Part 2 personal life
hnguyen1462
memoriesofschoolinginthefield.pdf
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MEMORIES OF SCHOOLING IN THE FIELD: From Barrio Scholarship Girl to Chicana Activist Scholar
Lilliana Patricia Saldaña
Through memory as methodology, this autohistoria examines the author’s memories of schooling and the ways in which this self-reflexive process serves as a site for theorizing the historical, institutional, and everyday practices of schooling in San Antonio, Texas. Through the analysis of various school artifacts—yearbooks, photos, and school records—the author unearths her memories of schooling to examine the class-, race-, and gender-based injuries of schooling and the ways in which she navigated, negotiated, and resisted a culture of schooling that has historically miseducated Mexican Americans. Drawing from Chicana feminist theories in education, this autohistoria also examines the ways in which family and community served as sites of resistance, empowerment, and Chicana/mexicana consciousness in the face of assimilationist discourses in school. This autohistoria also examines how memories of schooling became a site for analyzing testimonios of Mexican American teachers in a barrio school.
Key Words: autohistoria, testimonio, conocimiento
As part of my dissertation field research, between 2006–
2008, I interviewed Mexican American teachers at a dual-language school in
San Antonio’s Westside, observing their everyday practices and discussing with
them their memories of schooling as racialized, working-class, Spanish-speaking
children. As I listened to teachers’ stories of their experiences of cultural loss,
internalized oppression, and miseducation, as well as their stories of academic
survival and cultural self-determination in barrio schools, I could not help but
see myself in them.1 Their stories of miseducation, the process in which they were
systematically denied academic success through various forms of educational
oppression like tracking (being placed in vocational, rather than college-bound,
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courses), differential curricula, low teacher expectations, linguistic oppression,
and cultural exclusion, opened up my memories of schooling experiences in
a public school system where I navigated the culture as a “scholarship girl.”
While I did not experience language oppression in the same ways that they
did in the highly segregated 1950s and 1960s, their testimonios evoked
pain, shame, resentment, anger, and disappointment—emotions that I, too,
learned to negotiate, if not completely ignore, throughout my education as I
spring-boarded from one academic benchmark to another with what seemed
(on the outside) to have been seamless facility. Despite my familiarity with
critical ethnography and feminist methodologies that interrogated the myth
of objectivity in masculinist and Western research epistemologies, their
conversations presented a challenge to defuse the range of emotions that surged
within as I listened to the teachers voice their injuries (Torres 2003; Anzaldúa
& Keating 2002; The Latina Feminist Group 2001; Wolf 1996; Anzaldúa 1995;
Rosaldo 1993). As I interviewed teachers, transcribed hours of recorded data,
and analyzed individual and group pláticas, I did my best to exclusively focus
on their stories and put in context how my own experiences served as a site for
theorizing the practices of barrio teachers en el Westside.
Like many of the teachers in this study, I had not voiced the many injuries I
sustained in school from my days as a barrio scholarship girl en el Southside
to my days as a Chicana student activist at an East Coast university. To family
and friends, I was a success story. While their accolades gave me the spiritual
and emotional nourishment to continue jumping hurdles y abriendo brecha
or carving a path for others, they had no clue as to the hurdles I jumped to
survive the culture of academia—a culture that was diametrically different to
my personal and social history as a working-class mexicana. While I resisted
the arduous and painful process of unearthing my own memories of what it
was to be miseducated, silenced, and treated as less than worthy of a first-class
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education, I could no longer dismiss those recollections. I placed the injuries
teachers voiced—injuries they embodied not only in their flesh but also in their
everyday professional practices—in context. This embodiment clearly informs
how they understand their identity and conduct their work as teachers.
In order to be clear about how my experiences formed the lens through which I
saw my data, I critically unearthed my memories and traced the ways in which
the culture of schooling in mexicana/o working-class schools shaped my identity
as a scholarship girl. Moreover, I called upon the ways in which family and
community served as sites for cultural resistance, empowerment, and Chicana/
mexicana consciousness.2 However, the most difficult memories to excavate and
process were the ones I attempted to bury as a high school and undergraduate
student at a prestigious East Coast institution in a wealthy, conservative, and
predominantly white cultural environment; it was much different than the one
in which I was raised and educated—working class, Spanish-speaking, and
predominantly Mexican. Even as I analyzed teachers’ narratives, I struggled
with what Chicana feminist scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa (2007) calls—the
“Coatlicue State”—the process of reopening the most excruciatingly painful
wounds inflicted at the interpersonal and institutional level in order to come out
more whole and conscious. Notably, it was by engaging in the iterative process
of listening, analyzing, and interpreting teachers’ stories that I generated a much
deeper understanding of the ways in which the culture of schooling shapes
Mexican American teacher identity and consciousness, a process that required
emotional, as well as intellectual, engagement.
