Formando Comunidad: Convivencia and the Future of East Coast Latina Research Spaces

• In Event: Co-Designing Futures: Latina Scholars Build the East Coast RAC Through Collective Vision and Shared Praxis

Abstract

Purpose
This session shares the perspective of original members of a longstanding West Coast Research Apprenticeship Course (WC-RAC)[7], who are walking alongside compañeras on the East Coast as they envision the formation of an East Coast Research Apprenticeship Community (EC-RAC). Grounded in Critical Race Feminista Methodologies (CRFM)[1-3, 5, 9-10]], we invite the broader education research community to consider how intentional community-building—rooted in convivencia, healing, and fementorship—can be activated to support Latina scholars across geographies. Rather than offering a programmatic model, we offer a process: one of collective reflection, dialogue, and transformation.
Theoretical Framework
We draw from CRFM as both a methodological and epistemological framework developed through over a decade of praxis within the WC-RAC. This framework integrates plática, testimonio, and affective relationality as central to the research process and aims to disrupt academic traditions that isolate scholars of color. Our praxis is also informed by Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Spatial Analysis [4-5, 9-10], which help us interrogate how research spaces are racialized and gendered, and how counterspaces can be cultivated in resistance. Through this paper, we extend CRFM not as a fixed approach, but as a living methodology shaped through collective engagement.
Methods
Our process is grounded in pláticas and reflective praxis shared with East Coast compañeras over the past year through digital exchange, joint planning sessions, and a co-facilitated town hall during the 2025 AERA conference. These dialogues surfaced critical questions about belonging, care, and the labor of community formation. Our methods center collective narrative and dialogic process, guided by the ethics of CRFM—reciprocity, relationality, and accountability. As West Coast comadres, we continue this accompaniment—offering lessons from our journey while holding space for visioning and healing.
Process/Vision
In this co-facilitated session, the process itself becomes both method and message. The session begins with a grounding in the origins and goals of the EC-RAC, contextualized within a lineage of justice-centered, relational research spaces. In a shift from traditional formats, we will co-facilitate the town hall by modeling CRFM in action—sharing how rituals, storytelling, and relational accountability shaped the WC-RAC, and inviting participants to co-design what an East Coast RAC might become.

Rather than offer a replicable model, we bring process, not prescription—fementorship that is dialogic, emergent, and rooted in care. Participants will engage in a live, participatory visioning process using pláticas and testimonios to explore: What spaces have nourished us? What do we still long for? What values, structures, and commitments can sustain a community across institutions and generations?
Significance
This paper contributes to a growing movement to redesign research spaces as sites of healing and transformation. It challenges competitive, individualistic academic norms and centers community, identity, and collective care. The EC-RAC is envisioned not as a program but as a relational infrastructure: a Radical Refuge [6] from exclusion and a catalyst for leadership, healing, and transformation across generations [8]. We offer this session as part of a broader movement to reimagine research as liberatory, relational, and just.

Authors

• Lindsay Pérez Huber, California State University - Long Beach

• Maria C. Malagon, California State University - Fullerton

• Verónica Nelly Vélez, Western Washington University