margarita // daisy.

introduction: tending our gardens

This chapter is written as an introductory chapter which gives the reader an overview of the project as a whole. A traditional “roadmap” exists in this chapter, as well as an introduction to the guiding theoretical approaches and commitments of this work.

figure 1. collage with merriam-webster definition, 2023

air and soil. light and temperature. space and time.

These essential elements are necessary to foster a healthy plant. But even when we^[1] move with the best of intentions, when we have a routine, and are carefully tending to our garden, we run into moments when our plants are no longer thriving. They’ve dried up. They’re stagnant. They’re sick. And when this happens, we acknowledge the need for a necessary change for our plants to flourish. Through selective removal, our plant can slowly begin a process to thrive. Oftentimes, this process is painful. It means cutting off leaves, even flowers, and many parts can feel hard to let go. It requires a slower intentional moment of reflection to get rid of the parts that no longer serve us. To move with purpose. Pruning (Figure 1) is not meant to further harm but rather, improve current conditions. It is this careful level of intentional pruning that Ethnic Studies needs to grow and fulfill its purpose of freedom dreaming and liberation. We need to prune, reexamining and reimagining what this field can become by taking a hard look at the unwanted parts we've inherited through patriarchy and colonialism, which have perpetuated the invisibility of women of color (WOC^[2]). In this dissertation, I discuss the erasure, invisibility, and vanishment of women of color within Ethnic Studies and beyond, highlighting what I call the need for documenting, preserving, and amplifying the stories of women of color as an intervention to this vanishment (Vaught, 2019). Using this theoretical base with a recounting of emergent theories from an intergenerational archival project, the Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive), I argue for shifting Ethnic Studies and other learning spaces towards an unsettling of patriarchal content and privileging of men's voices while also shifting pedagogy to be transformative. This chapter also provides an overview for navigating the work that includes rationale around metaphors and digital tools for audience participation.

Often conceptualized in a limited way as a history or social studies topic in education, Ethnic Studies has deep roots in abolition work and community organizing. The history and growth of Ethnic Studies includes activists, movements, and historical forces across all fields of education - including the political fight to legally teach it in schools that continues today. Although not formally called Ethnic Studies, learning from and about our own communities of color has a long tradition in the work of Black teachers in the South during late 1800s Black Reconstruction and the 1960s parent organizing of Puerto Rican women in New York City advocating for instruction in their children’s mother tongue (Anderson, 2010; Aponte, 2019.) Ethnic Studies also has deep roots in activist movements that both predate and include the Chicano East LA Blowouts of 1968, the formalized student organizing demands from the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State of 1968, and the Supreme Court overturned ruling of Tucson Unified School District’s ban on Mexican American & Raza Studies (MARS) in 2010. Yet, despite its radical roots and potential to be a space of freedom dreaming and liberation, Ethnic Studies has been stunted by coloniality, where women of color continue to be silenced and pushed to the margins. A struggle not unique to Ethnic Studies, women of color have historically voiced the ways in which activist spaces have silenced them. The Combahee River Collective’s statement (1977) describes the need to create a new space because of the sexism present in their activist spaces:

Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. (1977)

Many Chicanas have spoken about the patriarchy they experienced in the Chicano movement (see García, 1997), and the same experiences have been documented in current Ethnic Studies classrooms through the silencing of WOC in professional development, and the invisibility of Anzaldúa and other WOC in classroom curricula (Barrales, 2019; Cotera, Espinoza, & Blackwell, 2018). The writings and lessons I’ve learned from these women and their movidas guide our work in 2023 and beyond.

Highly contested, the decades long work of educators, students, and community stake holders, is the catalyst for the recent growth in Ethnic Studies programs and departments within K-12 settings. Within the last few years, states such as California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, introduced legislation to mandate Ethnic Studies as a high school requirement (Kwon, 2021). This expansion can be celebrated. But with this growth comes an urgent need to embrace a WOC pedagogical praxis that disrupts dominant narratives that reproduce harmful & violent educational spaces. Without a deep reflection and pruning, WOC will continue to be marginalized within a space that is intended to be liberatory. With this in mind, this dissertation showcases how a women of color feminisms approach of intergenerational storytelling, digital art, and pedagogy ensures a fuller and more accurate picture is captured so that our stories are heard, valued, and amplified for ours and future generations.

