A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

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Harvard Educational Review Vol. 82 No. 4 Winter 2012Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

DOLORES CALDERÓNDOLORES DELGADO BERNALUniversity of Utah

LINDSAY PÉREZ HUBERCalifornia State University, Long Beach

MARÍA C. MALAGÓNUC/ACCORD

VERÓNICA NELLY VÉLEZCenter for Latino Policy Research, University of California, Berkeley

In this article, the authors simultaneously examine how education scholars have taken up the call for (re)articulating Chicana feminist epistemological perspectives in their research and speak back to Dolores Delgado Bernal’s 1998 Harvard Edu-cational Review article, “Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research.” They address the ways in which Chicana scholars draw on their ways of knowing to unsettle dominant modes of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies, and build upon what it means to utilize Chicana feminist epistemology in educa-tional research. Moreover, they demonstrate how such work provides new narratives that embody alternative paradigms in education research. These alternative para-digms are aligned with the scholarship of Gloria Anzaldúa, especially her theoreti-cal concepts of nepantla, El Mundo Zurdo, and Coyolxauhqui. Finally, the authors offer researcher reflections that further explore the tensions and possibilities inherent in employing Chicana feminist epistemologies in educational research.

You examine the description handed to you of the world, picking holes in the paradigms currently constructing reality. You doubt that traditional western sci-ence is the best knowledge system, the only true, impartial arbiter of reality . . .

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You turn the established narrative on its head, seeing through, resisting, and subverting its assumptions. Again, it’s not enough to denounce the culture’s old account—you must provide new narratives embodying alternative potentials . . . Beliefs and values from the wisdom of past spiritual traditions of diverse cul-tures coupled with current scientific knowledge is the basis of the new synthesis. (Anzaldúa, 2002, pp. 561–562)

Gloria Anzaldúa’s powerful insights speak directly to our work as Chicana1 education scholars committed to anti-oppressive social justice research and guided by Chicana feminist epistemological frameworks. She reveals not only that doing such work represents a critique of dominant research paradigms but, more importantly, that such work, being both spiritual and intellectual, also requires deep introspection and a vision for something different. Her comments remind us that as Chicana education scholars drawing from a Chi-cana feminist epistemology (CFE), we must collectively embark on a path of decolonization. We understand her to be suggesting that in doing this work we are not alone. Feminists of color in education have drawn on alternative sys-tems of knowing that hold the potential to disrupt Western colonial assump-tions (Delgado Bernal, 1998, 2002; Dillard, 1995, 2000; Elenes, 1997, 2011; Hurtado, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2000; Tillman, 2006; Villenas, 1996, 2010). Importantly, this work has opened possibilities to suture the bodymind-spirit2 split common in positivist and so-called “objective” forms of research, as well as to examine the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and other identities (Ayala, 2008). Chicana education scholars, in particular, have taken up the call to articulate Chicana feminist perspec-tives that contribute to a decolonization of the research process and inform our practice as educators and activist scholars. Elenes (2011) reminds us that the process of decolonization “is not to recover the silenced voices by using hegemonic categories of analysis, but to change the methodological tools and categories to reclaim those neglected voices” (p. 60). Hence, in this article we address the ways in which Chicana scholars draw on their ways of knowing to disrupt hegemonic categories of analysis, create decolonizing methodologies, and expand our understanding of what it means to employ a CFE in the field of education.

Our work here speaks back to Dolores Delgado Bernal’s 1998 Harvard Edu-cational Review article, “Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research,” by examining how education scholars have taken up the call for (re)articulating CFE perspectives in their research. We believe a new genera-tion of education scholars is building on the important work of Chicana femi-nists and, as Anzaldúa suggests, providing new narratives that embody alterna-tive paradigms in education research. We argue that this is important because it demonstrates that Chicana feminist frameworks in education are unique sources of knowledge as well as valuable contributors to theory, methodology, and pedagogy.

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A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisitedcalderón, delgado bernal, pérez huber, malagón, and vélez

To do this we first briefly revisit Delgado Bernal’s (1998) article in order to provide a context for how subsequent scholars have taken up Chicana feminist thought. Second, we review educational scholarship that extends her work and our collective understanding of what it means to use a CFE in education. We synthesize this educational scholarship, demonstrating how it ruptures rigid binary and hierarchical thinking, offers a queered articulation of the body, and provides decolonizing methodologies. Next, we provide three personal researcher reflections that address the nuances and methodological tensions we encounter while working from a Chicana feminist framework. Finally, Del-gado Bernal shares her thoughts on this new generation of Chicana scholars and the implications of their work for educational research. Throughout, we use Anzaldúa as an anchor, because Borderlands (1987, 1999a) and her sub-sequent writings are seminal texts in the Chicana feminist project found in education.

An Early Conceptualization of a Chicana Feminist Epistemology

In 1998 Delgado Bernal drew on Anzaldúa (1987) and other U.S. third world feminists to propose a CFE in education that privileges the life experiences and knowledge of Chicanas. Her article is noteworthy for paving the way for education scholars to employ Chicana feminist systems of knowing into their scholarship.3 In her landmark article, Delgado Bernal (1998) conceptualizes CFE in education as a response to the failure of both mainstream education research and liberal feminist scholarship to address the forms of knowledge and experiences Chicanas bring to educational institutions and research. CFE is said to emerge from concerns about how and who constructs understand-ings of Chicana experiences and how “this knowledge is legitimized or not” (p. 560).

Chicana feminist scholarship expands educational research by offering a different standpoint that challenges traditional ways of knowing and shapes every aspect of the research process. According to Delgado Bernal (1998), a CFE in education is a “means to resist epistemological racism” (p. 556) that functions to disrupt traditionally marginalized non-Eurocentric knowledge systems. As she explains, a Chicana standpoint informs how we develop and enact the research process—from the questions we ask and the analysis of our findings to the political and ethical considerations we make. Delgado Ber-nal describes CFE as a research tool that “will expose human relationships and experiences that are probably not visible from a traditional patriarchal position or a liberal feminist standpoint” (p. 560). She further explains how the social justice commitments that motivate a CFE make it an anti-oppressive research framework.

A key aspect of this CFE framework is cultural intuition, the unique view-point that many Chicanas bring to the research process. Cultural intuition

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reimagines Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) notion of theoretical sensitivity that draws from four major sources: personal experience (extended by Delgado Bernal to include community memory and collective experience), profes-sional experience, the existing literature on a topic, and the analytic research process itself. Cultural intuition produces a critical, social justice approach and is the basis of a CFE in educational research. Because it relies on subjec-tivities of Chicanas, cultural intuition is inherently an evolving concept:

The sources [of cultural intuition] do not include all possibilities, yet they pro-vide a framework that facilitates an understanding of cultural intuition and there-fore a Chicana feminist epistemology in educational research. My hope is that this framework helps demonstrate what forces shape a Chicana feminist epis-temology without limiting the nuances that must be addressed in future work. (Delgado Bernal, 1998, p. 564)

The scholarship reviewed below as well as the researcher reflections demon-strate how cultural intuition and, more broadly, a CFE in education are more nuanced than originally outlined. As these nuances and methodological ten-sions in the ways a CFE informs our research are explored in depth, we reveal how the framework that Delgado Bernal first articulated has been expanded and rearticulated to produce an array of diverse educational research guided by CFE perspectives.

