¿Cómo Se Dice Queer en Spanish? How Queer Chicanx Educators Facilitate Affirming Bilingual Queer Curriculums

• In Event: Creando Senderos en Comunidad: Working Towards Lifelong Language Learning with Latine Communities

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the efforts of Queer, Trans and Non-Binary (QTNB) Chicago-based bilingual educators as they navigate moments, lessons, and projects in their curriculum that affirm queer youth. This research is guided by Queer Chicanx feminist perspectives that value how our layered identities and political decisions about the curriculum we facilitate in and out the classroom affect the care within education queer bilingual students receive (Pendleton Jiménez, 2009). By engaging in testimonio methodology, a methodology that encourages Chicana education researchers, especially, to affirm lived experiences as sources of knowledge (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga & Flores Carmona, 2012), this presentation will include evidentiary quotes, zines, and calls to action that exemplify how their lived experience as queer bilingual educators have created positive and life-affirming education for queer youth in Chicago.

By analyzing the testimonios of three Chicago-based Queer/Trans Chicanx educators, this paper copes with the difficulty of both the exclusion of queer, trans, and non-binary people in educative spaces such as schools, afterschool programs, and community centers, and the reality that our self-identification as QTNB people is limited by a historically dominant heteronormative Spanish language. This reality repositions Chicanx educators of queer youth to advocate for queer-centered curriculum and teaching practices that not only affirm queer youth’s livelihood, but also asserts agency for them to reclaim words that were once harmful and turn them into self identifiers of resistance. Self-identifiers of resistance such as marimacha, dyke, cuír, y tortillera are examples of ways both queer youth alongside their queer educators have chosen to identify when their identity, gender, or lack thereof are questioned by Spanish-speaking people. While the words themselves have their own historical significance often situated in harm, this poses a larger argument about the invisibility, and more importantly, the silencing of queer youth in Spanish-speaking educative spaces.

The queer and trans educators centered in this study, Luz, Nancy y Omar, provide us with culturally enriching testimonios that require us to consider what it truly means to be “en comunidad” and what necessitates supporting lifelong bilingualism for Latine and Chicanx communities. This paper argues that to be en comunidad necessitates an urgency and responsibility to center queer approaches to curriculum, language, and identity in educative spaces, as a way to build affirming spaces of agency and self-expression for queer youth. Each educator has attested to positive transformational experiences by making room for queerness in their curriculum, while also elevating the curiosity of young bilingual students about why there are words we can say in Spanish, and why there are other words (like the ones that define us) that we cannot.

Author

• Jodi Aguilar, University of Illinois at Chicago