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.

In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to dem and of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.

This is education as the practice of freedom. (bell hooks, 1994)

As bell hooks reminds us, the classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility, and it is with that tension of the academy as a toxic space whilst also a space of possibility, that I approach this dissertation. I come to, and commit to, this pruning and cultivation as an Ethnic Studies student and former Ethnic Studies teacher. I center a loving critique for this field because it’s been both a space of violence and possibility. I’m inspired by the work of Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and other women of color scholars and activists who have long shared and legitimized personal experience and lived knowledge to be a foundational part of their academic and theoretical work. This project also embraces Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) epistemologies that insist that young people are experts of their lived experiences and take on roles of co-researchers and co-producers that must be respected. This is also connected to the work of testimonio which has deep roots to Latin American political movements that have shaped my worldview and politicized my identity as a Chicana daughter of immigrants.

Thus, the purpose of my research is threefold. First, grounding research and academic epistemologies in the stories of women of color; second, broadening scholarly understanding of the nuanced experiences of young women of color; and third, contributing to ongoing Ethnic Studies research by demanding a feminisms lens in classroom curriculum through digital storytelling, archiving, and oral histories, which are all further detailed below. I also advocate for moments where I can disrupt the colonial assumption that writing and reading are the most rigorous and hierarchal medium to show your intelligence (Calderón, et al., 2012), and instead, center arts-based methods, experiential learning, and intergenerational women's stories/spaces as necessary alternatives.

What follows is my research goals and questions, an explanation of the metaphorical structure of my study, and an overview of chapters in this project.

research goals: beginning with matriarchs

Although the recent wave of activism has sparked a large movement demanding a radical shift in K-12 curriculum that is more culturally relevant and historically representative of communities of color, there is still a gaping hole in centering women of color and in shifting pedagogical approaches in K-12 classrooms and beyond. From Fannie Lou Hamer’s groundbreaking organizing with the Civil Rights Movement (Mills, 2007), to the revolutionary work of Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers, (Godoy, 2017) women of color have been, and still are, key players who organize and mobilize communities to challenge and change social inequities. Despite the critical roles and contributions of women of color, our histories and experiences are persistently silenced, overlooked, and rendered virtually invisible. Within this void, there is a need for publicly accessible resources at the intersections of gender and race that value our personal lived experiences and reject monolithic ideas of Black, Indigenous^[3], and other women of color. Through this exploration, I am guided by an array of questions: What do I learn from the missing stories of women of color? What if, instead of solely focusing on the product, the archive, and its stories, I focus on the process and journey in cultivating this praxis? And, what happens when I try to document this process for a public-facing digital project? My dissertation pursues this speculative inquiry through the creation of a digital publication. Because of the existing erasure, my dissertation explores what we, teachers, researchers, artists and other educators can learn when intergenerational WOC knowledge is at the center of the product and the process.

Throughout the project, I’ve foregrounded three research inquiries across phases of the project:

1. How can an epistemological approach utilizing YPAR with young women of color enable co-production of knowledge through intergenerational art-based testimonios?
2. How can we reimagine classrooms as liberatory learning spaces through a feminisms lens and digital storytelling?
   1. What can we learn from intergenerational WOC digital storytelling?
3. How can we disrupt the hierarchies of “knowledge” in the academy by designing publicly accessible and legible scholarship that documents and guides a praxis?
   1. What might we learn about art based and digital methodologies when they are rooted in WOC stories?
   2. How might this clarification help us imagine new types of liberatory spaces?

This work developed some preliminary answers, as well as, pointed to further possibility and necessary work in the fields of Ethnic Studies pedagogy, art-based research, and digital humanities.