As a feminist and critical ethnographer, I relied on various school artifacts
kept since the first grade—academic achievement awards, yearbooks, photos,
school newspapers, report cards and transcripts, classroom notebooks, exams,
and letters by school officials—to critically examine the multiple ways in
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which I complied with, negotiated, and resisted a culture of schooling that
ultimately miseducated me through a differential curricula and an ideology
of meritocracy that concealed institutional race, class, and gender inequality.
Through this archaeological process, I have been able to begin to work
through the insidious injuries of internalized oppression I have carried.
Further, I have gained a deeper understanding of the unvoiced injuries of
my educational experiences and identified the ways in which I have engaged
in acts of resistance and negotiation to survive and thrive in an institutional
structure that has historically miseducated, and at worse, denied education to
people of Mexican descent. I also map out my post-baccalaureate educational
experiences to understand the ways in which the process of conocimiento and
liberatory praxis, the ability to create personal and social change from a place
of political struggle, informs my personal and social identity as a Chicana
activist scholar, thus framing my analysis of first generation college graduate
Mexican-descent teachers.
Bordercrossing Home and School Cultures
I grew up in San Antonio’s Southside, where mexicanos constituted the
overwhelming majority of the population. The Southside was pura raza
and reflected the linguistic, religious, cultural, regional, generational, and
class diversity of Mexicans in the Southwest—from working-class Mexican
immigrants like my family who came from el otro lado and made the
Southside their home, to others who had lived in San Antonio for generations
and created a unique cultura from living in between two worlds.
My mother, tíos, and grandmother made the Southside their home in 1972,
entering a new sociocultural landscape marked by a history of racial, cultural,
and class oppression (Ruíz 1999) against Mexicans. Within the specificity of this
cultural environment, they witnessed the consequences of language oppression
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and cultural loss among Mexican Americans; in response, they immersed me en
todo lo mexicano and instilled a strong sense of ethnic pride, with the Spanish
language being the main vehicle for forging my cultural identity as a mexicana
de este lado. This context informs my family’s sense of fear that their children
could one day become acculturated pochas or pochos, Mexican descendants
with a fragmented sense of self, or worse, ashamed of their origins.
I am not sure when or how I learned English, but I must have learned the
language before entering public school. At the age of three, my mother
enrolled me in a small preschool downtown, not far from her work, run by
Carmelite nuns. It was then that I was first excluded and marginalized for
being different—for speaking Spanish and looking “Chinese” (i.e. indigenous).
I have vivid memories of my classmates deriding me for not speaking their
language. While I did not understand their exact words, I understood their
tone and caras—facial expressions that communicated hostility toward me.
Feeling like an outsider, I became frustrated and angry. I fought back, hitting
those who taunted me, even sticking a pencil in a boy’s ear. Those who picked
on me the most came back to school with bruises. I must have been pushed
to my limits. I remember the monjas telling my mom, in a sanctimonious
tone: “She has to stop hitting students or she is gonna have to go somewhere
else. Parents are becoming very upset.” I was immediately tagged as the
problem. For years, I tried to understand why I reacted so violently to their
taunting. Reflecting on this experience, I realize that I wanted to be accepted
in school just as I had been accepted by my family who loved and cared for
me. My fighting was an act of resistance against the exclusionary tactics of my
peers and even the administration. At the age of five, I had an opportunity
to begin a new academic journey when my mother enrolled me at Antonio
Olivares Elementary, only two blocks from my house. I started first grade
in 1980, during the emergence of what the media termed the “decade of the
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Hispanic” and at the height of Reagan’s call for more standardized testing and
assimilationist models of bilingual education (San Miguel 1988).
Since I had already learned some conversational English, I was not placed in any
kind of bilingual education program, although one of my closest childhood friends
claims we were in a bilingual classroom in second grade—it may have been an
early-exit program that transitioned me into an English immersion classroom by
the time I was in second grade. While I do not have any memories of learning or
speaking Spanish in school, I have many memories of working toward academic
excellence in a new language and culture. My elementary school, Antonio Olivares
Elementary—named after a Spanish friar who helped establish the presidio and
villa of San Antonio in 1718 with the intention of converting Coahuiltecan Indians
to Christianity—was ethnically Mexican and working-class. In his description
of the inhabitants of San Antonio, Olivares describes them disparagingly “as
nothing more than ‘mulattoes, lobos, coyotes, and mestizos, people of the
lowest order, whose customs [were] worse than those of the Indians’” (De la Teja
2000, 18). While I do not remember the school mistreating me or my peers for
being Mexican, we, like the Indians Olivares sought to civilize and save, were
deculturalized in school in many ways, stripped of our ethnic culture, language,
or history in our everyday school learning. School was the place where we spoke
English, learned “official knowledge,” and complied with a culture of schooling
that made us into passive and obedient learners, memorizing and regurgitating
sanctioned information (Apple 2000). Unlike the generation of Spanish-speaking
mexicanas/os who attended schools during the era of segregation, we were not
physically or emotionally punished for speaking Spanish. Nevertheless, our school
miseducated us mexicanas/os, in a subtle yet violent ways.
