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Journal of Latinos and Education

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Seeking a Mexicana/Mestiza Critical Feminist Ethicof Care: Diana’s Revolución of Body and Being

Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio

To cite this article: Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio (2016) Seeking a Mexicana/Mestiza CriticalFeminist Ethic of Care: Diana’s Revolución of Body and Being, Journal of Latinos and Education,15:4, 303-319, DOI: 10.1080/15348431.2015.1134537

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2015.1134537

Published online: 06 Apr 2016.

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Seeking a Mexicana/Mestiza Critical Feminist Ethic of Care: Diana’sRevolución of Body and BeingMia Angélica Sosa-Provencio

Department of Teacher Education Educational Leadership and Policy, University of New Mexico

ABSTRACTThis Chicana Critical Feminist Testimonio reveals a Mexican/Mexican-American Ethic of Care and Testimonios of struggle and survival informingcurriculum and pedagogy of one Mexican/Mexican-American female edu-cator of predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American students. This work ispart of a larger ethnographic study conducted through multiple methods.Findings here reveal Diana’s Ethic of Care, a (re)framing of social justicerevolution/Revolución at the intersection of race, class, gender, language,and immigration status. As Diana (re)constructs and (re)claims her Mexican/Mexican-American identity, she likewise endeavors toward her students’dignity and academic access. Findings have curricular, pedagogical implica-tions for all educators serving marginalized youth and youth of color.

KEY WORDSEthic of care; testimonio;social justice curriculum andpedagogyChicana/o,Mexican/Mexican-American;Hispanic

Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza1 is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under avariety of conditions … the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture … she clings to thecob … she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.—Anzaldúa (1987, p. 81)

Traditionally black folks have had to do a lot of creative thinking and dreaming to raise black children free ofinternalized racism.… in our own little black neighborhoods, with schools and churches, in the midst of racism,we had places where we could undo much of the psychological madness and havoc wreaked by whitesupremacy …—hooks (1993, pp. 80–81)

Across the United States, from the Jim Crow South to rural and Spanish-speaking communities inthe Southwest, there lives a legacy of Black and Spanish-speaking Mexican American, Mexicana/oclassroom educators who carried the academic preparation of young people of color as an ethicalcalling for social uplift. Through a rigorous, nourishing curriculum and pedagogy rooted in healingand resistance, Black and Brown young people were given the tools to reclaim the dignity and self-love necessary to buffer the White supremacy that elsewhere threatened their bodies, minds, andspirits. Educational scholars have documented these histories of educators of color who wrappedtheir young people tightly in the husks of their culture within nurturing and protective communitiesof resistance within which young people living and learning at the perilous intersection of class andrace could develop the means to heal from and resist the racialized cruelty of the outside world(Cross, 1998; Donato, 1999; Foster, 1993; Maestas, 2011; Milk, 1980; Siddle Walker, 1996, 2000).Within these school spaces, local educators of color fortified young people whom they deemedhermanas/os, and vecinos—kin, or community—through a critical feminist ethic of care frameworkthat cultivated a strong sense of self and community and the academic tools necessary to overcome

CONTACT Mia Angélica Sosa-Provencio msosaprovencio@unm.edu University of New Mexico, MSC05 3040, 1 Universityof New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131.1Mestiza/o and the more colloquial Mexicana/o signify a racialized identity at the intersection of Indigenous, Spanish, and Africanancestry within the context of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Mexico and the present-day Southwest. Although theseterms may can never fully encapsulate identities whose essence is mutability and resistance of form, I utilize them inter-changeably to describe the complexity of a hybridized, hyphenated reality not defined or limited along ethnic, racial, national,and political demarcations (Acuña, 1988; Anzaldúa, 1987; Córdova, 1994; Menchaca, 1999; Villenas, 2006).

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

JOURNAL OF LATINOS AND EDUCATION2016, VOL. 15, NO. 4, 303–319http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2015.1134537

the racialized physical and psychological violence daily raining down on their minds, bodies, andspirits. These educators of color teaching within a critical feminist ethic of care brought a con-sciousness of collective responsibility to their craft wherein the survival and uplift of their ownpeople hinged on teaching with a sense of purpose beyond a mastery of content for mastery’s sake.These educators taught with urgency as the means to dismantle the social ills of racism, inferiority.They created hopeful schooling spaces that drew on the capacity, intellectual gifts, wisdom, and richhistories of students and their families, utilizing curriculum and pedagogy simultaneously as ahealing balm and the battle armor necessary to resist the pain of invisibility, distortion, silencing,and physical brutality threatening to erode a collective body and being.

Today, communities of color continue to be in need of this critical feminist ethic of care andeducators who embody it. Young people of color who find themselves on the margins of schoolingcontinue to cry out for a healing, resistant, and historicized critical ethic of care that goes beyondthe individualized, maternal, and emotive caring largely characteristic of the White feminist ethicof care that dominates the discursive and physical spaces of mainstream schooling (Knight, 2004;Noddings, 1992, 2003; Thompson, 1998; Valenzuela, 1999). I aim specifically to more deeplyunderstand a Mexicana/Mestiza critical feminist ethic of care and the Testimonios, those under-lying silenced, guarded stories of struggle and survival at the intersection of race, class, gender, andresidency status which inform this ethic of care. I seek to identify a Mexicana/Mestiza criticalfeminist ethic of care to particularly serve the needs of Mexicana/o communities in order that localschools may become the spaces in which our young people may gain the knowledge, wisdom, andacademic skills necessary to transform the inequitable structures within which we live and work.This work is informed by the wisdom and knowledge of Mexicana and Mestiza female educatorsand the Mexicana/o students and families they serve who still live in a world that relegates them—that relegates us—to an underclass of people whose race/heritage, culture, history, and language/dialect(s) remain subjugated and whose right to live, work, and gain access to an equitable,meaningful education in the United States is still hotly contested. Falling within a Chicana criticalfeminist framework, this work is part of a larger year-long study that seeks a Mexicana/Mestizacritical feminist ethic of care as embodied within the classroom curriculum and pedagogy of fourMexicana/Mestiza female educators who construct schooling as a site of hope for reclaiminghistory, voices, and the beauty of our face. Although this larger study involves four participants,this article focuses specifically on the Mexicana/Mestiza critical feminist ethic of care embodiedwithin the curriculum and pedagogy of Diana Meza, a 26-year-old female social studies teacherborn in Durango, Mexico, and raised predominantly along the U.S.–Mexico border. This workfocuses on the particular Testimonios that nourish her work and the larger Mexicana/Mestiza ethicof care she embodies. I have chosen to focus solely on Diana in order to create the depth andspecificity necessary to fully develop a conceptual understanding of this critical ethic of care and itstenets to better meet the academic and social needs of Mexicana/o students.