This project is an extension of the WOCArchive - an intergenerational project seeking to preserve the stories of women of color in a digital and accessible space. I founded the WOCArchive after an interview with my abuelita Aída in 2016 that became an art piece entitled, primer país. Through the WOCArchive, I sought to preserve stories on a digital platform that not only archived my abuelita’s experiences but included the stories of other Chicanas & women of color. The WOCArchive grew through submissions from high school age artists whose projects included stories from women with roots in Nigeria, Trinidad, Guatemala, Panama, and several other Caribbean & Latin American countries. The WOCArchive projects are based on a prompt given to them by me (their teacher) to archive a notable woman of color in each high school artist’s life. After a series of interviews, the artists chose an audio clip they found most compelling, and then paired audio with a stop-motion collage art piece(s) featuring photographs, drawings, and video. Throughout this dissertation and the WOCArchive project, collage was used as a visual representation in the digital storytelling process and as a form of analysis (see gipsófila for more on collage as method.) Projects were created within a WOC centered Ethnic Studies classroom (led by me) and are currently housed in a public digital archive at Weeksville Heritage Center, a cultural institution in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

las flores

chapter overview & nature metaphors

Nos quisieron enterrar. No sabian que heramos semillas.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.

Source unknown

I come back to this quote often. I first learned of it at a protest, written in spanish on a cartel de cartón. I think about the experiences that have buried me and drowned me. The experiences that attempted to silence my community and mi gente. And I find comfort knowing, again, how much la naturaleza nos enseña. That even with this quote, there is a lesson from mother nature - that they will try to stop us, but our worth is infinite. We^[4], are seeds.

My mother’s backyard is a lush green space. Her haven. She has grown and nurtured this space into a safe haven within the last decade while I've been in New York. Growing up, this house and garden looked distinctly different. The yard was dry. There were a few rose bushes, and few living things were thriving. I find my mother’s garden is a reflection of the healing and transformative chrysalis she’s been through. My abuelita Aida also has a deep connection to land. Abuelita knows how to grow anything and everything: coffee, sugar cane, maíz... She knows what plants to make into teas, which leaves to wrap around a swollen leg, and she tills her soil, from her walker, every day. Plants and flowers play a significant role in my life because they are part of my ancestral knowledge – the same knowledege that I’m always grasping for. The knowledge that I'm always afraid of escaping me, that grounds me, that I'd be lost without, and that I want to ensure future generations have access to. Because plants are so representative in my life, it’s important that this dissertation reflects those community members and ancestors. And I begin with my mother, margarita.

figure 2. photograph of mami’s garden, 2022

Drawing from my personal matriarchs, adrienne marie brown’s use of dandelions (emergent strategy 2017), and indigenous ways of knowing from Turtle Island^[5], this dissertation is modeled after the significant teachings connected to nature, and specifically, flowers. Two of the most significant women in my life are named after flowers: my mother, Margarita // Daisy; and my older sister, Jazmín // Jasmine. The chapters as flores pay homage to the women of color who have inspired this work, beginning with mi mama y mi hermana. There is a deep symbolic concept of dándoles sus flores / giving them their flowers – to thank people in our lives and communities both alive and those who have passed. Many times, we, the larger collective, wait until people have passed to honor and acknowledge them. Instead, this dissertation gives matriarchs their flowers now, while many of them are alive and for those who have passed, we ensure that our memory work is also present. The research project also revolves around archival work, of which I see archival work as honoring our ancestors in real time (J. Wortham, 2022)

adrienne marie brown talks to us about the resilience of dandelions and how many lessons we, her audience, can learn from nature. Even her principles of theory of change revolve around lessons learned through nature: the resilience of mushrooms, geese flying together, “change is constant, be like water” (brown, 2017). The honoring of nature’s teachings are also inspired by the work of Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), where she describes several lessons and ways we can strengthen our relationship with the land, including a maternal and collective concept of nature.

This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden — so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone. - braiding sweetgrass

The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity.