In elementary school, I learned that if I wanted to succeed, I needed to know
the culture. So, I learned what the school system deemed important for
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me to know (including English). With the help of my padrinos, who were
second generation English-speaking Mexican Americans, I learned English,
maintained an excellent academic record, and was a “good” student. Looking
back, I did not feel confused or ashamed of my ethnic/racial identity. I
learned to border-cross between home, school, and community spaces like
my church, and to negotiate and synthesize multiple subjective identities of
granddaughter, mexicana, and student. At a very early age, I became aware
of the differentiating aspects of these cultural spaces and succeeded in school
precisely because of my ability to be a naguala and shift or synthesize my
identities from one context to another in order to survive in every world I
entered (Anzaldúa 2007).
Elementary school introduced me to the culture of schooling very similar
to the one I found at my field site, marked by high-stakes assessments,
memorization and regurgitation, and a market approach to education.
I remember second grade as the time in which I invested much of my
time perfecting my writing, an exercise that would become a disciplinary
technology of the self as a scholar. I spent hours on end writing on pieces
of thin, beige paper with dotted lines to guide the height and width of
each letter. With each stroke of my pencil, I meticulously replicated the
beautifully written alphabet above the green boards. I was so proud to have
the best handwriting in my class. My grandmother, who had only a third
grade education, was central to my success. Before beginning elementary
school, she had shown me how to draw lines and circles; exercises she
believed would sharpen and strengthen my handwriting skills in school. As a
working-class mujer who raised four children in one of the poorest barrios of
Monterrey, Mexico, she learned to use available resources, and she lovingly
crafted small notebooks out of brown paper bags from the grocery store so I
could practice my writing.
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While first and second grade were about copying and mimicking expected
behaviors, third grade was about becoming a competitive and efficient worker,
a market philosophy central to Reagan’s educational policy. My third grade
teacher, Mrs. Olvera, taught us our multiplication tables by timing us, a
practice privileged by American capitalist business rationale. Those who
finished their tables first without any mistakes earned the highest grade.
Through this subtle math lesson, I learned the culture of competitiveness and
efficiency, rules of the game that would benefit me as I maintained my status
as a scholarship girl. My mom also learned and perpetuated the culture of
schooling as she quizzed me with homemade flashcards after working long
hours at the panaderia. It was with her help that I strengthened my ability to
recall multiplication tables.
In Mrs. Lopez’s fourth grade class I was taught to be a consumer, one of the
components of neoliberal educational curricula. In her class, I read voraciously,
turning in book reports at the end of each one. Students would earn fake
money for each report, which we used to buy school-related goodies. After
school Mrs. Lopez would set up shop in the back of the classroom where we
would exchange our imitation bills for colorful pencils, snazzy sharpeners,
and funky erasers. This is a practice I witnessed with some of the teachers at
Emma Tenayuca Elementary where I conducted my fieldwork. At the end of
the six weeks, those students with the highest number of book reports earned
a corporate reward—a free personal pizza from Pizza Hut. The implicit lesson
others and I learned: We would be able to reap the rewards of our academic
labor as consumers in a capitalist market economy.
While I benefited from these rewards, I knew that my formal education meant
more than a corporate reward. It meant being in a position of first-world
privilege, not forced to quit school to earn wages at an early age to survive. My
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grandmother and mother (who completed high school before immigrating to
the United States) instilled the importance of an education for personal and
social growth. I did well in school to make my family proud. Throughout my
elementary school years, I succeeded academically because the mujeres in my
family instilled the value of education without ever having to explicitly tell me,
“Échale ganas a los estudios, mija.” As a child of immigrants, I cultivated a
dual-frame of reference for understanding that I was in a position of privilege
(Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001). I would not have to work on my
feet all day long in the blistering heat of the panaderia.
Looking back at my early childhood experiences, I have become aware that
I learned to maintain discrete boundaries between school and home. Even
though the schools I attended were predominantly Mexican American and
working-class, the majority of instruction was in English. Moreover, curricula
excluded Mexican American history and cultural knowledge. While I do
not share the same memories of language oppression as the teachers in my
study, I nevertheless experienced institutional racism, cultural exclusion, and
assimilationist strategies through White-stream and differential curricula.
Looking back, I do not remember ever learning about the cultural knowledge
valued in my home and community.
At home, my mother and grandmother constantly emphasized the importance
of speaking “proper” Spanish, not for market reasons, an idea that was
constantly “sold” to students at Emma Tenayuca, but because it was connected
to my ethnic identity. For them, language was an extension of mexicanidad.
I remember my grandmother telling me, “En esta casa se habla español. En la
escuela puedes hablar todo el inglés que quieras—as if I had a choice—pero
aquí solamente español y no me vengas con tu mocho pocho.” It was evident
that my family did not want me to become what they perceived to be “una
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agringada,” Americanized, or worse yet, a lower class Mexican who spoke
mixed codes. So, I spoke “proper” Spanish. My grandmother, who had limited
formal schooling, also taught me how to read and write in Spanish, and both
my mother and grandmother passed on Mexican history to me. I learned
about la conquista, las guerras de independencia, la invasión norteamericana,
y la revolución mexicana. They taught me countercultural narratives that
decentered U.S.-dominant narratives that vilified or made Mexicans invisible,
such as the recurrent historical narrative of Anglo men from Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Missouri, which glaringly overlooked Mexicans of whatever
side. They also instilled the value of various Mexican cultural expressions and
as such, I came to appreciate folklorico, el cine mexicano, las comidas típicas,
and the various musical traditions like rancheras, boleros, mariachi, and sones.