Anzaldúa’s (1987) work is foundational to Delgado Bernal. Anzaldúa infuses her spirituality into her writing and gives us permission to incorporate our politics of spirit into our own research, writing, and teaching. She teaches us that “spirituality can assist us in challenging racism, sexism, homopho-bia, and other forms of material psychic oppression” (Keating, 2005, p. 243). When closely linked to the struggle for social justice, spirituality becomes what Anzaldúa calls “spiritual activism” (Elenes, 2011). While Delgado Bernal does not explicitly include spirituality in her original discussion of cultural intuition or as essential to a CFE, she later integrates spirituality in her work (Delgado Bernal, 2001, 2008). We found spiritual activism to be a thread that (explicitly or implicitly) weaves through almost every piece of scholarship we reviewed in preparation for this article. Within CFE scholarship, there is a sense of political urgency to engage in a decolonizing process and address educational inequities within Chicana/o communities, and this decolonizing work is never separate from spiritual activism.

Literature Review

In this literature review, we weave together scholarship that powerfully cap-tures how a CFE in education has been deployed and how it can transform the established narratives told about oppressed communities. We limited our scope to educational research published after Delgado Bernal’s 1998 article. Our literature search included peer-reviewed journal articles, dissertation

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studies, and book chapters. We reviewed scholarship that used Delgado Ber-nal’s formulations of a CFE and/or “cultural intuition” as one of the main methodologies, analytical tools, and/or theoretical frameworks. In addition, we reviewed work that drew more generally from Chicana feminism. While our initial review was much more expansive than what space allows us to pro-vide here, we believe that the scope of work we include below provides a rich portrait of how scholars continue to rearticulate and employ Chicana feminist perspectives in educational research.

We organize the scholarship according to three overlapping themes that emerged from our literature search and that we align with theoretical concepts offered by Anzaldúa. These themes illustrate what Anzaldúa (1999a) calls the multiple “strengths” that Chicana scholars bring to educational research and that speak to our “borderland experiences” (p. 561). The first theme emerges from work that draws from alternative sources of knowledge to disrupt binary thinking and confront the tensions that we, as scholars concerned with decol-onization and social justice, encounter in academia. We align this theme with Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla—living between multiple worlds or beliefs—to explain how scholars have confronted issues of power, contradictions, and subjectivities to develop transformational pedagogical spaces in education. Next we explore scholarship that queers and radically decolonizes how body and place are rearticulated to expose oppression and create transformative educational practices. This theme is aligned with Anzaldúa’s concept of El Mundo Zurdo—that place in the margins where the dispossessed, the queer, the surplus, and the subaltern coexist. Finally, we review scholarship that dis-rupts the dominant Western model of education research that calls for a split of the bodymindspirit. This theme of decolonizing methodologies is aligned with Anzaldúa’s reclamation of Coyolxauhqui—a process of “healing through words” (Keating, 2008, p. 19) and rejoining severed pieces of ourselves.

While the scholarship is presented according to these separate themes, most of the work we review encompasses two or all three themes. Our orga-nizational choices are merely utilized to highlight and illustrate the differ-ent strengths and emphases in the research. Throughout the review, we show how the intellectual, spiritual, and political are interwoven for these scholars and how the utilization, extension, and rearticulation of a CFE in educational research is a form of spiritual activism.

A Disruption of Binaries and Hierarchies: “Living in Nepantla”

We stand at a major threshold in the extension of consciousness, caught in the remolinos (vortices) of system change across all fields of knowledge. The binaries of colored/white, female/male, mind/body are collapsing. Living in nepantla, the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems, you are aware of the changeability of racial, gender, sexual, and other categories render-ing the conventional labelings obsolete (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 541).

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The literature in this section works within a contradictory space to illuminate how we are subject to and participate in the colonizing gaze of academia, how we can make knowledge claims based on the lives of Chicanas, and how hierar-chical relationships that are often constructed as binaries might be disrupted in the teaching or research process. To understand the ways that scholars have extended a CFE to do this work against binary thinking, we utilize Anzaldúa’s (2002) concept of living in nepantla, an in-between place of possibility where we gain insight from our insider/outsider subjectivities. In nepantla, we “are exposed, open to other perspectives, more readily able to access knowledge derived from inner feelings, imaginal states, and outer events and to ‘see through’ them with a mindful holistic awareness” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 544). This awareness can be used to make meaning of the contradictions that define us as Chicana education scholars. For example, we often hold contradictory identities as the colonizer and colonized and embody what Villenas (1996) describes as having “a foot in both worlds; in the dominant privileged institu-tions and in the marginalized communities” (p. 714). Collectively, the schol-arship in this section draws from alternative sources of knowledge to disrupt traditional researcher/participant or teacher/student binaries.

Diaz Soto’s (2009) work proposes “critical emancipatory mezcla praxis,” a combination of social action projects which move students to be socially active, and participatory action research (PAR) in teacher education. Specifi-cally, she conceives Xicana participatory action research (X-PAR) as a “femi-nist participatory action paradigm” (p. 168) that weaves together traditional feminist PAR with Anzaldúa’s (1990) mestiza consciousness, Sandoval’s (2000) oppositional consciousness, and Delgado Bernal’s (1998) notion of cultural intuition. Diaz Soto proposes that X-PAR be applied in teacher education to respond to the specific community contexts in which social action projects exist. For Diaz Soto (2009), a mezcla (hybrid) praxis, informed by this Chicana feminist framework, centers Chicana sources of knowledge as valuable places from which to make knowledge claims and move teacher education programs away from the dominance of Western colonial epistemologies: “The idea of including ‘cultural intuition’ meant that we could move from largely patriar-chal ways of seeing the world to learning to listen to our inner voices, to trust our intuition, and to interpret research outside existing paradigms” (p. 168). Delgado Bernal’s cultural intuition thus becomes a reflexive component of this mezcla praxis and a significant proposition within the broader debate sur-rounding the importance of community involvement in shaping teacher edu-cation programs.

Espinoza-Herold (2007) conducted a case study of a mother-daughter rela-tionship that captured the resiliency and cultural resources of a former drop-out along her educational trajectory. She posits that beginning research from the lives of Chicanas—including the researcher—demands that subjects tradi-tionally framed as deficient be reframed as empowered. For instance, resort-ing to cultural intuition, she draws from her personal experience to analyze

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the experiences of her participants and to capture what previous literature on dropouts had not: “the cultural resources that allowed an immigrant former high school dropout to beat the odds and pursue her academic aspirations” (p. 261). Espinoza-Herold’s cultural intuition has served as a “sixth sense of survival” that she shares with her participants. From a place of nepantla, she perceives and makes sense of her participants’ experiences from multi-ple angles and is able to transform or demythologize (Anzaldúa, 2002) deficit framings of dropouts. Unlike traditional educational research that demands distance between researcher and participant, we believe that living in nepantla allows Espinoza-Herold’s relationship with her participants to be a valid point of departure in the research process; it allows for the subject of research to claim agency. Espinoza-Herold’s use of cultural intuition allows her to locate problematic gaps in the literature on dropouts and reframe the narrative, pay-ing attention to the resiliency of students pushed out of schooling.