What happens to one happens to all. We can starve together or feast together. (2013, p.15)

Nature based and flower metaphors resonate deeply in their connection to my indigenous ancestors. Although colonization has made it nearly impossible to know who they were, I honor the ancestral knowledge passed down to my matriarchs, many of whom grew up in the native lands of the Huichol, Otomí, and Mexica in lands mostly known now by their colonial name, México. It’s also connected to my family’s relationship to the land - my grandfather as a farmworker picking tomatoes in Oxnard, California, my mother as an avid gardener and her plants as a source of healing, and my abuelita who continues to till the soil even from her walker. Cultivating my own garden in the borders of the academy, las flores guide the chapters below. This dissertation can be read in any order and like a garden, cycles like the seasons.

margarita // daisy

Introduction: tending our gardens

Named after my first country, mi mama, Margarita, this first chapter provides an overview of the dissertation and parts of my origin story. This work is grounded in the matriarchs in our community, and my genesis and first point of departure, my mother.

amapola // poppy

from sí se puede to pa’lante: a meta analysis of ethnic studies research

Every year during the early spring season, visitors flock to Antelope Valley to see the California poppy blooming. This stunning golden cup of sunlight is the state flower and reminds me of the healing powers of sunshine that I’ve longed for ever since moving to New York City. I was born in California – the first person in my family born in the United States, the first one with papeles. In California, I grew up with an enormous Mexican family and it wasn’t until moving over a decade ago, that I realized how deeply connected I am to the Tongva land, more commonly known as it's colonizer name Los Angeles. My Chicana identity is most honored and embraced in the L.A. area, the same city where Chicano students historically walked out in East L.A. to protest the quality of their education, where the first Chicano Studies program was founded at my alma mater Cal State L.A., and where I was politicized through my personal and academic experiences with Ethnic Studies.

With Ethnic Studies as a foundation of this project, formally and personally, and its deeply seeded history to California, amapola // poppy is a literature review that takes a close look at the current state of Ethnic Studies. Through an attempt to find and center women of color, this chapter explores existing empirical research on Ethnic Studies and showcases the absence of WOC in curricula, teacher professional development, and in overall academic gains for young women of color students in high school Ethnic Studies courses.

lavanda // lavender

theoretical framework & methodology

Lavender is used as a medicinal flower and plant to calm our stress and anxiety, to heal. Throughout the women of color feminisms emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, the Lavender was representative of queer feminists within the movement. Feminisms, intentionally multiple and historically fraught, and Ethnic Studies both are rooted in notions of liberation and like lavanda, cycle through seasons and years in their formations. Lavender can return hardily year after year and be used for many purposes from medicine, to culinary, to décor, and to showing love, even often used in ceremony.

Because of this, this chapter is dedicated to the theorists, scholars, and activists, most of whom are queer feminists of color, that have inspired this work. They have made me and so many like me feel seen by legitimizing and showing me the importance in telling my story. This chapter describes the theoretical underpinnings of this dissertation influenced by well-known scholars such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa. It also includes artists as theorists who have influenced the work as a disruption to who academia traditionally includes and give flowers. And equally importantly, gives textual space to the everyday theorists and analysts as the matriarchs in this work – my abuelita Aida, the women interviewed by youth, and the epistemological approach taken by collaborative work that forefronts the theory existing in our lives.

The chapter concludes with a methodology section that explains (1) the design of this project, and (2) how I, Wendy, am in relation with my community, students, and the design of this research – in a form that Anzaldúa refers to as autohistoria (1981). Lavanda is about knowing our histories and how feeling seen is part of that healing process, both calming and transformative.

girasol // sunflower

testimonio and counterstorytelling by immigrant-origin children and youth: insights that amplify immigrant subjectivities

Girasoles follow the sun when they are first beginning to grow. In the morning, they face the east, and through the day they turn towards the warmth of the sun, their guide and biggest supporter, to the west. Sunflowers also bloom in the summer, at the end of a traditional academic school year.