As racialized ethnic, working-class women, my mother and grandmother also
passed down their stories of struggle and survival in Mexico and the United
States that created their ways of knowing and understanding the world.
I unearth these memories because, while I did not experience the hostility and
oppression that teachers in my study articulated, these experiences led me to
create a third culture—the liminal space between two oppositional cultures—
out of necessity in order to survive and thrive in the culture of schooling. I did
not simply maintain separate spheres between home and school, although these
cultures were diametrically opposed. The expressive elements of my mexicana
working-class culture, such as cuentos (stories), canciones (songs), dichos
(sayings), food, and dance—and an immigrant worldview and mujer-centered
epistemology—all informed my identity and consciousness as a scholarship girl
in San Antonio’s Southside. My mother and grandmother’s stories of struggle and
survival, and their experiences as working-class mexicanas, gave me the ganas
(motivation) to valerme por mi misma (to be self-reliant) and survive and thrive in
a culture of schooling that denied my identity and miseducated me in the process.
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As a border-crosser I learned to navigate home and school cultures with
fluidity. Despite the rigid linguistic and cultural borders of both spaces, they
were porous and fluid enough for me to take the best of both worlds for my
intellectual, spiritual, and emotional security. For example, I often relied (and
continue to do so) on my mother and grandmother’s ways of knowing—
their consejos (advice) and words of sabiduría or wisdom—to jump through
the various academic hurdles along my educational path. The mujeres in
my family also encouraged me to further develop my intellectual curiosity
and love for learning at home and emphasized the importance of a formal
education and an educación—the comportment of a proper Mexican girl. It
was by bridging both cultures that I was able to maintain the sociocultural
identity my mother and grandmother carved and continued to shape in my
trajectory as a mexicana, barrio scholarship girl. Unlike Richard Rodriguez’s
scholarship boy, I did not want to lose my mexicanidad. On the contrary, I
sought opportunities through home and community spaces to maintain my
sense of mexicanidad; for instance, strengthening my Spanish oral and literacy
skills and learning about indigenous and mestizo cultures as a matachín at
my church. Still, as a scholarship girl, I learned to be a compliant student,
accepting a system I knew to be unjust in terms of funding, curriculum, and
overall treatment of working-class Mexican origin students who were, for the
most part, pushed out of the educational system. My survival as a scholarship
girl depended on my ability to navigate, blend, and work my way through the
institutional inequality and racism.
By the time I attended middle school, I had already learned the “hidden
curriculum” of compliance where working-class, Mexican-origin students like
myself deferred to teachers’ authority when it came to challenging rhetorics
of domination. As a “good” student, I learned to memorize and regurgitate
(Freire 2000) colonial/master narratives, even when these contradicted the
counternarratives I learned at home.
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Negotiating Cultural Imperialism and School Success
By middle school, the “system”—teachers, counselors, and those educational
practitioners linked to the state—officially tracked me into honors courses,
where I continued to excel in all content areas, including history—my favorite
subject. From all of my classes, I remember my Texas history class the most,
probably because I worked so hard to navigate the competing discourses of
home and school cultures. While my mother and grandmother taught me that
“los Estados Unidos se había robado la mitad de México,” our teacher, Mr.
Potter, reminded us mexicanas/os that the Anglo “settlers” liberated us from
the savage hands of the Mexican government. I, of course, did not question
Mr. Potter’s historiographic authority on the matter. As an “A” student, I
knew that if I wanted to continue being an academically successful student, I
needed to comply with the colonial/master narrative—at least in school.
My mother and grandmother taught me to respect my elders, especially my
teachers, so I deferred to Mr. Potter’s authority. Within the context of U.S.
schooling, this meant that I did not challenge or contest “official” narratives
of U.S. superiority. I had become well aware that my academic success rested
on my compliance to memorize and regurgitate a dominant cultural memory
that glorified colonizers and vilified Mexicans. I did so well on a term paper
about Sam Houston, a slave owner responsible for the “liberation” of Texas
and subsequent colonization of the region (not to mention the genocide of
Cherokees), that it earned first place in a district-wide competition. For that
state competition, I created a giant poster board presentation to go along with
my award-winning research paper. My mother even helped me with my poster
board, helping me draw a large cutout in the shape of Texas. She wanted me
to do well and supported me as much as she could in my school projects, even
when challenging their content. When my mother and I arrived at the venue,
Mr. Potter embellished my poster board with some additional artifacts—a
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machete, an ax, a Southern hat of the time period (like the one Sam Houston
wore), and some flags from his personal collection—signifiers of colonialism
and white supremacy. As I studied the photo that Mr. Potter took of me, I
realize why I had always felt awkward pulling the photo out of my mother’s
photo box. In the picture, I am half smiling, happy and proud of my academic
accolades, but at the same time I look tense, if not troubled, at participating in
a project that reproduced, if not reified, the culture of white supremacy in my
schooling. I negotiated cultural imperialism in the best way that I could given
the inequitable social position I occupied as a Mexican female student and
went ahead with the project to avert school failure. Given the counternarratives
that I learned at home, I refused to internalize the gringo narratives that
branded Mexicans as criminals and as subhuman.