These tenets, which I develop further within the research findings, include (a) a curriculum andpedagogy rooted within intergenerational Testimonios of struggle and resistance; (b) educationframed as an ethical imperative toward recovering dignity and transforming inequities; and (c) areframing of notions of revolution within a blurred and blended ambiguity, a mestizaje, whichconceals and protects equity work on behalf of Mexicana/o students and their families. This Chicanacritical feminist Testimonio seeks to address the following research questions: What is a Mexicana/Mestiza critical feminist ethic of care? What are the Testimonios of struggle, resistance, and survivalthat inform Mexicana educators? What pedagogies and practices do Mexicana (female) teachers ofpredominantly Mexicana/o students infuse into their roles as educators?

Background literature

More than 52 million Hispanics/Latinos, 17% of the total population, live in the United States, and thisnumber is projected to reach 33% by 2050 (J. González, 2011; U.S. Census, 2014). Even within the

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context of this growing population and in states where Mexican Americans make up the majority of thepopulation, speak English as their native tongue, and live within their ancestral homeland of theSouthwest, Mexicana/o students are underserved and undervalued within their schooling institutions,as is evident from low academic achievement and completion rates and disproportionate suspensionsand expulsions (J. González, 2011; National Center for Education Statistics, 2011; New Mexico PublicEducation Department [NMPED], 2011; Valencia, 2011a, 2011b). These differential educational out-comes have brought some public attention to closing what has come to be referred to within dominantnarratives as the achievement gap between Mexicana/o young people and their White peers. Theseinequities, however, represent something much deeper than that which is numerically evident: Theyrepresent the need to heal the brutality; cultural and linguistic shaming; and assimilationist histories ofcolonization, conquest, and peonage accomplished and perfected through schooling policies andpractices aiming to solidify a subordinated economic class of people (Gomez, 2008; Valencia, 2011b).For Mexicana/o and Mestiza/o daughters and sons whose very DNA remembers the grief of culturalerasure, enslavement, second-class citizenry, social rejection, and colonization (Moraga, 2011), healingmust come through a curriculum and pedagogy that challenge the paradigms of schooling that havelong sought to erase and distort. Today, these historical social policies and practices of neglect, bodilycontrol, assimilationism, and silencing enacted within all social arenas continue to be mirrored withinthe epistemologies and ontologies that constitute the blueprint of public schooling institutions, espe-cially for those purporting to serveMexicana/o students at the intersection of class and residency status(Acuña, 1988; Gomez, 2008; Menchaca, 2002).

Perfection of colonization, social inequity, and the role of schooling

For young people of color, schooling has endeavored to control the minds, bodies, and spirits ofthose deemed subordinate and inferior—those who stand apart from dominant, White, middle-classculture (Cross, 1998; Darder, 1995; Lomawaima, 1993; Milk, 1980; Smith, 2002; Spring, 2007, 2010).Within this social vision of schooling for social stratification and the perpetuation of inequities,students’ role is constructed as moving toward social refinement to “accept their proper place insociety as a marginal class” (Lomawaima, 1993, p. 236). Mexicana/o students born on both sides ofthe U.S.–Mexico border have endured public education wielded similarly: as a ubiquitous arm ofoppression, assimilation, and cultural degradation (Alarcón, Cruz, Guardia Jackson, Prieto, &Rodriguez-Arroyo, 2011; San Miguel, 1999; Valencia, 2011b; Valenzuela, 1999). For Mexicanas/osliving and learning in the land of their birth though constructed as trespassers upon it (Baca, 1990),schooling has existed to clear away “backward cultural beliefs … inhibit[ing] them from embark[ing]on the process of social betterment” (G. González, 1999, p. 58).

It is the young inheritors of these educational practices who are today bound within an unacknow-ledged accumulated educational debt, a knowledge apartheid that is the result of these gross socialinequities (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2006; Pérez Huber, 2009). Black and Chicana feminists maintain thatif we are to pay back these accumulated educational debts owed to tens ofmillions of young people of colorand their communities, we need frameworks of caring capable of healing heavy histories of colonization,conquest, subjugation, slavery, and ongoing degradation and criminalization for those struggling at theintersection of class, language, and residency status. Much as a unified sisterhood within the feministmovement has been critiqued by critical feminists of color for overlooking intersections of class and raceundergirding gender politics, dominant constructions of schooling including curriculum and pedagogyand specific to this work’s notions of academic caring—ethics of care—have been similarly critiqued asdevoid of dynamics of power and oppression (Collins, 2009; Delgado Bernal, 1998; hooks, 1994; Knight,2004; Pesquera & Segura, 1993). Critical feminists of color critique the framing of care within Whitefeminisms as a moral relativism, a “pre-act consciousness” whereby educators act, “not attempting totransform the world” but “allowing [themselves] to be transformed by it” (Noddings, 2003 pp. 28–34)—asan emotion that does not “posit one greatest good to be optimized” (Noddings, 1992, p. 21). Criticalfeminists of color charge us as educators to continue to look beyond these apolitical, interpersonal, and

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feminized frameworks of care in the education of students of color (Blum, 1993; Gilligan, 1982; Larrabee,1993; Noddings, 1992, 2003; Oakes & Lipton, 2003). This work is situated within this charge.

