MEMORIAS PORFIADAS: REMEMORY, HERSTORIES, & BROWN WOMEN’S LIVING PEDAGOGIES OF REFUSAL By Romina Stephanie Peña-Pincheira A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2022 ABSTRACT MEMORIAS PORFIADAS: REMEMORY, HERSTORIES, & BROWN WOMEN’S LIVING PEDAGOGIES OF REFUSAL By Romina Stephanie Peña-Pincheira The 2019 social protests were widely referred to as El estallido. The 2019 estallido was a momentary explosion that shaded powerful light onto events happening in plain sight but so normalized that the broader population could not see it anymore: the everyday despair, dehumanizing public spaces, and the violence in the ways people related to each other (Peña- Pincheira, Bilbao-Nieva, & Romero-Quintana, forthcoming). People in Chile questioned everything they had accepted as given, such as the multiple ways they and their previous generations experienced dispossession, lack of self-determination, and the promise of meritocracy entangled in the rhetoric of progress, sacrifice, and pain. Covid and a never-ending pandemic made these issues even more evident. In this context of sociopolitical and historical awareness, I was moved to revisit my own places of memory and oral traditions of collective family memories that began before my time. Additionally, ongoing women's protests as accusations and refusals of normalized gender violence pushed me to look to my mother’s, and grandmother’s embodied memories and (her)stories anew. They began to haunt my days and conversations more often. In this dissertation, I examine generational herstories and memories that persist over time due to the violence they carry (e.g., Tuck & Ree, 2013). These haunting memories and experiences stand in plain sight but are shrouded and normalized as part of women’s everyday experiences. These stories haunt us as unsolved, inexplicable, and unjust events. In addressing these memories in the classroom through feminist decolonial lenses, participants in the language classroom can recognize hemispheric and normalized logics of gender, class, race violence, dispossession, and death as historically and structurally bounded in ongoing coloniality. Copyright by ROMINA STEPHANIE PEÑA-PINCHEIRA 2022 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There is a picture of me as a baby where I have my hands deep inside my food plate. My arms, hands, and face are covered with traces of oil and little chunks of spaghetti. My mom describes the usual hard time trying to feed me because I was determined to do it my way. I wanted to experience the food, grab it with my own hands. Of course, my mom was not pleased with that kind of a mess. My aunt, mi tía Chela, whom I used to call my second mother, encouraged her to let me feed myself, that way, I was at least going to eat something and enjoy the process. My aunt and my mom were everything to one another; she was her mother who guided and taught her most things, a mother who secured her safety and growth, a sister that accompanied and guided her, and a friend that listened and would attend to their friend’s call. My mom followed my aunt’s advice. My aunt taught her one of many important lessons she taught her over the years: to trust her child’s heart, dreams, and curiosities. Twenty-five years later, my mom did it again, she did something that scares every mother: letting go of their child, this time, far away from home. She let me go free to do what I love, and she trusted I knew what I was doing. This dissertation is dedicated to all women who love, fight and protect someone else’s lives, especially other women who experience racialization, marginalization, gender, and class violence across nation-states. To my mom, Nora. I wish everyone had a woman in their lives like her. To my aunts, María and Graciela; and to my grandmother, María del Carmen Silva. I am the result of their efforts, dreams, and sacrifices that no woman should ever make. To them, for them, and with them is this work and who I am as a woman, scholar, and educator. Their stories, tenaciousness, relentlessness, and refusal flow across this dissertation. To women like them that trust and encourage their daughters’ potential, honor their mess, and teach them to be resilient, self-reliant, and unstoppable through their own living refusal and example. We, Brown daughters, are iv courageous because our mothers have been before us. And when their Brown daughters crumble and fall apart after overwhelming days, they, our Brown mothers, remain alive and strong in our memory to help us pick up the pieces and show us how to go on. These pages are NOT meant to be a romanticization of women’s selfless sacrifice. These pages narrate, honor, and witness women’s stubbornness, resilience, memory, and persistence against everyday violence, erasure, and extraction of insidious colonial and conquistador settler projects. They continue to challenge time and space in a future here and now, speaking to our present. I was not alone in this dissertation process. I was guided and inspired by amazing women here in the US and in Chile. To all the amazing women who are everything: friends, sisters, mentors, and my family; women who supported me through the hard times and celebrated the good ones: Fernanda Herrera, Katherine Vergara, Fernanda Lueiza, Nury Araya-Burnett, Graciela (Chely) Pincheira, Lau Romero-Quintana, Valentina Velázquez-Zvierkova, Tati Merino, and Lilian Riffo. Leaving home is an exciting adventure, yet the hardest a first-generation college and graduate student can ever do. Tuve mucha suerte no estar sola, de encontrar amigos y amigas que me ofrecieron su entera compañía y su amistad. Mi familia Latina en Michigan continúa guiándome académicamente, continúa alimentando mi alma, mi corazón, y mi estómago. A José Manuel Martínez quien fue y continúa siendo el mejor mentor y amigo; él entiende y acompaña en todo momento, desde comprar un colchón hasta leer y tratar de entender lo que escribo. Por guiarme desde mi primer año hasta mi búsqueda de trabajo. Quien me presentó a Abraham Ceballos y que juntos me llenaron el corazón de historias, risas, buena comida, y momentos de mucha felicidad en tiempos de estrés y de lo incierto. Llevo cada momento en mi corazón. A Ben Espinoza por su mentoría, ayuda y compañía. A la familia chilena que conocí acá, apañándonos durante el Estallido: Isi Bilbao, Begoña Cortéz, Ignacio González, Phillip Kester, and Nathaly Rivera. v To my friends, mentors, and colleagues in the College of Education at MSU: Vivek Vellanki, Amit Sharma, Eliana Castro, Christina Ponzio, Ashley Moore, Effat Id-Deen, Cait Bergeon-Raber, Liv Furman, Laura Kennedy, and Lindsay Mcholme. To Rachel, my dear friend, with whom I had so many conversations over tea that helped me think, expand, challenge, and understand the ideas that structure this dissertation more deeply. Words cannot describe the support and guidance from all faculty advisors, mentors, and instructors that unconditionally provided over these past seven years. My loving and ongoing appreciation to the faculty and staff in Grinnell College who supported and guided me through grad school applications and beyond: Cori Jakubiak, Valerie Benoist, and Deborah L. Michaels. To MSU advisors, mentors, and instructors: Higinio Dominguez, Sandra Crespo, Dorinda Carter Andrews, Lucía Cárdenas Curiel, Sandro Barros, Chris Kaiser, Terry Flennaugh, Christina Schwarz, Maddie Mavrogordato, Amita Chudgar, Amy Parks, Janine Certo, Lynn Fendler, Amelia W. Gotwals, Anne- Lise Halvorsen, Gail Richmond. My biggest appreciation and love for Terry Yuncker Edwards. When I arrived at this huge campus, lost, alone, and with more questions than answers, mama T held my hand and walked me through everything that I needed to know as a student, instructor, and researcher. From the start, she was honest and straightforward. Her no-nonsense captivated me from the beginning—as she was one of the few people to whom I did not have to translate myself or translate her words. Terry would anticipate what I needed. She supported my students even when she did not know them. She was my first and most important mentor on how to navigate school spaces, loneliness, and paperwork. She was there for my job interviews, dissertation defense, and graduation. My wish is that every student has that kind of unconditional loving support. To the faculty mentors, staff, and fellows in the Residential College of Arts and Humanities (RCAH). My deep appreciation to the people who have been the driving force behind RCAH’s vi creative, transdisciplinary, and transformational vision: Stephen L. Esquith, Dylan AT Miner, David Sheridan, Marcus Fields, and Pam Newsted. My endless love and appreciation to India Plough, who supports and encourages our transdisciplinary inquiries, collaborations, teaching adventures, and our ongoing growth as scholars in spiritual, intellectual, and material ways. With your support, India, many of my motivations and curiosities related to language and education flourished and led the way. I wish your presence and work in RCAH continue to provide such creative and brave spaces of inquiry and exploration. Writing and thinking about this dissertation has been a sweet and healing process (and adventure). This was only possible due to my dissertation committee’s continuous humanizing, supportive, and inspiring guidance. I am deeply grateful to Estrella Torrez, Vaughn W.M. Watson, Peter De Costa, and Jungmin Kwon. Jungmin Kwon became a key mentor and loving friend from the day we met. Estrella Torrez who guides me to think and connect deeper and offers a caring and safe space for students across RCAH and MSU; Peter De Costa who guided me in my writing and ways of approaching complex ideas; Vaughn W. M. Watson who sees beyond the constraints of discipline, thinks deeply and big, and creates togetherness and collaborative friendships amid academic spaces. Lastly, I am beyond fortunate to have been guided and supported by two courageous, passionate, empathetic, and outspoken women: Alyssa H. Dunn and Alex Allweiss, the first two to call me "Doctora." My learning and growth were possible because guided by them, I was free to think, do, and learn with them. They care, listen, and see the extent of who I am and what I want to do, even when I had no words to describe it myself. They let me explore, follow my instincts, and decide based on what my heart dictated—just like the little girl I was, who would explore her grandma’s garden and trees for little creatures and unripe fruits. And the thing is, as I have told Alyssa Hadley Dunn and whoever that asked me “how I chose my advisor,” I said, “I chose them vii with my heart.” And this is exactly who they are, educators and mentors who teach, work, and imagine from a stance of love, radical imagination, and activism in every second and every turn. And I, a raising scholar and educator, was fortunate to witness powerful examples. They are scholars who act based on their unyielding commitment to justice. They exemplify concepts that often remain as buzzwords: advocacy, humanizing teaching, collaborative work, and empathy. They create and support spaces of co-conspiracy and seek opportunities to do otherwise wherever they go and break away from oppressive patterns. I wish students everywhere have mentors, friends, and educators like Alex Allweiss and Alyssa Hadley Dunn. I am a better person and educator because of them, and the education spaces they share are filled with hope and possibilities because of them. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES…...................................................................................................................... xii LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................................................ xiii Chapter 1 Introduction................................................................................................................... 1 Purpose ......................................................................................................................................... 1 Framing this Work ...................................................................................................................... 4 Overview of Dissertation Chapters.......................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2 “Son tantas cosas que no se qué poner:”1 Background and Sociopolitical Context................................................................................................................................................ 8 Mayo Feminista ........................................................................................................................... 9 El Estallido .................................................................................................................................. 10 Reclaiming Public Spaces........................................................................................................... 11 Body as Protest............................................................................................................................ 12 Chapter 3 Guiding Conceptual Framework............................................................................. 15 Overview....................................................................................................................................... 15 The Coloniality of Gender.......................................................................................................... 15 Settler colonial structures and the conquistador............................................................... 17 The myth of mestizaje.......................................................................................................... 19 Memory................................................................................................................................... 20 Vulnerability........................................................................................................................... 21 Pedagogies of Onto-Epistemological Silencing and Cruelty.................................................. 22 Spatialization of cruelty and abolitionist geography......................................................... 22 A woman’s body.................................................................................................................... 24 Haunting Memories and Places of Pain................................................................................... 25 Chapter 4 Methods of Inquiry...................................................................................................... 27 Porfiada Memoria15 (Stubborn Memory)................................................................................. 27 Decoloniality of Women’s Rememory as Multi-Generational Living Refusal................... 27 Author’s Positionality.................................................................................................................. 30 Rememory and Evocative Analytical Approach..................................................................... 32 Artifact exploration............................................................................................................... 34 Sisters’ portraits............................................................................................................................ 34 Fernanda................................................................................................................................. 35 Feña......................................................................................................................................... 35 Kathy....................................................................................................................................... 35 ix Chapter 5 Mothers’ and Sisters’ Persistent Memories of Refusal....................................... 37 A Pause.......................................................................................................................................... 37 Home is Where a Kettle Boils................................................................................................... 38 In Between Forgetting and Remembering............................................................................... 38 Toda........................................................................................................................................ 40 Swirls and Spirals of Memory: The Present is the Past is the Future.................................. 40 The time from birth to the in-between.................................................................................. 41 The space in-between............................................................................................................... 42 Grand/Mothers’ Herstories....................................................................................................... 42 Vignette: The man................................................................................................................. 43 Vignette: A grandmother’s herstory................................................................................... 44 Vignette: A mother’s herstory............................................................................................. 45 Discussion..................................................................................................................................... 48 Chapter 6 Mothers, Sisters, Mentors, and Friends’ Collective Memories that Haunt 53 Classed and Gendered Trajectories in Education................................................................... 55 Segregation, displacement, and extraction of time........................................................... 57 Girls’ and Women’s Bodies........................................................................................................ 58 Girls’ Innocence and Childhood Interrupted.......................................................................... 60 Colonial and Patriarchal Gaze: Gendered Expectations and Peer Sorority....................... 62 Pedagogies of Silence and the Toxicity of Romantic Love................................................... 67 Geographies of Material and Symbolic Dispossession.......................................................... 69 Memories of onto-epistemological silencing.................................................................... 72 First-Generation University Graduates: Biographic and Academic Refusal...................... 75 Gender and Generational Rupture........................................................................................... 77 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 7 Wounded Memories and the Coloniality of English......................................... 87 Context of this Work.................................................................................................................. 87 Memories of Onto-Epistemological Silencing........................................................................ 88 Onto-Epistemologies at the Periphery...................................................................................... 90 Memories and onto-epistemology...................................................................................... 91 Socioeconomic and Ideological Contours of English in Chile............................................. 92 English All Around but Never About...................................................................................... 94 The Coloniality of Language Teaching..................................................................................... 95 Vignette: Two flags and a prayer......................................................................................... 96 The Clashing of Worlds: University Socioeconomic Disparities.......................................... 97 Socialized Gender Subordination and Silencing..................................................................... 99 Vignette: Porfiadas, the quiet niece and the talkative aunt............................................. 99 The Olympus and the Master.................................................................................................... 102 Pedagogies of Cruelty and the Mastery of English................................................................. 104 Vignette: Pedagogies of cruelty and onto-epistemological silence................................ 105 x Vignette: THINK in English............................................................................................... 107 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 108 In Closing...................................................................................................................................... 110 Vignette: Mending of the self.............................................................................................. 112 Vignette: Untranslated.......................................................................................................... 113 Chapter 8 A Path Towards a Transformational Language Teaching and a Polydisciplinamorous Pedagogy................................................................................................. 114 The CLAC Program.................................................................................................................... 116 Spanish ILO.................................................................................................................................. 117 Pedagogical and Epistemological Underpinnings................................................................... 118 Language as a semiotic and social phenomenon.............................................................. 120 Vignette: Where I am From Poem, Ella Lyon.................................................................. 120 Transdisciplinary and onto-epistemological language learning...................................... 121 Transdisciplinarity and Polydisciplinamory in the Language Classroom............................ 