Mestiza Consciousness Research Articles

“I Want to Give Back": Examining the Mestiza Consciousness of Multilingual Rural Latinx Students from California’s San Joaquin Valley

“I Want to Give Back": Examining the Mestiza Consciousness of Multilingual Rural Latinx Students from California’s San Joaquin Valley

The Cannibal’s Antidote for Resentment: Diffracting Ressentiment through Decolonial Thought

Abstract This essay is split into two thought experiments. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Édouard Glissant. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I then look at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers in the Poetics of Relation. I argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all signals the overcoming of ressentiment. The second experiment diffracts ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion, then putting our diffracted ressentiment in conversation with the Brazilian anthropologist’s post-structural interpretation of Amerindian perspectivism.

Challenging Dualism: Rethinking the World Council of Churches through Anzaldúa's Borderlands

precis: This essay applies Gloria Anzaldúa's theoretical lens of borders and borderlands to the World Council of Churches. Such a lens highlights how the W.C.C. simultaneously expands the borderlands and reinscribes dualisms. I explore the Council's voting procedure and flexible understanding of membership as instances of the W.C.C.'s softening borders. I also present the Council's struggle for representation, specifically with gender and rationalism as instances of the W.C.C.'s supporting dualisms. In response to existing borders within the Council, a mestiza consciousness imagines alternative possibilities. The 11th Assembly's elections offer key insights as a case study of border support and opposition that intersects with consensus, membership, representation, and rationalism. I suggest that Anzaldúa is useful for the W.C.C. and ecumenism overall in identifying and challenging dualisms.

‘The world where dreams come true’- Using the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist to explore the cultural and religious identity issues through an online literary exchange

This paper presents original research which explores university students’ perceptions of cultural and religious identity issues in relation to Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist at two public sector universities in Sindh and Punjab, Pakistan. The theoretical concepts of dialogism and mestiza consciousness are used as major frameworks governing this study. The findings are based on data supplied by 16 students through google circles. The key arguments based on findings of this study are that the participants discussed and connected to cultural and religious identity in the novel that was geographically, socially and temporally close in terms of their local and global context. These results are important for curriculum designers, teachers and researchers in dialogism, mestiza consciousness, fiction and education in the context as they provide significant insights into students’ perceptions in relation to fiction

Adult education and belonging

Access to education is a matter of individual and communal justice and development. However, simple access to education, and simple inclusion as often noted in DEI, fail to capture the structures of power and inequality that limit the potential of education. It is not enough to be in education, we must aim for an education adult students can belong to. This requires that we re-conceptualize belonging as complex, non-binary, and multifaceted, acknowledging the struggles of our adult students to participate in education. For this re-conceptualization, we call upon theories of liminal belonging, in particular Anzaldúa's idea of mestiza consciousness. We use adult education students in Ecuador as a case study to reflect on the gender and identity struggles to belong and conclude with some recommendations of how pedagogy and institutions can be adapted to foster belonging for adult learners.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Woman on the Threshold: Patterns of Liminality and Communitas in Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood

This contribution carries out a spatial analysis of the short stories and poems collected in Giovanna Capone’s In My Neighborhood (2014), with a twofold aim: exploring the significance of physical and metaphorical liminalities in the development of Capone’s poetics and, on a more theoretical level, outlining an alternative paradigm, based on the concepts of liminality and communitas, to read Capone’s poetry, as well as other contemporary Italian-American literary texts. I identify four sites of liminality in Capone’s work and delve into their relationship with the narrative voice and the role they play in its evolution. This essay reflects on Giovanna Capone’s Bildung and her identity as a queer Italian-American author by re-reading the four spaces described in In My Neighborhood through the lens of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality and Roberto Esposito’s notion of communitas. Esposito’s development of the concept allows for an alternative interpretation of the community of Italian American queer subjectivities created by Capone in the Southwest. Finally, the connection of such community with Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation of Borderland and ‘mestiza consciousness’ is highlighted as a theoretical counternarrative to the identification of the ethnic queer self as a member of a community defined by borders.

