issues around identity, politics, and activism often take center stage in cultural center work, specifically in Latino cultural centers.

Directors of these spaces contend with the challenges of supervising professional staff, administrative assistants, graduate students, student workers, and alumni, all while balancing competing demands and expectations (Pedota, 2024). Anzaldúa (2015) captured the work of those in the “in-between” when she coined the term nepantlera to refer to an “artista-activista” who navigates this liminal space where multiple worlds and perspectives collide (p. 82). She conceptualized this as a perspective “from the cracks,” as being stuck between the cracks of home and other cultures, where you experience dislocation and disorientation (p. 81). Nepantla is the zone between where you struggle to find equilibrium between the outer expression of change and your inner relationship to it.

The author then uses the theorizing of nepantla to examine her experience entering into a cultural center initially fraught with internal conflict and mistrust, where leading from the middle meant first recognizing her own insecurities and “cracks” that she found herself within, as contended with identity as she sought to build connections among staff. Furthermore, this work illuminates how cultural center directors must also earn and maintain the trust of students – supporting their activism while meeting the responsibilities of a middle-management administrator who reports to an upper-administrator (Harris & Patton, 2017; Pedota, 2024).

An important insight in this work is the way the author illuminates that leading from the middle requires a willingness to minimize your own ego in the service of others. Additionally, the author highlights how she acclimated to her role as a cultural center director by leaning into her identity as someone who has always occupied a space of neplanta. She demonstrates this through troubling her own assumptions about what it means to be a transformative leader. Finally, she shares her approach to self-inquiry to underscore how identity-based work is painful to navigate when experiencing dissonance around one’s own identity, yet, how a commitment to this awareness creates opportunity for more authentic and transformational leadership.

Anzaldua, G. E. (2015). Light in the dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. (A. Keating, Ed.). Duke University Press.

Harris, J. C., & Patton, L. D. (2017). The challenges and triumphs in addressing students’ intersectional identities for Black cultural centers. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 10(4), 334-349. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000047

Pedota, J. (2024). Institutionalization of a Latinx campus cultural center: Exploring a case of racialized administrative burdens faced by Latinx staff and students. Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, 27(1), 34-46.

Author

• Adele Lozano, University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse