“Minorities and Mentoring in the Postcolonial Borderlands” Radical History Review 72 (Fall 1998): 21-31.

Minorities and Mentoring in the Postcolonial Borderlands

Vik Bahl and Manuel Callahan

The imperatives of radical mentoring, in the context of the corporatiza- tion of the academy and budgetary cutbacks in the humanities and social sciences, must attend to the project of identifying and enhancing student power, authority, and autonomy.' In the face of the devastating success of structural adjustment in the academy, students have struggled for reductions in tuition and fees, access to opportunity, the unionizing of teaching assistants, improved health care, increased funding for alternative programs, and curriculum reform.2 For students (and faculty) of color, regressive shifts in the public discourse around race further complicate the challenges posed by the most recent phase of the global- ization of capital. The alarmingly successful attacks on affirmative ac- tion, such as the Hopwood decision in Texas and Proposition 209 in California, herald a period of renewed ra~ialization.~ The response to Hopwood and other such initiatives must take many forms, including creative legislative and administrative strategies, popular mobilization, and education. However, the post-Hopwood era also calls for new strategies directed at and within the academy itself. This article describes one pedagogic and political response to these conditions and objectives, the Advanced Seminar in Postcolonial Borderlands (ASPB), undertaken entirely by Chicano/a students (with the exception of one member from India) at The University of Texas at A ~ s t i n . ~

Writing as "students" for this special edition of Teaching Radical History, we recognize the significance of mentorship for the formation of radical5 academics. But we would insist also upon the capacity of students to take responsibility for their own education, that is, to attend individually and collectively to their own mentorship and the future of their communities. Notwithstanding the transformative power of radical faculty mentors, whose sufficient presence and availability in any given site cannot be guaranteed, our individual experiences prior to the founding of the seminar revealed the impossibility of relying upon faculty alone to provide the necessary tools and support for our

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academic success and evolving political identities. Access to the relatively few radical faculty on campus may be difficult for various reasons, including their own struggles for professional survival, political activi- ties, and teaching commitments, among other potential conflicts. They may also have a set of priorities regarding their politics within a depart- ment or the campus at large that cannot meet the myriad needs of developing students. While individual faculty members have been crucial to our learning and for making opportunities available, these rela- tionships cannot easily undo the conservatism of professionalization, the alienating apprenticeship associated with the guild system, nor the hierarchies of academic relations, which can produce empowering but also devastating effects. Moreover, if one way of characterizing the aim of radical pedagogy is the production of ”de-professionalized intellectu- als,” there may be necessary limits to the important role that faculty mentors, often experienced primarily as institutional agents, can play. Having said the above, we do not suggest that the need for and challenges around mentoring are any less urgent, only that they are distrib- uted between faculty and students, as the latter empower themselves.

The question of mentoring, radical or otherwise, cannot be understood as a set of desired prescriptions. Radical mentoring, it seems to us, must attend to the aspirations and claims for a radical cultural identity as they intersect with the constraints and logic of the academy. These include the formal demands of academic progress, contributions to and leadership within a discipline and field, and other dimensions of professional development such as administrative work, teaching innovations, and future academic survival. An investigation of the conditions for radical mentoring must also confront the irony that while the academy promises to be a unique site for the flourishing of unalienated labor, academic work, especially dissertation writing, is often an intoler- ably alienating experience.

These factors, crucial to occupying the academy successfully as a site of political investment, pose additional challenges and contradictions for students of color through the lived experience of race (or cultural difference) and class (or cultural capital). Beyond these effects that reflect the academy’s participation in capitalist relations as well as in traditional professional frameworks for measuring and rewarding intellectual ex- cellence, institutional culture is necessarily constituted by broader bourgeois values and by dominant relations of race, gender, and sexuality. The relatively recent but increasingly embattled presence of new constituencies, at the faculty and student levels, from culturally marginalized positions has of course altered the conditions through which institutional academic social relations can be read.6 While radical students of color may seek to reject the bourgeois values associated with the acad-

MINORITIES AND MENTORING/23

emy, it often remains alluring as a site of privilege, class mobility, desired identity formation, and social and political power. Pedagogic responsibilities and mentoring projects can finally only be understood within this context of institutional culture and the radical possibilities within it. While this culture is heterogeneous and uneven in its effects for student/ scholar subject formation, it nevertheless embodies powerful forces, which may be difficult and in some instances not even desirable to refuse.

The Advanced Seminar in Postcolonial Borderlands While we could not refuse the academy altogether if we were to remain here, we were not content with defining academic radicalism in terms of topic or even methodological approach for the development of our scholarship and pedagogy. We also rejected the liberal, multicultural models sanctioned for students and scholars of color. In large part, the ASPB grew out of our specific needs for radical mentorship to aid us in defining a suitable alternative and enhancing our already existing political commitments. In the fall of 1996, seven students convened the as-yet-untitled Advanced Seminar, which was eventually comprised of nine students from six disciplines, including two undergraduates, who met each week for nearly a year. This was not a random collection of students, nor were shared scholarly interests sufficient for its formation. Rather, the seminar represented a specific political strategy of a particular grouping of people that had developed over the course of several years.

This community had first formed consciously to address collectively the needs of campus radicals and students of color, recognizing that we were often outside of standard channels of academic support and therefore needed alternative mechanisms for our professional development. A small group of students developed a “virtual center,” an effort to transform ”public houses” and “happy hours” into mobile community spaces where politicized students, faculty, and community activists could gather to share information and resources; provide mutual support; forge links between the university and the larger Austin political community; and enable our active participation in campus politics and community struggles.

An initial effort responded to the failure of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) to fulfill its mandate in its service to students and the larger Austin Chicano/a community. The ”virtual center” provided a critical site where students variously called into question the leadership of CMAS, successfully promoted the radical alteration of the Center’s governance structure through the development of an executive committee that included students and staff, and intervened in hiring


decisions throughout c a m p ~ s . ~ Further, this site ensured our role in the landmark founding of the Graduate Student Assembly in service of student movements, which achieved institutional legitimacy through formal access to essential administrative bodies. These spaces also facili- tated contributions by students to other community projects, in particular the Barrio Student Resource Center, the non-commercial community radio station (KOOP 91.7 FM), the alternative university based newspa- per (sub)TEX, and, finally, political work around the Zapatistas through the local activist organization Acci6n Zapatista (AZ).*

Our involvement with the Zapatista revolution currently underway in southeastern Mexico represents a crucial dimension for understanding the birth of the Advanced Seminar. While a great deal has been and remains to be said about the uniqueness of the Zapatistas as a revolutionary force, one significant feature relevant for our formation have been their initiatives in staging dialogues with civil society. They have repeatedly called for a move beyond solidarity to a consideration of the possibilities for linking of multiple, heterogeneous struggles as well as for transformations between and within sectors and locales. This current shift in revolutionary political discourse is captured well by the phrase, ”One No, Many Ye~es!”~ Members of AZ who would later form the ASPB investigated the extent to which the western academy itself constitutes a distinct sector, interrogated its relation to other sectors, and explored the possibilities in this particular historical moment, as radical students, for our own intervention in this site of profound resources and contestation. A central innovation of the ASPB was that it emerged from a constituency that tried to see itself as such, long having moved beyond cultural nationalism and now applying the international- ist and autonomist challenges of the Zapatistas to their own condition and locale.

Our own efforts at alternative, collective mentoring, while retaining our commitments to specific activist projects, accepted the potential value of the training, roles, and responsibilities afforded by the academy and specific disciplines. But resisting their logic, we sought to interrupt and redirect the sanctioned circuits of institutional authority and power. Since the members of the ASPB all claimed histories, identities, research agendas, and political ambitions that effectively ensured their marginali- zation in the academy, the category of ”advanced seminar” we chose for our formation encouraged the subversion of accepted flows of academic information, promotion, and intellectual support and, thus, reflects more than a refusal of the subordinate position allotted to us as (graduate) students. Working from the models of postdoctoral programs and other academic spaces reserved for advanced scholars, we undertook to iden- tify positively our range of expertise, experience, scholarly agendas,


and political commitments as the bases for our claims and modes of operation, transgressing our status as students and valorizing our various projects.

The original motivation for convening the seminar was to explore the possibilities, challenges, and responsibilities of radical academic work and location and to recompose ourselves as a more effective collective force. Our initial discussions therefore focused on critical pedagogy, an assessment of the politics of disciplines (historically and in particular departmental manifestations), and debates about how the new space of the seminar should relate to our already existing projects as well as to other groups, organizations, and formations on campus and in the community. Recognizing that our effectiveness in the academy would not depend upon our understandings of key issues nor on our ideological clarity alone, we also gave priority to questions of our professional development by evolving a self-conscious bureaucratic politics and by charting viable scholarly projects.

To this latter end, crucial meetings were organized around the work- in-progress of seminar members, including conference presentations, dissertation proposals, masters theses, essays, area exam preparation, and curriculum development, The new space of the seminar, following the goals of earlier and ongoing embodiments of the ”virtual center,” was also successful in facilitating the professional development and political maturity of the participants. For instance, one member successfully completed and defended his dissertation and prepared for the job market. Three others advanced to candidacy. And everyone re- positioned themselves in relation to scholarly topics, activist projects, and future academic trajectories. Each member’s projects and vision, we are confident, were fundamentally transformed and enhanced by the sustained dialogue and mechanisms of support afforded by the seminar.

While we resolutely rejected any reduction of the ASPB to the status of ”reading group” or ”support group,” readings on selected themes often structured our meetings in order to assess collectively the forces and issues with which we were contending. These themes included critical pedagogy; the state of the U.S. academy; cultural and material violence; Chicana and non-western feminism; a genealogy of Border- lands; cultural studies, race, subjectivity, and representation; postcolonialism, subaltern studies, diaspora, and hybridity; activist ethnogra- phy; comparative modernities; the intersections of Marxism, anarchism, and autonomia; Zapatismo and the current transformations of the left, among others. Our review of major theoretical innovations in light of the histories, social movements, and political imperatives out of which they have emerged was a crucial strategy for understanding the current


organization of disciplines, their strategies of representation, and the relationship between the academy and social movements."

The engagement with these discourses informed the evolution of "Postcolonial Borderlands." The scholarly work of all members (except one) could be placed under the emergent paradigm of Borderlands, itself a critical outgrowth of Chicano/a Studies." And the idea of articulating Borderlands with postcolonialism grew out of a recognition that many current and emerging fields of study shared a set of concerns and methodologies, grounded in poststructuralism, various Marxisms, and critical race and gender theory, which were addressed by the ambitious scope of postcolonial criticism.12 For example, Borderlands shares with other emerging fields, such as Diaspora Studies, the critiques of essen- tialism, nationalism, and liberal pluralism in favor of analyses that highlight shifting and multiple identity and community formations, with attention to popular agency and resistance as well as to the continu- ities and connections across history and geography. Yet it is also important to insist that these various theoretically-aligned paradigms emerge from and are designed to serve distinct constituencies and often respond to particular disciplinary pressures. "Postcolonial Borderlands" sought to link the intellectual debates and political struggles of constituencies in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with the Zapatistas and the international left, seeking to reposition the study of US. imperialism and westward expansion within the long history of European colonialism and contem- porary global politics.