123 Vignette: Ausencias............................................................................................................... 124 Vignette: Climate change and ecological soundscapes.................................................... 126 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 130 Chapter 9 Tea-colonize Yourself................................................................................................. 132 Vignette: Tea-mo................................................................................................................... 132 Vignette: [Tea]colonize yourself......................................................................................... 133 REFERENCES................................................................................................................................ 135 xi LIST OF TABLES Table 6.1 Extract of Ricardo Arjona’s song “dime que sí, dime que no” .................................. 68 xii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 5.1 Romina at a 2011 student protest nearby her birthplace........................................... 41 Figure 5.2 Romina’s mother, nine-month pregnant standing outside her home...................... 45 Figure 6.1 Romina and high school classmates’ school shoes..................................................... 63 Figure 6.2 High school graduation. Romina and her high school volleyball coach................. 74 Figure 7.1 Artifact: First Spanish- English bilingual dictionary bought used at a local market.................................................................................................................................................. 94 Figure 7.2 Artifact: Academic text that shows the emphasis on phonological structures...... 104 Figure 7.3 Artifact: worksheet used in phonetic practice sessions, titled “Television” .......... 106 Figure 7.4 Artifact: A poem a professor chose to practice English............................................ 111 Figure 8.1 Artifact: Students describing their project and brainstorming.................................. 129 Figure 8.2 Artifact: Students at the early stages of their project at RCAH Studio Art............ 129 Figure 8.3 Artifact: Finalized project presented at RCAH Showcase......................................... 130 Figure 9.1 Artifact: Romina and her mom on the day of her baptism....................................... 133 xiii Chapter 1 Introduction Purpose I began the examination and writing of this dissertation in the 2019 context of social movements in Chile. The 2019 social protests were widely referred to as El estallido. The 2019 estallido was a momentary explosion that shaded powerful light onto events happening in plain sight but so normalized that the broader population could not see it anymore: the everyday despair, dehumanizing public spaces, and the violence in the ways people related to each other (Peña- Pincheira, Bilbao-Nieva, & Romero-Quintana, forthcoming). This momentary burst of light moved people in Chile and Latin America to face their own experiences of exploitation, recognize this as a shared experience, and imagine an alternative. People in Chile questioned everything they had accepted as given, such as the multiple ways they and their previous generations experienced dispossession, lack of self-determination, and the promise of meritocracy entangled in the rhetoric of progress, sacrifice, and pain. Covid and a never-ending pandemic made these issues even more evident. Protests and performances reclaimed public spaces, in the form of a discursive (performances, public art, paste-ups), physical (direct encounters with police and violence), and material (collectivization through interests: food, protection, medical attention) refusal. In this context of sociopolitical and historical awareness, I was moved to revisit my own places of memory and oral traditions of collective family memories that began before my time. Additionally, ongoing women's protests as accusations and refusals of normalized gender violence pushed me to look to my mother’s, and grandmother’s embodied memories and (her)stories anew. They began to haunt my days and conversations more often. Lugones (2003) alongside many decolonial feminists (e.g., Figueroa, 2015; Gordon, 2007; Rhee, 2021; Tuck & Ree, 2013) urge us to examine these underlying ghosts and haunting spaces of memory as spaces that point to relentless systems of oppression, and spaces where resistance and coalition persevere. 1 I thus began this work from the deep need to see, name, and understand the insidious presence of colonial logic and practices in multi- and cross-generational women's experiences in different social spaces (hospitals, schools, public transportation, workplaces, etc.). Herstories and memories flow orally across generations of women, return, and are activated by contextual cues like El estallido, when another young woman is murdered by a husband, boyfriend, or a male stranger. Women’s cross-generational storying and remembering (rememory) are spaces of resistance, refusal, and hope (e.g., Smith, 1999). In other words, in remembering, mothers and sisters name and accuse transgenerational violence, claim their rights and freedoms (for themselves, their mothers and sisters), create transformative knowledge, and project alternative presents and futures. However, women’s herstories and practices of transgenerational rememory, families’ stories, and colonial refusal are not part of school curricula, their experiences in the classroom, their ways of knowing, and the ways herstories unsettle neutrality, unveil colonial logic, and create possibilities. As a personal and collaborative decolonial methodological process, I seek to mend onto- epistemological silencing in educational spaces that reproduce experiences of dispossession, extraction, and cruelty in the classroom and beyond. I refer to onto-epistemological silencing as overt and covert practices, spaces (geographies), and school genres (e.g., discipline boundaries, expectations, unwritten rules) that disrupt the intertwined nature of ontology and epistemology. From a feminist perspective, by ontology, I consider the self and the essence of the self—linked body, mind, and emotions (Stanley & Wise, 2002), the self as historical, experiential, relational, and interactional. A feminist understanding attends to self and subjectivities in relation to social conditions and colonial logic that sustain and promote subordination, oppression, and violence (e.g., Lawson, 2003; Maruska, 2010). I understand ontology as intertwined with women’s cross and transgenerational consciousness through herstories, sometimes described as testimonio. Testimonios are traditional oral practices in Latin America. It is a practice that exposes individual and shared 2 experiences of violence among women, fostering communion and solidarity (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). Herstorie, life stories, and testimonios offer cross and transgenerational critical awareness of systems of violence, critique gender-based violence, and possibilities of transgenerational healing (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012; Díaz Beltrán, 2018; Nuñez & García-Mateus, 2021). Also from a feminist perspective, I understand epistemology as the construction and process of knowledge generation--and in some cases--what knowledge or ways of knowing become dominant, erased, or subordinated (Hill Collins, 2000; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999). Oral transgenerational herstories, that is, practices of rememory and testimonio, are spaces of resistance and knowledge creation; their critique and rejection of the status quo offer radical imaginings of possibilities. Herstories and memory are an intrinsic well of knowledge and critical awareness and offer spaces of communion, coalition, and witnessing of resistance and collective strength (Anzaldúa, 2000; Lugones, 2008; Villenas, 2018). In this work, I bind memory, herstories, testimonio in one space: tea making and sharing as a space of communion, celebration, healing, and resistance. Therefore, I present those moments through evocative vignettes and short personal narratives. In the next pages, I retrace the inseparable link between ontology and epistemology, the self and ways of knowing (i.e., personal stories, political, cultural, historical, and meaning-making ways, as Rhee (2021) described it) as a generationally conformed, inherited, and resilient in the form of memories and stories. I examine generational herstories and memories that persist over time due to the violence they carry (e.g., Tuck & Ree, 2013). These haunting memories and experiences stand in plain sight but are shrouded and normalized as part of women’s everyday experiences. These stories haunt us as unsolved, inexplicable, and unjust events. In addressing these memories in the classroom through feminist decolonial lenses, participants in the language classroom can recognize hemispheric and normalized logics of gender, class, race violence, dispossession, and death as historically and structurally bounded in ongoing coloniality. By making them visible, this logic can no longer lay 3 unattended, unexamined, and unchallenged in school curricula and educational experiences. Therefore, by exploring generational onto-epistemologies gathered in herstories and haunting memories, I unveil colonial logics of violence and dispossession that continue to shape families, youth, and women’s day-to-day as common yet invisible gender, class, and racial violence. Methodologically, this piece contributes to transdisciplinary work by drawing from all fields, contexts, experiences, and people I have been in dialogue with within education and beyond. I contribute to an inquiry and research that blurs discipline boundaries to honor women’s onto- epistemologies and herstories as transgenerational decolonial resistance. I present an inquiry that is in dialogue with the reader’s “lives, one that not only expresses but also creates experience, putting meanings in motion” (Bochner, 2018, p. 366) as, most likely, the reader will see themselves and their loved ones reflected across the upcoming pages. Thus, this inquiry work is an educational, humanizing, and decolonial piece with “artful resonance that can bring readers into an encounter with the otherness of others, evoking feeling deep in their hearts that they are there as both witnesses and participants in moments of life that bring meaning out of chaos” (Bochner, 2018, p. 366). Framing this Work This dissertation is framed by the work of decolonial feminists around rememory, haunting of gender violence, and women’s multigenerational memories (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Gordon, 2008; Rhee, 2021), and racial and gender geographies (e.g., Cruz, 2001; Gilmore, 2018). In this sense, I am guided by the generational consciousness embedded in the ongoing dialogue with women in my life and the invaluable knowledge of women from the Global South, Indigenous women, and Women of Color. As Rhee (2021) states, rememory work is considered methodologically messy, rich, and given many names (autoethnography, memoir, narrative inquiry, etc.) due to its inter-and transdisciplinary and the ways it blurs knowledge and disciplinary boundaries. I thus draw from works in education, 4 psychology, art-based educational research, anthropology, and sociology, among others. At its core, this dissertation process is an educational and humanizing research and learning space. I engage in dialogue with my mother, her mother’s stories, and female friends from different stages of life. I also describe language framework and pedagogy that provides strategies to nurture multigenerational ways of knowing as part of the curriculum, examination of shared haunting memories, and freer pasts, presents, and futures. Lastly, I write these pages honoring women who made my experiences possible: my mother, my mother’s mothers, my mother’s sisters, and my chosen sisters and mothers in life and education. Their growth has been my growth; my accomplishments (I dislike this word, but it is what describes what is quantified: grades, diplomas, scholarships, awards) have been possible because of them and the space and communities of economic, emotional, and academic support they have created with other women, from the clothes I wore to the tuition they paid at school. My mom recently said: “you overcame generational barriers.” I did because they did it: they imagined it and they fought for it and passed their knowledge generation after generation through herstories and practices of rememory. Similar to Sofia Villenas’ description of mothers’ pedagogical moments at home in her chapter Pedagogical moments in the borderlands: Latina mothers teaching and learning (Villenas, 2006 in Delgado et al.), I am here writing this dissertation because my mother, her mother, and her sisters encouraged me and showed me how to keep going; they taught me to be strong and resilient–even when they shouldn’t have had to be resilient; they protected my childhood space and my freedom to play, learn, grow, and love. Overview of Dissertation Chapters This dissertation is structured into 9 chapters. In Chapter 2, I begin by providing a sociopolitical and historical background of how this dissertation came to be. In Chapter 3, I then define the main concepts that flow across chapters, followed by how these concepts shape and 5 inform this dissertation’s methods of inquiry across chapters. I began by framing this work onto- epistemologically. I examine the coloniality of gender as alive and well as evidenced by haunting memories of violence, dispossession, and vulnerability in women’s lives. In Chapter 4, I describe a decolonial feminist and onto-epistemological methodology through a polyphonic or multi-voice approach (Gordon, 2008; Rhee, 2021). I present the ways rememory and multigenerational refusal guided my journey tracing shared experiences through narratives, poetry, and images that emerged from my mother’s, her mother’s, sisters’, and my own (her)stories. I follow Avery Gordon’s and Jeong-eun Rhee’s effort for a decolonial practice to deepen (and in some cases, reestablish) the inseparable link between ontology and epistemology, that is, “where the personal, political, cultural, historical, and theoretical are intricately merged” (Rhee, 2021, p. 4). As a decolonial process, this approach challenges constructs of time and space, separation of self and others, and the ways we know and learn, and it embraces holistic understandings of identity, language use, and education. In Chapter 5 I begin by re-introducing decolonial work through creative writing and positioning this work in the in-between time and space as a present, future, and past conjugated in the same space and moment in time. I trace mothers’ herstories—experiences that show colonial footprints of dispossession, obstetric violence, and vulnerability. In Chapter 6, I continue the collective and dialogic work of educational rememory and the coloniality of educational trajectories starting with high school. I again draw decolonial feminist and onto-epistemological methodology and a multi- voice approach. As a practice, a friend (Fernanda) and I always revisit memories that shaped us in high school. We maintain ongoing critical conversations around feminism, gender expectations, school curricula, our educational trajectories, and the memories we seek to understand. Together, we visited our high school space in 2019. We walked the same hallways, bathrooms, and classrooms we had forgotten since 2005. In combining these two events (our conversations and our visit), I tried to deepen and extend our conversations guided by some specific and recurrent topics: our identities, 6 classmates, curriculum, public spaces, El estallido, to be a woman, a mother, and a social worker. In this chapter, I also include the experiences of Feña, whom I met at the university, and with whom I shared similar experiences and routines such as long commuting times in public transportations, balancing traditional and progressive family expectations about motherhood vis à vis a professional career path. In Chapter 7, I transition into university experiences while learning English. I explore the coloniality of language education, and specifically, the English language. Here again, I include collective and shared memories that show the commonality of suffering in the English language learning classroom at the university level. As part of my own path towards a transformational and socio-politically, and culturally responsive classroom, in Chapter 8 I present a critical ethnography that explores onto-epistemological silencing and polydisciplinamorous framework and pedagogy as a counter-pedagogy. This pedagogical framework builds upon decolonial and transformational perspectives in language pedagogy and expands language learning goals to respond to students’ commitments, curiosities, and disciplinary interests through critical intercultural real-world explorations. 7 Chapter 2 “Son tantas cosas que no se qué poner:”1 Background and Sociopolitical Context Ongoing social feminist and student movements are at the core of this inquiry. Students, activists, collectives, and feminist groups have been historically mobilized in response to the dominant patriarchal, colonial, capitalist, and settler economic and social systems These systems converged and are embedded in neoliberal reforms adopted without any public input, in all spheres of society to reduce public welfare and state involvement in education (Bellei et al., 2014; Cabalin & Bellei, 2013; Valenzuela, Bellei, & De Los Ríos, 2014). Not unique to Chile but a hemispheric malaise, these systems of neoliberal and free-market reforms “brought about a dramatic growth in economic and social inequalities both within states and internationally. There is no sign that this polarization is not continuing within countries, despite a general diminution of extreme poverty” (Hobsbawm, 2007, p. 3). This neoliberal sociopolitical context shapes the lives of the vast population in Chile, especially, women and children, with racialized, low-income, and indigenous backgrounds. In fact, despite the apparent thriving economic landscape, for decades, youth in university and high schools have managed to expose the failure of Chile’s capitalist neoliberal and market-oriented social and economic systems. Loud and clear, high school and undergraduate students demand the State's public responsibility as a warrantor of quality and equitable access to social services (e.g., education, health, natural resources, housing). On social media, people around the world wondered how a 30 Chilean pesos spike in prices could trigger such a response among people on the evening of October 18th, 2019. When Chileans reacted with their protest slogan, “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years,” the Indigenous slogan “it is not 30 years, it is 500 years” further unveiled the conquistador-settler (King, 2019) and colonial legacy in place. At a time of rampant neoliberal 1 “There are so many reasons that I do not know what to write” 8 capitalism, colonial practices of dispossession, exploitation, and extraction of bodies, spirits, and land are still very much alive (Gilmore, 2018; Richards, 2013; Speed, 2017), as demonstrated by the continuous invasion and militarization of indigenous lands in the south of Chile and the recent killings of Mapuche and other indigenous activists in the region (Bonnefoy, 2018). To understand the factors that contributed to Chileans’ uprising and historical “awakening” (Fraser, 2019)—and thus the social context that undergirds my own personal and professional inquiry–it is important to consider its neoliberal economic, social landscape, and its colonial legacy embedded in the Chilean economic, cultural, and sociopolitical systems. Mayo Feminista On the 17th of April 2018, female students took over the main building of the Universidad Austral de Chile. Their mobilization erupted in response to normalized and uninterrupted instances of sexual harassment, violence, and rape happening in university spaces and the larger society as normalized and unpunished crimes (Contardo, 2020; Llanos, 2021). These sexual harassment and discrimination cases were disregarded and silenced by the university administration. This was the beginning of 2018 Mayo Feminista Chileno, a new feminist wave from the Global South (Forstenzer, 2019). A movement that was the coalition of ongoing hemispheric normalized and institutional violence and murder against women and LGBTQI+ communities, especially those who are low income, racially marginalized, Indigenous, and migrant. What was singular about this feminist movement was its use of social media, appropriation of public spaces as sites of protest, reclamation of the female body as autonomous and political territory of resistance and denunciation, public performances, and coalition-making outside of institutional spaces or political parties (Ibáñez-Carrillo & Stang-Alva, 2021). This is a feminist movement that takes root in the social and shared experiences of multigenerational subordination, and critiques deeply the role of the Chilean state and its socioeconomic paradigm imposed 9 undemocratically during the dictatorship (Sola-Morales & Quiroz-Carvajal, 2021). Thus, various feminist, LGTBQI+, and many other local collectives and auto-convocated organizations called to dismantle the root of these systems of violence and domination: the colonial and patriarchal neoliberal system in place that does not protect or guarantee women, transgender, and diverse sexualities’ rights or basic needs (Sola-Morales & Quiroz-Carvajal, 2021). In fact, this predatory system fosters and promotes exploitation, subordination, violence, extraction, and death in everything that lives (cosificación by Segato, 2018), especially nature, women, and children. The unspoken and normalized violence was seen by much of the population, often advocates of the myth of meritocracy as an individual and isolated problem, which goes hand in hand with tales of sacrifice that flow within families, schools, and communities. The 2018 Mayo Feminista Chileno was the beginning of a slow and momentary “awakening” to the intergenerational experience of misery, indignity, material and symbolic dispossession, and the violent inequity of a segregated society. This time, however, was different, it was everything. People’s protest signs such as “Son tantas cosas que no sé qué poner,” became relatable for many. That day, a year later in October of 2019, the collision of many forms of violence began to surface, generating a space of solidarity and encounter among everyday working- and middle-class Chileans. El Estallido On October 14 of 2019, to the sound of heavy punk and metal music in English, high school students from emblematic2 and prestigious public schools ran in groups toward the nearest Metro3 station in downtown Santiago. Their school uniforms and their heavy backpacks did not stop them. Male students wearing white shirts and gray pants; female students wearing black and navy- 2 Emblematic schools are the first built foundational public schools. They often carry traditional beliefs and practices related to their role in society and public responsibility. Originally these were segregated by gender. After new non- discriminatory and anti-bias educational policies, most of them are transitioning to become gender-inclusive schools 3 Metro is the name of the subway transportation in various areas in Chile (Valparaíso, Santiago). 