Understanding a critical feminist ethic of care

Within the legacies of critical feminist ethics of care within which I situate this work, caring isnecessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to over-come these forces of oppression in their daily lives, and young people of color on the margins ofschooling loudly echo this critical feminist critique. In overt and covert ways many students of color,and particular to this work Mexicana/o and Latina/o young people, are crying out for rigorous andinterconnected pedagogies with a critical understanding of their lived realities and the muscle toengage the whole of their multigenerational identities to transform an inequitable world (DelgadoBernal, 2006; Oesterreich, 2009; Olsen, 2008; Rolón-Dow, 2005; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001;Valenzuela, 1999).

To answer this call for critical connectedness we look to resistant and healing ethic(s) of careinfused with the resistance and intellectual legacies of communities of color. A critical feminist ethicof care answers this urgent charge to construct education as the practice of freedom for marginalizedyoung people by validating the multiple identities and native ways of knowing these young peoplebring to the classroom (Asher, 2010; Darder, 1991; Godinez, 2006; hooks, 1994; Knight, 2004;Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 2002; Smith, 1993, 2002; Taliaferro-Baszile, 2010). A critical feministethic(s) of care seeks to cultivate critical communities of perseverance in classrooms that servestudents and communities of color to challenge historical and current educational and socialinequities that they and their families face (Anzaldúa, 1987; Delpit, 2003; Henry, 2006;Rolón-Dow, 2005; Villenas & Moreno, 2001; Yosso, 2005). Through liberatory pedagogies rootedin traditions of survival, uplift, and reclamation found within Black and Chicana critical feminisms,students and educators may together develop the buffers of cultural armor that will enable them tonegotiate and ultimately thrive within and beyond the highly racialized and oppressive educationalstructures of schooling (Collins, 2009; hooks, 1994; Knight, Dixon, Norton, & Bentley, 2006;Oesterreich, 2007; West, 1993).

As the multiple intellectual and cultural legacies of students of color are often conspicuouslytwisted while simultaneously made invisible within the dominant White spaces of schooling (Darder,1991; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 2002), a critical feminist ethic(s) of care strips away the untruthsthat “continue to reproduce a conversation about [our] invisibility” (Taliaferro-Baszile, 2010, p. 491).It offers up “interstitial spaces between coloniality, patriarchy” within which lives and breathes adecolonizing “interruptive space of possibility” (Villenas & Moreno, 2001, p. 675) in which margin-alized young people may thrive. Audre Lorde (1978) called for spaces of possibility, for pedagogies ofreclamation in the lives of people of color, pedagogies with the power to “make me whole again/tolove/the shattered truths of me/spilling out like dragon’s teeth/through the hot lies/of those who saythey love/me” (p. 44). In the lives of Mexicana/o youth, too, cultural, linguistic, and racial subjuga-tion continue to take a heavy toll on bodies, minds, and spirits both in and out of school. This workseeks a Mexicana/Mestiza critical feminist ethic of care for the academic preparation of Mexicana/oyoung people with the power to speak a healing truth to dismantle the hot lies (Lorde, 1978) ofcolonization, peonage, economic subordination, cultural inferiority, and linguistic shaming that havelong threatened to limit and disfigure a People.

Calling for a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care

Anzaldúa (1987) similarly beckoned toward a theoretical and pedagogical grounding, a criticalfeminist ethic of care that constructs schooling spaces as potential sites of hope—as the healingbalm to racial distortions that are killing us as Mexicanas/os and Chicanas/os slowly, “taking away ourself-determination … [making] us weak and empty … we have never been allowed to develop

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unencumbered” (p. 86). Manifested in the bulk of her life’s work, Anzaldúa called us as Mexicana/opeople to come back to knowing and loving ourselves through a Mestiza consciousness that is itself afluid, resilient, subversive, and oppositional epistemology rooted within our Indigenous, European,and African ancestry (Delgado Bernal, 2006). Within a mestiza consciousness of intersecting races,languages, nationalities, geographies, sexualities, and spiritualities lies the capacity to survive andthrive while navigating a complex matrix of opposing powers and realities (Anzaldúa, 1987; Darder,1991; Delgado Bernal, 2006; Godinez, 2006; Knight et al., 2006; Villenas & Moreno, 2001).

Through this critical feminist Testimonio, I aim to answer this call to understand themeans by which weas Mexicanas/os may come back to knowing and loving ourselves within the walls of our schools andbeyond. This work seeks to identify and understand a critical feminist ethic of care as aMexicana/Mestizaethic of care that is particular to the needs, wisdom, and resistance legacies of Mexicana/o and Mestiza/ocommunities and the young people who continue to struggle for academic access within racialized spaces ofschooling that refuse to see or validate us. The larger body of this work draws on the present lived realities offour Mexicana/Mestiza female educators whose curriculum, pedagogy, and physical presence in theclassroom embodies this legacy of teaching as the battle for dignity, academic access, and uplift. I seekhere to reveal and more deeply understand tenets of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care and its rootednesswithin intergenerational Testimonios of struggle and survival in order to equip all educators with theunderstanding and means to create protective and nourishing school spaces wherein Mexicana/o youngpeople may fully develop the academic wisdom and dignity to grasp a more hopeful future for themselvesand their communities.

A Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care challenges and reconstructs dominant notions of social justicerevolution as it cloaks itself within an ambiguity and mutability in order to protect those who fight thisstill-contested battle on behalf of and with their Mexicana/o students and their families. The four femaleeducators who participated in this study reveal a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care in which they, embody-ing the spirit of La Revolucionistas, or woman warrior, wage a battle for equity and educational access onbehalf of Mexicana/o students that remains unrecognizable to those who have not the eyes to see Her orHer war. This article details the Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care as manifested within the curriculum andpedagogy of Diana as she embodies the spirit of La Revolucionista who wages Her Revolución in plainsight beneath a protective ambiguous cover, a mestizaje, of blended, mutable realities that resist form anddetection. La Revolutionista living and breathing within a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care reframesdominant notions of social justice revolution as Revolución, a battle waged beneath a mestizaje, themeans of survival deeply rooted within the history of a Mestiza/o people never conquered (PendletonJiménez, 2006; Rodriguez, 1996).