By validating alternative sources of knowledge as appropriate for learn-ing, Chicana feminist epistemologies provide Chicana educators the ability to deconstruct the teacher/student binary common in all levels of school-ing and move toward decolonizing pedagogical models. Because they begin from the lives of Chicanas, these pedagogical models demand that issues of patriarchy, sexuality, race, and class be acknowledged in the classroom. One such model is Xicana Sacred Space (XSS). Diaz Soto, Cervantes-Soon, Villar-real, and Campos (2009) conceived XSS out of a Chicana research course. Specifically, XSS emerged from the tensions inherent in classroom dynamics. Informed by Emma Pérez’s (1999) understanding of third space, Anzaldúa’s (1999a) border crossings and mestiza consciousness, and Delgado Bernal’s (1998) cultural intuition, XSS is not simply a “friendly” space but a space for the rigorous exchange of ideas, one impacted by the different subjectivities, standpoints, and histories present in classrooms.

In conceiving an XSS, the authors expand cultural intuition to include spirituality as “a fundamental tool for those seeking ongoing reflexivity and a more natural approach to research rooted within our mestiza consciousness” (Diaz Soto et al., 2009, p. 761). XSS constructs learning in circular rather than linear ways, emulating indigenous sacred circle practices that conceive reality as a cyclical process. The dialogic and reflexive nature of the XSS challenges traditional notions of the classroom. XSS acknowledges the difficult, complex, relational work of sifting through and negotiating the diverse subjectivities within classroom and research spaces. XSS encourages “full awareness of the present moment” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 549). The ability of these educators to connect the material and spiritual worlds and be present in their pedagogy is also a product of living in nepantla, “the point of contact where the ‘mun-dane’ and the ‘numinous’ converge” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 549).

Chicana feminist epistemologies have also informed the development of tools to disrupt the binary of teacher of color/white student tensions in the classroom. Through the practice of border/transformative pedagogies in her

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work, Elenes (2001) utilizes cultural intuition and relational theories of dif-ference to develop teaching practices that critically engage multiple and often opposing ideologies in the classroom. She then utilizes the spaces in between these oppositions for transformation. Her border/transformative pedagogy disrupts traditional classroom practices in which students are merely expected to learn material presented by a teacher, because it insists that learning must start from the lives of those who live in the borderlands. Elenes’s subjectivity as a Chicana informs how she enacts a border/transformative pedagogy with her mostly white female students. Hence, beginning from the lives of Chica-nas demands that issues of power, gender, race, and class be foregrounded. Thus, border/transformative pedagogy aims to build on insights that are con-cerned with eliminating damaging hierarchies having to do with race, gender, class, and sexuality in classrooms. Through an exploration of the tensions produced by opposition, border/transformative pedagogy demonstrates that transformative educational praxis can excavate awareness of what was once unseen.

Together, this work demonstrates that a CFE is not inherent but, rather, something achieved. Centering Chicana subjectivities in educational research and practice requires deconstruction of the multiple ways class, gender, sexu-ality, and race impact people’s lives. Living in nepantla reminds us to learn from our borderland experiences as Chicana scholars and teachers in order to construct knowledge. The distinctly Chicana research questions and analyses provided above— the manner in which teacher/student or researcher/partici-pant binaries have been disassembled —lead to insights that previous research has not. However, confronting the ambiguity, tensions, and conflicts these scholars describe can be difficult to navigate and experience. These scholars illustrate that, similar to Anzaldúa’s (1999b) nepantla state, we engage in our research to confront the messy contradictions of our Chicana subjectivities and the conflicts of power we encounter in the academy.

Queering Bodies and Place in El Mundo Zurdo

We are the queer groups, the people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our own respective cultures. Combined we cover so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the collec-tive fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit we are a threat. Not all of us have the same oppressions, but we empathize and identify with each other’s oppressions. We do not share the same ideology, nor do we derive similar solu-tions. Some of us are leftists, some of us practitioners of magic. Some of us are both. But these different affinities are not opposed to each other. In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet. (Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 209)

The educational research we examine here derives its knowledge from El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed world envisioned by Anzaldúa. It offers a queering—a radical decolonizing and tolerance for ambiguity—of how body

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and place can be rearticulated to expose mechanisms of oppression, such as homophobia, and offer liberatory alternatives. Our bodies and the places we live carry the colonial scarring of an imperfect healing, a recovery that desires transformation. For Anzaldúa, this transformation, or “queering,” is possible through an intimate knowledge of the body, the places, and the earth that sus-tain us. She explains, “For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories, to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body—flesh and bone—and from the Earth’s body—stone, sky, liquid, soil” (Anzaldúa, 1999a, p. 97). El Mundo Zurdo is a location where the odd, different, misfit, and queer bodies exist. It can be seen as a marginalized space, but, more impor-tantly, it is a space informed by these bodies and where these bodies begin to heal; as such, it is a space of alternative insights and transformative knowledge. It is also a location that allows us to strip the places we live in of the colonizing structures that territorialize it, allowing for the “Earth’s body” to heal and in turn heal us. The insights the following scholars offer have this transformative power, emanate from the flesh, and provide us with alternative educational practices that promote healing and liberation.

Explicitly decolonizing the body as a source of knowledge, Saavedra and Nymark (2008) introduce the concept of borderland-mestizaje-feminism (BMF). Drawing from Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness, the scholars incorporate a reworked critical pedagogy (Elenes, 1997) and identify the body as a place from where theory emanates—a sort of theory in the flesh (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983). BMF starts from the knowledge claims of the oppressed, but it also explicitly centers the bodies of those silenced and excluded, even from progressive pedagogical models such as critical pedagogy (Saavedra & Nymark, 2008). Through BMF, a multidimensional methodological, peda-gogical, and theoretical project, Saavedra and Nymark (2008) address “how research is embodied by Chicana(o)s and Latina(o)s feminist scholars who find it necessary to decolonize educational research and practice” (p. 255) in ways that center the everyday lives of people, particularly those at the mar-gins of Western knowledge production. The authors arrive at an epistemo-logical place known as new tribalism (Anzaldúa, 2000), which demands con-stant reflection, vigilance, and reevaluation in order to decolonize educational research. New tribalism may be just the tool we need as researchers to reflect on our subjectivities and assumptions in the research process, which, in con-junction with a CFE, furthers the goal of decolonial work. Do we, for instance, leave heteronormative lenses intact in our research, in our nuevas teorías (new knowledge)?