10 blue skirts and jumpers, all running in black, school shoes and the distinctive school tie. They jumped Metro stations’ turnstiles as a collective, demonstrating their disagreement about the new spike in subway fees that affected most of the population that used public transportation in Santiago (Barlett, 2019; Vergara, 2019). Such an episode happened every day for several days after school until the Metro administration decided to close all stations on the evening of October 18, triggering what would be massive protests across the country. This massive fare-dodging form of protest, however, was more than a critique of the spike in subway fees during rush hour. It was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. People tired of being robbed of their dignity said “enough.” The following day, on October 19, massive protests took place across Chile, with people demanding all forms of dignity and justice. People again expressed that “it wasn’t 30 pesos; it was 30 years.” These messages spread through consecutive protests across the country, which came as a surprise for the neighboring countries and across the globe. Chile had been an economically prosperous country in the eyes of its neighbors and trading partners. However, for decades after the return of democracy in Chile, students have mobilized to uncover society's precarious state due to extreme neoliberal reforms and its colonial past and legacy. Reclaiming Public Spaces In the last decades, protests take the form of a place-based and embodied contestation, and the materially and discursively appropriation of symbolically meaningful public spaces. Public spaces were reclaimed as spaces of encounter, collectivization, protest, and dialogue. In Santiago, the Ex- Plaza Italia is the main square park that divides the city between the Western and the Eastern parts of a deeply segregated city (the East being the most affluent area). This park was renamed Plaza Dignidad (Ex-Plaza Italia or Plaza Baquedano) and became one of the main contested spaces in their demand for Dignidad (dignity, humanity). At the center, there was the statue of a male on a horse, Manuel Baquedano, a wealthy Chilean settler of Spanish descent, who participated in the occupation 11 of the Wallmapu (Mapuche territory) and the War of the Pacific (Congress National Library of Chile; González Amaral, 2021). People gathered daily at this spot, painting over, hanging flags, performing, singing, etc. This park and statue became ground zero for encounters between protesters and police. Across city buildings, shared demands and critiques were visually presented through murals, paste-ups, sprays, memorials, and artistic installations. A common word is written on walls and protest signs: the figure of the mother. “Tomo x ti mamita,”4 “Por ti mamita…que te llamaron a operar cuando te velábamos,”5 “Jubilación digna pa’ mi weli”6. Dispossession and violence against mothers and grandmothers were prominent motivations behind youth from segregated, marginalized, and low-income backgrounds. Body as Protest Women-led feminist collectives and organizations (e.g., 8M, la Yeguada, LasTesis, Juntas Siempre Vivas, Borda sus Ojos, Escuderas Salvaojitos, etc.) were vital in articulating and collectivizing demands for autonomy and self-determination, visualizing insidious violence against women, children in SENAME (National Service for Minors), incarcerated women, ongoing violation of Human Rights, and appropriating public spaces as an important part of a national. Women in feminist collectives reclaimed their bodies as contested territory, in other words, “el cuerpo en protesta y como protesta” (Ibáñez Carrillo & Stang Alva, 2021, p. 210). For instance, Yeguada Latinoamericana is a performative project created by Cheril Linett in 2017 and gathers women and non-conforming sexualities. La Yeguada Latinoamericana occupies public spaces wearing a mare’s tail as a counter-sexual artifact (Registo Contracultural). Thus, “El cuerpo aquí se exhibe 4 “Everything [I am doing] for you mamita” 5 “For you mamita…because they [the hospital] called you for your surgery when we were holding your vigil” 6 “A dignifying retirement pension for my grandma” 12 substrayendo su sexualización a la mirada patriarcal y en analogía con la yegua y sus diversos significados peyorativos”7 (Llanos, 2021, p. 181). Furthermore, they critique the exploitation of animals (a mare) by police to subordinate and oppress. On 20 November 2019, LasTesis, a Chilean interdisciplinary, intersectional, and trans-inclusive feminist theater collective, initiated in Valparaiso what would become a global phenomenon and anthem. This group of blindfolded women performed in various cities in Chile “Un violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your path). Un violador en tu camino emerges from Rita Segato’s texts related to rape and impunity as a structural and social problem and not one that is individualized, “a woman’s problem.” In their performance, the collective (Martin & Shaw, 2021) unveils, discursively and performatively, patriarchal structural systems, institutions, and actors in public that manufacture and reproduce dispossession, extraction, and death of women. Through their work, LasTesis translate into fifteen-minute performances of the main theses from feminist authors (Huenchumil, 2019). Their goal is to present feminists’ theories in a format that reaches a wider audience—those who might not have access to or the opportunity to read or analyze feminist texts. In sum, LasTesis’ performance visualized a widespread cross- and multigenerational experience of suffering, dispossession, and trauma among women. As a form of public pedagogy, LasTesis opened cross and intergenerational spaces for community, solidarity, testimonio, and critical witnessing (e.g., Lugones, 2008; Villenas, 2018, 2019) of shared experiences of gender violence and dispossession. A moment that allowed women to see, from different access points, that they were not alone in their struggle against institutionalized violence through the collectivization, rememory, and articulation of their own stories. Beyond linguistic resources, women across the nation visualized through public vigils for women and children who were unprotected and murdered, 7 “The body is exhibited here subtracting its sexualization from the patriarchal gaze and in analogy with the mare and its various pejorative meanings.” 13 through collective embroideries with victims’ names and faces, “mi primer abuso”8 stories, among other public and collective visualization projects and interventions. In a similar vein, in this dissertation I examine cross- and multigenerational haunting memories and experiences that stand in plain sight but remain shrouded and normalized as part of women’s everyday experiences. Guided by critical and decolonial feminists of Color, this dissertation constitutes an intimate decolonial practice and process, and I hope it contributes to the broader dialogues of feminist decoloniality. I weave multiple voices of shared and personal narratives and colonial tensions in the form of dispossession and violence based on class, gender, and racialization. In what follows, I detailed the feminist and decolonial concepts and understandings that guide my inquiry and the ways I understand colonial violence and gender. 8 “I was first abused/harassed” 14 Chapter 3 Guiding Conceptual Framework Overview In this dissertation work I am guided by feminist decolonial concepts that stem from different disciplines and bodies of work, primarily coming from feminist Women of Color beyond nation-state borders. In what follows, I weave the concept of coloniality of gender in relation to pedagogies of cruelty, and how they generate and maintain customary and insidious vulnerability, dispossession, and death among women from low-income, racialized, and indigenous backgrounds. I also draw on the concept of haunting memories as a sign of the ongoing project of coloniality and the unresolved horrors of its afterlife. In understanding coloniality and coloniality of gender as an ongoing project of reduction, extraction, and dispossession, the concepts of pedagogies of cruelty and colonial geographies allow me to trace insidious and normalized acts of violence across haunting spaces and memories that mothers and sisters inhabit. The Coloniality of Gender Coloniality, Lugones (2010) asserts, is the “active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (p. 745). This ongoing classification of people and experiences of vulnerability, dispossession, and cruelty are possible due to imposed systems of subordination as intermeshed in the modern/colonial gender system. Coloniality of gender is a Western, modern, and colonial imposition (Lugones, 2010) that defines modes of organizations, property and labor relations, and ways of knowing (Lugones, 2007). From its onset, gender was constituted by colonial/modernity relations and arrangements of power that entangled mechanisms of heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classifications—and not simply in terms of patriarchy (i.e., male supremacy). In understanding these entanglements, it is possible to see how power relations of gender played out differently for those “colonized” and the “colonizer.” Lugones (2007) theorizes 15 the gender system as having two sides, a light and a dark one. The light constructs gender relations between white European and bourgeois men and women in hegemonically, heterosexual, and patriarchal in its reduction of white women’s rights and power to reproduce control and power from sexual access. The dark side of the gender system is utterly violent as it constitutes the full reduction of people through gender and racial lines, a “reduction to animality, to forced sex with white colonizers, to such deep labor exploitation that often people died working” (p. 206) In this sense, Lugones cautions about Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1995), asserting that obscures what’s really missing at the intersection in the production of the light and dark sides of the colonial/modern system. She asserts that dichotomous, hierarchical, ‘‘categorial’’ logic (Lugones 2010, p. 742) is central to colonial modernity and a tool of dehumanization. Thus, such logics of classification separates the human and non-human, civilized and uncivilized wherein the white bourgeois Europeans were civilized (Christian, etc.), fully human, and within categories of gender. Following such colonial categorization of dichotomous hierarchies, Lugones (2007) explains that “given the construction of the categories [atomic, dichotomous, separable], the intersection misconstrues women of color…it is only when we perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color” (p. 193). Thus, because colonial logic of dispossession and death deny women of color’s humanity, a “colonized woman is an empty category: no women are colonized; no colonized females are women” (Lugones, 2010, p. 745). In other words, “non-white women” exceeds the colonial/modern imposed categorical logic. As a colonizing construction, it denies humanity, gender, and existence to Indigenous women and Women of Color. It is the deep reduction of people to animality that sustained the creation of capital and labor, while reproducing control, power, and accumulation of capital through sex, dispossession, and forced/enslaved labor. 16 This work explores the ways colonial categories of gender, race, class, age, etc. inform experiences in intermeshed ways that deny women’s humanity, womanhood, and girls’ childhood in normalized and everyday practices. Settler colonial structures and the conquistador. Colonial logics of dispossession, extraction, and genocide are still alive, and, in many ways, their insidiousness is obscured as part of the landscape, “[it] is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence—the snake in the flooded basement” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 642). Importantly, and to contextualize neoliberal experiences as colonial experiences, colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist processes are entangled in the rationalization of dehumanization, racialization, and thus, the exploitation of people. Colonial structures and logic have been primarily obscured by the myth of “independence” across Abya Yala9 (King, 2019; Speed, 2017). In other words, we begin to see that “there is a state of ongoing occupation, in Latin America as elsewhere in the hemisphere” (Speed, 2017, p. 786). Speed (2017) also asserts that analyses of colonialism and coloniality of power have failed “to address settler colonialism as settler, they accept the basic premise that the settler has settled, and is now from here, rather than acknowledging that there is a state of ongoing occupation” (p. 786). In the territory known as Chile and Argentina, economic elites’ ongoing project continues to be one of epistemological, ontological, land, and human death for Indigenous Mapuche communities. Chilean conqueror-settlers continue to be integrated by economic and political elites who have pushed a dominant script motivated by nationalistic, economic, and political goals. Although Indigenous genocide was part of the Spanish colonial project (e.g., Selk’nam people in the 19th century), Spanish conquest maintly entailed land dispossession and extraction of Indigenous people’s labor under slave-like conditions (Mellafe, 1959; Villalobos et al., 1974). Additionally, they created and sustained current violent encounters and 9 Abya Yala, term in the language of the Kuna indigenous peoples of Panamá for the Americas. Often translated to mean Latin America, it in fact refers to the entire continent (Speed, 2017). 17 continuous death among indigenous peoples as the racialized and inferior Other in discourse and social hierarchies (King, 2019). First, Chilean conqueror-settler “formed the basis of the dominant script” of the formation of Chile through the notion of mestizaje in order to create a homogenous and unified national identity as the basis of a nation-state (Crow, 2013; Merino & Quilaqueo, 2003). This settler categorization denies, erases, and eliminates Mapuche and indigenous people’s presence and possibilities of self-determination, governability, and their ability to protect the land from Chile’s extractivist economy. Chilean government acts as a conqueror settler state through the ongoing militarization of Mapuche territory, denying their identity and demands, and ongoing media and everyday racist and discriminatory portrayals of indigenous peoples as “barbarians,” “lazy,” and who won’t value land in economic and monetary terms (Richards, 2013), thus enemies of progress and civilization (Strodthoff, 2011). Nahuelpan, Hofflinger, Martinez, and Millalén (2020) describe Chile’s elites as “una élite terrateniente suplantadora.”10 They explain, El proceso colonial en territorio mapuche corresponde a una modalidad específica de colonialismo denominada settler colonialism, colonialismo de colonos o de asentamiento, el cual gira en torno al despojo-posesión de la tierra-territorio, la dominación racial, una lógica de eliminación, genocidio y desintegración de los pueblos indígenas como sujetos políticos colectivos. This framing of the militarization and invasion of the Wallmapu as a settler-colonial project challenges the deeply ingrained historical tale of “independence,” an event that sustains Chileans’ nationalist identity, sense of homogeneity, and equality. The myth of “independence precludes the vast population identified as Chilean from seeing themselves as implicated and afflicted by the structural colonial practices and logic of human and land dispossession, extraction, and death. Along 10 “a ‘supplanting landowning elite” 18 these lines, King (2019) notes that the term “settler” does not entirely encompass the ongoing violence enacted on Black and Indigenous people, the afterlife of slavery, and current structures wherein political and economic elites continue the colonial and capitalistic project of dispossession through accumulation and exploitation, and exploitation through dehumanization (Povinelli, 2011; McKittrick, 2006, 2011). Thus, the construction of Chile as a nation-state requires Wallmapu and Mapuche dispossession, violence, and death. In short, the figure of the conquistador-settler “established the violent terms of contemporary social relations” (King, p. xi, p. 2019) of cruelty, dispossession, and extraction of life. The conquistador-settler seeks to fragment and subordinate people’s subjectivities, intersubjective relations with land and one another, with the spirit world, and colonize memory (Lugones, 2010). King’s words expand in space and time, to a historical and a global project. In Chile and the US, conquistador-settlers “established the violent terms of contemporary social relations” (King, p. xi, p. 2019) of cruelty. These nation-states are built through historically specific but similar processes of human and land theft and exploitation. Although conquistador settler-colonial logic shift and hide, spatially and geographically it is possible to evidence the ever-present colonial social relations in the way of current racial and class segregation, border surveillance and incarceration, ongoing profit from land theft, militarization, and contamination. The myth of mestizaje. In considering Chile as a settler-colonial state, the ideology (and myth) of mestizaje in the territory was part of a political project to construct a homogeneous and assimilative national identity that would legitimize the settler’s nation-state. Mestizaje is defined as a technology of discursive homogenization, racial, and onto-epistemological erasure of the indigenous self. Speed asserts (2017) that Mestizaje, as “a racial mix of Indian and Spaniard thus became the hegemonic belief that there was one race, rendering indigenous peoples a part of the racial mix and historic past” (p. 787), a process “capaz de renovar al indio” (Arre Marfull & Catepillán Tessi, 2021, 19 p. 19). The ideology of mestizaje serves as a technology of erasure and genocide. If unassimilated into to the “national model of the mestizo” (Grande, 2000, p. 473), indigenous peoples are framed as “the unreal other,” whose existence is deemed impossible within modern frames of mestizaje, thus placed outside and antithetical to modern understandings of progress, which justifies removal, death, and erasure for the conquistador-settler state. Additionally, Chilean conquistador-settler society adopts and internalizes a discourse of color-evasiveness (Annamma, Jackson, & Morrison, 2017), in the way of “we don’t see race” and “we are all Chileans,” when in fact, race, racialization, and colorism are embedded in the ways power relations are set up and are complicated by elements of gender, class, nationality, immigration status, and linguistic markers. Memory. As presented above, material, and discursive colonization of onto-epistemologies and memory are crucial to the colonial project of subordination and dehumanization. With onto- epistemology, I mean the intertwined nature between ontology and epistemology (e.g., Ohito, 2021; Rhee, 2021; Shahjahan et al., 2021). Ontology relates to modes of being, ways of existence, relationality, identities, and subjectivities--who and how to be in the world (Ohito, 2021), while epistemology relates to ways of knowing, creating knowledge, and the ways we come to know. Like decolonial feminists of color, in this work I also assert who I am, the ways I relate with others and with content, and how I know relate to shared transgenerational knowledge, rememories, and herstories. In the erasure of onto-epistemologies, languages, culture, and past, the colonizer seeks to dominate, instill despair, and create docile minds and bodies. Aimé Césaire (2001) presents the equation of colonization=thingification, whereby colonization destroys the mere identity of peoples by destroying their past, culture, and epistemological ways of knowing. In Césaire’s words, “I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out” (p. 42). In this sense, epistemological and memory genocide 20 moved alongside body, spirit, land dispossession, and genocide. Hence, trans- and multigenerational practices of rememory are spaces of decolonial resistance, encounter, and onto-epistemological knowledge. Culture, identity, and belonging are forged through the dialogic, intersubjective, and contextual practice of memory (Reyes et al., 2015). Memory and identity borders are difficult to discern, given that “identity is founded in the continuity of consciousness, whose orientation to the past is our memory upon which our identity [and place-making] is built” (Souroujon, 2011, p. 237). Memory shapes our identity and our identity is the frame of selection and signification of our memory across time and place, in the way of continuous consciousness (Candau, 2001; Souroujon, 2011). Our memories do not exist in a vacuum tied to a specific temporality, place, nor are they embodied, enclosed, or alienated. To the contrary, identity and memory are in an intimate, onto- epistemological, intergenerational, and polysemic relationship with our ancestors, our land, our stories through time and space. The colonization of memory then aims to reduce our humanity, belonging, identity, our stories, and ways of knowing. Vulnerability. Speed (2019) examines violence against women through the construction and reproduction of vulnerability in settler capitalist states. Colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal settler’s institutions and structures, conquistador-settler logic, and gender ideologies are deployed in overt and covert ways creating experiences and states of vulnerability for Indigenous women and women from low-income backgrounds. Thus, Speed (2019) asserts women’s vulnerability is afforded by structural and institutional conditions, rather than an inherent condition for women. In this dissertation, I focus on structures that create and foster vulnerability and pedagogies of cruelty as insidious across everyday spaces: at schools, hospitals, and on the bus to school. 