Cimarrón Pedagogies. Lidia Marte
Qualitative Methodologies and Academic Narratives
Chapter Four: Cimarrón Pedagogies: Marronage, Critical Education and Liberation Paths
Bonus Track: Mapping the Calendars of My Educational Roots and Routes
←viii | ix→
I am grateful to my dearest friend and colleague, Natalia Biani, for being a compassionate witness, first reader and first editor of this book manuscript; without her enthusiasm for the contents, unconditional support, bilingual expertise and insights this work would have not existed. To the series editor at Peter Lang, Yolanda Medina, for her support and editing help since the book prospectus stages. I thank her for believing in the potential of this book and in my ability to complete it. I thank Peter Lang Publishers, for the risk and vision to publish this kind of work. I am grateful to my current and former students; without them this book would have not been necessary; I thank them for helping me remain a student and for inspiring me to continue teaching. I thank those who gave me permission to use samples of their work and evaluations. I thank all of those who did not drop my courses, being open minded and courageous to try the tools I offer, for letting me be a witness to their visions, struggles and cultural histories, and for nurturing hope, the certainty that new generations will help us create more sustainable, just and joyful worlds. Thank you to colleagues who read the manuscript and gave their endorsements.
Thanks to the Department of Sociology & Anthropology (DSA), University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras Campus), for support with accommodating schedules and course-load negotiations to have the time-space to focus on the completion ←ix | x→of my work. Gracias and bows of respect to our DSA chairs over these years, Jorge Giovannetti, Jaime Pérez (an ethnographer who teaches constantly through his kindness, humor and humbleness), and Lanny Thompson. To the chairs’ side-kick angels, administrative assistants, Mildred, Denise and Mari Carmen, for their kind help and for saving us from going mad with paperwork. Thanks to Dr. Ana Maritza Martinez, at one point, dean of the School of Social Sciences, for her time and kind support in moments of job crisis. Kind thanks to Bárbara Abadía-Rexach, innovative scholar, dedicated teacher and friend, for the collaboration to visit mutually our classes, learning from each other’s teaching styles. I am grateful to colleagues in the Comité de Personal of the DSA (especially to Jorge and Juan José), who—unbeknown to them—helped me return to Puerto Rico to complete my healing and to fine-tune my teaching. Thanks to Carlos Guilbe, a brilliant geographer with an ethnographer’s heart, for his support of my work, for his inspiring commitment to his teaching, for his friendship and refreshing sense of humor. Thanks to Viviana de Jesús, Paola Schiapacasse and other colleagues whose names are many to list, and to the “sin par” Donato, at the LabCAD. Thanks to Isar Godreau and Mariluz Franco, for their anti-racist and de-colonizing work that we have been using at UPR to further pedagogies of liberation, and for offering mentoring resources for undergraduate research. Thanks to the cleaning and maintenance crew and administrative staff from different schools and departments, for their work, and for their contribution to help create a community of solidarity in campus. I will be forever grateful to Carole Counihan, Samuel Wilson, Jonathan Shannon and Deborah Kapchan, for their mentoring and support all these years. Many years ago, Val Episcopo, at St. Edwards University (Austin, TX), asked me to explain my approach to using auto-ethnography in the classroom, to her also goes my gratitude, and here is my answer.
Gracias, to my family, who from their dispersed geographies, offer me their love and moral support, even when they don’t quite understand what is it that I do. Thanks to old and new dear friends, for their moral and survival support Dina, Lucia, Teresa, Eugenio and Lidia (la Camarada Reyes), Pamela, and to Elba Paoli (my middle school teacher and dear friend), among others. Thanks to Ana, for being the best neighbor and friend anyone could have, for feeding me and helping me to re-adapt to Puerto Rico, for teaching me to appreciate tropical place-making, for her kind humanity and her joyful disposition. I thank anyone else who directly or indirectly gave me help and moral support throughout the manuscript writing and completion process for this book.
I am grateful to the beautiful soundtrack that helped me to complete this book (especially during challenging days), in particular, in this ritual recurrence: Sona ←x | xi→Jobarteh & Band-Kora Music from West Africa (Gambia-London), Alí Farka Touré, The River (Mali), Irak Instrumental Music (Doha, Qatar), Coltrane (US, My Favorite Things), Bonga 1974 (Senegal), Cesarea Evora (Cape Verde), Ska-Reggae (mixed) and Nneka (Live in Berlin). The diversity of music and foods we have created makes life in this Planet delicious, and it reconciles me with my humanity.
←xi | xii→
Yolanda Medina and Margarita Machado-Casas
General Editors
Vol. 25
The Critical Studies of Latinxs in the Americas series
is part of the Peter Lang Trade Academic and Textbook list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.
←xii | 1→
Introduction: Mapping Educational Contexts, Relations and Histories
We have to talk about liberating minds, as well as liberating society.
Angela Davis
Framings and Common Grounds
What we do in the classroom is not a rehearsal; it is real life. Learning happens spontaneously in everyday life; it is through such ongoing process of socialization that we are “domesticated” into becoming culturally specific humans. Formal education, however, happens mostly through “conscious” learning efforts and through problematic and contested institutional spaces, sites of great vulnerability, but also of great opportunity, especially for college students “of color.” The structure, disciplining practices and ideologies that circulate—and are reproduced—through these spaces shape profound transformations in our ways of perceiving, understanding and taking action.
The practices of a “banking education” identified by Paulo Freire (2000) are the standards in most college classrooms, where the student is a passive being to be molded, or a recipient to be filled with information, to later regurgitate in an exam. These practices are costly and ineffective for all students and are particularly damaging and catastrophic for students who come from marginalized communities, ←1 | 2→all minorities, queer groups, immigrant communities, and for students coming from any colonized memory-histories. Students who come from such communities or “minoritized” social groups, frequently find, in the colleges they attend, a toxic environment of rejection where they do not feel valued but rather pathologized; this is usually expressed through stereotypes, prejudices and racist micro-aggressions (see Duncan