In this regard, Revilla’s (2004, 2010) study of a Chicana/Latina women’s organization at the University of California, Los Angeles, purposefully queers Delgado Bernal’s cultural intuition, introducing what she names “a queer Chi-cana/Latina ‘intuition’” (p. 1). According to Revilla (2010), a queer Chicana/Latina intuition is

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based on academic study, personal experience and connection to several Chi-cana/Latina queer professional and activist communities that bear with them a collective memory, shared secrets, and a different “discourse community” than the one described by Delgado Bernal, which is still heavily based on heterosexual models of cultural intuition. (para. 16)

Revilla redefines CFE, not only acknowledging how the subjectivities of Chi-cana/Latinas are diverse but also centering a queer episteme that disrupts the confines of heteronormativity. Revilla reminds us that while claiming a CFE, we may still bring colonizing mechanisms, such as heterosexism, with us into the research process. Thus, part of working toward a CFE requires us to con-sider what those mechanisms are in an effort to disrupt them. We seek nuevas teorias produced in the margins—El Mundo Zurdo—as they are manifested in formal and informal educational spaces. Anzaldúa (1999a) reminds us it is not an either/or dilemma but a tolerance for ambiguity, embracing what she refers to as divergent thinking—“movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes” (p. 101).

Cruz’s (2006a, 2006b) ethnographic research on Latina/o queer street youth argues that the body cannot be divorced from research. By centering the body of youth, framed as uneducable yet highly surveilled, as the start-ing point of analysis, Cruz insists that educators can achieve a Chicana critical practice of education in solidarity with the subaltern. For Cruz (2006b), the body is the site of a liberatory Chicana standpoint: “The most profound and liberating politics come from the interrogations of our own social locations, a narrative that works outward from our specific corporealities” (p. 61). Cruz (2006a, 2006b, 2011) found that Latina/o queer street youth use their bodies to challenge heteronormative framings of sexual and gender roles. She locates these disruptions within the testimonios of the youth, concluding:

For the educational researcher, the inclusion of the body holds the beginning of charting new territories in epistemic approaches, where we can begin to develop strategies to rethink our work in education to reflect the multiplicities of lan-guage and history in less partial and less distorted ways. (2006b, p. 72)

Centering the body allows Latinas and queer youth to assert their subjec-tivities and scholars to embrace hybrid methodologies that include the body. Through her documentation of these voices and bodies, Cruz also shows us that educational institutions recoil from the brown body, finding mechanisms to push them out of certain spaces. But while Cruz’s use of testimonio, like Diaz Soto’s (2009) use of X-PAR, may provide a means with which to decolonize the relationship between subject and researcher, we must ask if it is enough for us to simply affirm the voice of the queer or the subaltern? Cruz (2011) and the Chicana feminists whose work is reviewed here suggest it is not. We must also stand in solidarity with them and “change the methodological tools and cat-egories to reclaim those neglected voices” (Elenes, 2011, p. 60).

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Indeed, Chicana feminist work begins from the lives of the oppressed who are located in multiple spaces. Anzaldúa (1983) reminds us that the sites of such oppressions may be as different as the street corner (Cruz 2006a, 2006b) or a college campus (Revilla, 2010; Hisa, 2001). Nevertheless, we reside together in El Mundo Zurdo, the shared space where “the people who don’t belong anywhere” exist and have potential to reveal insights that might other-wise be ocultados, hidden out of sight. She also reminds us that for our research “to have . . . transformative power, [it] must arise from the human body—flesh and bone” (Anzaldúa, 1999a, p. 97). The work of Revilla, Cruz, and others (Hisa, 2001) is exemplary of decolonizing educational research and practice because it privileges the subjectivities of bodies marginalized by mainstream scholarship. This work is significant because it disrupts heteronormative vio-lence imposed on queer students of color, and it provides pedagogical and methodological tools that legitimate the body as a source of knowledge. Plac-ing queer and other subjectivities at the center allows these researchers to ask different questions that illuminate the realities faced by queer and other mar-ginalized communities as well as the diversity within them.

In education, queering the body or place can occur in multiple ways. Pérez (2003) points to how this can be done: “To queer the border is to look at the usual documents with another critical eye, a nonwhite, noncolonial nonhet-eronormative eye” (p. 128).

The following Chicana education scholars turn to documents such as curric-ulum and textbooks to engage in this type of transformative work. Calderón’s (2008, 2011, in press) research examines how social studies curricula promote settler colonialism in the United States. She draws from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that consists of Smith’s (1997) decolonizing methodol-ogies and Delgado Bernal’s (1998) cultural intuition. She interweaves an indi-genized perspective with cultural intuition by drawing from Deloria’s (2001) “power of place”—the embodied and living presence of landscapes and place as spirit that is central in many indigenous worldviews. Her cultural intuition is informed by a living, spiritual geography that draws from the unique expe-rience of her own border Mexican/Indigenous community as well as the set-tler and indigenous histories of the border. Calderón (2011) also explores how epistemologies of ignorance are produced in social studies curricula in ways that promote knowledge gaps or “colonial blind discourses” concerning Indigenous peoples. She explains how her multiple sources of cultural intu-ition, including place, provide her with an acute awareness, or facultad, that unmasks settler relations with Indigenous peoples. Calderón’s (in press) work highlights the impact of settler colonialism on schooling, thus beginning the work of healing places from the impact of colonialism.

Pendleton Jiménez’s (2006) research examines place and its colonial sub-jectivities, paying attention to the body and its function in Chicana critical edu-cation scholarship. Specifically, she examines the relationship between land, identity, colonialism, and sexuality to articulate “Chicana pedagogies of the

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land,” which locate Chicana bodies within the framework of colonial interac-tions. Pendleton Jiménez argues that similar to the land, Chicana bodies have been stripped of value through the process of European colonial expansion. Like the extraction of natural resources that scar the earth, the accompany-ing degradation of the environment, and the borders erected on land to keep out unwanted bodies, the devaluation of brown women’s bodies is connected to the colonization of the land. As mestizas (both colonizers and colonized) there is a hybridity to our relationship to the land (Villenas, 1996). Grounded in her own subjectivity, for instance, Pendleton Jiménez (2006) describes how her own hybrid identity exemplifies this relationship between place and space: “Because my very body is a product of these multiple ancestries, because my very body, as a butch lesbian, is the image of both genders, because my sexual desire and love are for feminine women, my relation as a Chicana dyke to this land is a mess” (p. 223). Her body is testament to the material consequences of colonialism, and thus identity is intimately woven within this colonial pro-cess. However, it is not a fixed location or identity. One can struggle with these embodied identities, resisting heteronormative, patriarchal, and racial-ized subjectivities. Pendleton Jiménez asserts that transformative educational practices must include examinations of colonialism in curricula. Her use of hybridity outlines how educators working with queer students can help inter-rogate heteronormative stressors. Furthermore, she reminds us to revisit our own histories in order to understand how the markers of colonialism on our bodies and identities influence who we are today.

Together, this work demonstrates that pursuing decolonizing educational research can begin from the lives of Chicanas, paying attention to the places where we are located. We must also pay attention to the manner in which colonial ontologies are inscribed onto contemporary bodies. Without such an endeavor, the multiple ways colonial oppressions shape our educational lives go unexamined. This work of queering place requires us, as Pérez (2003) asserts, to look “for different possibilities and interpretations of what exists in the gaps and silences but is often not seen or heard” (p. 129). Seeing with a decolonial queer gaze, as the above authors do, allows us to look for those gaps where certain knowledges are purposefully hidden to maintain systems of power. This work also requires that we turn the gaze inward to disrupt het-eronormativity, classism, and racism in ways that we might not have recognized outside El Mundo Zurdo. As Pérez (2003) and Anzaldúa (1999a) remind us, to examine the gaps we must examine the methods used by Chicana education researchers to facilitate this examination. In other words, how is a decolonial queer gaze enacted in educational research?

