ABSTRACT
Our entry to this Companion represents a sort of crossing, an aperture to experiences and concepts possible only by the act of trespassing. A crossing we consider a passageway to the US-Mexico-Latin America borders. A threshold into a space Gloria Anzaldúa has named borderlands. A borderlands that rubs, slashes, scratches and, at the same time, touches what Raymond Williams understands as “structures of feelings” of people who live in and walk through them. This friction produces openings, like this entry. An opening may be expressed as a
wound, an incision, an aperture that has produced different forms of knowledge, cultural practices, genres, art projects, cultural artifacts, and forms of cultural critique. A wound may refer to narratives, to stories, to poignant events that happen to specific bodies, in precise places, and that leave a mark. Here we want to address experiences that leave a trace inside a very common and at the same time our most important stage: the classroom, within bodies, bodies which are vulnerable in specific ways. Slavoj Žižek refers to this type of wounds as “bodily marks,” these are the openings, the “entries” we want to explore. In this section we focus on a privileged type of contact and exchange located in
academic scenarios. Here, we underline the way in which Latino/a and Chicano/a studies, knowledge and cultural practices produced by Latinos (mainly Mexicans) in the United States have traveled “back” and are being appropriated and taught in Mexican classrooms. In doing so, two important questions emerge: How does this knowledge produced on the other side of the border make sense in Mexican pedagogical scenarios? And which concepts and pedagogical “maneuvers” may transform a closed classroom into an open transnational one? Movidas, or maneuvers, are the operations that situate the teaching-learning subject we call pedagogies of crossing, and pedagogies of the double (legitimizing subaltern knowledge and articulating our
methodologies in process, by assembling texts from both sides of the border). We take the concept “movida” from Chela Sandoval’s “Love as a Hermeneutics of Social Change, a Decolonizing Movida” (Sandoval 2000: 140). We maintain that as a result of this border and this “friction,” in our context, the
classroom is transformed into both an opening, as in a wound, and into a space for crossing, as a border: crossing fields (from cultural studies to gender studies, from gender studies to queer studies, to subaltern studies, and lastly to transnational studies), crossing concepts (from body to discourse, from culture to subject, from power to resistance) and crossing cultures (Chicano, Latino, American, Western, and others). The Anzaldúa and Moraga text This Bridge Called my Back has been key in our classroom maneuvers to speak of the production of situated knowledge and to speak of the experiences that have been invisible in the mainstream or dominant knowledge (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983). Provoked by these maneuvers – gendered and transnational ones – the classroom
incorporates critical and innovative pedagogies, and at the same time represents both an opportunity and an invitation to experience the borders of knowledge, disciplines and academia in a situated space. A significant number of our students at Mexican public universities come from
working-class and poor-working-class families mixed with the most privileged of Mexican youth, due to the academic status of our university. Similar to the subjects Anzaldúa understands as atravesados, these students are considered potentially “dangerous” as migrants are considered “transgressors” in the United States. Public universities such as UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) offer students a haven where they can transform the closed walls of the university classroom into an open space that can speak not only to excellence in knowledge, but also on the historic reasons for disadvantage and disenfranchisement in the country. This entry strives to delineate an explanation of the ways in which Latino/a
Chicano/a discourse is being used as a pedagogical gesture in Mexico. Framed as pedagogies of decolonization, a set of questions, concepts, and practices that tend to visualize the increase of a position of consciousness-raising related to the historic reasons of exploitation and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, are beginning to be worked in the classroom. Involvement with the discourse produced by Chicano/a and Latino/a studies helps
students understand and articulate experiences of lived discrimination based on vectors of difference such as race, sexuality, gender, and class. Feminism in Mexico and gender studies at the Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género at UNAM have provided the Mexican Academy with the space to incorporate Chicano/a and Latino/a experience and knowledge in such a way that our students understand the dense territories of exclusion on an everyday basis. In reading and understanding the Chicano/a, Latino/a knowledge and epistemologies, we arrange a classroom where students are willing to look at their own frames of discrimination and possibilities of analyzing and deconstructing them. Thus, in such borders where division, alienation, and violence are imposed and disconnection and indifference are the normative desensitizing mechanisms, we propose a ground for a pedagogy as borderlands where connecting with the other inside the classroom as empowering space represents a learning experience.