Reframing Identity and Building a Nomadic Home through Mestiza Consciousness in Brincando el charco. Portrait of a Puerto Rican

Reframing Identity and Building a Nomadic Home through Mestiza Consciousness in Brincando el charco. Portrait of a Puerto Rican

MESTIZA AS SPEAKING SUBALTERN IN TAHMIMA ANAM’S A GOLDEN AGE IN NEW HISTORICIST PERSPECTIVE

By drawing a nexus between Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of mestiza consciousness and Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualization of speaking subaltern, this article discusses that how the protagonist, Rehana Haque in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age raises her voice, struggles for survival and achieves mestiza consciousness in the backdrop of 1971 war and therefore can be named as speaking subaltern in new historicist perspective. Haque is resilient, brave and courageous who not only challenges the societal norms but also sets a precedent for oppressed and marginalized women. She relishes a hope despite hardships to get a country of their own; irrespective of their religion, language and multiple culture. Anam in A Golden Age has brought into limelight the struggle of resilient female figure and the hurdles she faces while achieving mestiza consciousness. The study is qualitative and hence implies concept of Mestiza Consciousness and Subaltern stance. Key Words: Mestiza Consciousness, Speaking Subaltern, 1971 War, New Historicism

The Cannibal’s Antidote For Resentment: Diffracting Ressentiment Through Decolonial Thought

The purpose of this essay is to diffract ressentiment through decolonial theory. I would like to see what sort of light this sheds on the psychological undercurrents that impose barriers on colonial and decolonial thought, as well as on the conceptual dynamism of ressentiment. This essay is split into two different experiments in thought. The first will be to diffract ressentiment through the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Édouard Glissant, and Gilles Deleuze. To this end, I will begin by providing an analysis of ressentiment as developed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and then supplement this with Deleuze’s analysis of ressentiment in Nietzsche & Philosophy. I will create a bridge with decolonial thought by interpreting Anzaldúa’s concept of the nopal de castilla and mestiza consciousness through the interpretive lens of ressentiment to show the affinity that exists between the work of Anzaldúa and Nietzsche. I will finish the first experiment by looking at ressentiment through some of the concepts Glissant offers us in the Poetics of Relation. In particular, I will argue that ressentiment resists the creolization of identity and culture, and that Glissant’s demand for the right to opacity for all is the sign of a thinking that has overcome ressentiment. The second experiment is to diffract ressentiment through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, beginning with an analysis of the most relevant points of that text for our discussion then putting our diffracted version of ressentiment in conversation with Amerindian perspectivism. However, this does not mean that I am aiming at a synthesis of ressentiment with Amerindian perspectivism. Rather, in the spirit of the Brazilian author’s post-structural anthropology, this essay sees only a disjunctive synthesis of the two: a ressentiment-becoming-Amerindian perspectivism and an Amerindian perspectivism-becoming-ressentiment (we will focus on developing the former). I hope that, by the end of this experiment, we may have a richer conceptual understanding of ressentiment by offering this concept an image of itself that only our decolonial thinkers and an Amerindian perspective can reveal.

The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature by Cordelia E. Barrera