Decolonizing Methodologies: “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together”

To me [Coyolxauhqui’s story is] a symbol not only of violence and hatred of women but also of how we’re split body and mind, spirit and soul. We’re sep-arated. I think the reason this image is so important to me is that when you

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take a person and divide her up, you disempower her. She’s no longer a threat. My whole struggle in writing, in this anticolonial struggle, has been to put us back together again. To connect up the body with the soul and the mind with the spirit. That’s why for me there’s such a link between the text and the body, between textuality and sexuality, between the body and the spirit. (Anzaldúa in Keating, 2000, p. 220)

Coyolxauhqui is the Mesoamerican moon goddess who, according to leg-end, had her body cut up and the pieces buried in different places by her brother Huitzilopochtli. In her work, Anzaldua reclaims the myth of Coyol-xauhqui, offering a vision for social justice writing and theorizing that seeks the holistic reunification of the bodymindspirit. She invites us to reimagine ourselves as scholar-warriors who think differently, recognize alternative forms of knowledge, and engage in spiritual activism with our body, spirit, and text. The scholarship in this section has responded to her invitation to construct and employ decolonizing methodologies that begin to “put us back together.” These decolonizing methodologies include, but are by no means limited to, testimonio, pláticas, and trenzas y mestizaje. Collectively, they challenge objectiv-ity, call for reciprocity, merge the bodymindspirit, and inject a sense of politi-cal urgency to address educational inequities in Chicana/o communities.

The methodology of testimonio, born out of Latin American human rights struggles, is an example of a decolonizing methodology that is increasingly reshaped and used by Chicana education scholars (Behar, 1993; Benmayor, 1991; Burciaga, 2007; González, 2006; Pérez Huber, 2009; Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012b). Because it “align[s] with a strong femi-nista tradition of theorizing from the brown female body, breaking silences, and bearing witness to both injustice and social change” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012b, p. 364), it can be understood as a response to Anzaldúa’s call to link the text and the body as it merges our communities with academia. Testi-monio in education represents an important methodological tool that inserts Chicana voices and enacts new forms of political agency, allowing “for differ-ent possibilities and interpretations of what exists in the gaps and silences but is often not seen or heard” (Pérez, 2003, p. 129).

Saavedra’s (2011) research concerning language and literacy practices uti-lizes testimonio to explore the complex experiences of immigrant and trans-national language arts students. She draws from the works of Anzaldúa and other Chicana feminist scholars to “challenge dominant conceptions and productions of theory, knowledge, and pedagogy” (p. 262). Her theoretical framework influences her quest for “nuevas posibilidades” that might be found within the linguistic margins and outside of academia. For example, she writes in English and Spanish because this bilingualism best captures the way people live and talk in the frontera. Through testimonio, she narrates her personal story about language and literacy as an immigrant from Nicaragua, a bilingual teacher in Texas, and a scholar of early childhood ESL/bilingual education. She also uses testimonio to reimagine and revolutionize children as “organic

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intellectuals” and reimagine “nuevas posibilidades for working with children” (p. 267). The implications of Saavedra’s use of testimonio are important to highlight in light of current anti-immigrant/English-only politics that tar-get Latinas/os. Through her work, she foregrounds the voices of those stu-dents that dominant society frames as deficient. She demands that education research make whole the intellect of bicultural children and recognize the code switching of language and cultures of the border as valuable wisdom and competence. In doing this, she demonstrates how scholars can draw on mul-tiple sources of knowledge, including the intellectual, spiritual, and political, to devise decolonizing methodologies.

González (1998, 2001) provides another example of a decolonizing meth-odology in what she calls “trenzas y mestizaje.” Her research examines how gen-dered cultural socialization and the transmission of educación shape Mexicana ways of knowing, teaching, and learning. González (2001) creates and utilizes a “multimethodological approach of trenzas y mestizaje, the braiding of the-ory, qualitative research strategies, and sociopolitical consciousness for inter-acting with and gathering knowledge from young Mexicanas” (p. 643). The methodology of trenzas y mestizaje draws from Montoya’s (1994) concept of trenzas (braids), to weave together pláticas, women’s popular conversations, González’s positionality as a researcher, and her research participants’ voices “as an analytic frame of intersectionality” (González, 2001, p. 645). Inspired by Anzaldúa’s call for nuevas teorías, González offers trenzas y mestizaje as an innovative new theory or methodology grounded in Chicana feminism. This theory proposes that knowledge derived from and about the experiences of Chicanas is crucial for their educational success (see Espino, Muñoz, & Mar-quez Kiyama, 2010).

Delgado Bernal, Alemán, and Garavito (2009) use a borderlands analysis to examine first-year Latina/o undergraduate students’ participation in an ethnic studies service learning course at a predominately white institution. The authors draw from González’s (1998) trenzas y mestizaje methodology to blend their personal and professional identities as well as their intellectual, political, and spiritual work with that of their student participants. This meth-odological approach revealed the importance of understanding identities as something you keep creating (Anzaldúa, 2002). The authors did this by pro-viding students with critical discourses that allowed them to “talk back” to nor-mative discourses that marginalize nondominant experiences and by provid-ing alternative ways for students to be connected to university life.

While they had initial concerns that the service learning component of the class might overwhelm the students, the authors found that the students’ involvement as mentors to Latina/o youth in the nearby community had the opposite effect: their participation led them to reflect on the transformation of their social and political identities as Latina/o students on campus and in the community. The authors explore this transformation by drawing from a sitios y lenguas framework (Pérez, 1998) and the concept of hybrid identities

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(Anzaldúa, 1999a). Their research, like Anzaldúa’s vision of putting ourselves back together, attempts to represent students as whole while still recognizing the fluidity of students’ identities and the multiple worlds they bridge in and out of academia.

These scholars illuminate how engaging a CFE leads to the development of methodologies that provide explicit strategies to disrupt oppressive research paradigms that reinforce the bodymindspirit split. Returning to Anzaldúa’s Coyolxauhqui, these methodological approaches become tools of our spiri-tual activism through which we bridge multiple identities, sensibilities, and spiritualities in “putting ourselves back together” and allowing us to more fully understand the experiences of marginalized communities.

In this literature review, we have presented key works that illustrate how a CFE is an evolving, living framework responding to the diversity of Chicana experiences. What is perhaps most provocative is how Delgado Bernal’s (1998) cultural intuition has been expanded in ways that queer, indigenize, decolo-nize, and spiritualize the research process. Undoubtedly, Chicana feminisms provide the tools to perform decolonizing educational research that reimag-ines these processes in liberatory ways. Chicana feminism’s rich hermeneuti-cal trajectory provides education scholars with theoretical, methodological, and epistemological sources to document the lives of students placed at the margins of the educational pipeline. These scholars also challenge us to think about how we use a CFE. Does our work demand we live in a state of nepantla, residing in “the overlapping space between different perceptions and belief systems” (Anzaldúa, 2002, p. 541) regarding pedagogy and research? How do our subjectivities as Chicana education researchers allow us to imagine El Mundo Zurdo and queer conventional notions of body and place? How can we use a CFE and call on Coyolxauhqui to engage research in holistic ways that allow us to reconstruct our communities and ourselves? We have noted how these scholars and others include issues of place, relationships, spirituality, and sexuality as sources of their own cultural intuition. They also challenge us to be vigilant about the orthodoxies we may bring to the research process that unwittingly silence others.