For this reason, I name this chapter girasol // sunflower, as representative of my students, my girasoles. When I think about them, I think about how I’ve inherited these beautiful flowers from a previous season, and I’ve also nurtured them into thriving flowers. Through the findings of this chapter, coauthored with my adviser and mentor Dr. Ariana Mangual Figueroa, we discuss how the quotidian mundane stories of immigrant-origin girls help amplify and nuance our understanding of immigration and of agency. Through the lens of testimonio, a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle, insight is gained into what they, the authors/speakers of the testimonio, believe the audience should know about them. By foregrounding first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children from Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, the reader also learns about the young people’s imagined futures for themselves and their loved ones. This chapter is featured in the Societies Journal.

cempasúchil // marigold

nuancing latinidad through visual testimonios in a women of color archive: latina girls and matriarchs as knowledge producers

Cempasúchil, the Nahuatl word for Marigold, is known as the flower of a thousand petals that guides the spirit world back to earth during Día de los Muertos. It has a distinct smell and adorns the altares we, descendants of Mesoamerica, create to honor our ancestors on this day of reconnection. The symbolic and stunning visual aspects of marigolds are recognizable and beautiful, signaling ceremony in Latin America and across the globe in places like India & Bali.

Because of its significance in my Mexica roots and ancestors, this chapter explores the visual testimonios of girls and matriarchs with roots in Latin America, including my oldest living ancestor abuelita Aida. Featuring testimonios with roots in Ecuador, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and México, the reader learns what Latina girls find to be important to preserve for future generations and acknowledge the need for more research on Latina girlhood. This chapter also explores the significance of visual, aesthetics, and arts-based methods when creating digital oral histories, what I call visual testimonios. This chapter is featured in the forthcoming undergrad textbook Latinx Experiences by SAGE Publishing.

gipsófila // babys-breath

intergenerational digital storytelling as a public art praxis

In bouquets, gipsófila, or babys-breath is sometimes undervalued as a filler that creates foliage for a larger bouquet. But it plays a significant role in bringing parts together, to make them whole, a similar concept to the purpose of collage. Their aesthetics may feel minimal, but without them, the other parts of the bouquet feel compartmentalized and detached. Gipsófila is gentle and ever-present, also becoming a part of adornments in hair and a subtle part of community making. Fittingly, babys-breath is a prominent aspect of Ana Mendieta’s work Imagén de Yagúl (1973) another artist that inspired the theoretical underpinnings of this work.

For this reason, this chapter is named after gipsófila. This chapter touches on how visual aesthetics and intentionally creating intergenerational participatory spaces bring various parts together, creating a feeling of wholeness. The project is intentional in every way, including the public and accessible nature of the final project. Like babys-breath, the stories are recognizable and in the creation of a digital story space, create community and are connected to the smaller fragments coming together the way they do in a collage, the prominent medium used throughout the WOCArchive.

floreciendo // blooming

conclusion: educators as gardeners

When a plant or flower is in full bloom, it has reached some level of self-actualization, a stage of bliss --- the best version of themselves.

Thus, the title of this chapter is quite ambitious. It is a hopeful and ambitious wish. A wish for the young people I’ve had the honor to work with, for educators hoping to do this work, and for Ethnic Studies as a field, to bloom. This concluding chapter offers insight from a student perspective and their experience in my Ethnic Studies course wherein we created the WOCArchive. This chapter opens with a recording and transcript with my former student, curator, and thought partner, Jennifer Florencio, describing her thoughts on the 2^nd annual Women of Color Archive event. Through this reflection, the audience hears first-hand from a young person what felt most compelling, what she learned from this experience, and how some things must be experienced and felt, rather than retold. I end with a hope of where research should go next, including my own.

As whole, this dissertation is a re-imagining of an Ethnic Studies praxis – not solely a curriculum, archive, or oral history repository, but an emphasis on learning from the process of embodying an Ethnic Studies praxis that centers pedagogies rooted in feminisms, art, and WOC oral histories. Collectively, this entire dissertation is a collage. Each chapter is its own piece that can be juxtaposed, layered, moved around and explored in whatever way you, the reader, feel most compelled to engage. Each chapter is a fragment of the larger piece. A collage.

On a technical and formal note - this is a manuscript style dissertation where each chapter is meant to stand alone. Some are previously published, and some exist in their first form here. For this reason, there is a repetition of major themes (e.g., WOC feminisms) and the guiding research questions in each chapter. At the beginning of each chapter, there is an introductory note informing the reader of the genre and any pre-existing versions of the chapter.

genres & digital humanities as democratizing scholarship

By creating an innovative digital dissertation and pushing the limits beyond a digital and OER book I’m building upon the archive and history collection co-constructed with my students to invite learners into the community of the archive and ask educators to think about their own pedagogy and recognition of those who are in their classroom. Through this, I’m also asking us to de-academize theory and recognize that theory literally lives in our work of co-creating an archive alongside young people.

