Search Results (8)

Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019) captures the challenges that “lost”, or undocumented children experience in their attempts to cross the US-Mexico border and provides a stringent critique of the unjust and arbitrary nature of border laws. In this paper, I argue that Luiselli’s novel merges the narrative with the archival to form an “archival novel”, which generates what I call “archival narrative justice”, a form of achieving justice through an archival narrative when legal and institutional justice is absent or inadequate. In doing so, I demonstrate how the narrative form and the practice of archiving, both independently and collectively, are significant avenues for re-conceptualizing “justice” through generating counterhistories and making visible multiple marginalized perspectives. I connect Luiselli’s archival-narrative practice with how the borderlands house such counterhistories by building on Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on borderlands. I develop the concept of “borderland as archive” to understand how Lost Children Archive recognizes the interstitial space of the borderlands as coded with the knowledges, histories, memories, lived experiences, and resistance of border crossers and border dwellers, from undocumented immigrants to dispossessed Native Americans who have been illegalized by settler-colonial and capitalistic immigration laws. Full article

Faced with the hegemony of racial superiority, the oppression of gender dominance, and the demands of religious homogeneity, Mexican American Gloria E. Anzaldúa proposes a New Mestiza Consciousness that seeks to achieve a multifaceted transcendence of La Frontera (Borderlands). Using Krsiteva’s semiotics and mythology-based feminism as a theoretical guide, this paper will analyze the cultural, gender, ethnic, and religious manifestations of New Mestiza Consciousness and the logic behind this consciousness in terms of women’s writing in the Chicana women’s literary community and the re-shaping of the maternal mythological archetype in indigenous culture. Full article

Given the various shortcomings of classical phenomenological methods identified by critical and liberatory theorists, this paper considers what phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized experience. The paper begins with an account of the major reasons for which Latinx feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega have found a phenomenological approach useful in their projects. This account reveals that though Latinx feminist phenomenologists have found useful resources for theorizing multiply marginalized theory and identity in the classical texts of phenomenology, experiences unique to those subjected to marginalization remain significantly underdeveloped or absent from classical accounts. Taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of ‘rupture’, this paper argues, is therefore necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Informed by the work of Latinx feminist theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, this paper closes with a proposed critical feminist phenomenological approach that centers the moment of ‘rupture’ described in such work. Ultimately, this paper argues that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends. Full article

How is writing a part of creatively understanding ourselves, research questions, data, and theory? Writing is a critical form of connecting concepts, exploring data, and weaving knowledge in qualitative research. In other words, writing is integral to theorizing. However, writing is not an individualistic process. Writing is a relational and creative epistemological weaving of thoughts and embodiments constructed by researchers and their interactions with mentors and instructors, participants, and theoretical proponents. In this paper we discuss this creative process by paying attention to each co-constructor of knowledge and the ways in which the weaving of knowledge was constructed through our shared and different journeys as doctoral student and instructor. Grounded in Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderland and nepantla work, we will present our positionalities, interactions, and suggestions for fellow qualitative writers struggling to make sense of their writing and theorizing. Our hope is that doctoral students and veteran academics alike can benefit from this exploration. Full article

This paper is a work of autoethnography in which I (the author) observe critical practices that I and my colleague, Aisha, thought, said, and embodied during our tenure as the only Muslim Nostra Aetate Fellows at the St. Catherine Center for Interreligious Dialogue in the Vatican City, Italy. The paper focuses on our survival strategies that took on an interreligious and anti-patriarchal character within our interreligious, Muslim–Christian encounters. The framework of border thinking, as theorized by Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, and the concept of emerging rituals proposed by Ronald Grimes, will serve as analytical tools to understand our practices. I argue that our embodied thoughts and practices, as seen from the lenses of emerging rituals and border thinking, represent an anti-patriarchal, interreligious epistemology that questions and deconstructs the hegemonic presence of patriarchal Catholic praxis around us within that specific context. Full article

The author identifies as a mixed-race Chicana teacher/educator, bridging ecology, culture, and learning situated within an early learning center on a university campus. This inquiry integrates Gloria Anzaldúa’s autohistoria teoría/autobiographical theory and documents (1) the social construction of a gender-fluid persona doll named “Logan” during a focus group with REMIDA Reggio-inspired educators, (2) a (dis)rupture that took place after engaging the persona doll to introduce the term “transgender” during a preschool circle time, and (3) lessons learned to move early childhood education for social sustainability forward. During this disrupture in our learning community, the question of whether or not to discard Logan’s (gender non-binary) identity emerged. Logan’s story is one of curricular innovation in the examination of topics and concepts of ecological sustainability, equity-based pedagogy, and creative reuse through the construction and use of persona dolls. The dolls themselves are created from reuse materials, and they adopt personas and social backgrounds reflecting awareness of ecological and social injustice while co-developing ideas of actions for equity with the input of children. Full article

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a critical continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. Full article

This paper explores the relationship between disability and the aspirational health of the civic body through an analysis of the criminalization of immigration and the war on drugs. In particular, this paper utilizes tools from transnational disability studies to examine the formation and maintenance of a form of ablenationalism operating within immigration reform and drug-related policies. Specifically, the militarization of border zones, as well as the vast austerity measures impacting people across North, Central, and South America have shaped notions of public health, safety, and security according to racial, gendered, and settler logics of futurity. The final section of the paper turns to three authors who have been situated in various ways on the margins of the United States, Gloria Anzaldúa (the Mexico-U.S. border), Aurora Levins Morales (Puerto Rico), and Margo Tamez (Lipan Apache). As such, this article analyzes the liberatory, affective, and future-oriented dimensions of disabled life and experience to chart possibilities for resistance to the converging momentum of carceral settler states, transnational healthcare networks, and racial capitalism. Full article