Our Researcher Reflections

Anzaldúa asks us to be reflective in our spiritual activism (Keating, 2000). We offer this section as a reflection on the research process, one full of contra-dictions, tensions, and unknowns. While the literature review focused on the new findings, theories, methodologies, and pedagogies offered by a new gen-eration of scholars, our researcher reflections offer personal accounts of what it means to do this work. Lindsay Pérez Huber provides a moving account of beginning research from bodymindspirit and embracing our vulnerabilities through the research process. María C. Malagón shares compelling insights gained while working with Chicano male youth pushed out of schools and con-

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siders the tensions in centering the body as a site of decolonization. Verónica Vélez concludes with a powerful reflection on her work as a scholar-activist with ALIANZA, a grassroots advocacy group comprised of mostly Chicana/Latina immigrant mothers. Individually these reflections provide powerful portraits of the tensions, contradictions, insights, and syntheses of using a CFE in educational research. Collectively, these reflections remind us what is both unique and powerful in this framework.

A Testimonio on Cultural Intuition, Healing, and Spiritual Activism (Lindsay Pérez Huber)In this reflection, I challenge myself to make sense of the role of cultural intu-ition in my research and life. I return to a very difficult moment during my doctoral program when I experienced the death of my father. Following his passing, I quickly returned to school and work as a way to cope with this tragic loss and avoid confronting my profound grief. This experience led to a real-ization that fundamentally changed me: I had to face and embrace my grief in order to move forward in a process of healing that could not be divorced from my research. It informed the ways I engage in research now by allowing a space for vulnerability and the joining of the bodymindspirit in my work. Here I discuss how this vulnerability was shared with the Chicana college students who participated in my dissertation research and became a powerful source of my own cultural intuition.

My realization was prompted by a presentation given by a group of my peers who discussed remaining spiritually grounded and caring for one’s self as women of color in the academy (Cueva, González Cárdenas, & Pérez, 2007). Their presentation led me to consider the state of my own bodymindspirit in relation to my work as a researcher after having recently experienced such a traumatic loss. By preoccupying myself with my work and avoiding my grief, I had (un)consciously attempted to separate myself from my research. Acting as the “detached” or “unbiased” researcher was a contradiction to the research I was so passionate about and to the researcher I thought I was. It was a con-tradiction to testimonio (the methodological approach I utilized) and to my Chicana feminist epistemological stance.

Hernández-Ávila (2002) explains that as women of color facing the daily realities of oppression and trauma, grief can become normalized in our lives.

[G]rief has become so familiar we’ve made a home for it in our lives, we tend to it, we serve it, we give ourselves over to it. For some of us the grief has turned into creative rage, to awesome deliberate coraje, for others grief has become a bitterness so deeply immobilizing it’s hard to have faith in anything, much less ourselves. (p. 534)

In my attempt to compartmentalize my grief, I gave myself to it. Prior to experiencing the death of my father, I was privileged in naming the anger and grief I encountered from racism, patriarchy, classism, and ageism—systems

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of power I frequently experienced as a young, heterosexual Chicana mother and student. Hernández-Ávila (2002) reminds us that our greatest privilege is “knowing how to read and write, how to think things through and see it and name it all” (p. 533). Why I felt I could name grief caused by oppression and not death is still unknown to me. However, this experience granted me the insight to learn from grief. I decided that I would move forward with my research and begin a process of healing.

I began documenting the testimonios of Chicana college students for my dissertation. These testimonios revealed the complexities of identity and oppression that emerged throughout their lives that caused them great pain and trauma. I remember feeling those emotions with them—sadness, anger, hurt. Their testimonios were not only stories about sadness and pain but also about the resiliency, faith, love, and hope they found to forge ahead. I fre-quently found myself sharing with these students my own experiences as a mother, daughter, and student—not as strategic moves to engender comfort or identification but out of compassion and care. During the study, the women explained that in sharing and reflecting on their testimonios, they found heal-ing and empowerment, and documenting these testimonios—the painful and the hopeful—was a process of healing and empowerment for me as well.

Entering this research at that moment in my life was a turning point that enabled me to acknowledge my grief. I became consciously vulnerable and forced myself to integrate bodymindspirit—“the sacred and the profane in our work, the spiritual and the political in our lives, and our mind with our body” (Lara, 2002, p. 436). This allowed me to deal with my sense of loss and engage in healing. I recognized my own vulnerability as a form of my cultural intu-ition. However, it wasn’t exclusively my own vulnerability that played a role in cultural intuition; the participants were also vulnerable in sharing their most intimate fears and greatest hopes with me. This was especially salient for the undocumented students in the study. I believe a shared vulnerability can be a source of cultural intuition that allows us to enter each other’s lives in the research process and become motivated to overcome pain, trauma, or grief; it engenders a solidarity that moves us toward a collective effort of healing, empowerment, and resistance.

Being motivated by the stories and experiences of others through the research process, I developed a sense of collective agency that signaled my contradictions of detachment and allowed me to confront my grief. I engaged in a shared vulnerability that became an empowering source of cultural intu-ition. Moving forward with my dissertation, engaging this cultural intuition, and documenting the testimonios of other Chicana students provided me with a profound sense of peace and afforded me a process of healing.

My hope is that my work contributes toward a larger structural and ide-ological transformation of educational theory and practice, yet I too have been transformed; I have gained much more than I am able to give. My work became a form of spiritual activism that produced solidarity, reciprocity, and

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transformation. I continue this research empowered by the idea that this work is a collective social justice project that I take part in with other mujeres within and outside of the academy. It is work that “feeds my soul” (Delgado Bernal, 2008, p. 145). It is my story of Coyolxauhqui (Anzaldúa, 2000). It is work that put me back together again.

Bodies as Discursive Sites in Contested Spaces (María C. Malagón)As I straddle the contradictions of academia, I am aware of the relative privi-lege this space affords me as I simultaneously struggle to engage in a decolo-nial praxis—one of survival, acknowledging that my purpose as a scholar is not just an act of consuming ideas, but that I carry the responsibility of creating them. In my research on the educational trajectories of Chicano male students in a continuation high school, I reflect on the presence of Coyolxauhqui. In order to challenge the colonizing discourses that distort and erase the rela-tionship between ineffective schooling and the educational experiences of Chicano youth, I found that I needed to account for the body in ways that normative educational research has not.