The eventual naming of the seminar as "Postcolonial Borderlands" also reflected our ambition of claiming unsanctioned authority, even the prerogatives and responsibilities of "senior scholars." As a new, or synthetic, paradigm, Postcolonial Borderlands successfully offered new directions for scholarly inquiry that were both intellectually innovative and politically engaged.13 The paradigm, however, only came to have meaning in the vibrant dialogue between the various scholarly projects of the members, representing the disciplines of history, English, sociology, Spanish literature, sociolinguistics, and education. The projects included critical work on the link between race relations, violence, and cultural formation in late nineteenth-century "greater Mexico"; the lan- guage practices of Latinas in the context of health care institutions in the US.-Mexico borderlands; the flows of popular culture, music, and political consciousness between Rastafarians, Native Americans, and Chicanos; the sociology of community organizations in Chiapas and the lessons of indigenous successes for resistance to neoliberalism in the U.S.; the contradictions of literary nationalist discourse in the borderlands and Latin America, with special attention to the ironic neglect of


Mexican culture deZ otro Zado in Borderlands Studies; a comparative analysis of culture and pedagogy in educational institutions in the U.S. and Chiapas, complementing an investigation of gender and power relations in the Southwest; an assessment of the various local, regional, and international Encuentros called for or inspired by the Zapati~tas;’~ a social history of Latina workers in postwar urban Texas; and the relationship between literary cultural production and postcolonial mid- dle-class politics in the context of subaltern social movements and trans- national capital (India).

Far from seeing scholarship as merely representing various social movements, we regarded the writing of ”cultural history”” (an interdis- ciplinary methodological category) itself as a form of participation in them, from a particular sector. While the seminar saw the legitimacy of the critiques and positive efforts made available by various critical paradigms, including our own, we also sought their political application, particularly with regard to our own location at, movement through, and future diaspora out of The University of Texas at Austin. The ASPB never imagined that innovative scholarship would be the sufficient basis for a radical academic politics that sought to make the academy accountable to social movements. We did not therefore regard our elabo- ration of the paradigm of ”Postcolonial Borderlands” as sufficient. It is only meaningful when understood as part of the political strategy of the ASPB to regard the academy as a site of maneuver, taking into account the operations of disciplinary fields and the needs of constituencies.

In the ASPB, we considered our involvement in social movements emerging from the following communities: the Zapatistas and the international left movements and networks that have been galvanized around them, communities of color in the U.S., the diverse Austin progressive community, and popular movements seeking autonomy in relation to the logic of postcolonial nation-states (eg., in India). Signifi- cant sessions of the ASPB revolved around ongoing activist projects on campus and in the community. These included our development of an analysis and strategy in response to Hopwood, which led us to highlight departmental politics (relating to student funding, committee representation, and the redefinition of fields and curriculum) and also to interface with other groups such as the ”Post-Hopwood Strategy Committee” in order to promote and participate in a sophisticated campus-wide movement; group meetings with visiting scholars and activists; our ongoing work with Acci6n Zapatista; and our multiple initiatives in staging dialogues with other sectors and community activists, culminat- ing in our participation in the historic Austin Encuentro.“ We regarded


the ASPB itself as an important community, which we fostered by inviting other stude&ts to join and by representing ou; analyses and strategies in different venues.

Such an overtly political project as the ASPB situated in the academy allowed for a dynamic dialogue about the limits of academic training; the relation of academic work to social movements; and the role of the university in developing alternative social relations, historically specific countercultures, and collective autonomy. Our work in the Zapatista movement also forced us to examine our own investment in solidarity strategies traditionally associated with left and progressive communities. The seminar allowed us to focus on current political debates about the direction of a radical politics seeking to move beyond traditional Marxist and liberal forms of organizing. And as we considered the role of radical academics in social movements, we came to understand the significance of ”pedagogy” and ”cultural authority” as important cate- gories for reconceptualizing the traditional limits and hierarchies of organizing, which, in our estimation, characterize well some of the uniqueness of the Zapatista dialogue with civil society. Refusing the facile and romantic disavowal of power and authority, we undertook to navigate not only the distribution of power within the academy, as we sought to insure our own academic survival, but also the multiple forms of intellectual and cultural authority and conflict that characterize relations between the academy and community organizations. Whatever the general theses we evolved about the relationship between the academy and other sectors, our own experience and the nature of this pedagogic experiment must be understood within the local contexts of a specific grouping of people working to participate in, transform, and be transformed by UT and the larger Austin political community.