21 Pedagogies of Onto-Epistemological Silencing and Cruelty Segato (2018) defines pedagogía de la crueldad as the adopted habit to turn what lives and supports life into an object/thing devoid of life and humanity (cosificación) through the normalization of cruelty and violence as part of the landscape. Thus, through low levels of empathy, we get used to death, extraction, and accumulation as the only possible path to progress. Low levels of empathy and the normalization of cruelty accompany the project of coloniality and “conquista nunca se completó, nunca fue consumada, y es un proceso continuo todavía en marcha” (Segato, 2016, p. 99)11. For the purpose of this work, I explore insidious forms of pedagogies of cruelty that are part of spaces of human interaction (e.g., schools, hospitals, prisons) in the form of onto-epistemological silencing and cruelty, that is, the silencing and erasure of the self in relation to body, mind, and emotions (Stanley & Wise, 2002), and the self in relation to meaning-making and multi-semiotic ways of languaging as historical, ecologically -afforded, experiential, relational, and interactional (Canagarajah, 2013; van Leeuwen, 2005). In other words, under onto-epistemological silencing and cruelty, bodies are expected to remain docile, static, and disciplined, they dislocate and constraint children and youth from their multi-semiotic potential (communicatively meaningful resources afforded by peoples contexts and cultures, as defined in Chapter 8) thus learning content unrooted from their biographies, stories, culture, languages, transgenerational memories, languaging practices, etc. (see above Césaire’s 2001 concept of Thingification). Spatialization of cruelty and abolitionist geography. Spatializing difference and cruelty in conquistador-settler states results generative in the understanding of the horror, resistance, and the afterlife of colonization, given that experiences of subordination and marginalization are spatial experiences socially and ideologically mediated; it is the spatialization of difference (McKittrick, 11 “the Conquest never finished, never was accomplished, and it is an ongoing process still in progress” (p. 99) 22 2011). Colonization and coloniality is thus a project of spatial displacement and dispossession; it limits who deserves material or symbolic space, who enters a place, and who experiences a sense of belonging, wholeness, and safety. Therefore, geography and space are not elements that just exist. On the contrary, McKittick (2006) asserts, they reveal “that the interplay between domination and black women’s geographies is underscored by the social production of space. Concealment, marginalization, boundaries are important social processes” (p. xi). As I describe in upcoming chapters, places serving and interacting with Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized communities (e.g., schools, prisons, hospitals, anti-union corporations) have historically been places of fear, suffering, cruelty (e.g., Segato, 2018; Dumas, 2014) and death. Similarly, Gilmore’s (2017) description of prisons expands beyond just the prison space. Its reach expands to any space that is extractive of people’s autonomy, life, possibilities, time, and space—a space that is life-annulling, unfree, and generates premature death and/or criminalization. Experiences of subordination and dispossession are also spatiotemporal experiences of colonial power dynamics: who is rejected from or belong to spaces (e.g., schools, hospitals, coffee shops), forced to wait for life-saving medical attention, whose time is valuable and expendable, and the imposition of western conceptions of time (i.e., linear, future-oriented). By visualizing and examining spatialized experiences, abolitionist geography examines and looks for an otherwise. In this sense, Gilmore (2017) summarizes, “La geografía abolicionista comienza desde la premisa simple de que la libertad es un lugar”12 (p. 62). Said differently, through geographic and place-based inquiry, possibilities and abolition of human extraction can also be envisioned in the pursuit of symbolic and material freedom and wholeness. 12 “An abolitionist geography starts from the simple premise that freedom is a place” (p. 62). 23 A woman’s body. Colonization and colonial logics still live and are represented in women’s stories, memories, and bodies. Complementary but differing from Lugones (2006, 2010), Segato (2016, 2018) theorizes coloniality around gender-based violence and patriarchy as concomitant with colonial violence. Through her argument, it is possible to visualize the embodiment and the corporality of gender violence as a colonial practice. She argues, Estados durante el siglo XX, la mujer era capturada, como el territorio. La tierra, la naturaleza, no es el territorio. El territorio es el espacio delimitado, circunscrito y políticamente habitado, administrado. La mujer siempre fue apropiada, violada e inseminada como parte de las campañas de conquista. En ella se plantó una semilla tal como se planta en la tierra, en el marco de una apropiación. (Segato, 2016, p. 181) Women’s bodies are contested spaces deemed conquistable under the conquistador-settler colonial structure as an extension of territory and dominance. Thus, to trace coloniality’s insidiousness, we need to consider body and memory in tracing and spatializing colonial entanglements. That is, women’s memories as bodily-spatial struggles where we can trace physically, materially, and symbolically embodied memories as “places of pain” for Black, Brown, and Indigenous women (Lorde, 1982 cited in Rhee, 2021, p. 18), where Women of Color’s bodies are “regulated and govern in schools and other social institutions” (Cruz, p. 664). Moreover, women’s multigenerational ways of knowing and ongoing consciousness lie alongside their bodily memories and stories (i.e., onto- epistemologies), which is also their liberating potential. In this sense, Shapiro (2005) notes, “What we know speaks with and to our bodily memories of living. Both mind and body mingle together in a continuous informational stream creating the interpretations we call knowledge. As such, we experience our interpretations as reality” (p. 32). Considering that the conquista never ended and it is an ongoing process, I am guided by the knowledge that women’s onto-epistemologies gathered in memory carried and passed to the next generation. In short, mothers’ and sisters’ rememories are 24 inherited and spatialized onto-epistemologies of a woman’s body, spirit, and meaning-making experiences thus paving that path towards resistance, transformation, and liberation in resolving haunting memories of pain, violence, and death. Haunting Memories and Places of Pain Memories of embodied pain haunt the living as a reminder and demand for change at the individual, social, and structural levels—a reminder that points to the presence of “an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 642). Similarly, the persistence of pedagogies of cruelty is normalized as part of the landscape is made visible and is witnessed anew through a haunting event that might be our own embodied memories or memories inherited from our mothers’ herstories. Under the presence of haunting memories, we are pulled to embodied memories and spaces that feel unfamiliar, unsettling, uncomfortable, and uncanny. Gordon (2008) and Rhee (2021) theorize the experience of haunting memories as unsolved violence and suffering in relation to forgetting, remembering, and imagining. A haunting memory, Avery Gordon (2008) describes, is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely (p. xvi)…[haunting] is a mediation, a process that links an institution and an individual, a social structure and a subject, and history and a biography. (p. 19) In this sense, haunting disrupts modern understanding of time and space, where present, past, and future are bounded and fragmented in a straight line (Rhee, 2021, p. 3). It brings the past as a present-past to show the ongoing horror. In understanding conquistador-settler (King, 2019), haunting is the refusal horrors of colonization—genocide, rape, humiliation, and above all, what’s made killable (e.g., Haraway, 2013; Potts & Haraway, 2010; Tuck & Ree, 2013)—, the ongoing horrors of its afterlife, and current settler-colonial states. In this sense, Tuck & Ree (2013) note that 25 “social life, settler colonialism, and haunting are inextricably bound; each ensures there are always more ghosts to return” and that haunting “is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation” (p. 642). A haunting is also our mothers’ onto-epistemologies and experiential knowledge gathered in a wish for an alternative existence for their daughters. In this work, I trace shared haunting memories across spaces as multi-generationally and cross-generationally rememory and ongoing women’s consciousness and desire for freedom. Women in my family--my mom, grandmother, and aunts--often want to let go and erase the pain. However, at the same time, they refuse to forget the violence that was brought to them for being women in contexts of poverty, men13 wounding them (Anzaldúa, 1987), and lived impositions of prescribed and bounded roles such as motherhood, care responsibilities, and housekeeping. Rememory (Rhee, 2021) and co-construction of herstories14 is the living pursuit for freedom and possibility. This is a private and intimate practice that has created a continuous multi/intergenerational consciousness, memories, and stories of women passed to other women. As feminist scholars of color have described herstories memories are feminist stories that uncover “secret places of pain” (Lorde cited in Rhee, 2020, p. 18) caused by abusive systems of power, and demand freedom and possibility for future generations. In the next chapter, I describe how these guiding conceptual frameworks inform the chosen methodologies for my inquiry by engaging in collective and personal rememory and memorias porfiadas. 13 The man: the figure of a man appears across herstories as the main perpetrators of women’s suffering, but not the only ones. Dominant patriarchal and colonial systems perpetuate and sustain violence based on sex, class, gender, race, migrant status. 14 Women stories and point of view from a resistant, that highlights feminist issues. Stories and memories passed generationally by women to women as a resistance practice. 26 Chapter 4 Methods of Inquiry Porfiada Memoria15 (Stubborn Memory) esta memoria porfiada asomada con insistencia la muy obstinada se queda insistente, persistente la porfiada se resiste a olvidar porque persistente y rebelde es la memoria de mi pueblo16 Decoloniality Women’s Rememory as Multi-Generational Living Refusal In this work, I explore cross-generational and multi-generational refusal to remember and forget memories that haunt. I weave the multiple voices and stories that I grew up with and grew up with me as living transgenerational onto-epistemologies in relation to women’s place, autonomy, belonging, and desire within social, economic, historical, and political contexts. Villenas (2006) describes these teaching moments between mothers and daughters as mujer (womanist)-oriented pedagogies that happen across places and times (p. 148). These ‘pedagogical moments’ are diverse and happen through everyday actions, mothers’ body language, life lessons, family stories, the unsaid, and silences. In this work, these moments escape spatial, time, and generational bounded understanding. They transcend generations, from mothers to daughters as a womanist pedagogy for survival, self-strength, and self-reliant practices in contexts of political, social, and cultural oppression (Villenas, 2006). 15 this stubborn memory/leaning with insistence/this very stubborn memory/stays/insistent, persistent/ the stubborn refuses to forget/ because persistent and rebel/ is the memory/ of my people. 16 I wrote this piece inspired by “Porque persistente es la memoria de los pueblos” (Pedro Cayuqueo, 2018, p. 325). 27 As a methodology, rememory is a process of witnessing and making sense of inherited, shared, and lived herstories in their past, present, and futurity. It is a process of honoring embodied herstories as refusal and “conscious rupture” from resilient oppressive structures (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 83). Moreover, it is a way of documenting the bodily, spatial, emotional, and spiritual contours of embedded colonial horror and haunting memories that shape us generationally and guide us to new paths herstories of wholeness in research, teaching, and writing. Growing up, I witnessed mothers’ and grandmothers’ stories as stubborn memories that persist, insist in their presence, and refuse to be forgotten. When these herstories emerge, usually they do not stand in isolation, they are shared experiences that unveil the commonality of widespread violence as part of a woman’s experience. These are urgent herstories that need to be remembered, digested, and chronicled as transgenerational onto-epistemologies. Thus, across this piece, I bring my mother’s, her mother’s, my high school, and college friends’ herstories, and my own persisting, resilient, and haunting memories. I collect inherited rememories and herstories and remain faithful to the details that have survived time and the horizons of memory. I frame these multivoice herstories through storytelling, poetic inquiry, and narrative pieces, together with visual artifacts, and reflections written over the years. In particular, I focus on memorias porfiadas (stubborn memory), reiterative and inherited mothers’ and sisters’ memories that stay, grow, and remain alive as shared consciousness, as a resilient wish for autonomy, choice, freedom from colonial and patriarchal horror. Cindy Cruz (2001) asks, “How does a brown body know?” In this decolonial path, she asserts, Our production of knowledge begins in the bodies of our mothers and grandmothers, in the acknowledgment of the critical practices of women of color before us. 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. 658) 28 As a child, I listened to my mother’s embodied stories that became part of the ways I made sense and related to spaces and people, my own identity, and commitments. As I grew, these memories acquired new-found shapes and meanings. Memorias porfiadas are the living refusal to forget (Ahmed, 2017) and generational onto-epistemologies of resistance, desire for healing, and wanting an otherwise. These memories became the roadmap that guided my own path. I learned what it means to grow up the daughter of a low-income family in a working-class, segregated, and racially marginalized area; and being birthed by a mother who migrated from the rural south of Chile. Blurred in-between my own memories and stories, I often tell their stories as if they were my own, as my mom and aunts told my grandma’s stories and memories as if they were their own. Even when my aunts and grandmothers are gone, their stories are women-centered, co-constructed by women, and passed to the new generation of women in search of freedom and possibilities. As a process, rememory is “a feminist aspiration for knowledge. Knowledge that heals our wounds, supports our recovery and realization, and pursues wholeness” (Rhee, 2021, p. 25). Drawing on Rhee’s work (2021), I define rememory and herstories as the knowledge we inherit from women before us who envisioned happiness and wholeness for themselves, their sisters, daughters, and their mothers. Reconstruction of herstories and memories is a dialogical, intersubjective, and contextual process where different versions of the past (memories and rememories) are constructed in the present (Reyes et al., 2015, 2016; Rhee, 2021). It is, in other words, an intimate, dialogic, and relational space that transgresses modern understandings of time and space, it challenges time as a straight line. It is, in fact, a pendulum that swings back and forth, nurturing a new consciousness about the past, the present, and the future. As we grow and change, our memories take up new meanings. We revisit memories from a different angle, with different values, and gathered understandings. I then, transgenerationally and collectively, weave stories and memories together. Memories that break our hearts and souls, to then piece them together in community through 29 generational and onto-epistemological knowledge that nurture generational healing of wounds across time and space. Thus, the resilient herstories presented here are my mother’s and women’s living hope for an alternative future-present for women after them. Author’s Positionality Writing these pages has meant to piece back together onto-epistemologically. Throughout my scholarship, I have critiqued the boundaries that keep students’ stories, languages, sociopolitical commitments, and generational biographies outside the classroom space and away from experiential content and dialogue. This is then an effort to repair and heal my own academic trajectory wherein herstories were silenced thus disempowering young women. Onto-epistemologically, I have not been alone in my growth as a transnational woman and scholar of color. The ways I know, think, and care are shaped and guided by women’s memorias porfiadas, collective voices, and trajectories of women who allowed and protected my space for exploration and learning; women who walked with me and came before me; women with whom I share educational trajectories of dispossession and resistance, who are critical thinkers, who teach me every day how to heal and love generational wounds, love other women, love and forgive myself, vocalize love, and sustain one another. I weave in this work my intellectual, spiritual, and multigenerational herstories as valuable knowledge and decolonial work. I reject the compartmentation of the personal and the intellectual, social, and political. Multi/intergenerational dialogue, shared herstories, and memories have also been powerful spaces of encounter, understanding, and empathy. In this sense, I am guided by the concept of in-betweenness to spatialize and onto-epistemologically communicate the meshing and overlapping experiences, women’s stories, processes, and transitions. Growing up, women’s ways of knowing and teaching were in the form of stories and memories, mujer womanist-pedagogies (Villenas, 2006), that is teaching and learning spaces led by women for other women, thus creating coalitions beyond time and space, and beyond blood ties. Although we differ in age and experiences, 30 our identities as women with shared experiences brought us together in the same space and time. Furthermore, like Rhee (2020) describes: “[w]ho I am shaped and is shaped by what and how I know, which affects ways in which I pursue knowledge” (Rhee, 2020, p. 4). In other words, onto- epistemologically, herstories (mine and given) are collective voices and trajectories that guide and sustain how I know, and I have come to know (onto-epistemology). In the words of Jeong-eun Rhee (2020), I am not “separable from m/others whose pains, losses, and fights have mothered a place for me to be a part of herstories” (p. 4). In this sense, memory is also relational and intersubjective. Halbwachs (1992), for instance, asserts that our “autobiographical memory is always rooted in other people. Only group members remember, and this memory nears extinction if they do not get together over long periods of time” (p. 24). Similarly, for Bakhtin (1982) to be is to communicate for, through, and with the help of other consciousness, and “the most important acts that constitute auto- consciousness are determined by the relationship to other consciousness (to you)” (p. 327)17 in a dialogic and relational space. In other words, our identity, memory, and consciousness are tied to those with whom we have emotional, familial, and spiritual connections (Rhee, 2020). That is, my memories, what I know, who I am, and who I will be are inseparable from the women before me and women I have met and with whom I share similar and intimate stories of class, race, gender subordination, silencing, exclusion, and symbolic and material extraction. Similarly, as a scholar, I stand in this in-between dialogic space of memorialization and multi/intergenerational consciousness, where memories of refusal meet my own stories and my current understandings. All of them together guide my trajectory as a woman of color living through many firsts away from home. Furthermore, in a feminist decolonial move, in this in-between guided by women of color, I revisit moments of gratuitous suffering, silencing, and material and onto- 17 Yo me conozco y llego a ser yo mismo sólo al manifestarme para el otro, a través del otro y con la ayuda del otro. Los actos más importantes que constituyen la autoconciencia se determinan por la relación a la otra conciencia (al tú). 