Mexicana/Latina Campesinas Cultivating Knowledge: A Collective Agricultural Land-Based Education in Rural Washington State

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Desire Within Empire, Land-Based Pedagogies, and "Latinx" Sites of Learning

Abstract

I draw on a one-year ethnographic collaboration with (im)migrant campesina mothers in Yakama Nation/Central Washington state. I focus on the ways in which campesinas, as intellectual agents, create conscious spaces of learning. I follow desire-based frameworks (Tuck, 2009, 2010; Author, 2019) and draw on Indigenous and anti-colonial perspectives (Calderon, 2014; Paperson, 2014; Tuck & McKenzie & McCoy, 2014) to unpack the notion of desires around education and its relationship to land as pedagogy. We learn from critical land education that land (nature, farming, urbanized contexts, etc.) is an integral part of co-creating pedagogy and shaping one's relationship (via displacement, relationality, sacred connections, etc.) and learning. For campesinas, the agricultural land is a place of teaching and learning. The orchards and vineyards as complex land places (both as sacred and as part of larger structures of dominance, abuse, and exploitation) guide their educational experiences and movements. I discuss how agricultural land co-creates campesinas’ pedagogies and guides relationships, in particular, to create spaces of learning that are grounded on campesinas’ desires for creating education that cares for themselves, their children, and the land.

I engage my participant witnessing (Behar, 1996) of campesinas while they work during the cherry harvest and pruning of the vineyards. I explain the education that is taught to them, including that of westernized knowledge around agriculture production that is grounded on mass production, efficient movements, and exploitative practices. Taking this model of education into consideration, I share how campesinas respond and repurpose this logic to not only enact notions of efficiency (as one of the components) but find moments to create alternative movements through their learning of the crop’s needs. The first example that is unpacked includes campesinas’ consideration of the type of cherry (as delicate/not delicate) to decide the speed and technique that they will engage during harvest. Another example that will be shared is that of campesinas pruning the vineyard. In this example, I show how they assess how much of the overgrown buds they need to cut off to help the vine grow. These examples show how campesinas are prioritizing their relationships and lessons from the land to alter their modes of efficiency. I argue that it is important to understand this complexity in land as pedagogical, even land that is used for capitalistic purposes because land and its gifts have their own movement that guides people in deeper, more meaningful ways. From campesinas’ experiences, we can appreciate a deeper connection to land as place/space than what is normalized in narratives about campesinxs within the scope of agricultural work.

Further, as a Chicana ethnographer who desires to be in conversation with Indigenous perspectives, I often think about how my dissertation work can better address Yakama Nation peoples’ presence. In this paper, I also consider my role as a researcher on Yakama Nation/Washington and campesinas land-based pedagogies in ways that are attentive to the history and ongoing processes of colonization.

Author

• Rosalinda Godinez, University of California Berkeley