Reviewed by: The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature by Cordelia E. Barrera Bailey Moorhead Cordelia E. Barrera, The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2022. 224 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $19.95. Cordelia E. Barrera draws from Chicana and Indigenous cultural theory, critical regionalism, genre studies, decolonialism, ecocriticism, and critiques of capitalism to develop an informed and innovative reexamination of the Borderlands. Spanning ideology and embodiment, The Haunted Southwest reads contemporary fiction, film, lived experience, and performance to “re-situate the histories and ruling mythologies of cultures and people . . . whose stories, and thus memories, have been effectively silenced by official doctrines and policies” (xviii). Much like William Faulkner described the US South’s past as “never dead—it’s not even past,” Barrera delineates a Southwest whose past is “not dead, but reshaped, revised, and silenced” (xii). Through this lens, her book concerns historical yet ongoing issues of environmental and social justice that demand recuperation through multivocal perspectives. Barrera astutely acknowledges from the outset that “re-situating” these histories and mythologies is a complicated process due to the enmeshed quality of Borderland existence. A long timeline of meetings, crossings, and mixtures of ethnicities, languages, and cultures has generated many competing narratives in and about the Southwest. To address these complexities, Barrera introduces the term “Bordered frontier”: a container for the “intrinsic connections” between “border and frontier imaginaries” that accommodates “a discursive mixture of registers from American literary forms—such as the Gothic—alongside conceptions that speak to Indigeneity, Aztec and Mayan mythologies, and precon-quest ways of living in the world” (xvi). In this way she confronts [End Page 95] the contemporary inextricability of multiple perspectives while still accounting for the gaps often left between “official” narratives of the Southwest and stories erased by such dominant discourses. Her invocation of the Gothic alongside preconquest methodologies reflects her titular nod to “haunting,” as she seeks counternarratives through “spectral forms and absences” that surface “where unresolved forms of imperialist violence push through” (xix). Barrera’s “Bordered frontier” then provides an ideal model through which to channel such ghostly matters and logics, as it integrates and synthesizes elements of overlapping and contested spaces in which these hauntings appear, leaving room to incorporate their decolonial ways of meaning-making. Barrera argues that these specters that haunt the Southwestern landscape help us envision a more embodied and culturally attuned “ethics of place” (xliv), an approach that “foregrounds the nature and necessity of change” and “embeds aspects, dispositions, and properties of Indigeneity” that contradict colonial narratives of supposedly vanished cultures and memories (77, 87). Barrera exemplifies this process through characters “who are haunted and embody aspects of return and recovery . . . or who exist within haunted landscapes and therefore fear what could return” (xlv). She identifies such “haunted” characters within a wide range of texts and real-world events: John Sayles’s 1996 film Lone Star; the Laredo, Texas, area pageantry performances of the [George] Washington’s Birthday Celebration Association; Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Arturo Islas’s The Rain God (1984); various frontier cowboy stories by Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry; and Alex Rivera’s 2008 film Sleep Dealer. This variety of mediums over six relatively short chapters highlights the breadth of her methodology’s applications while maintaining an engaging pace for the text and further reflects the diverse qualities of multivocal counter discourses. Building upon foundational criticism of the West and Borderlands, Barrera makes vital contributions to scholarship within and beyond these fields, as her book “re-situate[s] the frontier within border narratives that are bound not by linear constructions of space but by a place-based poetics” that “disrupt[s] a monologic [End Page 96] frontier mythology” (xlv, xl). Barrera’s “haunted” “Bordered frontier” offers exciting applications, and her “ethics of place” priori-tizes cultural memory and material history to shift dominant narratives of the Southwest. Her careful attention to the “dialogic nature of complex ideologies” (xvii) invokes Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as well as José E. Limón’s anchoring of the global in the local, as Barrera finds new, hybridized ways of...

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

Expressive arts therapy: A profession in a “wild zone”

Expressive arts therapy is being increasingly acknowledged and growing as a profession. This article examines the ways that expressive arts therapy has emerged as a profession separate from the other creative arts therapies. Expressive arts therapy is investigated using Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) manifesto of mestiza consciousness. Through engaging with images and giving voice to multiple, hybridized, and politicized identities, Anzaldúa’s work serves as a guide. This exploration of expressive arts therapy poses several questions regarding self-definition, professionalization, credentialing, and the paradox of inclusivity versus lack of coherence. Expressive arts therapy must begin to recognize the impact of power structures which preset privilege and oppression. The impact these contextual dynamics have on our theories, training, research, and practice needs new voices, and this piece issues a beginning call towards this examination. This examination, reflexivity, and growth is work in the “wild zone” – timely and emergent.