I share this story because I have come to the realization that I learned to move
in and out of shifting worldviews and identities at a very young age, from
seemingly compliant student at school to mexicana daughter of working-class
Mexican immigrants with strong cultural roots in the home and my community
of upbringing on the Southside. I learned to live and thrive in nepantla, the
in-between space of home and school, in order to succeed in school without
compromising the mexicana identity and consciousness my mother and
grandmother had so carefully nurtured at home. It was in the in-between space of
home and school that I learned to adapt and negotiate colliding worldviews. It was
also in that in-between space that I learned to resist discursive practices that I had
perceived to be detrimental to my sense of self as a mexicana. The home-school
borderlands introduced tremendous ambiguity, tension, and contradictions, yet it
was where I developed my identity as a barrio scholarship girl who was not going to
compromise my ethnic identity to be a successful student.
Despite the neocolonial relations of power where white, middle-class, and
ideologically conservative teachers banked narratives into the minds of
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Mexican working-class students (Freire 2000), I resisted cultural domination
and worked within the constraints and limitations I faced as a student
so as not to compromise my academic success or sense of self. I did not
unconsciously comply with a colonial discourse. I consciously navigated spaces
of power and regurgitated dominant discourses while privileging the personal
collective histories of struggle and resistance that my mother and grandmother
taught me, from oral histories of the Mexican Revolution to their testimonios
of everyday survival as working-poor mujeres in Mexico and the United
States. Their narratives served as pedagogies of possibility that gave me hope
to succeed in a culture where an overwhelming majority of “Hispanics” would
be pushed out of the educational pipeline (Yosso 2006). I was very proud of
being Mexican, unlike some of the teachers I interviewed, who internalized
shame for being Mexican from their similar experiences in the school system.
The women in my family, like others in the community who played an integral
role in my identity formation, emphasized the importance of never losing
sight of who I was and nurtured me through what Dolores Delgado Bernal
et al. (2006) call the epistemologies of everyday life—the cultural knowledge
and sabiduría that informs my Chicana, working-class, and mujer-centered
consciousness today. I became a nepantlera, a border dweller and transgressor,
and learned to rely on my facultad (Anzaldúa 2007), a sixth sense that
provided me with the ability to read reality and enact my agency.
Becoming Aware of my Miseducation
By middle school, I had already started to see myself as a scholarship girl in
the making. As a “good” student, I listened attentively and took copious notes
in class as teachers deposited knowledge in a top-down, banking method
(Freire 2000). I continued to maintain stellar grades, making the honor roll
every grading period and earning membership in the national junior honors
society. With the encouragement of teachers, I also began to participate in
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academic competitions and received invitations to participate in pre-college
summer enrichment programs like the Pre-Freshman Engineering Program
(PREP), a math and science curriculum that prepares high achieving students,
including underrepresented groups like women and students of color, to
pursue careers in science and technology.3
I was fourteen years old and had just finished eighth grade when I started these
college prep summer courses. I felt confident and excited about being part of
such a prestigious program. But unlike the As and Bs I was accustomed to
earning in school, I only managed to earn a few Bs during my three years in
PREP. Despite my ganas—ambition and willingness to work—and laborious
empeño or effort, words of empowerment that had sustained me throughout
my miseducation, I found it nearly impossible to earn anything above a C,
bringing home a couple of Ds. These extracurricular experiences became
significant in my understanding of the culture of schooling because through
them I learned that no matter how hard I worked, I would never be able to
excel like the students who came from private or more affluent public schools.
It was during this time that I became more and more disappointed with my
academic preparation and began to wonder whether I was not able to succeed
in the program like my peers because I was Mexican, working-class, a girl,
or a combination of these identities. For the very first time, I questioned my
teachers’ assessment of me as an outstanding student. How could it be that I
was barely passing PREP, yet earning excellent grades at my school? I began
to be plagued by questions and self-doubt. Was I really as smart as I thought?
Was I college material? Did I have what it took to go to college? I soon
came to the conclusion that there was a gap between what the school system
wanted me to believe—that we all had en equal opportunity to succeed in
the educational system regardless of race, class, and gender—and the harsh,
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uncensored reality of my miseducation in segregated, under-funded, Mexican
working-class public schools. As part of the top ten percent of my graduating
class, and an Advanced Placement student at my high school, I internalized the
myth of meritocracy inside all its classist permutations and practiced the values
of a system that prepared me to succeed academically, when, in fact, it had
miseducated me, albeit to a lesser degree than other students.