Through the interplay between the more formalized academic elements of this experience (for example, Cempasúchil: From Sí Se Puede to Pa’lante, and the interactive and creative elements for example, primer país,) this digital dissertation strives to push at the notions of borders by further enmeshing the intractable elements of this work and demanding those who visit the digital space to wonder to themselves how this enriches the “academy” (e.g., the ivory tower) while simultaneously refusing to be bounded by it. This dissertation is a tool for educators, students, and for our communities that identify as neither of those but of course hold their own troves of knowledge.

In the legacy of those who have pushed for participatory work to be recognized as a proper form of research even as it (Fine, 2010), and perhaps ESPECIALLY, as it blurs the rigidity between researcher/researched (Torre & Ayala, 2009), what lives here includes a myriad of forms of knowledge produced and shared throughout the process of finding mami & abuelita. This project is living, and it asks guests to partake in inquiry - however that is useful to them.

I imagine this to be used as a resource in classrooms (k-12, higher ed, and teacher ed), to inspire folks to build their own curricula and archives with students, and equally importantly, to simply exist within a space where it was not invited. By existing in these spaces, I hope that practitioners, youth, and my community continue to resist, disrupt, and transform the spaces we inhabit.

art as a resistance to essentializing: who i wrote this for

These findings are also about utilizing art-based methods within research to analyze, carry out, and share the research. I’m not just interrogating and/or investigating, I'm also designing and creating through the analytic frame that decrees oral histories are important to our understanding of local knowledge, and that locality and experience fundamentally alter how we know said knowledge. Whereas Western Modern Science is saying let’s take something and apply it everywhere (abstraction), which flattens the local experience and creates a hierarchy of knowledge from the west being superior (Strong, 2022), this work is echoing those researchers who reject WMS. My work prioritizes starting with the matriarchs of our local communities and centering that knowledge and building from there. In doing so, we are disrupting the Eurocentric ideas of knowledge and how they are essentialized. This project seeks to inspire classroom curriculum that invites students to SEE themselves in their own history and to connect with their family members (chosen or otherwise) using multimodal forms and “products.” By doing so, students and their families literally become centered in the curriculum and are at the foundational grounding of both the curriculum and classroom space. Thus, this dissertation findings document the process of creating a dissertation based on local knowledge that centers oral history, art-based methods, and digital humanities as ways that further educational research should take up.

I wrote this for my community as my primary audience. When I say my community, I mean first and foremost, my mami and abuelita. My sister, my brother, my dad, mis primas, my former students, my former colleagues, and so many other educators who are still doing incredible work in the classroom. I wanted to reflect back all that I learned through my interactions with them and to let the world know of their brilliance. The privilege I had to learn alongside them, whether it was in a formal classroom setting, growing up as the middle child of two incredibly supportive siblings, or hearing the stories of all that my family has lived through, both the funny and tragic.

When I come to the question, who I wrote this for, it takes me a minute to answer, because the academy is not who I wrote this for. That’s not the reason I wanted a PhD. It’s not the reason I was motivated to finish. However, my community is the reason for the project. That is the reason for embracing digital tools, accessible and public facing work, and for writing already living theory into the academic record. I hope this dissertation is part of teacher education/preparation programs as a way to support more classrooms as liberatory spaces, for more teachers who are women of color, and more women of color reflected in curricula. I hope it contributes to the field of YPAR work by showing another way that this epistemology lives on in an art-based nuanced way. I hope it contributes to the field of education and pushes us to transgress beyond traditional research tools that are violent and perpetuate stereotypes in our community (for more on these tools, see Strong, 2022). I hope to see more research that is public facing through open access platforms like Manifold. I hope my research inspires more researchers, especially women of color, to tell their truths, be honest and brave to share an idea, and know that we can embrace the will and knowledge to revise. And that as education, art, ethnic studies, and digital humanities researchers, we move from a space of positionality to relationality (Patel & de los Ríos, 2022), further centering the communities and contexts we’re working in rather than seeing ourselves as a removed individual from it all. My work does this by vulnerably showing my full journey – how I show up in the work, where I’ve been, the mistakes I've made, and my por-venir of where I hope to be.