31 epistemological dispossession. I pursue the visibility of insidious colonial practices in the overlapping space low-income women of color continue to occupy in their everyday lives. Lastly, I stand in an in-between as “porfiada”. Since I was a child, my mother (and some teachers in their own ways) would describe me as porfiada because I did not abide by outside impositions that stood against my inner desires. My grandmother and my mother were categorized in the same ways as the disrupted imposed dominant narratives, traditions, and expectations. To be porfiada is a good conflict at “a space of doubling,” wherein we hold traditional and dominant oppressive beliefs while struggling to ensure survival and self-worth (Villenas, 2006, p. 152). In other words, to stand in an in-between before crossing over to an otherwise. Villenas (2006) describes this space as intergenerational and borderland living. This is an in-between between generations, mothers and daughters, living and educational possibilities, an otherwise. Rememory and Evocative Analytical Approach I deconstruct and reconstruct memories I share with other women (herstories) in my life guided by sisters, mothers, and women of color, with subordinated and marginalized experiences. I voice experiences rooted in coloniality seeking to disrupt the “normality” of colonial extraction, cruelty, and dispossession as intrinsic to women’s day to day. To do so, I use the practice of rememory which is an evocative practice as a guiding evocative, dialogic, and resilient oral practice and method. I explore herstories as a place that is “forever transcending the temporality of past, present, and future” (Rhee, 2021, p. 2), thus defying modern and colonial constructs of time and space. Like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui illuminates, El mundo indígena no concibe a la historia linealmente, y el pasado-futuro están contenidos en el presente (...) El proyecto de modernidad indígena podrá aflorar desde el presente, en una espiral cuyo movimiento es un continuo retroalimentarse del pasado sobre el futuro, un 32 “principio esperanza” o “conciencia anticipante” (Bloch, 1971) que vislumbra la descolonización y la realiza al mismo tiempo.18 (2010, p. 55) I first began excavating and writing my own memories that constantly emerge as part of my own identity and day-to-day. Early, I knew that this work had to be relational, multi-voiced, and dialogically iterative. This wasn’t difficult because rememory, as presented across sections, has always been a way of relating and connecting with one another among women. As I explored, I needed additional information. I need to go deeper into memories and herstories that grew up with me, the memories I had from high school and college. To do so, I drew on a dialectic and material evocative approach to allow the resurgence of personal memories, moments, questions, and reflection. I first wrote and reflected the memories that often emerge in my day to day, others occupy spaces of pain, that were/are an important part of my identity and pedagogical commitments. Then, I divided these stories as: mother’s herstories, high school stories, English learning stories, and alternatives in language education. For Chapter 5, mother’s herstories, I had many conversations with my mother over video, only some of them were recorded. Some stories (stories I grew up with) would come up spontaneously in our weekly video calls, so I would take notes to later writing them down in detail. When I had questions, my mom would respond through detailed voice messages. My follow up questions were like: Can you describe the room? Who were the doctors? Why? How? Mother’s stories were reiteratively written and examined, as my mom would bring more details. Importantly, my mother was faithful to herstories and their details, so I know details by memory after listening to them many times over. For chapters 6 and 7, I created a semi-structured script to guide my conversation with Fernanda, Feña, and Kathy. The script included questions that I had 18 “The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear; the past-future is contained in the present (...) The project of indigenous modernity can emerge from the present in a spiral whose movement is a continuous feedback from the past to the future—a “principle of hope” or “anticipatory consciousness”—that both discerns and realizes decoloniza- tion at the same time” (English Translation by Brenda Baletti, 2012). 33 while writing my own stories. Some questions related to spaces (public transportations, classroom, school), related to teachers, and what they wished they had learned. Artifact exploration. Following an evocative approach (resurgence of memories in interaction with artifacts), I examined family and education artifacts (photos, worksheets, notebooks, etc.) as supportive resources for rememory. Education artifacts included books and phonology worksheets from the time I started learning English in 2007 at the university level (19 years old) through immersion and content-based learning. The purpose of collecting artifacts is to reconstruct memories and stories. Over the years after graduation, I classified physical copies of worksheets, readings, and books, according to subject by year and subject. I selected books that brought back memories of joy, dislike, or connected to a specific moment. I took photos and kept digital versions, like books and worksheets. After each artifact interaction, I journaled about these lived experiences and memories, stories, silenced, and questions that come up during the interaction. While journaling stories and analysis became meshed, thus poems and narratives are presented both as an artistic, conceptual, and analytical piece. Sisters’ Portraits Throughout the upcoming chapters, I spatialize and narrate experiences from my period in high school and in college. I weave the multiple voices and stories of Fernanda (Fer), Feña, and Kathy19. Together we retrace our shared moments. Moments that emerge quite often in our conversations and our desire to unlearn what it means to be a woman, a mother, and the firsts in our families to attend university spaces and receive a university degree. We share memories of silence and memories that haunt due to its afterlife and shared living refusal. 19 Fernanda (Fer), Feña, and Kathy chose to use their real names. These are shorter versions of their first names which is how I called them due to our closeness. 34 Fernanda. Fernanda is a mother, scholar, and a social worker who specialized in social intervention who also prepares other social workers. Like me, she is first in many things in her family. She is the first to graduate from higher education, the first to study abroad in Argentina, and the first to complete a postgraduate degree. Her students—mostly adults who are parents, work, and study—are students who were economically marginalized from higher education. They access education through the law 21091 for higher education that guarantees access to the 60% of families with the lowest income. We have a lot in common today: we care deeply about gender, racial, and class issues; our mothers share similar stories, and we share experiences and memories through which we continue learning and examining. She is many people to me. She unconditionally educates me, guides me, and supports me. She is my mother, sister, my mentor, and friend. We were not taught to be these women for each other. It required healing and unlearning everything we thought we knew about love, about loving women, and class-conscious feminism. Feña. Feña is many things. Her proudest and strongest identity is being the mother of 4 children. She is a Latina mother of four Afro-descendent and Afrolatinx children. A Latina mother in “a white world” that is Canada. She was born in Chile in Canela, a small town in La Serena, that has no more than 9,000 people. Canela is one of the comunas (municipality-level subdivisions) in the region with one of the highest levels of poverty (31%) and the highest percentage of people deprived of basic services. I met Feña at the University. She was kind, supportive, and like me, struggled with English and the academic demands of a competitive and elite university. Despite the years, the distance, and our different lives, our conversations about decoloniality, feminism, and our relationships with others and the world continue. She is many things to me too: a mother, a friend, a sister, and a mentor. Kathy. Kathy and I have gone through our university program and many other key moments together. We became close friends at a moment in time when many events collided: the 35 first year in a challenging program, her mother became sick and quickly decayed, and together we failed the main class that was the prerequisite for many others: English I. We shared similar trajectories: we were the first generations in our family to access higher education, and our older siblings navigated similar challenges as the first generation and young professionals. Kathy was also like a mother to me. We would talk about things I did not feel comfortable talking about with my mom or other friends. Although we are the same age, Kathy seemed knowledgeable about the world, wiser, more experienced, and more aware in general. She is like a friend, a sister, and a mother at the same time. She always was more informed about contraception, feminism, poetry, literature, politics, news, etc. She was the first woman I ever heard stating, quite emphatically determined, that she did NOT want children. That day my mind was blown away. I thought, can you even do that? Up to that moment, I did not know that there were options. That I could choose. Within a context of competition and critique among women, with her and Feña we created a space of solidarity, support, and trust. In the next chapter, I begin with my mother’s and grandmother’s rememories and herstories that shape my onto-epistemological positioning at a spatiotemporal in-between. I collected stories and memories that I grew up with and were shared with me in faithful detail over the years. Through them, I trace colonial footprints of embodied dispossession and violence in the way women’s transgenerational desire for wholeness and freedom in the form of memorias porfiadas. 36 Chapter 5 Mothers’ and Sisters’ Persistent Memories of Refusal A Pause Multi and cross-generational herstories and rememory trace who I am socially, politically, and culturally. I acknowledge that I am a descendant of colonization, and its epistemic colonization moves and persists. It bounds “physical space-mind-body-affect for thousands of years, persistence over multiple generations, and ‘deep pauses’, are necessary to change reflexes” and dominant understandings and ways of doing (Daza & Tuck, 2014). I see this work as an ongoing deep pause where I will trace, untangle, eventalize20, and specialize colonial footprints across shared spaces and trajectories accompanied by my mothers’ and sisters’ herstories within a dialogic encounter of multigenerational memory. I borrow Anzaldúa’s (1987) words to describe this rememory encounter, She puts through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at forces that we as a race, as women, have been part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentros, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraizado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. (p. 82) This chapter embodies the pause over tea that my mom, aunt, and I would take to sit, talk, cry, laugh, and remember people, places, and stories surrounded by those loved ones who understand deeply. I use a metaphor of tea as fostering togetherness and a dialogic space, an invitation to heal and witness each other’s wounds, an intimate and sacred space of hope and love for one another. Tea making and brewing is the embodiment of a pause, the moment your wandering mind and overwhelmed soul return to oneself. It all begins while you wait for the kettle to boil. Set up your 20 Ligia (Licho) López Lopéz (2017) describes event-alizing or Eventalization is a form of inquiry that historicizes and makes visible events. In this piece I continue what Dr. Allweiss and I started in our project, to capture moments, memories, and herstories that haunt that unveil pervasive colonial logics. 37 favorite teacup, green tea peach flavored tea bag. Add the right amount of sweet. Hold the cup with two hands to scare away the cold. And listen. The mind untangles the day, the thoughts, the worries, the pain, and it comes back to our body a bit more after every warm sip surrounded by women who raised, fed, and protected me through their example of resilience, spirit, and thirst for knowledge and self-reliance. Home is Where a Kettle Boils A mate or tea at home is always an invitation to stop for the day, to rest, to let go of the good or the bad that the day brought. When my mom and her sisters meet, these warm beverages are an invitation to sit and talk. Despite many lies and heartbreaks, their jokes, their laugh, and their unspoken youthful connection are still there. Their stories would bring their past, present, and futurities entangled at the precise moment. They would recount stories of their mother, their childhood, their youth, and their adulthood again and again. In their stories, my grandma was suddenly a child on a horse sneaking out of the house to go to school. Her exemplary messages were for us to insist on what we wanted even if it meant disobedience, that education was a priority, and that her efforts were instigated in my mother, and my mother protected my right to education with determination. My grandma’s refusal remains alive through those stories that I heard so many times, and each time with the exact same details. They were told as if they wanted me to hold on to that memory, to learn and teach something precious and urgent. Sometimes it is not easy to come back to those places of memory, and yet my mothers and her sisters do, almost like saying “here is a road map that will keep you safe.” In Between Forgetting and Remembering Rememory as a feminist decolonial process is a dialogue of shared herstories of despojo (dispossession) and crueldad (cruelty) carried transgenerationally. Rememory is a space of dialogue 38 and knowledge-creation, a space where haunting memories of gender violence and trauma often emerge (Rhee, 2021). I carry stories of young women from my family that migrated from rural areas to the Capital, Santiago; women who were racialized, dark-skinned, from modest backgrounds to whom education was a luxury, and the first ones to complete middle and high school. I carry with me these herstories and memories from women before me and those who have inhabited similar memories and experiences alongside and through their mothers. Despite the resilience of her memories, my mom wants to forget sometimes. She is a strong woman who believes and feels deeply. A devoted Catholic, she can hold many contradictory beliefs: she refuses to delve into the past while, at the same time, refuses to forget stories. When I would bring “negative” and conflictive moments from the past, she would get mildly upset and say “olvida esas cosas, Romina”21 Nevertheless, I grew up listening to my grandparents, parents, and aunts’ memories. Those memories reflected trauma, food, housing, and job insecurity, especially for the women in my family. As many contradictory messages that we, especially low-income women often receive growing up (e.g., be quiet but strong; obey and be selfless but don’t let anyone disrespect you, see Anzaldúa, 1987), my mom would ask me to forget and move forward while telling and retelling stories from the past. She wanted me to move on, to be resilient, to be free--but remained aware. My mother’s connection with one of her oldest sisters is a reminder of the possibilities of deep sisterhood and love between women (even beyond blood and family ties). In the coalition of violence and multiple experiences of vulnerability, my mom and her sister (who was also my mother by choice) played many roles in each other’s lives. They raised, protected, guided, fed, dressed, and comforted one another unconditionally. They would give up everything for each other. It was the 21 “Forget those [harmful] memories” 39 purest, deepest, and strongest love and trust between two women that words can describe. When her sister passed during the onset of covid, many lives were gone with her death. For a while, my mom could not talk about her. Their stories turned into silence. There was so much loss that words were insufficient. Months later, in one of our video calls, she described how much she missed her, Toda Ella era como mi mamá mi hermana mi mejor amiga mi confidente ella era toda22 With her sister gone, she struggled with remembering and forgetting. Remembering was an overwhelming place of pain, loss, and absence. Forgetting meant that her sister would be completely gone. I think Toda was her way of accepting her sister’s absence and bringing her back into our lives through her memories. Swirls and Spirals of Memory: The Present is the Past is the Future In looking at women’s herstories, the understanding of time and space are not bounded, static, or disconnected. They are contained within and across each other, in spirals and waves. Spatially and temporally, rememories and multigenerational consciousness are an in-between where dialogue, new knowledge, and rupture from oppressive practices take place. As I revisit and relive my mother’s memories, I stand in the time and space in-between as I make sense of this process of rememory. They all come together at this moment. 22 “ All. She was like my mother. mi sister. my friend. my best friend. my confidant. All” This is how my mom described her late sister to me a few months after my aunt passed away. She passed away in June of 2020 due to Covid. 40 Figure 5.1 Romina at a 2011 student protest nearby her birthplace The time from birth to the in-between. Someone took this picture (Figure 5.1) during one of many student protests in 2011. Protests, marches, and educational spaces occupations lasted over a year. Here, I am walking towards Parque O’Higgins, a space that I have inhabited in many ways over the years, and in between. 34 years ago, an ambulance parked at this in-between where I was born. I was born in an ambulance at 4:55 pm in the middle of summer in Santiago. I was left in between my mother’s legs, bound through the umbilical cord. Years later, I shuttled this birthplace for seven years, as an undergrad on the bus to school. This was in between our home and our primary hospital location, in between my home and my university, and in between working-class homes and more affluent geographic areas. Memories that were given and are now my own want me to hold a space for an in-between time. Swirls and spirals of memory meet in this in-between, making former impossible paths wide enough for all the lives and dreams I carry in my one life. 41 The space in-between. I haven’t been able to call home any of the places that I have inhabited since I came to the U.S. seven years ago. Today, uprooted from the home I knew for 25 years, I am learning to live in-between places. Not here, nor there. I was, ironically, born in the in- between. My mom, a working-class, dark-skinned, and shy young woman from the South of Chile, and I in her womb were refused, returned, and postponed from medical attention. Since then, I guess, I have made the in-between my home. Grand/Mothers’ Herstories When thinking about multigenerational rememories and knowledge, it starts with my grandmother. Her desire for better opportunities for her children is visible in every turn of herstories; these are linked to her own experiences of extraction, dispossession, abandonment, and limited choice. Her resilient herstories are a wish that my mom reclaimed for their own children, and like Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), my mom and aunts, just like her mom, puts through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at forces that we as a race, as women, have been part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentros, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraizado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. (p. 82) Wholeness, autonomy, and choice are multigenerational endeavors sustained in women’s herstories and rememories of knowledge production, living refusal, and imaginings. As Cindy Cruz (2001) clearly notes, “our production of knowledge begins in the bodies of our mothers and grandmothers, in the acknowledgment of the critical practices of women of color before us” (p. 658). Thus, to respond to this onto-epistemological need, I return to my grand/mothers’ embodied herstories and rememories. 