Before PREP, I had never felt so academically unprepared. For years, I thought
I was qualified, competent, and smart, only to find out that I was not exactly a
stellar student in the eyes of others. I internalized the notion that I had been lied
to by those I trusted the most—my teachers, and the system as a whole. I began to
doubt my intellectual abilities and felt embarrassed as instructors returned exams
or homework assignments riddled with red marks and less-than-impressive grades
that were not worthy of a scholarship girl. I remember the many times instructors
returned my work. I would take a quick glance at my grades, distraught, ashamed,
and wounded by my academic failure. I would immediately turn my work face
down and stuff the papers in my notebook so my peers would not think I was an
intellectual fraud, someone who had ostensibly and erroneously been accepted into
the program. In PREP, every day became an academic and emotional struggle
as I battled with self-doubt. While my family expressed an enormous sense of
pride and joy with my accomplishments, I could not help but internalize the idea
that I was an undeserving candidate in the program—most seem to come from
privileged classes and I did not measure to their standards. Despite my growing
insecurities, I continued to enroll in the program for the next two years with the
understanding that my academic failure was a reflection of the lack of educational
preparation I received and not a result of my race, gender, or ethnicity.
Like many of my peers tracked into the honors curriculum, I entered various
interscholastic competitions in middle school and high school. To further
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elaborate on this part of my academic history, I rely on an issue of my middle
school newspaper, Panther Pride, which records the various competitions I
entered. I remember preparing myself academically and emotionally for my
first academic meet and even though I felt a bit nervous, I was confident in my
ability to excel and earn commendable marks. Being a scholarship girl, I entered
just about every area of competition for our district, including spelling, Spanish
poetry, history, writing, modern oratory, and even the most absurd areas like
dictionary skills and calculator, areas that were clearly not academic, but rather
technical. It turns out I earned eight trophies that day—five first-place awards,
one second-place award, and one for fourth place. By January, my peers and
I were up for the next challenge: to compete with students from the sixteen
districts in San Antonio. We were seventy of the 600 students from all over San
Antonio to show off our academic talents at the Texas Military Institute. While
I had taken a second-place trophy at the district meet, I ended up eighteenth in
this competition, a considerable drop from my previous record. The newspaper
also shows that I entered another UIL (University Interscholastic League)
competition in February at Roosevelt High School with over 1100 students from
twenty-eight schools. This time, I knew what my academic competition looked
like and prepared myself for what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge,
earning ninth place in spelling. At the end of my middle school year, I was one
of sixteen students at our school to receive a presidential academic fitness award.
The letter in my personal archives reads:
By taking advantage of your educational opportunities, you have
shown the judgment, character, and determination necessary to
succeed in all your endeavors. Whatever you do tomorrow, you
will do better for having taken your education seriously today. As
you will no doubt discover, the rewards of diligent study and hard
work are virtually unlimited. I commend you all for setting an
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outstanding example of scholarship, and I encourage you to share
your talent and enthusiasm with others.
Apparently, my “educational opportunities” had more to do with personal
characteristics such as “judgment, character, and determination” rather than
educational inequality. By the time I completed middle school, I had learned
one of the most important lessons in my academic career—that race, class,
and gender were utilized in systems of domination and privilege that shaped
the lives of Mexican, working-class students like me in material ways. While
I did not have the language to articulate my miseducation, I recognized I had
participated in an inequitable education through a watered-down curriculum
by the time I started high school in the fall of 1990.
I became aware of the pervasive pattern of miseducation my peers and I
experienced, as I apprehended the educational inequality and social injustice
that affected every student who lacked the privilege of race and class. As an
insider-outsider of this inequality, I realized that the ninety percent of my
peers in high school, who were also Mexican and working-class, had been
severely neglected—more so than me—and faced far worse consequences. I, at
least, had been tracked into an honors curriculum that, when compared to that
of affluent public schools, was water-downed in rigor and content. As water-
downed as the curricula was, I had access to intellectual and cultural resources
that would support me along the educational pipeline. I learned that school
would not provide me with the intellectual and cultural skills and knowledge
that I presumed a scholarship girl needed in order to succeed in higher
education. So, I sought out the necessary resources myself.
In high school, I made the conscious decision to forego interscholastic
competitions. Rather than focus my energies on this, I continued to participate
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in pre-college summer programs, completing my third year of PREP in 1992
and enrolling in the Texas Governor’s School at Lamar University in 1993. In
1992, I was one of a couple hundred students to participate in this program
and the only Mexican in a cohort of about ten young women from all over
the state who came from diverse race, ethnic, and social class backgrounds.
