Chicana/x Feminista Femtorship: From Ph.D. to Profesora

• In Event: Beyond Mentoring: Muxerista, Feminista, and Black Feminist Approaches to Femtorship

Abstract

Objectives & Research Question
In this presentation, three Chicana/x profesoras reflect on femtorship, an intersectional praxis necessary within academia, through the use of testimonio. In line with this year’s call, we recognize femtorship as a necessary praxis as insurgent scholar activists working within historically white supremacist institutions of higher education in order to build the vision and practice of education that we desire which is rooted in and reflects our communities' ways of being and knowing. In “futuring” within education and educational research, we recognize the care and femtorship of muxeres and queer folks from a Chicana/x and Latina/x feminista (Delgado Bernal, 1998) approach as radical and transformative, with the goals of not only contributing to the professional development of our students and ourselves, but also in providing a holistic approach to the work that we do that honors and recognizes the communities we come from and our spirits. As early career faculty, our testimonios speak to our positionalities as nepantleras in between a threshold where we reflect on the femtorship we received in graduate school, and the femtorship we are tasked to provide in our positions currently as junior faculty in California and Texas.
Theory
We situate our testimonios within Women of Color Feminisms, drawing from Black, Chicana/x and Latina/x scholars who provide a template of what it means to theorize in the flesh (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983) within the context of higher education. Specifically, we draw from our femtor, Dolores Delgado Bernal’s (1998) feminista approach, which has been used in the context of research and praxis, to theorize our approaches to femtoring students.
Methods/Sources
Testimonios are rooted in Latin American feminist traditions by Indigenous and women of color activists speaking their truths against oppression as one strategy to create social change. Chicana/x and Latina/x feminist educational scholars, as well as CRT scholars, have since used testimonios as a methodology as a way to produce radical and transformative research that recognizes and centers Indigenous, Black, and communities of color as experts of their lived experiences and that embody rich data that can influence policy and create change in schools (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012). As such, we draw from our lived experiences to testimoniar as part of the 3% of Latina/x faculty in full-time positions within institutions of higher education and the role of femtoship in this work (National Center for Education Statistics).
Findings and Significance
Across our testimonios, we explore 1) the impact of Chicana/x and Latina/x femtorship within our own educational journeys, 2) our specific approaches to Chicana/x and Latina/x femtorship within our respective institutions and states, and 3) the challenges of femtoring in this specific sociopolitical moment.

Authors

• Nancy Huante-Tzintzun, California State University - Sacramento

• Socorro Morales, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona

• Sylvia Mendoza, University of Texas - San Antonio