42 Vignette: The man “Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women. Kitchen of lust, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men— they come with keys, and sometimes, the men— they come with hammers” (Warsan Shire, “The House,” 2014) As I began revisiting and examining my mothers’, my grandmothers’, and my own stories, I noticed the presence of a character in every story: “the man.” Nameless, faceless, unloved, a shadow of a person that once was. A man who was a husband, a stranger on the bus, a stranger walking by. The man’s name and identity did not make it into my mom’s and grandma’s stories as a humanized figure. “The man” is often the main character behind their haunting memories. Growing up, I was told that if I left the house at night, a man would pick me up and take me away. The man had many nicknames: El cuco, el coco, el viejo del saco, the boogeyman. Early on, I knew that my mother and grandmother did not trust men because the keys to our safety and trust given to men may turn into hammers that harm us. And I knew that I could not trust men either. “The man” is the embodiment of the horror of the coloniality of gender and the structure of patriarchy that crosses all social classes, races, and ethnicities today within settler-colonial nations. Men, poor or upper class, bell hooks (2015/1981) asserts, “are able to oppress and brutalize women” (p. 200). The coloniality of gender and settler state-sponsored vulnerability supports and condones violence against women. The man gains power by “conquering” a woman’s body, autonomy, and safety while dehumanizing themselves into faceless and nameless men, like in my mothers’ herstories. As bell hooks (2015/1981) describes, in an imperialist capitalist and patriarchal order, “Men are encouraged to phobically focus on women as their ENEMY so that they will blindly allow other forces…to strip them daily of their humanity” (p. 259). 43 Vignette: A grandmother’s herstory. I was twelve years old when my grandmother passed away. At that age, I didn’t have many questions; she didn’t have much to say either. I was too little, too loud, too wiggly, and too squirrely for her. She would just get mad at me and my cousin for climbing her plum tree and eating the fruit before it was ripped and ready to turn into her favorite marmalade. “Les va a doler el estómago!” She would yell at us. But it never happened. My grandma, mi weli, raised and fed many children until the day she died. Many people knew her from other areas of the country, “La señora Carmen me mató varias veces el hambre,” I heard many times. She was the mother of 12 children. 5 of them were taken away by “the man,” her first husband, my mom often describes. That man left only one behind, the one that was breastfeeding. He put the rest of the children in an orphanage until they were old enough to work. In horror, my grandma went to the police for help. The police told her that nothing could be done to find them. “Los hijos le pertenecen a él por ley. Quédese con su bebé y rehaga su vida.”23 My aunts and mom asked her the same questions that I have been asking them recently. Did my grandma want to have children? Why didn’t she have a choice? The answers are always stories. Looking for a way to have control over future pregnancies, she visited the doctor at the company town where the whole family lived and my grandfather worked for a state company. She confronted the female doctor: ¿Cómo lo hacen? ¿Por qué nosotras [las pobres] tenemos tantos hijos y ustedes tienen tan pocos?24 My grandmother asked the female doctor, pointing to the lack of autonomy over her own body and the lack of choices among poor women like her in the countryside. The woman responded that it was illegal to give that information. I asked my mom how my grandma saw this difference in the number of children between women. “Todos vivían en el pueblo de la compañía. 23 “Children belong to him by law. Keep you baby and move on with your life” 24 “How do you do it? ¿Why do we [poor women] have so many children and you [wealthy women] have so little? 44 Las esposas de los trabajadores y las esposas de los jefes, las doctoras, etc. Todo eso se veía ahí mismo.”25 Looking close at women’s bodies and stories, it is possible to see the limits of their freedom and the ongoing colonial logic of domination and dispossession become evident. A woman’s body is a contested space, a territory deemed conquistable, docile, disciplined, and regulated—a corporality that does not belong to her. Her children born from her do not belong to her but to “the man.” Figure 5.2 Romina’s mother, nine-month pregnant standing outside her home Vignette: A mother’s herstory. My birth story is told as a tale, but nowadays it feels like a horror story. I grew up listening to my mom describing ourstory. Despite the years, my mom remains faithful to every detail of ourstory. To me, however, ourstory is an intricate memory that morphs through time. This memory grew as I grew up and changed as I changed. First, I used to tell my birth story as a good anecdote, a resemblance to the way my mom told ourstory of my birth and how we met. Now, as an adult, this story, as many others that my mom has narrated to me over the years 25 “They all lived in the company town. The wives of the workers and the wives of the bosses, the doctors, etc. Everything was visible right there” 45 repeatedly, acquires new meanings. My mom’s pregnancy was a surprise to her. “Yo ya estaba cómoda con tu hermano,”26 she reflects. My brother was 3 years old, “…yo quería trabajar, salir adelante” 27 she continues. She had my brother when she was 22 years old. “Mi embarazo” my mom always begins the story, “fue muy complicado.”28 In her 5th month of pregnancy, doctors told my mom that her baby might be dead. Considered a risky pregnancy, they told her to rest. She was given her pre-natal leave earlier due to how delicate her pregnancy was. On the morning of December 22, my mom woke up feeling pain and contractions. “Yo había guardado un dinero para un taxi, para cuando me fuera a la maternidad porque el hospital Paula está lejos.” My mom and dad arrived at the hospital, “me revisaron y me dijeron que todavía me faltaba. Que tenía 8 cm de dilatación y que tenía que esperar, que estaba en trabajo de parto.”29 “Me hablaba como cabra chica, como si fuera tonta, como se tenía que ver cuando la guagua está lista para salir.”30 And they never checked them in to ease her labor symptoms. “Nos fuímos con tu papá.”31She continues, with a quivering voice, “llegue a la casa y con dolor. Me paseaba. Mi mamá me miraba y no hallaba qué hacer. Cada vez era más intenso.”32 In paused and careful detail, my mom describes the things she did while feeling constant pain: she cooked and goes on describing what she made “me acuerdo siempre lo que cociné. Hice cazuela y ensalada de repollo.” She made the bed, pacing back and forth trying to soothe her increasingly intense pain. “Tú lo único que tú querías era nacer,”33 she repeats in 26 “I wanted to work, I wanted to get ahead…” 27 “I was already comfortable with your brother” 28 “My pregnancy was very complicated” 29 “They checked me and told me that I was not ready yet. That I was 8cm dilated and that I had to wait.” 30 “She spoke to me like I was a little girl, as if I were stupid, how it looks like when the baby was ready to come out” 31 “Your dad and I left” 32 “I got home in pain. I walked. My mom would look at me and she didn’t know what to do. It was getting more intense.” 33 “You only wanted to be born, I tried to resist because I didn't want you to be born there, I wanted to get to the hospital” 46 a tone that I think critiques and celebrates my strong unborn and infant will that caused many scary moments for her over the years. Deciding that it was time, a neighbor called an ambulance. The ambulance arrived soon after, scheduled to pick up three other people badly injured. The trip to the hospital took longer than expected and the summer heat made it even more difficult. “Tú pujabas cada vez más fuerte. Lo único que querías era nacer. Yo trababa de aguantarme porque no quería que nacieras ahí, quería llegar al hospital.” “Fui ignorante,”34 my mom reflects, she could have gone to another hospital, but she thought that the right thing was to go to the hospital that had her records and monitored her throughout her pregnancy. To assist her, the ambulance parked at Parque O’Higgins. It was very quick, my mom always says, “saliste rápido, jabonada.”35 The paramedic left the baby between her legs without cutting the umbilical cord. Once they arrived at the hospital, my mom recalls that the nurses were not happy that she had given birth outside the hospital. My mom recalls a nurse shouting “dónde está la señora que dio a luz fuera de foco?!”36 My mom was taken to different places, switched people, and never being told what they were doing or going to do. She was then taken to a room with a female and male doctor to remove her placenta. My mom began complaining of the pain, “porque la placenta es como tener [parir] otra guagua,”37 she explains to me. For expressing her pain, she continues, “me retaron por eso, porque yo me quejaba y ahí me amenazaron de que me iban a hacer el raspaje38 sin anestesia. Entonces yo entré en pánico.”39 While they were performing the procedure, my mom describes it with a sense of anger, 34 “I was ignorant” 35 “You came out fast, like a bar soap” 36 “where is the lady who gave birth out of turn?!” 37 “because the placenta is like giving birth another baby” 38 Curettage or scraping: to rub (a surface) with something rough, so as to clean or smooth it; a scoop-shaped surgical instrument for removing tissue from body cavities, as the uterus. 39 “They scolded me for that, because I complained and then they threatened me that they were going to do the curettage without anesthesia. So I panicked” 47 Mientras me manipulaban para sacar la placenta, ellos conversaban cosas que nada que ver…como que estaban tratando a un animal. No hablaban nada referente a lo que me estaban haciendo. Una cuestión bien fría y yo me sentía mal porque me dolía. Ellos no estaban ni ahí. Doctores totalmente inconscientes para el momento.40 After that, she was taken to an operating room with many instruments. When she saw these surgical instruments and a big surgical light above her, she felt terror. A nurse tried to calm her, telling her not to worry. Laying on the operating table, she was sedated for the procedure. When she woke up, she was in a recovery room not remembering anything after being sedated. Discussion These are my grandmother’s and mother’s haunting memories that have been passed to me as a reminder of the persistent horror committed against women’s bodies and their sense of wholeness. These living and transcending haunting memories and herstories are a living refusal, memorias porfiadas that disrupt and dislocate our sense of progress and freedom. Memorias porfiadas guide the next generations’ growth and consciousness towards autonomy over their bodies, their choice, and their unrelinquishable rights. I can tell many stories related to obstetric violence against women before, during, and after pregnancy. Across settler-colonial structures in the Americas and Latin America, underneath and through obstetric violence lie patriarchal, western, and colonial logics and legacies in medicine that affect women across age, socioeconomic status, and educational levels. The First National Survey about gynecological and obstetrical violence in Chile (Salinero Rates, 2020) reported that 79,32% of 4,000 survey participants expressed having experienced obstetric violence; 46,6% affirmed that their 40 “While they were manipulating me to remove the placenta, they were talking about random things, like that they were treating an animal. They didn't say anything about what they were doing to me. A very cold situation and I felt bad because it hurt. They didn’t even care. Totally unconsidered doctors for the moment.” 48 childbirth experience made them feel vulnerable, guilty, and insecure; 48,2% felt infantilized or ignored by medical staff; while 45% experienced unconsented procedures. Colonial and western frameworks of morality and hierarchies aid the enforcement of unspoken rules of behavior and punishment. Frameworks of morality are normalized and result in expected and biased behaviors in female patients, such as “good mother” and “good femininity.” At the same time, power differences take place through pre-determined hierarchies in place, such as savior/sick, expert/patient, etc., alongside expectations of docility, obedience, and silence (Chadwick, 2017). These arrangements and normalized practices of punishment in place interact with “flows of power, normalization, and subjectification, including medicalization, gendering, racialization, and class marginalization” (Chadwick, 2017). For example, Rachelle Chadwick (2017) attests that, being impoverished and a teenager marked women not only as ‘‘bad mothers’’ and potentially ‘‘bad patients,’’ but also as ‘‘bad women/girls.’’ Women and girls were thus sometimes positioned as ‘‘bad,’’ out of order, and worthy of punishment because they were poor, young, HIV+, or black. (p. 499). Thus, obstetric violence (physical, psychological, verbal, symbolic) is in interaction with overlapping levels of “othering,” that is, by racializing female patients, perceived socioeconomic background, age, education, etc. In this sense, medical staff’s good care and treatment, and otherwise, threat, violence, and hostility are mediated by their preconceived medical, gendered, raced, and classed notions of a good mother, good woman, good femininity, and a good patient. Moreover, institutional violence perpetuated by administrative staff is directly linked to pedagogies of cruelty— ongoing oppressive practices and understanding that further women’s experiences of pain, vulnerability, and trauma before, during, and after pregnancy. 49 Under such pedagogies of cruelty, a woman’s body is cosified and dehumanized from the get-go and throughout. A woman’s body is seen as unable to feel pain, voice concern, have agency over their body to provide consent, or need an explanation over decisions and procedures. Such cosified treatment relates to a western understanding of the female body. In this sense, Stella Slineros Rates (2020) argues, “Nuestros cuerpos han sido tratados a través de la metáfora de la máquina cuyo fin sería la reproducción y el ginecobstetra se entendería como el técnico legitimado que puede repararnos despojándonos de nuestra autonomía” (p. 145).41 A pedagogy of cruelty is an institutional set of practices that are normalized, allowed, and requires low levels of empathy and humanization. It reaches every space, every step of the way, and every interaction. As a young woman, attending a public hospital for working-class and low-income mothers and families, a visible flow of power and hierarchical dynamics was in place. The medical staff, a female nurse in this case, is the embodiment of the institutional normalization of gender violence, discipline, and punishment of women’s bodies and spirits. The nurse serves as the gatekeeper of care and safety, deciding who receives medical attention and denies it according to their set of expectations of women’s bodies, perceived behavior, and internalized bias. As a form of symbolic and psychological violence, the nurse interacting with my mom when she first arrives establishes a hierarchy of knowledge by treating my mother as a child and deciding that my mother is “not ready.” The nurse, an extension of the institution, diminishes my mother’s autonomy and knowledge over her body and her ways of knowing are depreciated when she disregards my mother’s childbirth experiences. The nurse’s arbitrary decision ultimately steals my mother’s sense of agency, safety, belonging, and humanizing affirmation. In turn, this sense of insecurity, silence, and 41 “Our bodies have been treated through the metaphor of the machine whose purpose would be reproduction and the gynecologist would be understood as the legitimate technician who can repair us by stripping us of our autonomy” 50 unsafety relegates mothers into a state of vulnerability due to a decision that is arbitrary, out of their control, and dependent on their “good” behavior. Despite my mother’s advanced dilatation and evidence of a risky pregnancy, there is an evident denial of recognizing her as someone risking her life, as a pregnant woman in pain, and in need of close medical attention and reassurance. There is then a denied intersubjective empathy over human suffering under the threat of pain and death. The mother’s and baby’s medical attention, which should have been provided immediately, is postponed. Furthermore, the violence and horror are also verbal and spatiotemporal. After the nurse’s arbitrary decision, my mother is relegated to a space in the in-between, at her house, in an extended unmonitored agony. She paces back and forth through an unnecessary waiting period, an extended space of pain and uncertainty until the ambulance arrived. Once in the ambulance, my mother enters a space that does not offer her privacy, security, or specialized attention. Then again, she enters an in-between: an in-between her home and the hospital, in-between life and death—should her or her baby have needed any specialized medical instrument or knowledge beyond their reach. Her only wish at that moment is for her baby to be born at the hospital. This wish, however, is in this in-between beyond her control. Pedagogies of cruelty continue after giving birth, again by disciplining and cosifiying her body and behavior. As the mother and the child between her legs arrive at the hospital, she is blamed and shamed for giving birth outside the hospital, “fuera de foco,” as the nurse calls her across the hospital halls, again violating her privacy and sense of belonging. This is another nurse’s missed opportunity to welcome her and ensure her sense of safety and demonstrate intersubjective empathy for the mother and the newly born child. The horror does not stop with the change in personnel and rooms my mother enters. Once with a female and a male doctor, the psychological violence becomes verbally direct. In a dehumanized, cosified, and mechanical understanding of a woman’s body, demonstrations or expressions of pain are outlandish, thus, though threats she is 51 silenced and disciplined. First, my mother’s presence as a legitimate person is not acknowledged: they don’t talk to her, what they talk about is unrelated to what they are doing, and when they direct their attention to the person is to discipline them. While they “manipulate” her body, my mother feels and expresses pain, she complains. To make her docile, they threatened her with completing the procedure without anesthesia. My mother then understands that her safety is again not guaranteed, it depends on her ability to remain compliant, quiet, and motionless. Thus, using threats, shaming, blaming, and disciplinary actions, medical personnel and staff position themselves as figures of power and authority as accepted and normalized, able to condone practices within the institution. These installed and systematized pedagogies of cruelty flow across institutions of health, education, and justice, which speaks to broader systems of violence against women’s human rights in Chile (Díaz García & Fernández, 2018; Cuevas Gallegos, 2018). These practices and pedagogies of cruelty are sustained by broader classed, gendered, and racialized sociopolitical contexts, and colonial legacies that inform and shape current medical, educational, and social spaces that rob women of their sense of autonomy, belonging, safety, freedom, and wholeness. 