By my junior year, I came to the awareness that schools privileged a dominant
canon that I needed to grasp to succeed in college. Working at my mom’s
panaderia, I remember meticulously jotting the names of renowned writers in
a small notebook—Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Ernest
Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, along with Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Miguel
Angel Asturias, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez—the latter were authors to which
my teachers had not exposed me, but that I knew were important to my quest
to become a well-versed scholar. So, my senior year, I checked out as many
of those books as possible and consumed them on a regular basis, crossing
names of authors off my list. I wanted to become a well-read barrio scholarship
girl without compromising my sociocultural identity, mi mexicanidad. I had
already come to the awareness that dominant educational institutions were
inequitable and assimilationist. While I wanted to be a successful student, I
also wanted to remain connected to my family and community. I made it a
point to read the Western canon without dismissing the important literary
contributions of Mexican and other Latin American writers. It was not until I
was in graduate school that I read anything by a Chicana/o.
I began to play “catch up”—a process that Raza teachers in my study would
place in context for me. Many of the teachers had been schooled in San Antonio
public schools in the working-class Westside and expressed the injuries of their
miseducation, learning how to read and write as adults, being inundated with
remedial courses, and preparing themselves to play “catch up” in community
colleges and four-year institutions after having been placed in vocational tracks
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in high school. As a result of their racialized schooling experiences—from
language oppression, cultural loss, and a differential curriculum intended to
reproduce the existing relations of power in San Antonio where Mexicans
would continue to be a source of cheap, low educated labor—these teachers
enacted a barrio pedagogy, implementing a rigorous academic curriculum,
a philosophy of caring, and instilling a deep belief of self in the students so
they could have a more empowering schooling experience. In observing their
practices, I developed a fierce determination to do the same as a Chicana
professor, to create a radically different college experience than the one I
endured in a predominantly white, conservative institution.
Forging an Interdisciplinary Mestiza Scholar Identity
During my senior year, having applied to various colleges and universities
across the country, I decided on attending Boston University (BU) because
of its reputation as a world-class research and teaching university. Little did I
know that this would be the place where I would experience the most covert
racism, not the kind of “in your face” racism, but the “read-between-the-lines”
type that was more difficult to decode (Bonilla-Silva 2009). In the fall of
1994, I began my studies as an engineering major, a white-collar profession
that seemed to offer the financial security and status associated with being
middle-class. Needless to say, I stood out in this white, male, and cutthroat
culture. Even though I had taken calculus in high school, honed my science
skills through pre-college courses, and sought my professors’ assistance, I
barely passed my calculus class, and ended up dropping my chemistry class
after weeks of being completely lost and confused. To make things worse,
my peers, distrustful of my aptitude, relegated me to the simplest tasks while
they took creative and organizational control over major projects. With
each week, I began to question my academic “fitness.” After a semester of
unsatisfactory grades, the school placed me on academic probation. I felt angry
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and embarrassed with the idea of having to return home a failure. Whatever
happened to the scholarship girl? I also did not want my peers (especially those
who were white) to think that I was indeed a token who could not “hack it.”
Rather than returning home, I stayed at BU and pursued what I enjoyed the
most that semester—the world of letters. I took countless literature courses, in
both the English and Spanish departments, and eventually declared a second
major in International Relations, my way of gaining a deeper understanding of
my sociopolitical relationship with el pueblo in Latin America.
As a newly declared English major, I read the works of Shakespeare, Keats,
Austen, Hemingway, and other authors who are considered definitive to
the mainstream canon. I read a couple of short stories by Amy Tan, a novel
by Zora Neale Hurston, and a couple by Richard Wright—all three writers
of color. I remember reading Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard
Rodriguez (2004), and feeling an immense sense of sadness for Rodriguez
because I, unlike him, wanted to succeed in academia without compromising
what my family had carefully instilled in me—a love for my language and
culture and the desire to create change in the world—beliefs that were at the
core of my identity and consciousness.
Throughout my educational trajectory at BU, I struggled academically and
internalized the scathing comments my professors wrote about my writing.
Little did I know that the English department would be the place where I
would experience the most exclusionary and racist treatment or movidas. My
English professors often told me I lacked the necessary preparation to succeed in
literature classes, and that perhaps I was better off in remedial writing courses
with the foreign students—this was despite my having gained experience
and prominence as a poetry reader in competitions. Others humiliated me in
class, telling me I did not know how to analyze poetry. Still, others, like my
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journalism instructor, told me I should consider switching to another major
without giving me any comprehensible reason. I remember the harsh sound of
their words, which came as an unexpected car crash. And I stood in shock, not
knowing what to do. Should I hide, run away, or cry? It often took me a few
minutes to figure out what had just happened. But their words did not deter
me; I would slowly pick myself up and give it the old college try I had long
heard would help me overcome their misperceptions of my abilities. Still, I
internalized messages of oppression, thinking I was nothing but an undeserving
and incompetent “scholarship girl” who made it through the academic pipeline
as an affirmative action token. I worked two, three times harder than my peers
to prove that I was worthy and qualified to be at BU.
I constantly felt like I was “catching up.” The only places where I felt worthy
were in the Spanish Department, where I focused my studies on leftist-inspired
literature, and the Department of International Relations, where I declared a
track in Latin America and studied radical social movements. I survived the
hostility by immersing myself in my education. I was not only trying to heal
from my miseducation, both emotionally and academically, but I was also
forging a mestiza scholar identity, where I took ownership of my education by
busting disciplinary boundaries and synthesizing the knowledge I learned in
my home and community with what I was learning in the ivory tower.
