Roots of Resistance: Land, Memory, and Emotional Geographies in Ethnic Studies Pedagogy

• In Event: Truth-Telling and Transformation: Critical, Reparative, and Community-Engaged Historical Methods Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

This study examines how local history—particularly the activist legacy of the 1968 East Los Angeles Blowouts—acts as praxis and pedagogy for sustaining intergenerational relationships, cultivating agency, and combating the colonial erasure of People of Color’s histories. It analyzes how ethnic studies educators utilize emotional bonds to place, elders’ oral histories, and mapping of displaced community spaces to challenge settler colonial narratives. Focusing on local history and land-based knowledge allows students and teachers to heal from historical dismemberment and imagine liberatory futures.

Theoretical Framework

The study is grounded in Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1991; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), Indigenous epistemologies (Cajete, 1994; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), and decolonial land-based pedagogies (Meyer, 2014; Stewart-Harawira, 2018). These frameworks show how settler colonialism operates through dispossession, displacement, renaming, and erasure (Bruyneel, 2013). Pulido’s (2015) theorization of place, race, and memory—particularly the “imprint of struggle on the land”—guides the analysis of how erased or repurposed spaces carry emotional and historical significance. Dillard’s (2016) concept of (re)membering further explains how educators and students repair relationships with land and community by re-mapping erased geographies and reclaiming elders’ knowledge. Emotions play a key role, aligning with Indigenous and critical scholars who emphasize the “intelligence in feeling” (Meyer, 2008, p. 11) as essential to knowledge creation.

Methods & Data

This intergenerational qualitative case study used Critical Race Educational History methodology (Santos et al., 2017) to explore how local history becomes embodied pedagogy and practice. Data included oral histories with Blowout elders, archival research, and pláticas with Ethnic Studies educators. Curricular artifacts from the Boyle Heights and Me Ethnic Studies course (Author, López, & López, 2016), mapping exercises, walking tours, and oral storytelling provided spatial and emotional insights into how geography, displacement, and land-based relationships shape collective memory. Data were coded thematically to capture emotional expression, embodiment, spatial relationships, and community agency.

Findings & Significance

Findings indicate that local history as pedagogy is emotional, geographic, and relational. Educators and students used walking tours, yearbooks, mapping, and films such as Walkout (Olmos, 2006) to uncover erased sites of resistance, including the Church of the Epiphany and La Piranya Coffee House. These activities deepened their connection to land and demonstrated that even repurposed sites retain emotional and historical significance (Pulido, 2015). Students showed anger over the colonial erasure of the Blowouts from K–12 curricula and pride in their communities’ contributions to social justice.

Elders’ oral histories were central to transmitting knowledge of displacement and survival. Movement elder Mita Cuarón stated, “We are the seeds that planted the trees, and now you’re the trees creating forests… I can feel it in your voices.” This metaphor emphasizes how land and history foster healing and resistance.

Ultimately, teaching local history is an embodied practice of mapping erased geographies, centering elders’ narratives, and healing from settler colonial wounds. Through land-based, emotionally restorative pedagogies, educators and students enact transformational resistance (Ginwright, 2008), affirming their role as inheritors of a legacy of agency, love, and possibility embedded in the landscapes they inhabit.

Authors

• Mariana E. Ramirez, University of California - Irvine

• Roxana Daylen Dueñas, Los Angeles Unified School District