Methodology of bearing witness: A Chicana critical feminist testimonio

This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone … it’s not only my life, it’s also thetestimony of my people…my personal experience is the reality of a whole people.—Rigoberta Menchú (1984, p. 1)

I have grounded this research within the decolonizing methodology of Testimonio, the authoring ofindividual and communitied selves through the sharing of often untold and treasured stories of resistanceto social oppression, domination, and survival, a methodology that recognizes that the right to voice andthe authority to bear credible witness to one’s lived reality of struggle and survival is an essential avenueby which oppressed peoples may stake a place of dignity and equity within society (Blackmer Reyes &Curry Rodríguez, 2012; Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012; Latina Feminist Group,2001; Menchú, 1984). This work is theoretically framed within Black and Chicana critical feminismsrooted in interconnected spiritual, intellectual, instinctive, embodied, historical, and cultural ways ofknowing, consciousness/conocimiento, for the purpose of survival and uplift for communities living amidracial oppression and subjugation (Anzaldúa & Hernández-Ávila, 2000; Delgado Bernal, 2002, 2006;Henry, 2006; hooks, 1993, 1994; Lorde, 1978, 1984; Moraga, 1983, 2011; Trinidad Galván, 2006; Villenas,2006). Resisting the perpetuation of racism, sexism, classicism, linguicism, nationalism, and heterosexism,

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Black and Chicana critical feminist frameworks privilege suppressed, silenced realities (Collins, 2009;Moraga, 1983, 2011). Thus, the privileging of voice is essential, particular to this work the spoken andshared lived realities of U.S. peoples of Mexican/Mexican American descent perpetually marked foreignin the land of our birth (Gaspar de Alba, 1998; Menchaca, 1999, 2002; Nieto-Phillips, 2004; San Miguel,1999). This Chicana critical feminist Testimonio is rooted within endarkened critical feminist epistemol-ogies that seek to unearth the protected and often untold lived realities of struggle and survival of thosewhose experiences have been historically invalidated (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Dillard, 2000; Hurtado,2003). This work seeks a deeply contextualized and nuanced understanding of the structures that createand maintain social injustices and the nourished resistance necessary to disrupt them (Collins, 2009;hooks, 1993; Moraga, 1983).

Participants

I utilized criteria sampling calling for female, Mexican/Mexican American educators within both acomprehensive public high school and a charter middle school who teach predominantlyMexicana/ostudents. I subsequently relied on chain sampling to achieve my goal of four participants (Marshall &Rossman, 2010). I selected four participants for this study because of the study’s rootedness withinthe collective sharing of Testimonios, which relies on intimacy and trust found in smaller numbers(Pérez Huber, 2009). I worked with four participants—Diana, Rosana, Priscilla, and Sylvia—whorange from fully bilingual to English-dominant heritage speakers and who interchangeably self-identify as Mexicana, Mexican, Mexican American, and Hispanic.

Diana teaches sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade social studies and history in a dual languagecharter school along the southwestern U.S.–Mexico border region. She was born in Durango,Mexico, to Mexican-born parents. She moved to California before her formal schooling began andrelocated to the city in which she now teaches during her high school years. Diana is a native speakerof Spanish and fully bilingual in Spanish and English. Although each participant’s curriculum andpedagogy reveals tenets of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, this article focuses on Diana alone inorder to gain a nuanced, detailed understanding of how these tenets come to life, a level of detailunattainable through a more comprehensive telling of it. The workings of the tenets of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care made visible through Diana though manifest within the curriculum andpedagogy of all participants are beyond the scope of this one article.

Research site

This research takes place in a mid-size city of nearly 100,000 lying 60 miles from the U.S.–Mexicoborder. Per capita income (2010) is less than $20,000, and 20.4% of residents live below the povertyline (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011). I chose this site because of its proximity to the U.S.–Mexico borderand its large Mexican/Mexican American population. According to U.S. Census Bureau 2011estimates, the city’s ethnic breakdown is predominantly Hispanic (56.8%) and White (37.5%). Theofficial public school has reported a 73.9% Hispanic enrollment with 14.2% English languagelearners (Anonymized District Office of Accountability, Assessment and Research, 2011), withmore than 40% of residents speaking a language other than English at home.

Data collection

I have used multiple methods in this work: (a) two individual semistructured Testimonio interviewsaimed at uncovering participant stories of struggle and survival, (b) five focus group interviews providingcritically reflective methodological spaces for Testimonios to emerge (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012), (c)ongoing field observations, (d) my own reflective researcher journal, (e) photographic elicitation(Altheide & Johnson, 1998; Eisner, 1993; Oliver, 2003; Sanders-Bustle, 2003), and (f) participants’

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ongoing reflections in order to communicate a growing consciousness/conocimiento (Anzaldúa &Lunsford, 2000).

Data analysis

“To take part in the … revolution it is not enough … you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if youfashion it with the people, the song will come by themselves, and of themselves.”—Fanon (1963, p. 206, emphasisin the original)

As this work is situated within the decolonizing methodology of Testimonio with the capacity toopen spaces for self-empowerment and deeper understandings of institutional agency, participantswere involved at multiple levels of data collection and analysis (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Delgado-Gaitan, 1993). According to Delgado Bernal (1998), foundational to a Chicana feminist epistemologyis the equitable inclusion of Chicana and Mexicana research participants in the analysis of data,which allows “participants … to be speaking subjects who take part in producing and validatingknowledge” (p. 575). Within this work, participants were equitable creators of knowledge in thequest for their own deeper understanding of their practice.