The politics of the body are intimately connected with other sources of cultural intuition, but its significance is not always explicit in the research process. For the young men in my study, where they lived, which schools they attended, how the school was built, where they sat in class, and where and when they hung out in their neighborhoods informed the regulation and gov-ernance of their brown bodies. Their experience and the contradictions they embody are intimately connected to my own. While I understand my relative privilege as a light-skinned Chicana, I refuse to disown the knowledge I bring from my home and community. As a young child, I learned the politics of my difference and chose to resist. I never backed down from taking on stu-dents, teachers, or school staff when I witnessed or experienced oppressive practices. My resistance was blamed on my friends, the “bad kids” (i.e., brown and black students). As a “scholarship girl” (Rendon, 1992) I navigated multi-ple borderlands: I lived in a working-class neighborhood but attended “good,” middle-class schools, and in school I migrated back and forth between regular and honors classes. These experiences allow me to understand how the body becomes regulated within schooling institutions and how, in turn, youth resist. While much dominant research may frame this disengagement as “lazy,” “at-risk,” and even “criminal” behavior, my own experiences allow me to see the complexity of youth resistance.

Still, there were challenges leading the group of young men who collabo-rated with my research through a decolonizing process that would allow for us to come together and produce ideas. Throughout, navigating these bor-derlands tensions became a rich focal point for our theorizing. Our initial disagreements allowed us to question, among other things, the different per-ceptions of institutional racism that arose from those who attended mostly Latino schools and those who went to mostly white schools. Sharing our expe-

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riences, we learned of the qualitative differences between these schools and explored how the racial composition of spaces mattered in shaping a race consciousness.

A more difficult tension arose as we explored how patriarchy mediated the experiences of these men. Some of the young men were not conscious of how daily school practices represented a need to control their racialized male bod-ies, and I had to conceive of a way in which to dialogue about patriarchy in a way that did not alienate them. I created an activity that pushed us to reexam-ine our trajectories through a feminist analysis. It began with me interrogating my experiences as a light-skinned Chicana and how I was afforded little, yet relative, privilege in some contexts. Teasing out my specific gendered expe-riences, I revealed my relationship with patriarchy in schools and my com-munity. As the youth followed suit, I came to see exactly how tedious, messy, and humbling this process was for them. I frequently intervened during silent and uncomfortable moments, reaffirming our commitment to maintaining a respectful and sacred space. We collectively agreed that rigid constructions of Chicano masculinity reproduced oppressive conditions, as Omar reflected:

We’re always worried about proving ourselves as men, but we’ll like never be complete, because I now know that we’re always going to be seen as kids. We can’t even break that cycle ’cause like for jornaleros [day laborers], we call them niños, even though they’re grown-ass men.

In deconstructing patriarchy in this way, we could only go so far. I was not able to interrogate heteronormative assumptions despite my attempts at prob-ing these issues. This pointed to larger issues of homophobia and heterosex-ism that are entrenched in complicated ways. I recognized that for young men who live and participate in patriarchy, these issues are extremely difficult to discuss within this mostly all-male space where these youth might have to later face the negative consequences of having been willing to discuss such issues. Perhaps with more time we could have engaged in creating a safer space in which we could have explored these issues more critically.

In light of these tensions, our collective theorizing allowed us to explore unexamined oppressive mechanisms. We explored how for students who do not feel attached to schooling and disengaged in the classroom learning can still exist outside of schools. As our theorizing emanated from our flesh, our analysis guided us into a transformative space of healing in which margin-alized youth began to rearticulate their identities as learners. Like Coyol-xauhqui, they were putting themselves back together—a notion most had rarely considered. The youth described activities they engaged in outside of school—such as learning history and languages, performing music, and other artistic expression—that were nurtured by their communities. Chicana femi-nist praxis offered the opportunity to locate the Chicano male body in edu-cational discourse and practice and allowed youth to become collaborators in the research process and all of us to engage in a process of putting ourselves

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back together. These decolonial forms of collaborative research and analy-sis and the tensions inherent in such work allow us to (re)articulate how our resistance can inform potentially transformative forms of agency.

Triggers and Milestones: Reflections on Becoming a Nepantlera (Verónica Nelly Vélez)Through my dissertation, I sought to document the formation of ALIANZA, a Latina immigrant parent group, as a vehicle by which to theorize about Latina immigrant mothers as powerful agents of change in schools and society at large. As one who witnessed my own immigrant parents rebuffed, ignored, and mistreated by the school system, the motivation to engage in this work is deeply personal. I joined the group as a volunteer in 2004, looking for ways to continue my community work with Latina/o families that I did prior to gradu-ate school. Little did I know that what began as a sincere community orga-nizing effort would turn into a journey of self-discovery, deep-rooted friend-ships, new avenues for activist scholarship. And, most importantly, who knew that it would lead to a strengthened commitment to embracing, engaging, and extending those methodological strategies, in both research and activism, that work to center the lives and experiences of marginalized communities so often silenced and/or distorted.

At first, contemplating this research with a parent group I had been collab-orating with for years meant facing others’ critique of my work as inherently “biased.” But my exposure to antiracist, antipatriarchal theories and frame-works prior to graduate school prepared me to address this critique. Another, much deeper concern was raised in conversation with Selena, the founder of ALIANZA, when I first approached her to volunteer for the group. Immedi-ately after introducing myself, she asked if I was a baseball player. Confused, I asked her to explain. She shared that other students and researchers from local universities had approached ALIANZA to examine their use of popular education as a core strategy for working with immigrant parents. Naively, she allowed them access to the group, expecting that the relationship would lead to a mutually supportive partnership. Instead, after they obtained what they needed from ALIANZA, she never saw them again. According to her, “pisaban y corrian” (they stepped and they ran), similar to baseball players. Her meta-phor for the often exploitative nature of education research replayed in my mind for several years, adding to the tension I feel between my roles as scholar and activist.

Reading the work of Chicana feminist scholars, specifically Delgado Ber-nal’s work on cultural intuition, triggered a profound shift in how I positioned myself in both these roles. I began to see value in my personal and profes-sional experiences with immigrant parents as critical sources of knowledge for shaping my research. I shared this work with ALIANZA mothers, who col-lectively began to reconceptualize research in much more transformative ways and eventually welcomed the idea of collaborating with me on my dissertation

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project that explored the political agency of the group. I also realized that the binary of activist-scholar was, in essence, a contradiction; yet embracing the merger of these roles was not immediate. While I celebrated how a CFE pro-vided me strategies to deconstruct traditional approaches to research and cen-ter my experiences in order to make way for alternative knowledge, practicing a new positionality informed by a CFE required additional work.

I wrestled with the tension of what it would mean to authentically coproduce research with the mothers of ALIANZA when the terms allowed for a disserta-tion project had been set by the university. For example, I proposed my dis-sertation be multiauthored in order to reflect the collective voices and efforts that would be involved in producing the dissertation. However, I was told that I would be denied my degree if more than one author was listed. I returned to the group with this disheartening news. Subsequently, I contemplated leaving the doctoral program after finding it difficult to reconcile these requirements with my commitment to ALIANZA and to a CFE as a guiding framework. It was ALIANZA mothers who helped me refocus on the dissertation. Together with the group’s coordinator, I organized three separate meetings to design and craft research questions, objectives, goals, and a collaborative approach to the study. The mothers understood that while they were supporting a dissertation project, our commitment to see this become something larger, something that would support the aims of the group, was the driving force for its completion.

