"We Write and Change Together as escritoras Y mentoras!" The Fractals and Flows of Chicana and Latina Writing Femtors Creating Emergent Strategies for Graduate School

• In Event: Cultivando Metodologías Feministas: A Chicana/Latina Feminista Praxis in Educational Research

Abstract

Objective: This paper presents a series of writings written by Chicana and Latina undergraduate students, and their Writing Femtor (Cisneros, 2021) as they reflect on graduate school preparation to co-create affirming social justice oriented relationships. Few studies have examined the preparation and relationships that support graduate school pathways for Chicana and Latina students. Although educational inequities likely prevent some racially diverse students from pursuing graduate study, there are also inequities in preparation for graduate study at the undergraduate levels. To that end, this paper addresses the following guiding questions:
How do we move the barriers of presence and engagement with graduate education for Chicana and Latina students?
How do we engage graduate school preparation for Chicana and Latina students that is transformative beyond the settler colonial imperatives of performative diversity, productivity, and accumulation?

Methods: In this paper, I draw upon Anzaldúan theories of embodied literacies (Ybarra & Saaavedra, 2021) and Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998). Anzaldúan theories of literacies are nested within Chicana/Latina Feminisms, an interdisciplinary theoretical tradition that emerges from women, femmes, and trans feminists creating spaces where embodied experiences are elevated (Anzaldúa, 1987; Castillo, 1994; Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016; Flores 2020; Pérez, 1999; Saldivar-Hull, 2000, Ybarra & Saavedra, 2021). CFE (Delgado Bernal, 1998) has informed the epistemological and methodological commitments of education researchers within Chicana/o and Latina/o communities. This paper is based on my qualitative study of 10 Chicana and Latina undergraduate students in a graduate school preparation program. The data analyzed for this study includes letters, journal entries and personal statements written by the participants. This paper repurposes the role of a “Writing Femtor” (Cisneros, 2021) as a methodological position within Chicana Latina Feminist research that supports writing as narratives of resistance.

Findings: Fractals and Changes for Graduate School: In this paper I describe the relational practices enacted by the students to reframe traditional academic advising and mentoring for graduate school. The relational practices are grounded in Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategies (2017) framework for organizing communities. Participants of the program recognized the heteropatriarchal and hierarchical patterns of traditional mentoring and offered an analysis of the scale and fluidity of relationships that are important in long term relationship building. The data reveals the work of remembering and healing that calls for a return to chosen relationships for community building. Aligned with Vega’s (2018) ofrenda, these written acts of healing offer Chicanas and Latinas the spirit to sustain different possibilities and pathways for graduate and professional work.

Significance: Emergent Strategies, enacted by Writing Femtors, for Chicana/Latina students in pursuit of graduate studies is necessary in this pandemic context where Chicana and Latina students seek to apply their brilliance to transform the crises toward justice. The Emergent Strategies principles of fractals and changes generated practices of reflection and collaboration to approach graduate school as a transformative tool for communal restoration and economic sustainability in a time of cultural, political, and spiritual reckoning.

Author

• Nora Cisneros, California State University - Los Angeles