Focus groups served as a site for data collection and equally for data analysis—focus groupmeetings were recorded, transcribed by me as a researcher, and provided to participants for furtheranalysis. Focus group meetings served as an opportunity to collectively identify emerging themesthat were initially and reflexively utilized to code and analyze data collected within this study.Participants and I conducted data analysis within emerging themes and continuously contextualizedand crystallized across all other data sources within the research phenomena (Luttrell, 2010a, 2010b).Analysis was likewise achieved within participants’ and my own experiential and cultural knowledgeand against community epistemologies and knowledge gained through dialogue with communitymembers beyond the scope of this research (Cervantes-Soon, 2012; Latina Feminist Group, 2001).Trustworthiness and ethical principles were scrupulously endeavored through responsibility not onlyto these participants involved in the study but also to the communities in which they are situated(Smith, 1993, 2002; Villenas, 2006). Part of the trustworthiness of my work lies in continuedreflection on myself as a researcher, including the particular intersectionalities of identity thatcollectively create the ever-present insider–outsider positionality coloring my work in unique andinfinite ways (Villenas, 2009). I self-identify as a Chicana, Hispana, and Mexican American femalewhose very body exemplifies the mestizaje of my Spanish, Indigenous (of Central and NorthernMexico and the Southwest), Anglo, and African ancestry. I come from a middle- to working-classupbringing, and my particularly situated identity as a bilingual, native-born, light-skinned, andEnglish-dominant U.S. Chicana/Mexicana has manifested itself in both marked and subtle ways.My family has longstanding geographic ties to both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border region, and Igrew up less than 30 miles from where I conducted my research.

A Mexicana/Mestiza Ethic of care: From a people marked to a people sealed

Each day through a curriculum and pedagogy fortified with the tenets of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic ofcare, Diana fights for dignity, equity, and educational access on behalf of her Mexicana/o studentsand their families. During one brief and hushed conversation that takes place at her desk in the 7min between her sixth- and eighth-grade history and social studies classes, Diana shares with mewhat lies at the heart of her work and what it means to be a Mexicana educator for Mexicana/ostudents:

They have that person to relate to … They come from the same neighborhoods, we have had the samestruggles … maybe they’re first generation or not, but who are still at the bottom of our society and going toschools where the don’t identify … aren’t acknowledged or recognized, aren’t able to succeed … always pushedoff to the side.

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Diana’s words give form to the world her Mexicana/o students face, irrespective of residencystatus. She describes point by point a world that challenges her students’ mere presence withinU.S. schools and society, relegates them to second-class citizenship, denies them connection to theirculture, negates their inherent worth, and ultimately inhibits their academic potential. Diana knowsthis world by heart as a bilingual, Mexican-born female of working-class background raisedpredominantly in the United States. It is this wisdom, her Testimonios of struggle and survival,that nourishes her curriculum and pedagogy. Diana brings a deep wisdom and critical social justiceconsciousness to her craft, but it is within the layers of what she shares next that the full breadth ofthe Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care she embodies can be seen. Within this aforementioned discussionregarding the inhumanity, subjugation, and lack of cultural connection Diana’s Mexicana/o studentsface, she shares with me the perilous contours of a battle fought visibly by one Mexicano educator, anassociate superintendent within a neighboring district. Diana relays his fight:

He used to be an associate superintendent … and maybe like 10% of the staff in the district were [Mexicana/o]and 95% of the student population was Mexicano, Latino … he started to recruit Latino, Hispanic, Mexicanbackground professionals and he went from 8% [or] 10% to 43% [or] 46% … they got rid of him because ofwhat he was doing after they ran him off that he realized that his rights were being infringed upon because hewasn’t violating anything and it was too late to do anything about it.

Evident in Diana’s cautionary tale is the reality that challenging the racial hierarchy of publiceducation by shining light on the underrepresentation of Mexicana/o education professionals, evenin districts with predominantly Mexicana/o students struggling for educational parity, is still anecessary though contested act. Diana’s words illuminate the profound understanding that lies atthe heart of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care: The more visible the battle is, the more vulnerable it isto outside attack.

Through Diana’s Testimonios and across all of the data that came forth within this research, thedeep wisdom of La Revolucionista, woman warrior spirit who battles within a Mexicana/Mestizaethic of care, slowly emerges. The urgency of revolution for dignity and equity is not enough to bringtransformation. This urgency must give life to an array of covert tactics that elude detection.Nurtured in this knowledge, La Revolucionista gives life to an armory of amorphous and unidentifi-able weaponry with the power to sustain the viability and sustainability of this still-dangerous war.

It is this subversive and elusive battle, this Revolución hiding in plain sight, that forms tenets of aMexicana/Mestiza ethic of care. Within the Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care that informs thecurriculum and pedagogy of Diana’s classroom, the spirit of La Revolucionista fights for Her2

Mexicana/o students’ sense of self and educational access; however, She will not allow Her battleto be detected by those who would seek to destroy it. Instead, La Revolucionista wages war within aMexicana/Mestiza ethic of care beneath the blurred cover of mestizaje (re)incarnating and (re)imagining familiar notions of the war for social justice. Within the following findings, I detail theways in which the critical text of Diana’s Mestiza body and being is transformed into the obscuredweaponry of healing resistance against the racialized, economic, and linguistic oppression thatimprints the lives of Mexicana/o students. Within a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, Dianabrandishes her body and being to seal her students beneath the curative banner of their sharedMexican and Mexican American heritage. In so doing, Diana embodies the spirit of LaRevolucionista, fighting daily to create spaces wherein Mexicana/o students may cultivate the dignity,self-love, and educational means necessary to grasp the quality of life that they deserve and that sooften escapes them.

2I capitalize Her and She when referring to La Revolucionista to highlight a unified spirit across participants. I in no way aim todistance this work from each of the participants who embody Her: They are La Revolucionista and She is them, never to beextricated.