52 Chapter 6 Mothers, Sisters, Mentors, and Friends’ Collective Memories that Haunt As contextualized in Chapter 2, Chile’s relative success hides the segregation and marginalization of most of the population. Segregation is in everything: housing, education, health services, public transportation, retirement funds, salaries, etc. Experiences of subordination, dispossession, and difference are a prevalent colonial legacy advanced by conquistador-settler states and elites (Galeano, 1971; King, 2019; Richards, 2013). In education, quality, availability of access, quality and variety of experiences, and possibilities are still mediated by students’ and families’ socioeconomic backgrounds, family’s educational trajectory, and geographic location (e.g., Insunza et al., 2019; Stromquist & Sanyal, 2013). Despite governments’ promise of “a better future” and “[eco-, environment-, and human-] friendliness” of exploitative and racial capitalism, neoliberal reforms (another iteration of the colonial project), continue to further subordinate and marginalize low-income groups, especially racialized women, children, and LGBTQI+ communities, by creating structures and conditions that leave people vulnerable to violence (Speed, 2017). While part of the population may experience extractive and violent colonial technologies in normalized and insidious ways (e.g., everyday pedagogies of cruelty), indigenous communities further undergo overt and brutal forms of violence through ongoing invasion and militarization of indigenous lands, such as the Wallmapu (Budds, 2013; Dockemdorff et al., 2000; Richards, 2013), the Ancestral land of the Mapuche people. And as anticipated by decolonial feminists, we should expect that, long after neoliberalism has faded into some new phase of capitalist exploitation, settler tropes of race, gender, class, and belonging will continue to structure the conditions of possibility for peoples’ lives. (Speed, 2019, p. 117) Experiences of subordination and marginalization based on social identities such as socioeconomic status, gender, and geographic location take a new turn vis-à-vis an education for low-income girls, from families who migrated to Santiago from the southern countryside in Chile, and whose 53 educational and social opportunities have been limited if not denied. Chile’s colonial and insidious legacy continues to readjust and shift. In this second part of this decolonial process of rememory, I explore conversations with three friends and classmates from high school and university, all of them women and we all share similar socioeconomic, education, and family backgrounds. Our relationship goes beyond academic spaces. We grew and learned together to navigate educational experiences as low-income women and maintained a relationship while looking back critically. We share a trajectory towards decolonial feminism through considerations of class, race, gender, and generational expectations. With them, I learned solidarity and love for each other, despite the geographic distance and the amount of time we have been separated. Our conversations helped me reconstruct personal and collective memories of different time and space periods. Informed by my own reflection of haunting memories and memorias porfiadas (stubborn memories), I examined the contours and insidiousness of coloniality in our shared educational and social experiences from a feminist decolonial perspective as presented in Chapter 3. The experiences I describe in the following pages are shaped by material and symbolic dispossession, spatiotemporal extraction, experiences of othering, and onto-epistemological silencing, among other insidious and shifting colonial practices that perpetuate vulnerability. Onto-epistemologically, what I know and remember are intersubjective experiences. In this sense, this chapter is a dialogic and multi-voiced process of rememory. Because my own haunting and stubborn memories relate to larger colonial structures and ongoing and normalized pedagogies of cruelty and vulnerability at play, I needed to engage in conversation with peers to voice these experiences that are often hard to put into words in isolation. As described in Chapter 4, I began the process of rememory as an intimate and personal journey by excavating and writing my own memories that constantly emerge (memorias porfiadas) from my years in high school and college. I then outlined a semi-structured protocol and talked to Fernanda, Feña, and Kathy. In this chapter, 54 the voices of Fernanda and Feña are included throughout. Kathy and Feña’s voices are part of the next chapter where we talk about our experiences learning English through pedagogies of cruelty and silencing. After each conversation, I journaled about stories and episodes that may come to mind, followed by memos that will consider my theoretical framework, alternative ones, and the memories and stories reconstructed in our conversations. A ti, mi querida polilla de farol, mi carreteada zapatilla cesante. A la verde juventud universitaria, que escribe su testimonio con la llamarada de una molotov que tisa de rabia el cemento. A los encapuchados del Arcis, de la Chile, de tantas aulas tomadas en la justa demanda de querer estudiar sin trabas económicas, sin la monserga odiosa del crédito, del recargo, de la deuda y el pago. Como si no bastara con quemarte las pestañas dándole al estudio los mejores años de tu vida, para después titularte de neurótico vagoneta. Como si no bastara tu dedicación, tu sincera dedicación, cuando te humea el mate toda la noche, hasta la madrugada leyendo, dejando de lado ese carrete bacán que chispearía de pasión tu noche de fiesta. Tu gran noche, pendejo, donde chorrearían las cervezas y un aire marigüano pintaría de azul el vaho de la música. Como si no bastara con todas las negaciones que te dio la vida, cuando postulaste a esa universidad privada y el «tanto tienes, tanto vales» del mercado académico te dijo: «Tú no eres de aquí, Conchalí, — No te alcanza, Barrancas, —A otro carrusel, Pudahuel, — A La U. del Estado, Lo Prado.»42 Carta a la dulce juventud Pedro Lemebel, 2017, p. 87-88 Classed and Gendered Trajectories in Education I begin this section with an extract of a letter by Pedro Lemebel, Carta a la Dulce Juventud (letter to sweet youth) dedicated to youth in his book Sanjón de la Aguada. In his letter and 42 Translation: “To you, my beloved lantern moth, my worn-out jobless sneaker. To the green university youth, who writes their testimony with the flare of a Molotov that grips the cement with rage. To the hooded ones of la Arcis, of la Chile, of so many classrooms taken in the just demand of wanting to study without economic hindrance, without the odious monstrosity of student loans, late fees, debt and payment. As if it weren't enough to burn your eyelashes giving the best years of your life to your studies, to later graduate as a neurotic vagrant. As if your dedication, your sincere dedication, were not enough, when your brain smokes all night, reading until dawn, leaving aside that cool party that would spark your night out with passion. Your big night, boy, where the beers would drip and a weed air would paint the mist of the music blue. As if all the denials that life gave you were not enough, when you applied to that private university and the «you have so much, you are worth so much» of the academic market he told you: «You are not from here, Conchalí, —It's not enough, Barrancas , —To another carousel, Pudahuel, - To the State University, Lo Prado. » (Pedro Lemebel, 2003, p. 87-88) 55 throughout his book, Lemebel portrays the experiences of socioeconomic and geographically marginalized youth at the margins of the seemingly thriving neoliberal capital, Santiago. Lemebel’s letter described in detail Fernanda’s, Feña’s, Kathy’s, and my own experiences, wherein attaining education was always an endeavor of never-ending sacrifice in the form of credit loans, late nights of study, fear, long commutes to school/university and back, protests and strikes, etc. I met Fernanda during my first year in high school and were in the same curso (class)43 for four years. We were 14 years old when we met. Our high school was an only-women technical school (EMTP, Secondary Technical Education) that offered three technical degrees: gastronomy, pre-school education, and supermarket administration. Like most of the student population, Fernanda and I commuted for 40-60 minutes or more on public transportation from the outskirts of Santiago. We came from similar families: working class families, parents who migrated from the South of Chile to a big city. We both knew from an early age that our choices were limited for two reasons: 1) higher education was not economically guaranteed, and 2) getting a job early offered economic security. A science and humanities high school would be primarily focused on university readiness and standardized testing, whereas a technical high school would prepare us for a job. Thus, our path in education was clear, our socioeconomic conditions and our limited knowledge of our possibilities gave us no choice: we needed to have a job after high school. During our conversation, Fernanda notes, si estudiábamos en un liceo humanista nos íbamos a quedar sin ningún tipo de formación [laboral]. No íbamos a poder trabajar. Entonces, nace como más desde la no opción. Nunca sentí que fuese una opción que yo no estudiara en un colegio que no tuviera una formación 43 Curso: Group of students that remain together until they graduate. 56 técnica o comercial (…) siempre fue “tienen que ir a estudiar para sacar una carrera que les permita trabajar [luego de graduarnos].44(Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). At 14 years old, our limited options and our technical all-girls school shaped our days in many ways. Our social class and gender defined our experiences of dispossession in material and symbolic ways. In our conversation, we saw a shared material, physical, intellectual, and emotional forms of dispossession that defined our space, time, our educational and personal choices, our experienced girlhood, innocence, and womanhood; gender expectations, ways to relate with other classmates, how we were taught to voice and express love, and our act of refusal and struggle to change our educational trajectories. These experiences were not limited to school spaces, but they extended to places outside school: on the bus on our way to school and back home, while walking to school in our uniforms, etc. Segregation, displacement, and extraction of time. When I asked Fernanda what she remembered about her time in high school, Fernanda recalled that time and space dynamics felt violent. In terms of time, commuting took an important part of our lives, and our lives revolved around our school scheduling. For instance, during our 1st year, we would start school in the afternoon or during lunchtime. Our commuting time forced us to eat too early to be hungry and then travel for 40 for me and 90 minutes for Fernanda. Even though it became a routine over the years, it was daunting at first. También sentí miedo en relación a moverme tan lejos, como de Maipú. Eso te hace pensar hartas cosas en la educación. Mira, que ir a andar una hora y media, o sea, tanto, andar tanto, 44 “if we studied at a humanist high school, we were going to be left without any type of [job] training. We were not going to be able to work [after graduation]. So, it [our choice] originated from the non-option. I never felt that it was an option for me not to study at a school that did not have technical or commercial training (...) it was always "they have to go to study to get a career that allows them to work.” 57 para llegar a estudiar algo que es tan básico. (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). Fernanda describes it well: we felt fear to move so far away from home, it was beneath our sense of dignity, and a form of injustice to have to travel so far for something so fundamental like access to a quality education which was not available at the periphery of the capital where we lived. I too remember those commuting days (from high school until college graduation) as a high price to pay for education: we spent all day long at school and we would come back home in the dark at 9 pm or 10 pm. We were unable to spend quality time with our loved ones or see our parents for more than an hour a day. Then, it was bedtime to start all over again the next day. Anything we wanted to talk about or share about our day had to wait or be forgotten. Since the Constitution of 1980, the state gave up its role as guarantor of equity and quality of education, whereby schools became increasingly socioeconomic and material segregated: education transitioned into parents’ choice and ability to pay. It was then the start of the voucher system and semi-private schools. As students from the periphery pursuing “quality” of education in such a big city as Santiago, we were removed from our homes, we gave up valuable time, and gave up our childhood to navigate adulthood at a young age because we could no longer remain innocent and trustful in public spaces. We were entering spaces that were not made to protect us but to dispossess us and make us vulnerable: remove us from our sense of privacy through unwanted public touch, dispossess us from our bodily autonomy, our sense of safety, and learn a gendered and classed hidden curriculum in and out of school. Girls’ and Women’s Bodies On the first day of class my parents took the bus with me to go to school. We could only dream of having and affording a car, so public transportation was the only affordable option. Public transportation is a common experience for most working- and middle-class people in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. It carries people of all ages: workers, students from all grades, 58 university students, etc. My parents wanted me to learn to commute alone those 40 minutes to school so they pointed to key buildings and bus stops to guide me. I knew little about the big city, Santiago. All the way up to my graduation from middle school, I went to schools around the corner from my grandmother’s house, with children from the same neighborhood. Before high school, I had never seen the world away from home, alone. A friend from college, Feña, remembers moving from a small town in La Serena, in the north of Chile, to Santiago. The main reason was to access quality high school education that wasn’t technical or vocational. “Todo el mundo se conocía”45 in her town in La Serena, “yo crecí en el cerro, jugando con tierra, con los árboles, fue bacán.”46 Feña remembers. Moving to Santiago was a big change; she had to learn to commute for long periods of time (one hour), learn to take the bus, learn to elbow her way into the morning and overcrowded bus on time, and deal with unwanted touches from men on the bus. Feña remembers, Varias veces tuve molestaciones porque me quedaba dormida y había alguien que me agarraba la pierna, o el tipo hueón que te olía, medios raros. Pero, además de eso, era una paja simplemente estar en la micro tanto rato. Porque ni siquiera podía como leer, porque era tanta gente, entonces, no te puedes sentar a leer.47 (Personal conversation, May 13, 2021) Leaving home, our families, friends, and communities for us meant that we left spaces that made us safe and protected and entered to spaces where we were made vulnerable. We moved from our families, our working-class communities, and neighbors where most people recognized us, to a loud, and crowded city—a city where we became sexualized, adultified, and harassed. Although these encounters were not reserved to a particular age or space, shared experiences of systematic and 45 “Everyone knew each other” 46 “I grew up on the hill, playing with dirt, with the trees. It was cool.” 47 “Several times, I was harassed because I fell asleep and there was someone who would grab my leg, or the guy who smelled you, strange guys... But other than that, it was a pain to just being on the bus for so long. Because I couldn't even read, because there were so many people, so you can't sit down and read.” 59 ongoing unwanted touch, exchanges, while waiting for the bus, on the bus, on the street, while walking to school, and on our way home, were loud reminders that we had to move away from a space of safety and innocence. Early on we learned to protect ourselves against any event. Girls and women's bodies occupy spaces deemed of available public access by young and old male strangers. Pedagogies of cruelty are spatialized in public spaces such as the bus, through normalized practices of subordination through violation of privacy and ownership of one’s body. On the bus, for instance, it is possible to see the extractive nature in which women’s and girls’ bodies are understood and treated. Parts of our individuality, innocence, sense of freedom, safety, and wholeness were seized from us. In this process of objectification and cosification, girl’s and woman’s bodies are treated as “cuerpo-cosa” (body-thing) (Segato, 2018, p. 11), thus conquistable, “conquestable”, “owned,” and “violated.” In this sense, women and girls navigate a “conquistualidad violadora y expropiadora permanente”48 (Segato, 2016, p. 22) that extracts and dispossesses women from their own safety, belonging, human rights, and autonomy over their bodies. Under a conquistador-settler colonial context, appropriation and violence against women’s bodies become part of the landscape, normalized, and made invisible. Thus, a pedagogy of cruelty entails a process of cosification (taking life and humanity and reducing empathy for the suffering of others) and an ongoing “perceived” access, condoned trespassing, and a deeply rooted sense and precedent of conquistualidad of women’s territory. Girls’ Innocence and Childhood Interrupted Our experience transitioning from childhood into adolescence was abruptly interrupted by teachers at our school. Extended childhood and innocence were a privilege we did not have. However, such a form of privilege was granted to children and youth in wealthier areas. As low- 48 “permanent violating and expropriating conquestuality” 60 income women from segregated areas, our process of exploring the world and its intellectual and creative possibilities was interrupted. It was our 1st year of high school. Quite early that year, our physics teacher, a man in his late 60s, stated that we were no longer children. Fernanda and I remember this moment as a shocking realization because we were 14 years old, En términos de los docentes, creo que sí, creo que fue un pequeño paso de la infancia como un poco a una “adultez”, adolescentes, pero había una trato distinto. Él decía “ustedes ya no son niñas, ustedes son mujeres”. Y a mí eso me impactó mucho, me acuerdo de él diciendo eso, como “a ustedes yo no las voy a tratar como niñas porque ustedes son mujeres”. Y por qué me impactó mucho, porque yo me sentía súper niña, si teníamos 14 años. Entonces “ustedes se tienen que comportar como mujeres de ahora en adelante”. Y eso recuerdo, esas pequeñas cosas que creo que te hacen como … esta insistencia que tenía la técnica como de que uno era una mujer, que tenía que trabajar. Como cuando tenías 14, 15, 16, 17 años.49 (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). We were expected to navigate the world as adults, but we were not given the strategies to do so in a way that allowed us to ensure our safety, self-advocacy, and autonomy. Our high school’s curriculum and teacher practices were designed to prepare us for a job. In this sense, high school can be a completely different experience across different socioeconomic groups. Age (childhood and adulthood) and educational trajectories are experienced differently for low-income students whose parents have not accessed higher education. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds usually transition into adulthood sooner than students from wealthier families, whose educational 49 “In terms of the teachers, I think it was a small step from childhood to an “adulthood”, [we were] adolescents, but there was a different treatment. He [our teacher] said “you are no longer girls, you are women.” And that impacted me a lot, I remember him saying, “I'm not going to treat you like girls because you are women.” And why it impacted me so much? because I felt like a little girl, we were 14 years old. So “you have to behave like women from now on” … this insistence that the [technical] school had about seen us as women, that we had to work. When you were 14, 15, 16, 17 years old” 61 trajectories into higher education have been paved and secured by their parents’ economic, cultural, and social capital. Looking to access social mobility and better living conditions for themselves and their families, students in low-income positions choose a technical school to enter the labor market early. Student then step into adulthood sooner, working at an early age (e.g., Dávila & Ghiardo, 2005; López et al., 2018). At school, we were abruptly treated as “ladies” and deemed as “women,” ready to work. Furthermore, through pedagogies of obedience we were taught to accept and honor imposed hierarchies. We were not prepared to navigate sexualizing, gendering, or cosificating practices and expectations in patriarchal educational and public spaces. We were not taught feminism, self-advocacy, collectivism at work, worker rights, unionization, or resources that could support us. In other words, we were being trained to obey, not complain, remain passive, and accept exploitative, life-annulling, and spirit-killing workspaces at “part of the job” and as normalized sacrifice and violence as part of life. Colonial and Patriarchal Gaze: Gendered Expectations and Peer Sorority I learned gender solidarity and sorority much later, not at high school. Much later, I felt in control of my body, my dreams, my decisions, and my voice, not at school. Learning to accept, love, root, and be proud and happy for our and other women’s success was something that Fernanda and I learned on our own, much later. It happened after high school graduation, college graduation, and much later as adults. Our peer relationships in high school were far from liberating. Over the years I kept wondering: how did these oppressive gender dynamics become part of our relationships? On the one hand, we were socialized to internalize our own subordination as young women. And on the other hand, school curricula did not mediate between internalized oppressive understandings and practices, and in fact, they were furthered. School’s available possibilities, expectations, and the limits of our femininity and womanhood were communicated through our school uniforms, school personnel (teachers and inspector), and curricula. They shaped our peer relationships, our autonomy, 62 and overall experience at school. Within school settings, although we were positioned as adults early on, our positioning as women was one of constraint—with limited ownership and freedom over our bodies, limited available choices, and little room for decision-making. Figure 6.1 Romina and high school classmates’ school shoes For instance, our semi-private technical high school imposed a strict dress code, behavior norms, and a specific uniform to differentiate us from other public schools in the area, while at the same time, making us all look the same (See Figure 6.1). We were required to wear gray skirts, navy blue or gray sweaters, black shoes, white blouses, and a tie. The length of our skirts was the main concern; they had to cover most of our legs, and they could not be too tight or too short. In this conservative practice, we had very little autonomy in deciding what or how to wear our school clothes. We were constantly monitored and reminded that parts of us did not belong at school, that as women we had to hide our body, cover our legs, and sit cross-legged. At the school entrance, hall inspectors (males and females) would ask us to remove anything outlandish like dangle earrings or colorful sweaters. They would examine us head-to-toe, check that the length of our skirts reached below our knees, and they would send a note to our parents if they thought our skirts were too short. One evening of our second year of high school, one female inspector went into each classroom to measure the length of students’ skirts. She tore the hem off 63 the skirts she considered too short. Everyone with skirts reaching above knee-level got their skirt hem torn, which turned out to be 80% of us. I never quite understood why we were being punished and humiliated. However, we learned a few things: 1) Our bodies could and would be disciplined and controlled by others, 2) a short skirt was wrong, it sexualized us, and 3) our bodies could and would be deemed available if we did not make the right