We discovered in the ASPB that for defining and enacting radical cultural and pedagogic alternatives in the academy, it is not sufficient to posit collectivist and egalitarian values in opposition to the competitive, careerist, and elitist ones endemic to institutional culture. Rather, alternative projects must also attend to the relations of power that circulate within the relatively disempowered margins that students occupy. In- deed, the complexities of negotiating power also applied to the internal dynamics of the ASPB itself. Our concern with our collective role as pedagogues, students, and cultural historians was matched by extensive discussions around internal pedagogy, gender, and power within the seminar itself. Rotating facilitation, report preparation, and proposals for each meeting, for example, were conscious efforts to distribute and develop leadership and enhance individual authority. However, the advancement, intellectual and political authority, and competing needs


and visions of different members could not always be expressed and mediated through the collective space of the seminar.

The ambitions of the seminar were many, including collective self- mentoring, but also encompassing three distinct spheres of activism- the community, campus, and academic disciplines. Arguably, it was precisely the difficulties posed by the intersections between objectives that could not be fully managed. For instance, the seminar emerged out of an official political organization but would perhaps never have been founded without an already existing self-perceived community. How- ever, we confronted the limits of operating like an organization via the ASPB, since the logic of more focused objectives within an organization had to contend with the competing logic of general intellectual development and professional advancement, which operates according to a system of rewards and constraints that exceed the local and specific. While we worked to join the radical possibilities of both political and scholarly identities, their mandates do not necessarily coincide. Still, because it has always been our intention to disrupt the conservative effects of the academy, we never abandoned the search for collective and autonomous forms, strategies, and identities.

While the particular formation of the ASPB is no longer in place, its analyses, objectives, and the needs it served remain relevant and urgent.I7 Besides individual progress on scholarly, activist, and academic projects, other proposed projects that emerged in the seminar are being pursued by various members, many of whom are still active in Accion Zapatista. Seminar members bring the insights and analyses of the ASPB to their participation in other struggles and groups. The efforts to rechannel the circuits of academic resources and power, on behalf of our political and professional effectiveness and in collaboration with present and future colleagues, students, and compi?eros, also continue to find creative new expressions. Ultimately, then, the Advanced Semi- nar in Postcolonial Borderlands represented a compelling experiment in exploring and enacting radical and creative forms of pedagogy and cultural authority, not in order to seek power but to exercise it.

Notes The authors would like to thank Professor Toyin Falola, Rebecca Gtimez, and

Karen Sotiropoulos of Radical History R e v i m for their careful and generous readings of earlier drafts.

1. A recent article that discusses the shifts in higher education is Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter, ”Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supply- Side Higher Education,” Social Text 51 (Summer 1997): 9-38.

2. The various struggles on campuses across the country are too numerous to list here. For a current discussion and a history of the emergence of the Center for Campus Organizing, see Jeremy Smith, “Faculty, Students, and Political Engagement,” Social Text 51 (Summer 1997): 131-42.

3. For a discussion of the Hopwood case along with a comparison to Proposition


209, see David Montejano, ”On Hopwood: the Continuing Challenge” in Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican-American Studies (Austin: CMAS Books, 1997): 133-156.

4. In addition to the co-authors, the ASPB included Marco Ifiiguez-Alba, Luis Alvarez, Rebecca GAmez, Heather Garza, Vicki Grise, Pancho McFarland, and Toni Nelson-Herrera.

5. We are aware that the category ”radical” is contested as well as easily misapplied and commodified. Rather than providing our definition explicitly here, we hope that this article and the descriptions of our projects will clarify how we understand and deploy this term.

6. An important discussion of the process of entering the academy for minorities at the faculty level is Robert Alvarez, “Un Chilero en la Academia: Sifting, Shifting and the Recruitment of Minorities in Anthropology,’’ in Race (New Brunswick Rutgers University Press, 1994): 257-69.

7. The course of struggles focused on CMAS and its successful reform initiated by Chicano/a student activists is treated at length in Manuel Callahan, ”I am the Director! I am the Director!” (sub)TEX 1 (May 1994). For an overall treatment of ethnic studies centers, see Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities” in David T. Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994): 157-167.

8. The Zapatistas captured the attention of Mexico’s sixty-five year ruling party and the world as they defied the imposition of neoliberalism and reasserted their political and cultural autonomy. On January 1,1994, date of the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement, they called upon Mexican and international civil society to prevent the further imposition of structural adjustment; to reverse political corruption, cynicism, and non-participation; and to develop an entirely new basis for polities.

9. A recent review of literature that provides a useful discussion of the progress of the Zapatista struggle can be found in Barry Carr, ”’From the Mountains of the Southeast’: A Review of Recent Writings on the Zapatistas of Chiapas,” Journal of lberian and Latin American Studies 3 (December 1997). For an examination of the Zapatista Revolution in the context of subaltern studies and Antonio Negri’s concept of ”constituent power,’’ see Jose Rabasa, “Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection,’’ in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997): 399-431. For a thorough treatment of the Zapatista strategies of political and cultural autonomy, see Gustavo Esteva, ”The Meaning and Scope of the Struggle for Autonomy” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Guadalajara, Mexico, April 1997), and “The Zapatistas and Current Political Struggle” (paper presented at the Second Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, Madrid, Spain, July 1997).

10. An insightful analysis of the relationship between radical politics and anthropology as a discipline can be found in William Roseberry, “The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology,” Radical History Review 65 (1996): 5-25.

11. Provocative investigations of Borderlands as an emerging paradigm can be found in Robert Alvarez, ’/The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology of the Borderlands,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 447-70; and Michael Kearney, ”Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 4 (March 1991): 52-74.

12. Significant interventions in the debates regarding postcolonialism appear in Stuart Hall, “When Was the Post-colonial?: Thinking at the Limit” in Iain Chambers and Linda Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (New York: Routledge, 1996): 242-60; and Cyan Prakash, ”Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Indian Historiography is Good to Think” in Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992): 353-88.

13. We envisioned, but did not complete, a founding statement for the new paradigm that emerged out of the unique conjuncture of members and for our model of


the ”advanced seminar,” which could serve as an introduction to an edited volume and provide the framework for other publishing projects and interventions.

14. Among the many initiatives for dialogue with civil society, the various Encuen- tros that have taken place since Spring 1996 best embody the Zapatista vision of the possibilities for the heterogeneity of social forces and sectors to resist neo-liberalism (the latest phase of global capital) in their diversity. The title of the first Intercontinental Encuentro held in Chiapas in Summer 1996, ”Against Neo-Liberalism and For Human- ity,” also reflects the political principle of ”One No, Many Yeses!” See note 16 for an account of the Austin Encuentro.

15. See Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postrnodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York Columbia University Press, 1997); Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contempora ry Social Theory (Princeton University Press, 1994).

16. A broad-based planning committee collectively organized and provided facilitation training for a two day gathering, held in July 1997, bringing together over one hundred Austin area activists. Inspired by the Zapatista model, the Austin Encuentro provided a political space for dialogue between and among constituencies, sectors and forces, making creative use of coyuntura analysis, with an outcome proposal of three interlinked community activist councils.

17. The ASPB as history and strategy, along with the work of members, has been represented at two conferences with presentations by Marco Ifiiguez-Alba at the panel ”Race, Rap and Resistance,” Mestizo Mainstream: Lone Star Ethnicity and the New Century, University of Texas, San Antonio, November 1997 and by Luis Alvarez, Vik Bahl, Manuel Callahan, and Rebecca Giimez at the panel ”Minorities and Theory in the Academy,” What’s Goin’ On: Africa and the African Diaspora, University of Texas at Austin, February 1998.

“Minorities and Mentoring in the Postcolonial Borderlands” Radical History Review 72 (Fall 1998): 21-31.

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