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Diana’s sello: La revolucionista’s seal for body and being

For Diana, the battle on behalf of her Mexicana/o students’ humanity and rightful place in thiscountry is waged through her body in the form of a dime-size circular scar on her upper arm from asmallpox vaccine she received as a child in Mexico. She explains the significance of this small scar byrecounting a conversation between an Anglo and a Mexicano student:

They brought it up today, ‘cause I was wearing this short sleeve … “Oh miss, you have one of those?” And oneof our only Anglo kids was like, “What is that? What happened?” And he [Mexicano student] was like, “Nah,man, it’s cuz when you’re born in Mexico they give you this shot. My mom and my dad have it … and myuncles have it” … and he [Anglo student] was like, “Ugh. That’s weird. Does it hurt?” …

The words of these students illuminate a critical literacy that Diana and her Mexicana/o studentspossess in their consciousness and on their flesh: Bodies born and raised in the United States aroundDiana’s age or younger do not bear this scar. According to the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention, individuals born in the United States received their last smallpox vaccines around 1980when the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated; developing countries stilladminister them, as the disease is still considered a threat (Vinzant, 2001). Diana’s body and thebodies of her students are imprinted on within the context of a Mexican-born identity, but as Dianaallows her upper arm vaccination scar to be visible to her students, she gives them the means to defythe shame and distortion heaped on a collective Mexicana/o Body marked Foreign Other in theUnited States.

Diana’s corporal imprint laid bare within her classroom disempowers U.S. distortions of themarked status of a collective Mexicana/o body and being, a status perhaps best represented by herAnglo students’ reaction to Diana’s scar as strange, potentially painful, and just plain “Ugh,”distasteful. Through the weapon of her vaccination scar worn conspicuously on her Mexicanabody, Diana binds herself to her students and their families beneath a common identity andexperience. The power that Diana’s Mexicana body and being hold in La Revolucionista’s war ofhealing resistance comes into sharper focus as Diana continues:

I’m proud, like I show them my scar, I’m not ashamed, I don’t hide it, I don’t cover it up. They know where I’mfrom … They feel like, you’re one of them … anyone that’s Mexican, they will have it, they’re going to knowwhere I’m from, it’s not like I’m, “Oh, no, I got stung by a mosquito” … that’s who I am, that’s where I’mfrom … there’s nothing that’s going to change that, it’s not going to keep me from doing what I want, it’s notgoing to change my person … I tell my students, … el sello, tengo el sello [I have the seal].

In her words, “el sello, tengo el sello,” Diana’sMexicana/Mestiza body is no longer marked but sealed—anointed as sacred, healed, and set apart. In reconfiguring this stamp on her flesh, Diana (re)claims her bodyand the beauty of herMexicanabeing. In sodoing,Diana seals herMexicana/o students in body andbeing aswell. Within a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, Diana’s upper arm imprint is reincarnated into a blazingemblem of pride, belonging, and inspiration to fulfil one’s capacity. Diana will not accept that this imprintmars her flesh or her future. In declaring “that’s who I am, that’s where I’m from,”Diana’s flesh (re)emergesas a seal of truth over herMexicana identity, a birthplace and being never inextricable, one that she wouldnever negate or reduce to the passing sting of amosquito. Diana bears her seal not as a scar but as themeansof dispelling the shame ofmarked status that she and her students carry asMexicanas/os living and learningin the United States.

La Revolucionistawarring within aMexicana/Mestiza ethic of care protects HerRevolución by obscuringHer weaponry: Herein, Diana’s individual vaccination scar is transformed into a curative seal of sharedMexicana/omembership beneath which Diana and herMexican-born students find resistance and healing.As Diana holds up her own sealedMexicana body and being, her body becomes an undetectable weaponthrough which La Revolucionista inoculates young Mexicanas and Mexicanos against the psychologicaldisease of second-class citizenship.Within aMexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, Diana’s body becomes an armof spiritual warfare, a critical text that speaks back to powers that strive to circumscribe a collectiveMexicana/o body for its own purposes (Gomez, 2008; G. González, 1999; Knight et al., 2006).

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In the following three sections, I further develop the ways in which the spirit of La Revolucionista,through the body and being of Diana, wages a concealed, subversive Revolución equippingMexicana/o students to survive and thrive beyond the protective walls of Diana’s classroom toultimately emerge healthy and whole (Baca, 2002; Moraga, 2011). Through the curriculum andpedagogy of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care that offers a curative banner of shared Mexicana/oidentity, cultural connectedness, and the academic tools to transcend the status of victim, Diana asLa Revolucionista seals her own and her students’ bodies and beings as sacred, set apart. She wages awar of healing resistance against the shame and denigration exacted on Mexicana/o bodies and livedrealities, a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care with the power to ultimately offer them up as A PeopleSealed.

Finding healing, dignity under a banner of shared Mexicana/o identity

Diana’s students continually seek knowledge of their shared Mexicana/o heritage through repeatedquestioning into her birthplace. Diana laughs, recounting how many times she has told the verysame students that she was born in Mexico: “The kids know where I’m from, they know I’m not bornin the U.S. … sometimes they’ll still ask me ‘Oye, miss, usted es de México?’” This repeatedquestioning is a ritual seemingly signifying more than one answer to one question: PerhapsDiana’s students, by hearing their teacher repeat that she too was born in Mexico, seek a solace inbelonging that Diana sorely lacked in her own schooling experience. What Diana does know forcertain is that her students feel valued when they are recognized within their Mexicana/o identities.Diana consciously works to make her students

feel comfortable with who they are and where they come from.… los chuleo [I endear them] … they’ll weartheir boots, their alligator, whatever … I tell them they look great, they look sharp so they’re not ashamed of it,so they get excited someone noticed, recognized …

In these words lies a Mexicana/Mestiza woman warrior with the power to heal the shame Diana’sstudents experience and to seal them beyond the reach of the subjugated status they and theirfamilies carry as U.S. Mexicanas/os. Within a Mexicana/o ethic of care, La Revolucionista transformsthe markings heaped on the Brown Mexicana/o body and being, warring beneath a mestizaje ofmainstream notions of the revolution for dignity. She wields Diana’s body as the covert weaponry ofa subversive Revolución with the power to “actually transform our experience, change our lives, saveour lives” (Moraga, 1983, pp. xviii–xix). Diana offers herself as a curative balm against the invalida-tion and invisibility she felt as a young Mexicana, for La Revolucionista within Diana’s Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care is never far removed from the little girl in the photograph, the “little Browngirl” with the pink Ballet Folklórico (Mexican folkloric) dress she introduces to us in our third focusgroup.

Diana shares this photograph with our research group to communicate the rootedness of herethic of care for Mexicana/o students. Another research participant asks, “Who is this?” Dianalaughs, “That’s me! … in grade school in second grade … The little Brown girl. I told you! I’m thelittle Brown girl, all slicked back.” Diana brings her hands to her hair, pushing it back tightly tomimic the “slicked back” hairstyle worn in traditional Ballet Folklórico dancing. Through Diana’sphysical body in this photograph, La Revolucionista warring within a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of carewraps Herself tightly within Her Mexican heritage, birthplace, and Her own Brown skin. It is anaming and (re)claiming of Mexicana/o descendency (Del Valle, 2002) with the power to dispel theshame, invisibility, and marginalized status that Diana knows she and her students carry as membersof a Mexicana/o community living and striving in the United States.

La Revolucionista wields the weapon of Diana’s body as a physical Testimonio that “comes torepresent a larger space than [her] flesh” (Danticat, 1994, p. 236). Embedded in Diana’s words and inher curriculum and pedagogy is a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care of deep consciousness of the racialand sociopolitical battleground that U.S. Mexicanas/os confront. Herein, Diana’s body and being

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offer her Mexican/Mexican American students a cultural salve for the pain of subordination they andtheir families bear beyond the walls of her classroom. Ultimately, it is the “little Brown girl” and theTestimonios of stripped cultural connectedness that follow that informs Diana as La Revolucionistatoday. It is this little Brown girl, conspicuous and isolated, who today fortifies Diana as LaRevolucionista and Her covert Revolución to seal and heal the shame Mexicana/o students feel andto bring them back into pride and dignity, their birthright.

Con El Nopal en la Frente: Dispelling Shame Through Cultural Connectedness

I was the only beaner in my class … con el nopal aquí [with a cactus on my forehead] … seriously, from myfreshmen year to my senior year … I didn’t look like a single person in the classroom … no me identificaba [Ididn’t identify]. Nobody. But I did just as well … Batallaba [I battled].—Diana

Diana describes standing on the outside looking in at the intersection of her race/ethnicity, class,gender, and language in her high school honors English class. Her Testimonio contains a cuttingdescription of a distorted and exaggerated Mexican girl caricature. Diana was perceived as a “beaner”with a cactus, a nopal, conspicuously marking her forehead, not even a human girl but a cartoon,ridiculous and foreign. In the following Testimonio, Diana reveals the roots of her knowledge of thestruggle Mexican/Mexican American students face in having to separate themselves culturally. Dianashares,

[In] this town … Spanish can be almost taboo … I didn’t speak Spanish at all at school and neither did any ofmy classmates even though you saw them get picked up in las troquitas [work trucks], their dads with theirsombreros … I couldn’t identify with my community … in class I was … trying to say something in Spanish,aver si ellos me contestaban y no [to see if they would answer me in Spanish and no] … like, “I don’t speakSpanish at school, oh my God, how embarrassing” …

In this Testimonio, Diana relays the message she and her Mexicana/o peers internalized deeply,even as it created losses in their lives and separated them from one another: Your academic andsocial survival hinges on denying the whole of your Mexicana/o identity, no matter the cost.

Though Diana had mostly White teachers and classmates, she recounts the strength and con-nectedness she found in her high school Spanish teacher, who was a Mexicana from Chihuahua: “Alot of what she lives is what we live and what we do … she understood my dad and my mom’ssituation.” This connection was significant to Diana as she worked her way through the “sweat andtears” that constituted her schooling and the pain of living a schooling identity that excluded herfamily and her culture and caused her and her peers to denounce their language, denounce theirheritage, and separate themselves from one another. When I ask her what it would have meant tohave more Mexicana/o teachers to see herself in, she answers, “I wouldn’t have been that shy girlgoing through school … I would’ve developed my person—my personality I have now … comfor-table around my community … I’d be a completely different person …” and today she works to healthis disconnectedness in her students. Today, Diana as La Revolucionista utilizes her presence as aMexicana to seal the fractures she and her peers experienced not so long ago, the fractures herMexicana/o students still experience. Nourished in her Testimonios, Diana’s “Brown girl” presence asa bilingual, Mexican-born, culturally rooted, and formally educated Mexicana woman stands as adeadly weapon within La Revolucionista’s unseen war to educate young people within the beauty andcomplexity that they inhabit as Mexicanas/os. In the following section, I outline another facet of LaRevolucionista’s war to seal Her Mexicana/o students’ bodies and beings. Through the curriculumand pedagogy of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, Diana’s students are emboldened and anointed totranscend the lowered expectations, perceived inevitability of failure, and victim status they carry asU.S. Mexicanas/os.

