Continuing Chicana Feminist Traditions: Negotiating Cultural Intuition in the Analysis of Chicago Latinx Teacher Testimonios

• In Event: The Value of Our Words: Sustaining Radical Women of Color Epistemologies in Qualitative Educational Research

Abstract

Purposes

In this paper, we examine the process our research team undertook in the analysis of teacher testimonios. Our team was composed of all Latinas of Mexican heritage. The teachers who recounted their experiences were also predominantly of Mexican heritage, bilingual, and from Chicago. As researchers who share overlapping experiences with our research participants, we now scrutinize the role of our own positionality in the analysis of the data collected. While listening to our teachers' testimonios, we were able to identify with many of the educational, linguistic, or cultural moments that we also lived. Thus, we point to both the affordances and challenges of cultural intuition as we engage in reflexión of the analytic process of collective experiences as racialized women in the US.

Perspective(s) and modes of inquiry

We use a LatCrit in education framework to examine the intersectional lived experiences of Latinx teachers in the US, while affirming our commitment towards the transformative potential of schooling (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). Our study used the process of testimonio as methodology as we interviewed Latinx Chicago teachers about the reasons that they became educators, their experiences as teachers in highly segregated Latinx schools in predominantly working-class Latinx barrios, and how they viewed the students they taught.

For this paper, we pay attention to how our intersecting identities influenced the way we analyzed the testimonio transcriptions. Continuing the critical work of Chicana feminist theorists who disrupt racist patriarchal traditions and uphold womanist ways of knowing and being in the world (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981), we centered the processes of cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and reflexíon (Espino, Vega, Rendón, Ranero, & Muñiz, 2012) to make meaning, interrogate, and build bridges between the lived experiences of the Latinx teachers in this work with our own personal and schooling histories.

Substantiated conclusions and scholarly significance

The process of analyzing Latinx teacher testimonios and making meaning of their words was often facilitated by our shared experiences of racial, linguistic, and economic marginalization. Delgado Bernal (1998) asserted that it is, “through past life experiences that individuals acquire an understanding of situations and why and what might happen in the particular setting, under certain conditions” (p. 564). The close proximity of experiences that we shared with teachers equipped us to intimately situate vulnerable moments as we read through each testimonio transcription and mediated a collective narrative about Latinx schooling in Chicago. Yet, through the process of reflexíon within our research collective, we also noticed the limited articulation of experience sometimes evident in the testimonio recordings because of assumed shared understanding.

Although testimonio as a methodological approach is highly contested as not having the same rigor as other eurocentric methodologies, we argue that the act of testimoniar is not only a valid process but one that contributes new understanding. Testimonio does not end after the interview process but permeates through transcription and analysis. In this phase, our team members were able to use our cultural intuition and reflexión to reciprocate the trust that was granted during participants sharing their testimonios.

Authors

• Yanelet Delgado, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Ramona Alcalá, University of Illinois at Chicago

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago