Contested Cartography: Transformational Teaching and GIS Research in Chicanx Studies

Abstract

Contested CartographyTransformational Teaching and GIS Research in Chicanx Studies Stevie Ruiz (bio), Quetzalli Enrique (bio), and Tomas Figueroa Jr. (bio) The Digital Environmental Humanities Lab When provided with research opportunities, Chicanx college students can overcome adversity that they face in their academic journeys as undergraduates.1 As of Fall 2020, Chicanx and Latinx undergraduates comprise 55.9 percent of the 35,211 undergraduate students who make up the California State University, Northridge (CSUN) student body.2 However, the same diversity among the CSUN student body is not reflected among its white faculty. According to CSUN Counts, a database that quantifies faculty and student demographics, white faculty still dominate the professoriate at 61 percent of all full-time and part-time positions combined, while Chicanx and Latinx faculty comprise only 12.5 percent.3 Just 50 percent of all CSUN undergraduate students complete their bachelor’s degrees at an average rate of six years. One explanation for lower-than-average graduation rates correlates to students not being valued and feeling supported to complete their academic goals. In order to address these educational inequities structured by institutional racism, Professor Stevie Ruiz put together a research team which included three Chicanx Studies undergraduate students. Lab participants included Quetzalli Enrique, Enrique Ramirez Jr., and Tomas Figueroa Jr., all of whom competed for financial support by Campus Quality Fees, an on-campus academic resource grant.4 Building upon the success of previous cohorts in his lab, Ruiz implemented a two-year [End Page 68] research collaboration with his mentees in their junior year and mentored them until they reached their graduating senior year. Like Ruiz, each of these students came from a working-class Mexican American background, and one of them was the first in their family to attend college. As Genevieve Carpio examines, digital humanities in ethnic studies are important to build the skills needed to bridge the digital divide that low-income first-generation Chicanx undergraduates come into the classroom with.5 Rarely provided with these opportunities, each of the lab participants were enthusiastic to contribute towards a collective project that could provide them with skills that would enhance their academic journey and future career. Ruiz’s research team focused on the visualization of archival records using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), an understudied method of visualizing data in the field of Chicanx Studies. Ruiz was motivated by his own research agenda in environmental justice and his commitment to his students enrolled in his lab. The “Digital Environmental Humanities Lab” was built to foster research excellence in a collaborative fashion. As a collective, we found that this was a rarity among the types of professional relationships built between faculty and undergraduate students that existed at CSUN. In the professoriate, Ruiz encountered the problematic tendency of faculty viewing undergraduate students as an obstacle in research design, development, and practice rather than as potential collaborators. Students who enrolled in our lab expressed that white faculty frequently ignored their personal experiences with topics of study and often felt undervalued by their intellectual contributions. In building our collaboration, we centered undergraduate voices as the basis of how to engage and model a transformational learning environment where students could provide their input without being scrutinized, belittled, or even mocked. This is significant because our research lab found that when undergraduate students were provided with research opportunities, it ensured a higher quality of student success and provided them with skills to persist into service-oriented professions that hopefully transform lives, including their own. Our lab’s success rested upon building an intellectual community that was built by mutual accountability and respect for one another’s time. Creating a weekly schedule for meetings helped us instill mutual accountability for both the faculty and student members. Because we [End Page 69] developed a democratic research community, each member assisted in coordination and time management in order to develop our collective research process. Members were responsible for meeting deadlines that were mutually agreed upon while granting the flexibility to work at a pace best suited to each member, even if it meant that we needed to work extended hours beyond our conventional meeting times. The culture that was developed within the research...