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Conquest debates and transcending the status of victim

… [As] a family of immigrants … you’re almost expected to fail.—Diana

Within the curriculum and pedagogy of Diana, who teaches within a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic ofcare, lies the covert mobilization of La Revolucionista’s war to transcend the expectations of failureand second-class citizenry that threaten to circumscribe Mexicana/o young people and their families.Diana’s Testimonio as a Spanish-dominant, working-class, Mexican-born female illuminates herfirsthand knowledge that Mexicana/o students are “always pushed off to the side … ‘Oh, those arethe bilingual kids’ … [they’re] going to carry … that label … with them but they’re capable of risingabove that bar.” In these words is La Revolucionista’s war hiding in plain sight. Diana’s expertise indismantling the marked status she herself felt as a young Mexicana emerges in a group activity sheconducts every year with her seventh-grade state history classes during their unit on the Spanishconquistadores. For the upcoming Conquest Debates, Diana has her students divide themselves intothree groups who will each represent the (a) Spanish conquerors/explorers, (b) King and Queen ofSpain, and (c) Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Their assignment is to defend their role withinthe Spanish conquest and to determine which group is most to blame for the resulting occupation.Students may not simply find fault with other groups but must present historical evidence to supporttheir actions and come to terms with their own responsibility. Diana explains, “Everybody wants tobe the native peoples because usually they’re just shown as victims who didn’t do anything wrong …the ones being attacked … but why didn’t they fight? Why didn’t they resist?” Diana says she valuesthis activity because it equips students to, in her words, “step up and defend themselves. That reallydoes speak volumes to whether you’re a victim or not”; in her words I can hear a collective of voicesechoing across time, if we posture as victims we will be victims (Anzaldúa & Hernández-Ávila, 2000;Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983).

In Diana’s class, La Revolucionista’s war lives and breathes: Diana’s Mexicana/o students will notsee themselves or their families as victims, nor will they posture as such. “I don’t cut them any slack,no one cut it for me … I had to work twice as hard to do the same type of work.” Within Diana’swords, a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care takes shape. Today, she refuses to allow her students tocarry their Mexicana/o identity as a scar that inhibits their capacity. Through Diana’s classroomcurriculum and pedagogy, and exemplified here within the Conquest Debates, La Revolucionistafights to ensure that young Mexicanas and Mexicanos are not marked but sealed, anointed in bodiesand beings beneath a collective dignity cultivated in resisting the workings of a society thatinvalidates your experience, intellect, and future. Herein, La Revolucionista brandishes high expecta-tions as a healing balm to seal the bodies and beings of young Mexicanas/os and their familiesmarked less, incapable, and expected to fail. Within Diana’s Testimonios of schooling bearing thesting of circumscribed inferiority resound La Revolucionista’s battle cry audible only to those whohave the ability to perceive it.

Conclusion

This research reveals that La Revolucionista unleashes a multiplicity of advanced, imperceptibleweaponry that protects and emboldens Her Revolución hiding in plain sight. As Diana (re)claimsher Mexicana body and being within its complexity and survivability, La Revolucionista sealsyoung Mexicanas/os beneath a banner of shared Mexicana/o identity, nurtures a cultural con-nectedness they lack elsewhere, and equips them to transcend their perceived status as victims. LaRevolucionista and Diana are one and the same, waging a blurred, ambiguous Revolución that aMexicana/Mestiza ethic of care demands amid the spaces in between (Villenas & Moreno, 2001,p. 675). Diana as La Revolucionista fights for the sanctity of her students’ culture, language,residence status, academic success, and sense of self through a multiplicity, duality, and ambiguitythat is her Mestiza birthright. We as Mestizas/os have long relied on our ability to hide in plainsight by reconfiguring, blending, and bending visible realities (R. Rodriguez, 1996). It reverberates

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a “continual[ly] creative motion” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 80) of dual consciousness with the power todeconstruct narrow paradigms that would keep Her, La Mestiza Revolucionista, in a bound andrigid existence. The Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care revealed here and the educators who embodyit are the inheritors of this means of survival “people of mixed race, people who have Indianblood, people who cross cultures, by necessity possess” (Anzaldúa, 1996, p. 54). Even asIndigenous and Mestizo men and women, masons, sculptors, and artists were ordered byCatholic clergy to build churches and cathedrals out of the very stones of their destroyed temples,their spirits would not be conquered. Upon altars, within the foundation of the churches, andinto the “very heart of the Christian sacred” (Wake, 2010, p. 99), men and women hid theirRevolución to protect their spiritual inheritance. They laid stones carved with the faces of godsand goddesses in a manner that expertly concealed them. Just as Christian clergy attempting toextricate Indigenous spirituality were halted by their inability to identify them (Wagner, Box, &Morehead, 2013; Wake, 2010), neither will those without the eyes to see La Revolucionista seeHer war. Diana as La Revolución conceals her war from those who may threaten it and in sodoing lives to fight another day. In ways seen and unseen, Diana reconfigures notions of socialjustice revolution for her Mexicana/o students. Diana as La Revolucionista builds a “footpath ofknowing back to the village of our forgotten” (Moraga, 2011, p. 87), infuses Hers as a path ofknowing by which Mexicana/o students may find dignity and a rightful Place to Stand (Baca,2002) as the inheritance of A People Sealed.

Scholarly significance

The Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care revealed in this research may arm educators of all gendered,cultural, racial, linguistic, and class backgrounds with the spirit of La Revolucionista to recognize thecritical urgency of waging revolution on behalf of young Mexicanas/os and all those on the marginsof public schooling. Likewise, these findings provide all educators who desire to be part of LaRevolución with the wisdom to give life to the subversive, amorphous weaponry necessary to ensurethe viability of this dangerous war. In an educational era of increasing standardization, educatordeprofessionalization, and high teacher turnover, a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care provides aMestiza conocimiento (Anzaldúa, 1987), a critical consciousness to reframe, conceal, and honetactical strategies on behalf of students who need it, who need us, the most. This ethic of care hasimplications for how Revolucionista educators of all backgrounds may move from seeing Mexicana/ostudents marked by oppression to seeing them in the power and beauty that are their identities as APeople Sealed. Within the consciousness of a Mexicana/Mestiza ethic of care, all Revolucionistaeducators may cultivate schooling spaces for Mexicana/o youth in which self-love, belonging,cultural connectedness, and intellectual and resistance legacies become the husks (Anzaldúa, 1987)within which they are tightly sealed.

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