Turning toward a Theology of Transformation: Notes from the Borderlands

This article brings Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “self” and “borderlands/ mestiza consciousness” into conversation with M. Shawn Copeland’s call to “turn theology toward persons.” After tracing Anzaldúa’s critical rethinking of José Vasconcelos’s understanding of mestizaje, as well as the political implications of borderlands/ mestiza consciousness as theorized in the work of María Lugones and others, the article examines Copeland’s engagement of decolonial theory in her attempt to “turn” theology. Both Copeland’s and Anzaldúa’s writings teach nos/otrx that theology can only be both transformed and transformative if the persons doing theology engage in critical self-reflection and build this critical reflexivity into the theologies they create.

Looking for Global Mormonism

Looking for Global Mormonism

4 Adopting a New Mestiza Consciousness in the University: A Southern Approach to Academic Activism in the 21st Century

Abstract: Universities are presently focused on neoliberal competition, commodification, consumerism and corporatisation. Such processes have devalued knowledge and impoverished the university’s commitment to social and epistemic justice, cultural democracy and inclusion. In this article, I seek to explore why academic activism, both within and outside of the academy, matters more than ever in the 21st century. Focusing on the BlackLivesMatter movement and the imperatives it creates to take seriously the significant theoretical resources offered by Southern philosophical approaches to activism, I outline how Anzaldúa’s concept of a new mestiza consciousness and the three stages of political action she proposes that new mestizas can enact can be applied to academic activism in the present. I argue that adopting these three types of new mestiza political activities might allow us to reconceptualise academic activism and reignite ideas about the university as offering important spaces for resistance, rebellion and political rejuvenation.

“I used to be one of them”: reflections on researching DACA students as a DACA beneficiary

This article examines my experiences as a Latina DACA-benefited researcher conducting qualitative research with Latinx DACA-benefited college students. Drawing from an interview study across two states, I describe my actions and responses to three stages I experienced in the field: reflexive analysis of positionality, acknowledgement of shared identity, and coming out to participants. In discussing my experiences during interviews, I showcase instances in which I pushed boundaries to adopt a methodology of compassion and humanity necessary in research by, for, and with undocumented immigrants. I draw from W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness to consider undocumented researchers’ compartmentalized identities and experiences in the field, and I use Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness to contest dichotomies around legal status, nationality, and belonging. I propose the adoption of flexible methodologies to disrupt existing rigidities in qualitative research in immigrant communities and static epistemologies produced in contexts where researchers hold legal privilege over their undocumented/liminally documented participants.

Community Narrative as a Borderlands Praxis: Anzaldúa's Mestiza Consciousness as Explored in Cortez's Sexile.