My work with the WOCArchive and this dissertation is to ensure that I highlight the quotidian & mundane experiences alongside stories of triumph and tragedy. This intentionality around day-to-day experiences emphasizes how these experiences are just as important in telling the full story of these historical women. This Findings, Girasol // Sunflower and Next Steps, Floreciendo // Blooming, of this dissertation will support efforts to implement curricula that centers art methods, WOC experiences, and the use of archival artifacts. Supporting the preservation of WOC narratives ensures that various stakeholders understand the value of archives created by and for women of color as legitimate forms of knowledge production and worthy of preservation – whether they be historic, tragic, AND/OR mundane. Ultimately, this dissertation and the WOCArchive itself refuse the erasure of women of color, so that our histories are accessible to seven generations^[6] and beyond.

References

Anderson, J. (2010). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Anzaldúa, G. (1981). Speaking in tongues: A letter to third world women writers. In G. Anzaldúa & C. Moraga (Eds), This bridge called my back. New York, NY. Kitchen Table.

Aponte, G. (2019). CUNY-NYSIEB Ambassador Gladys Aponte (Dual Language Bilingual Education Teacher). Available at: https://www.cuny-nysieb.org/classroom-videos/ambassador/gladys/

Barrales, W. (2019). Nepantla as a point of departure. Women of Color Archive. Retrieved from: https://www.wocarchive.com/blog/pointofdeparture Accessed: September 2020.

brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA, AK Press.

Collective, C. R. (1977). 'A Black Feminist Statement'. Retrieved at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24365010.pdf

Cotera, M. E., Espinoza, D., & Blackwell, M. (Eds.). (2018). Chicana movidas: New narratives of activism and feminism in the movement era. University of Texas Press.

Fine, M. (2010). An epilogue, of sorts. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.)(2010) Revolutionizing education (pp. 221-242). Routledge.

García, A. M. (2014). Chicana feminist thought: The basic historical writings. Routledge.

Godoy, M. (2017, September 17). Dolores Huerta: The Civil Rights Icon who showed farmworkers 'sí se puede'. NPR. Retrieved February 28, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/17/551490281/dolores-huerta-the-civil-rights-icon-who-showed-farmworkers-si-se-puede

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.

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1. I use “we” in this opening paragraph to include a broad audience who is working towards education for liberation within Ethnic Studies and beyond. When this “we” shifts, I specify who the we is: women of color, Chicanas, teachers, and more. ↑

2. I use the term, women of color, in line with the original theorists - but in the WOCArchive and in original theoretical frames as related to pedagogy and ethnic studies in schooling, you are referencing youth who are variously identifying as girls, young women, and non-binary youth. I also use this term as a point of solidarity as stated in the work of the Combahee River Collective’s Statement, as third world women, and not as a flattening, co-opting, and erasure of Black women. ↑

3. I use the term Native interchangeably with Indigenous depending on the original theorists use of the term. Throughout this dissertation, I use the term Indigenous because I'm referring to a broad group throughout the Americas, including but not limited to Arawak, Taíno, Tongva, Huichol, Mexica, Sioux, Diné, and others. Whenever possible, I name specific tribal names. ↑

4. We, in this portion, refers to communities of color, working people, and other historically marginalized communities. ↑

5. The name comes from various Indigenous oral histories that tell stories of a turtle that holds the world on its back. For some Indigenous peoples, the turtle is therefore considered an icon of life, and the story of Turtle Island consequently speaks to various spiritual and cultural beliefs. Robinson, Amanda; Filice, Michelle (November 6, 2018). "Turtle Island". The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historic Canada. Retrieved February 6, 2022. For some Indigenous peoples, Turtle Island refers to the continent of North America. ↑

6. The Seventh Generation Principle is based on an ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. We are a bridge between the past, present, and the future. ↑