These conversations triggered another shift in how I saw myself in rela-tion to ALIANZA. While encouraged by their words and commitment to the dissertation, and with a CFE as a core guide, I nonetheless felt challenged in my ability to fully capture ALIANZA’s experiences as someone who is nei-ther a parent nor an immigrant. I wondered what it meant as a Chicana femi-nist researcher to challenge deficit work done by white male researchers on Latina/o communities and not confront my own blind spots. Rather than deal with these tensions alone, I brought them to the group and discussed them openly with ALIANZA mothers. While these conversations didn’t necessarily reconcile these tensions, they provided a collective process by which to work through them. They also helped me realize that I share a community mem-ory with the mothers, particularly in the shared cultural ways we relate to one another and to the world around us. This shared perspective is informed by a sense of solidarity and commitment to community goals rooted in a long-standing practice of mutual aid common in many rural communities through-out Latin America.

Building reciprocal relationships with the mothers and working toward collective ends took years, and this negatively affected my ability to navigate through the academy. My commitment to the process meant that it took lon-ger to complete my doctoral degree and that I had to respond to questions about the length of my journey to the PhD. Although I resisted, the urgency to complete the dissertation grew as the years passed. I struggled with the com-ments and the disinvestment of faculty who perceived me as an undercommit-

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ted scholar who was not making the most of my time in graduate school. As I tried to drown out feelings of guilt and disappointment, I realized just how necessary a CFE was in helping me appreciate the value in what I was doing. I learned to embrace nepantla. The work of confronting the tensions that are part and parcel of having one foot in the academy and one in the community is at the core of what is required to produce transformative scholarship. A CFE is not a given; it is acquired. I came to see the importance of the deeply per-sonal spiritual work necessary to becoming an activist-scholar—a nepantlera (Burciaga, 2007).

Considering Our Researcher ReflectionsThese researcher reflections above offer intimate insights into what it means to use a CFE in educational research. It is more than just adopting a theoreti-cal lens, becoming familiar with a literature, learning corresponding meth-odologies, and analyzing data. As these researcher reflections demonstrate, adopting a CFE in educational research centers the bodymindspirit. This move is not made without caution. We must be ready to truly encounter our-selves through this process. And as we have demonstrated, Anzaldúa’s (1999a) work can serve as a meaningful guide. To truly endeavor toward a CFE, we must first confront those aspects of ourselves that render us the colonized or the perpetrator, particularly if we are working with marginalized communities and even if we are from these communities (i.e., the immigrant, the queer, the undocumented, the youth). Moreover, the reflections offer revealing insights into what it means to confront ourselves in this process—what it means to put ourselves back together and make ourselves whole. This demands that we do not approach the research process as baseball players, “pisando y corriendo.” It means that we confront the research process with our total selves—our grief, our fears, our desires, and our love. It means that we anchor our body, whether we are prietas or güeras, butch or fem, or someone more ambiguous, we accept and reconcile who we are and how we have come to be. This pro-cess encourages us to embrace a transformative consciousness, a queering of how we see the world in order to embrace alternative ways of knowing. Taken together, the research we examine here and our researcher reflections dem-onstrate that the fruits of this intellectual and spiritual labor are abundant. We come full circle.

Closing Words (Dolores Delgado Bernal)

Women united in close circles can awaken the wisdom in each other’s hearts. If in addition we learn to surrender to the ancestors’ guidance, we will learn about our mission together. As the bringers of life, the Grandmothers say we have no choice but to join together and raise our voices for humanity and for our Mother Earth, for the sake of the next seven generations to come. (Schaefer, 2006, p. 144)

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What is exciting to me is the way in which new generations of Chicana scholars have awakened the wisdom in each of us, sharing this wisdom in educational research and practice for current and future generations of marginalized peo-ple. As a graduate student, I recognized the wisdom of my elders and of those on whose shoulders I stood, but I saw little of this wisdom reflected in schol-arly articles published within the field of education. My early, and somewhat limited, exploration of cultural intuition and a Chicana feminist epistemologi-cal framework in education attempted to draw on alternative knowledges and a sensibility that was informed by both my ancestors’ and my own experiences and ways of knowing.

What I see present in the scholarship we reviewed (both what we included and those we could not include) and in the researcher reflections is schol-arship that translates into a way of life and requires us to understand our-selves as Chicana scholars in relation to our bodies, sexualities, place, com-munities, current sociopolitical realities, and commitment to social change. I see research that does not fit into predetermined categories, that is messy, full of contradictions, often very personal, and sometimes quite painful. The new generation of scholarship has allowed me to nurture and expand my own ideas and understandings of a CFE, but perhaps most importantly I know that the contribution of these writings to the field of education is monumental. The authors take seriously Anzaldúa’s call we started with: “turn the estab-lished narrative on its head . . . and provide new narratives.” They do this by disrupting Western colonial assumptions such as the ideas that research needs to be neutral or unbiased and that our bodymindspirit must be separate enti-ties. They then provide alternative methodological tools and categories that offer us countless opportunities, such as seeing with a decolonial queer gaze (Pérez, 2003) and engaging in a spiritual activism (Anzaldúa, 2002).

The process of decolonizing our educational research and practices is a complicated and never-ending journey with no exact destination. Chicana feminist scholarship is charting new paths on this journey. It is contributing to and allied with other forms of critical race, feminist, and decolonial scholar-ship. Yet, this work is uniquely Chicana in that it draws from the borderland experiences of Chicanas and the theoretical ideas (i.e., nepantla, cultural intu-ition, Xicana Sacred Space, border/transformative pedagogy, and borderland-mestizaje-feminism) that emerge from those experiences. That is, this body of scholarship provides us with theories that emerge from particular subjec-tivities, geographies, and histories of struggle (Villenas, 2010). And while col-lectively we hope it contributes to how we understand and address the edu-cational inequities within all marginalized communities, we demonstrate in this article that there is already a clear application to Chicana/o communi-ties. While this scholarship does not provide one specific solution for altering the educational outcomes of Chicana/o communities, it does provide unique insights into and understandings of our educational experiences. It also pro-vides us with a vision of hope and healing “that allows us to collectively and

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audaciously move towards action without assurance that educational struc-tures will indeed change” (Delgado Bernal & Elenes, 2011, p. 115).

I return to and end with Anzaldúa (2002), who tells us that “Coyolxauhqui represents the search for new metaphors to tell you what you need to know, how to connect and use the information gained” (p. 563). With this under-standing, my hope is that current and future generations of Chicana scholar-activists continue to raise our voices to put Coyolxauhqui back together as we (re)construct the ways we hear, interpret, and learn from and within a Chi-cana feminist epistemology in educational research.

Notes1. We use Chicana and Latina interchangeably throughout the article.2. This term was introduced by Lara (2002) as a way to integrate the body, mind, spirit

split and demonstrate visually how these three are indivisible.3. Prior to 1998 there were only a few education articles (see Elenes, 1997; Villenas, 1996)

that drew on Chicana feminism in a significant way. However, since that time, and espe-cially in the last decade, there has been a surge in the scholarship that takes up Chicana feminist perspectives as a decolonizing framework.

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A Chicana Feminist Epistemology Revisited: Cultivating Ideas a Generation Later

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