I apply Gloria Anzaldúa's "borderlands theory" to Jamie Cortez'sSexile, an HIV/AIDS prevention publication created as a first-person narrative of the journey of queer, trans activist Adela Vasquez who fled to the US from Cuba in 1980. I argue thatSexileis a borderlands text and operationalizes Anzaldúa'smestizaconsciousness at various levels- ranging from the essence of the text and what its existence represents to the literary techniques used in the telling of Adela's narrative. In the first half of this paper, I explore Anzaldúa's borderlands theory and the ethos ofSexileas a text, including Vázquez's story as inherently a borderland narrative; as a product of democratized knowledge; the praxis of the text's creation; and the technology of the graphic novel. Throughout the second half, I look more closely at the content of the text using close reading to explore notions of the "borderland" represented throughout Adela's narrative. Through both its content and the praxis of creation,Sexilerepresents the power of graphic medicine in illustrating the nuances of narratives at the interstices of marginalized identities and captures the multitudes and ambiguities of trauma, loss, rebirth, kinship, and joy at the margins.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Patti Duncan It is exciting to introduce our winter 2021 issue, featuring a special dossier on #MeToo and Transnational Gender Justice, curated by Chaitanya Lakkimsetti and Vanita Reddy. This dossier engages an important set of questions regarding the transnational dimension of #MeToo, as authors reflect both on how it poses a critique of the notion of "global sisterhood" as well as how it reproduces normalizing discourses of gender and sexuality. This exciting collection includes an introduction by Lakkimsetti and Reddy, eight essays, and an afterword by Ashwini Tambe. As part of the dossier, our Poesía for this issue features two powerful poems by Choi Young-Mi, "Monster" and "To The Pigs." As Lakkimsetti and Reddy discuss in their introduction to the dossier, "Monster" has been credited with igniting the #MeToo movement in South Korea. They write, "Choi's poem calls attention to the power of cultural representation not only in igniting social movements, but also its power in reimagining feminist strategies for addressing sexual violence." And it is this process—the reimagining of feminist strategies for addressing sexual violence—that comes to life throughout the dossier. Alongside the dossier, we include eight timely articles, beginning with "Abolishing the Broom Closets in Omelas: Feminist Disability Analysis of Crisis and Precarity" by Jess Whatcott and Liat Ben-Moshe. Whatcott and Ben-Moshe take as their point of departure Ursula K. Le Guin's well-known story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," to argue that attending to disability and the carceral institutionalization of disabled people is critical to our understanding of precarity under gendered racial settler capitalism. Within capitalist systems that devalue gendered, racialized, and Indigenous populations, Whatcott and Ben-Moshe write that "disability is key to understanding the capitalist crisis because disablement and the construction of the ability/disability binary has been a key mechanism for constructing disposability in the crisis of capitalism." In her article, "Political Times: The Multiple Temporalities of Activism in Feminist Print Culture," Agatha Beins examines the 1970s feminist publication Distaff as an artifact to help us understand how different textual forms shape political transformation and possibilities in feminist activism. Through a study of temporal shifts, Beins demonstrates how imagining different futures is intertwined with temporality, writing: "Because most social movement activism [End Page ix] takes linear-time politics as its basis, considering another form of time in which politics operate potentially broadens our revolutionary repertoires." Alana Bock also engages temporality in "Out of Place and Out of Time: Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss, and Queer Filipinx Haunting," in order to trouble the temporal paradigm that places some queer Filipinx figures (in this case, Andrew Cunanan) in a distant "primitive" past and others (here, Darren Criss) in a "multicultural" present without recognizing the ways that we continue to be haunted by the violence of US empire. Relying on a queer of color critique, Bock explores "what these queer Filipinx ghosts always already desire and speak in excess of imperial forms of knowledge production." Kristen Kolenz, in "A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands," discusses the music of Guatemalan queer feminist hip-hop activist, Rebeca Lane, through the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, demonstrating how Lane claims her Indigenous ancestry and spirituality through engagement with Anzaldúa's theories of the borderlands and mestiza consciousness. Through an analysis of Lane's songs, Kolenz suggests that she revises Anzaldúa's mestiza consciousness "to generate a liberatory and creative vision for Central Americans who build coalition through their shared histories, contemporary struggles, and tireless, decolonizing resistance." And in "'Anyone can be Pussy Riot': Exploring the Possibilities of Transnational Digital Feminism," Jessica Gokhberg considers the work of Russian feminist punk rock performance art group Pussy Riot to explore what is at stake in mobilizing transnational, anti-authoritarian, queer feminist art and activism, especially when using social media as a movement platform. They argue that Pussy Riot creates a "digestible feminism" and critique of state violence, often by mobilizing whiteness and familiar tropes of liberalism, while also enacting possibilities for coalition. Through analysis of a live performance and two online videos, Gokhberg aims "to bring the group's legitimate and...

A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands

A Central American Mestiza Consciousness: Rebeca Lane, Interruptive Choreography, and Rehearsing Change in the Borderlands

The Role of Mestiza Consciousness in Three Dimensions of Educational Expectations:A Self-Narrative of Borderland Pedagogy

ABSTRACT This manuscript examines the ways that a Queer Chicana teacher’s multiple identities and perceptions of race, gender, and sexuality shape her efforts to disrupt colonial models of education in the United States. Through a self-narrativization research design, the authors explore three essential dimensions of educational expectations (dispositional, ethical, and pedagogical) and illuminate concrete examples underpinning the concept of borderland pedagogy and the ways the teacher’s Queer and Chicana identities served as a source of strength to redefine the classroom. In doing so, this work has implications for educators to reexamine social justice dispositions and the ethical practice of classroom expectations of diverse students.