"La Burra no era Arisca*": Survival Fugitivity Practices in Research/Teaching/Leadership for Latina Women

• In Event: Seeking Routes to Freedom: Fugitive Methodologies for Rethinking Community Research, Literacies, and Engagement

Abstract

This narrative inquiry work and collective memory (Clandinin & Connelly, 2010; Haug, 1999) examines the fugitive strategies myself, a transnational Latina/Indigenous scholar, a Mexican educational leader, and a Mexican-American teacher needed to deploy to develop in our ongoing community ethnographic work on pedagogical knowledge among Latinx teachers working in transitional bilingual programs serving only minoritized students. The subtractive nature of these programs, their lack of funding, and professional development make these sites difficult to research since their visibility would be an indictment of school districts' neglect toward Latinx teachers, students, and community. Through reflections, memos, artifacts, text messages, and emails, work unveils the hoops we needed to jump to find ways to access Latinx teachers from their clandestine positions, to find allies to break into sites uninvited, and to find ways to do research after being told not to, all of which I did by "playing the game" (Urrieta, 2009).

Reminiscent of our life trajectory, the demands of trying to fit into a society that rejects us at different points of my life helped us develop a set of strategies that enable us to dance with both resistance and negotiation for survivance (Brayboy, 2005). This folk knowledge learned to "play the game" (Urrieta, 2009) as strategic and clandestine practices to play the system are "situational, calculated, and improvisational" (p. 156) and developed as marginalized individuals try to reconstitute their lives. The approach to the game, of course, changes depending on the power differentials, hierarchies of the players, and what is at stake. Although the fugitivity (Moten, 2013) of those strategies (transas: transactions; movidas: moves; jugadas: plays; travesuras: mischiefs) often have a negative connotation as they may not follow normalized standards of what is "just" and "fair," they are responses to both the refusal of access and the direct engagement to subvert the injustices in the current unequal educational system.

I used autohistoria-teoría (Anzaldúa, 2015), which is self-writing that fuses "personal narratives with theoretical discourse, autobiographical vignettes and theoretical prose" (p. 6) in order to engage in self-knowledge, to confront self-ignorance (Pitts, 2016), and to re-member (Dillard 2016) the autochthonous knowledges encouraged to forget. This approach is attuned with a Chicana epistemology cultural intuition (Solorzano & Yosso 2002) founded in personal experiences—in the shape of testimonios (Beverley, 2000; Cervantes-Soon, 2012), life histories (Geiger 1986), counter-storytelling (Delgado 1989; Solorzano & Yosso 2002), existing literature and professional experience in the field.

*a Mexican proverb: the female donkey wasn’t born surly, they made her so”

Author

• Blanca Gabriela Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities