Bridge Work

Abstract

Research Article| January 11 2021 Bridge Work: A Radical Subject in the Community and New Ways of Knowing Karma R. Chávez Karma R. Chávez Karma R. Chávez teaches, writes, and currently serves as chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where she also holds several affiliate faculty appointments. Her new book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance will come out from the University of Washington Press in 2021. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Autoethnography (2021) 2 (1): 119–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.119 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Karma R. Chávez; Bridge Work: A Radical Subject in the Community and New Ways of Knowing. Journal of Autoethnography 11 January 2021; 2 (1): 119–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2021.2.1.119 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search For nearly two decades in the academy, I’ve moved under the moniker, “woman of color.” As a guera, I came to accept my place in that coalition with some reticence. Sure, I had experienced a lot of discrimination growing up as a poor, mixed-race, Mexican American tomboy in rural Nebraska, but for better or worse, my white mother always shielded us from the racial/ethnic component of it, attributing maltreatment to the fact that “rich people hate poor people.” She wasn’t wrong, of course, but she didn’t have an intersectional analysis. Unsurprisingly, there were no Mexican American, Indigenous, or Black culture components to my middle or high school social studies classes, and at the predominantly white Christian college I went to in central Nebraska, the only course I ever had that even remotely approximated ethnic studies was called “Literature of American Minorities.” So, twenty years ago, in the summer of... You do not currently have access to this content.