As I constructed this new identity, I also worked with other Mexican
American students to create La Fuerza, a student organization that focused on
the retention of Chicana/o and Latina/o students on campus. As a child, I had
never embraced the term “Chicana/o,” a word that my Mexican immigrant
family considered derogatory. However, my experiences being marginalized,
silenced, and considered less-than-worthy of a BU education, politicized me
as a Chicana. I was not only the (grand)daughter of Mexican immigrant
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mujeres, but also a member of a social group that has been historically and
systematically oppressed in the United States. Thus, I identified as a Chicana
who as a graduate student began to carve my identity as an activist scholar
committed to participatory community-based research that would make a
difference in school and community contexts.
The injuries of schooling that shaped my higher education career would
come to haunt me with the insecurities that come from not having a cultural
cartography for navigating the expectations of becoming a PhD. For example,
from the University of Texas at San Antonio, where I clearly excelled in my
scholarly pursuits as evidenced by my original masters thesis research and
the publication of several articles, I once again had to navigate a culture of
schooling from a first-tier institution that raised the bar and the expectations
of my scholarship. As an academic, I continue incorporating the culture of the
academy as part of my professional preparation so as to keep at bay notions
of being an impostor, while carving out new ways of theorizing and creating
knowledge in a Mexican American Studies program.
Summary
Like the teachers in this study, I am using the everyday knowledge I gained in
my own schooling experience to avoid perpetrating the injuries done to me.
This often calls for me to act as a critical and feminist pedagogue in an effort
to create spaces for personal and social transformation, as students become
critical thinkers and agents of change in their communities of practice. This
has not been nor will it become an easy process, for as Anzaldúa posits, it is
through the pain that one sheds desconocimiento—or the not knowing—to
create individual and collective conocimiento (Anzaldúa & Keating 2002).
For me, researching the lived experiences and classroom practices of barrio
teachers gave me a mirror in which to see how schooling—as a system of
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reproduction—shaped my identity and consciousness as a Chicana scholar.
Like the teachers in my study, I draw from the conocimiento of my schooling
experiences. This embodied knowledge serves as a site for possibility,
empowerment, and collective growth in my work as a teacher, researcher, and
community activist.
Immersed in the field site, going about my observations, the more I spoke with
teachers and visited with those students who approached me to ask what I
was doing, the more I realized that our schooling had a point of convergence.
As I listened to teachers’ stories of cultural violence, internalized oppression,
and academic struggles, I tried to retrieve my own memories of schooling to
make sense of the ways in which the culture of schooling had shaped my own
identity as a Chicana activist scholar. How did I go from being a compliant
scholarship girl to a Chicana scholar?
Having listened to each of these teachers’ stories as I sifted through and analyzed
their narratives of schooling, the arduous, reflexive, and at times, painful, process
of placing my own memories to context about the meaning of being schooled
within San Antonio public schools in the Southside, I relived the trauma and
tensions of the school, home, and community contradictions I had long buried.
Upon reflecting on my schooling experiences and the ways in which I negotiated
a culture of meritocracy, individual achievement and free-market ideology, I have
gained a greater understanding of institutional cultures. Despite having been
miseducated, I maintained a cohesive cultural identity in my home where my
family valued educación and holistic wellbeing, which equipped me to enact the
solidarity necessary to engage the participants in my study.
Through the process of unearthing my own memories of schooling, I have
come to conocimiento about the ways in which my experiences have shaped
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my identity as a mexicana working class scholarship girl, who learned
the culture of schooling anchored in meritocracy and individualism, as I
countered and contested its disciplinary boundaries. I have complied with
the culture to succeed academically, although it was not until my graduate
studies that I carved my identity as a Chicana activist scholar through my
studies and community-based work, where I became an interdisciplinary
mestiza-in-the making, drawing from feminist and critical race theory, and
other social justice paradigms. My memories of schooling became a point of
entry for understanding the lived experiences of Mexican American teachers,
as I came to conocimiento through the act of remembering, having found
a point of connection with the teachers, as we negotiate often ambiguous
and contradictory actions while resisting, and transforming the culture of
schooling as Chicana educators.
Notes 1 For a more thorough discussion on the pervasive history of educational inequlity and miseducation, refer to Richard R. Valencia’s (2011).
2 The term “scholarship girl” signals Richard Rodriguez’s “Scholarship Boy,” a pivotal essay in his autobiography, Hunger of Memory. As a child of immigrants, he became the first in his family to advance through the educational pipeline. Rodriguez becomes absorbed in the world of academia as a “scholarship boy” who desires to become like his teachers. In the process, he rejects his culture and isolates himself from his family.
3 Founded by Dr. Manuel Berriozabal in 1979, the PREP program is a national academic program that identifies high-achieving students and prepares students to enter science, math, engineering, and technology careers through a rigorous curriculum for three years. See http://www.prep-usa.org/ portal/main/default.asp for more information.
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