Collective memory of violence of the female brown body: a decolonial feminist public pedagogy engagement with the feminicides

Troubling the Essentialist Discourse of Brown in Education: The Anti-Black Sociopolitical and Sociohistorical Etymology of Latinxs as a Brown Monolith

“…As Anthony L. Brown (2018) noted, “Once truth is ascribed to a racial subject, the ontological meanings become normalized” (p. 53). Thus, the nexus of ontology and epistemology is central to understanding why Brown represents more than mere colloquialism, but embodied meaning and knowing (Cruz, 2001; Trinidad Galván, 2016). Drawing from the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, Cruz (2001) took up this idea of Brown as ontology and epistemology, noting “the brown body must be made central in any consideration of an epistemology of women of color .…”

“…As we prefaced above, we do not claim that all uses of Brown are dialogically wrong. In fact, education researchers who have drawn from Anzaldúa and other Chicanx theoreticians (see Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983) bring much-needed attention to the violence often enacted on Latina bodies in educational contexts (Cruz, 2001; Trinidad Galván, 2016) as well as embodied experiences that problematize Eurocentric notions of smartness (Cervantes-Soon, 2016). Moreover, in the same vein as Anzaldúa, this body of work genders, queers, and inverts Vasconcelos’s idea of mestizaje, which was both heteronormative and anti-Indigenous (Hooker, 2017).…”

ARevolucionistaEthic of Care: Four Mexicana Educators’ Subterraneous Social Justice Revolution of Fighting and Feeding

“…Within the Mexican Revolution, soldaderas fulfilled “traditional roles as mother, war goddess, warrior, tribal defender, sexual companion” (Salas, 1990, p. 44). While womb-knowing traces back thousands of years (Martinez-Cruz, 2011), the centrality of women has also been idealized and manipulated by centuries of colonialism and male supremacy that venerate the maternal and yet virginal female archetype while denigrating the lives, desires, actions, political rights, and flesh-and-blood bodies of women and girls (Rosas Lopátegui, 2002; Trinidad Galván, 2016). Octavio Paz (1985), perhaps the embodiment of Mexico’s love affair with patriarchy, reveals a national narrative of the Mexican Revolution as a “return to the maternal womb” in Mexico’s communion, “[w]ith herself, with her own being” (pp.…”

“…The decolonial examination of practices and consciousness painfully reveals that not one of us is impervious to centuries of White supremacy and global patriarchy or its contradictory discourses that exploit and romanticize women of the laboring class (Moreno Sandoval et al, 2016; Trinidad Galván, 2016). The silencing that comes through Rosa and Sylvia’s data is one we learn, yes, at the breast of our mothers, who have perpetuated it and fiercely resisted it as well (Villenas & Moreno, 2001).…”