Youth Work is Sacred Work: Faithful Witnessing and Hanging Out in the City of the Angels

• In Event: Historicizing Los Angeles : Envisioning New Educational Futures in Latinx Radical Imaginations

Abstract

Cindy Cruz, using examples from her experience building a community school and teaching queer and trans* street youth in Los Angeles, rethinks faithful witnessing as a reflexive decolonial praxis to remember the resiliency of the communities of Los Angeles. Defining faithful witnessing as a calling for Chicanx and feminists of color to find different ways of accessing meaning that can be constructed against the grain of deportation and immigrant oppression, it is a concept that undergirds Lugones’ notion of “world”-travelling, where we learn to move with others in ways that are not agonistic or hierarchical, racist or transphobic. Faithful witnessing is resistance. To travel to another’s world is to learn to identify with others, where understanding “what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” becomes an essential method of new kinds of relations in youth work (Lugones, 1987). By centering solidarity, memory, and spiritual care, encouraging a shift from mere observation to being with in pedagogical practice.

Author

• Cindy Cruz, University of Arizona