decision. It was a decision we made and therefore, any harassment, any random unwanted touch in public, was our fault. We were disciplined to modify our ways of dressing to be deemed proper and serious students. The content of women’s brains and academic interests were not taken into account in contexts where women’s bodies are the focus of control. Thus they “need” to be disciplined and controlled as a way of reaffirming moral superiority and reproduce dominant social order and school hierarchies. This event also brought something positive to us. I remember this moment as a moment where our empathy and solidarity for each other surfaced: our classmates began to share their needles and thread, tape, glue, and anything that would fix our skirts. Our empathy for one another was there, waiting for an opportunity to emerge. We cared about each other, but we haven’t seen many models of loving and caring around us. It was, after all, a female inspector tearing our skirts and shaming us. This moment was not fostered or facilitated by teachers or school staff; it was created by us, in a context of shaming, normalization of cruelty and punishment, and invasion of our privacy. Similar to the ways school monitored us, we policed each other. During our last two years of high school, there were newfound specific expectations about femininity among peers. To gain a sense of power and superiority over peers, we used these learned and adopted expectations to shame and control women’s bodies. We learned through media, tv shows, magazines, and social interactions with our families, friends, and peers at school to dislike ourselves, our bodies, our features, our Brownness, etc. We remember being pressured and demanded a specific behavior and 64 beauty by peers, media, tv shows, and family patterns. We also learned competitiveness, envy, and individualism across different social spaces. We learned to critique, bully, and hate each other, while also feeling constant peer pressure to compete for attention from boys and men. For instance, every day, ten minutes before our school day was over classmates would put on their make-up and prepare to leave. I would sit next to a window that looked to the main gates of the school. From our classroom window, it was common to see groups of boys waiting for students from our school. At the age of 14 or 15, I did not feel identified with my classmates’ shared interests in boys. I was, however, pressured to assimilate to peer expectations. I used to have quite long hair and I would wear a sweater my mom knitted, both of which were highly critiqued by close classmates. For instance, a close classmate asked me once “when are you going to cut your hair?” and continued to say that I looked like I belonged to a certain conservative religious group. On different day my desk- mate asked me to take off my sweater because I looked like a nerd. Additionally, we are socialized to differentiate ourselves from others and discriminate based on socioeconomic and wealth perceived differences. In a socioeconomically segregated society, we discriminated against classmates who looked and behaved like belonging to a lower or higher social class, based on stereotypes of speech, dressing styles, grades, etc. Fernanda remembers: “Recuerdo como un grupo muy poco solidario. Un grupo competitivo, envidioso y con un tema de clases en un colegio pobre. Es una cuestión, pero insólita….todas éramos pobres”50 (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). We were all children from low-income and working parents; parents who might have not been able to complete high school, and we all were their hope for a better future. Moreover, to be in that school meant a sacrifice for most of our parents, because as opposed to public school, we had to pay annual tuition, purchase school uniforms and required gym clothes, 50 “I remember it as a very unsupportive group. A competitive group, envious and with a social class issue in a poor school. It is something unbelievable…. we were all poor” 65 and buy instruments and uniforms according to our technical career. In my case, I had to purchase a chef’s attire and professional cooking instruments. At school, efforts to differentiate us and separate us, rather than unite us through our common experiences, were common at school. Among various factors, teachers differentiated and grouped students based on grades and socioeconomic stereotypes. For example, Fernanda remembers with some regret that our language and literature teacher would divide us into groups according to our grades: the good and bad grades. We were separated from our friends. Visually, we could see ourselves as a number, we could see ourselves as superior or feel humiliated in public. Similarly, our profesora jefe (or teacher in charge of our class) would treat groups differently based on which ones were her favorites. At some point, we were divided into two groups us and them: the cuicas51 and the flaites52, to offend and discriminate against each other based perceive grades, socioeconomic status, and stereotypes furthered by peers and overarching social discriminatory practices. Fernanda reflects, Creo que era por la formación que ella tenía como de su formación como docente. Creo que todo eso de muérase Herrera, muérase Peña, como decía ella, sí era súper violenta, pero creo que era parte de una personalidad muy excéntrica… mi crítica hacia ella era esta separación que no era una docente para todas, sino que quería ser una docente como para las mejores estudiantes. Y porqué tal vez ella sabía que no todas íbamos a ingresar a la universidad, no lo sé. (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021) Pedagogies of cruelty such as othering, hierarchic relationships, shame and punishment of women’s bodies, and pressure to assimilate to one type of femininity, flow across social spaces and become 51 Cuica/o is a Chilean term that refers to a wealthy upper socioeconomic and politically dominant group. 52 Flaite is a Chilean term used to classify a group of youth based on shared socioeconomic, speech, clothes, music preferences, hair style. Scholars describe this term as the characterization of poverty, exclusion from society, in terms of delinquency. 66 normalized and insidious practices. In this case, pedagogies of cruelty are exerted by teachers, school staff (e.g., school inspectors), and peers. In adopting pedagogies of cruelty, a sense of superiority emerged from discriminating and othering our peers. However, dehumanization is an intersubjective endeavor, as bell hooks (2015) asserts, “to be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim” (p. 257). In discriminating and bullying other women from similar backgrounds, we are communicating a similar internalized hate and oppression towards ourselves. Widespread and insidious hatred and dispossession towards women made young women like us hate themselves and one another. If intentional and purposeful, schools can play an important role in providing spaces of encounter, solidarity, and healing among women. Nonetheless, our school did not mediate between our internalized understandings and inherited expectations of othering and differentiation based on class, gender expression, and sexuality through various sources. These harmful frames of understanding, being, seeing, and doing as young women were not interrupted by our school. Instead, they were further reified. Pedagogies of Silence and the Toxicity of Romantic Love Feminist approaches, readings, and sorority were not part of our school education, not unlike our mothers’ and families’ educational trajectory. We were exposed early to a subordinating curriculum that reproduced problematic understandings of gender roles and romantic love, which further silenced us and created rivalry and bullying practices among women. Among many haunting memories, there is one to which I come back often. Many students admired our language teacher, a woman who did not care what others thought of her, loud, colorful, eccentric, academicist, and smart. When I asked Fernanda about a teacher she admired from high school, she mentioned her. I asked Fernanda, do you remember she liked to talk about love, men, and relationships in class? Fernanda face changed and said “Ooooooh” and gasps, she continues, “hija de su generación. Oh! 67 Pero vino ese recuerdo ufff..., dime que sí, dime que no.”53For her, this was too a well-hidden and forgotten haunting memory. She began to sing the song I have in my mind when this memory comes, accompanied by a feeling of uneasiness. Our language teacher often felt compelled to advise us on relationships and “conquering” men. One day, she taught that to “get” a man, we had to follow Ricardo Arjona’s song, “Dime que No,” a popular song at the time (see Table 6.1. below). Table 6.1 Extract of Ricardo Arjona’s song “dime que sí, dime que no” Si me dices que sí, dejare de soñar y me If you say yes, I'll stop dreaming and become an volveré un idiota idiot Mejor dime que no better tell me no Y dame ese sí como un cuenta gotas, dime And give me that yes, in dribs and drabs, que no tell me no Pensando en un sí, y déjame lo otro a mí Thinking of a yes, and leave the rest to me Que si se me pone fácil That if it gets easy for me El amor se hace frágil y uno para de soñar love becomes fragile and one stops dreaming Dime que no tell me no Y deja la puerta abierta And leave the door open Recent critiques to the song have surfaced describing it as “una apología al machismo,”54sexual harassment, a song that glorifies and normalizes misogyny and heteronormativity, promotes a distorted view of consent and the patriarchal binary of an “easy” and “difficult” woman (e.g., Estrada, 2018; Luciano Sánchez, 2017). For a long time, this teacher’s message caused contradictions, subordination, and fear of being direct in my language. It made it very difficult to be friends with men or express love. I felt voiceless for many years. These practices of silencing are also generationally taught by mothers, maybe as a way of protection, as a way of 53 “A daughter of her generation. Oh, that memory came to me like…ffff” 54 “a justification to male sexism” 68 maintaining power, and a way to not appear weak. I remember I was thirteen, writing a letter to a boy I liked who lived far away. At the end of my letter, I wrote “te quiero mucho.” After reading it, surprised and with caution, my mom tells me, “My mom always told me that you never tell a boy that you like them.” I decided to send the letter unchanged. Confused, I regretted it later. When the letter was returned because I had the wrong address, I was relieved. Like Villenas (2006) describes, mothers’ teachings are situated in life experiences of agüantar (resist), resilience, and survival of gender, class, and racial oppression. In this moment, my grandma and mother were protecting from experiences of pain, teaching me how to be strong and careful even when we love. Geographies of Material and Symbolic Dispossession In patriarchal and colonial systems of power, oppression, hooks (1984) asserted, “means the absence of choices” (p. 5). This our parents knew too well. Our parents knew from the beginning that as children from low-income families, we did not have a choice. A technical school seemed like the only option. Technical schools like ours offered early access to work when families could not afford a university degree. At the same time, our school delimited and defined the horizon of possibilities and choices during our time in the school and after graduation (López Cárdenas et al., 2018). In this sense, available physical (structure) and symbolic spaces (recreational, extracurricular, explorational space) at school were limited. For instance, I played volleyball for three years on a field that was a volleyball, basketball, and patio space—all in one. The school was small, too small for all the grades gathered in the same period. When training volleyball during the week, we would take over the biggest open area in the school, reducing the available space. One memory that haunts us is the feeling of not having space, not even to lunch at school. Fernanda recalls, Nosotros no teníamos ni donde almorzar, ni dónde comer. Entrábamos como a las 12 y llevábamos almuerzo y no había lugar… no había un lugar digno donde comer. Y a veces 69 comíamos en la sala (…) creo que fuimos muy resilientes frente a esa realidad de soportar eso. Como ese nivel de casi violencia.55 (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). I realized that this was only common in most subsidized schools serving low-income students. As part of the volleyball team, almost by accident, for the first time, I crossed class and racial boundaries of which I was not aware until that moment. Our volleyball coach, a university student in physical education, was deeply invested in our team and growth. To expose us to multiple teams, she would enroll us in volleyball leagues and take us to play friendly games against other schools’ teams. These were mostly wealthy schools. On one occasion, after traveling quite some time on the bus, we arrived at a religious and private school. We arrived after a long bus ride. We were shocked to see a green outdoor full-size soccer field (5,750 m2) and an indoor volleyball field with padded floors. The list of spaces we did not see is long but listed on the webpage of the school: four tiled multi-courts (1, 200 m2), an athletic field (1, 200m2), a well-equipped library, art spaces, etc. Students in that school were not only blond, tall, and spoke differently, but they were different in the way wealthy people are. As they stared at us from the moment we entered the school, for the first time, I felt too visible, too different, racialized, small, and poorer than I thought. That day I felt uncontrollably sad and could not stop crying during the game and on my way home. It felt violent to have access to so little due to our background as low- income, most of us first-generation high school students, and racialized young women. The profound physical contrast between our technical school resembled the abysmal difference in the educational opportunities available and our school experiences in a segregated education system by hierarchies of class, gender, and race. 55 Nosotros no teníamos ni donde almorzar, ni dónde comer. Entrábamos como a las 12 y llevábamos almuerzo y no había lugar… no había un lugar digno donde comer. Y a veces comíamos en la sala y andar 70 In spatializing our experience at school, now I see the ways we were symbolically and materially dispossessed. Our symbolic space (recreational, extracurricular, explorational space) was as limited as our physical space in the school. Creative, intellectual, or academic interests were not encouraged or nurtured in most opportunities, except for very few occasions. I was fortunate that I had a volleyball coach who was committed to our growth and wholeness. Knowing her opened my eyes to higher education, social class segregation, and further possibilities. That space, however, was fostered by a single person within and not by the institution, so it eventually vanished once when she was gone. Although our coach was kind and respectful to us, she was rigorous and methodical, she would push us to further our critical thinking, strategic skills, our purposeful moves, our potential, and our needs. Other students did not have those opportunities. Students who cared about literature, debate, leadership, art, or a choice of independent studies. Curricula, school materials, teachers’ practices, and activities available were, intendedly or unintendedly, to reproduce obedience, subordination, and feminine traits. They were not intended to further critical thinking, advocacy, creative thinking, problem-solving skills that intellectual and creative spaces such as art, chess, debate, critical literature, or feminist literature, could provide. Unlike science and humanities high schools (schools that prepare students to access higher education) we were not provided a class on the Chilean Constitution of 1980, a course that would allow us to be informed about women contributions in society. As future workers, we were denied and discouraged from intellectual and creative work and we were denied from our rights to be active participants of public matters in and outside our school. Thus, pedagogies of cruelty are also onto-epistemological silencing practices. Learning is an onto-epistemological endeavor that entails our wholeness. How we know relates to the ways we are, come to be, and hope to be. We are and know in relation to generational knowledge and stories, the spaces we navigate on a daily basis, and our entangled identities. Learning includes the personal, cultural, political, historical, the lived generational understanding, our hopes, 71 dreams, and what we care about and want to know. Thus, onto-epistemological silencing disregards the inseparable link between ontology and epistemology, it disrupts wholeness (e.g., Boveda & Bhattacharya, 2019; Rhee, 2021). It silences parts of who we are or could be by creating strict and rigid paths that deny possibilities for students, alienating voices, repressing dreams, and alternative academic interests. Rhee (2021) asserts: Educators have ignored or forgotten this [ontology and epistemology] connection so long, by objectifying and aggrandizing disciplinary-academic knowledge and alienating the rest, including our students, ourselves, places, relationships, and what is not seen, not heard, and not known. (p. 4) Thus, compartmentalized and fixed understanding of content and expectations of who students are or will be may result in pedagogies of onto-epistemological silencing. The fact that we were in a technical school limited school staff and administrators’ expectations of students’ long-term goals of intellectual, creative, and academic growth and access. Considering that this was an all-girls school, possibilities we even narrower in the ways curricula, resources, and expectations were gendered, conservative, outdated, and thus limited and silenced us onto-epistemologically. Memories of onto-epistemological silencing. Growing up in a working-class family, access to creative and recreational spaces was often limited but encouraged by my family. To my mom, I was the greatest writer, reader, poet, painter, thinker, and runner ever setting foot on earth. I grew up reaffirmed in everything I ever wanted to do. So early on, fascinated by anime I began to draw and paint. I covered my room with my own art pieces. In high school, I was, however, lured away from it. In an art project in school, we were tasked with expressing values of solidarity for the month of August. With only what school materials afforded, I spent my winter break sketching two hands reaching for each other, and in the background, roses; I painted hands and roses’ shadows, light, and the contours; and I 72 recreated the drops of water on the petals with school glue. The whole piece seemed to come out of the paper, alive. On the first day of art class after our break, my classmates gasped with awe at the detailed color accomplishments. My proud mom wanted to frame it and hang it at home. Weeks went by and the art teacher would not return my art piece. Later, quite unapologetic, she asserted that custodians had thrown our projects away. No “I am sorry,” or “this shouldn’t have happened” followed. I always think about this episode and why it feels like onto-epistemological silencing. In this technical high school, this art teacher’s actions reflect the narrow orientation towards our academic, intellectual, or artistic potential. Most teachers showed a lack of interest in our learning. In their eyes, we were destined to become workers at an early age. Another last name on their roster of 35-plus students. Our onto-epistemological wholeness, who we were, our ways of knowing, and our artistic and other possible voices and skills were denied from our present and future temporality. Why would we even try? Art was of no use for low-income students. I define silencing not as the absence of speech or language, or the choice one makes to remain silent, but as the silencing and invisibilization of the onto-epistemological self as a whole: complex, historical, cultural, experiential, social (Quintar, 2006, 2015), as curious and driven, with rich ways of knowing, and potential further academic trajectory. Fernanda describes it well, Ninguna actividad, ningún desarrollo a nivel artístico, cultural, deportivo, que fuera fomentado. A tal nivel que no nos tenían graduación de cuarto medio. Ni siquiera tienes la nobleza de hacerle un hito de término a tus estudiantes. Eso me parece una aberración.56(Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021) 56 “No activity, no development at an artistic, cultural, sports level, was encouraged… to such a level that they did not organize a graduation of high school. They don't even have the decency to give their students a ceremony for completing a milestone. That seems like an aberration to me.” 73 Our technical school’s main goal was for students to complete their “práctica.” The práctica was a form of internship that lasted four months. During those four months, we were expected to work full time and deal with the responsibilities of the job, with little to no salary. During the internship period, I was placed at a restaurant located in an affluent neighborhood in Las Condes, 2 hours away from home. This restaurant was frequented by celebrities, political figures, and other influential people. I worked in the kitchen learning from chefs at the salad bar and at the “hot area” where main dishes were prepared. Sexual harassment from co-workers was an everyday practice. Full-time workers barely left the restaurant. Drugs were quite common during long working hours and lack of sleep. During those months, I worked 9 am to 6 pm and made 1.000 Chilean pesos per day ($1.23 USD), which barely covered public transformation. Even though our school’s goal was to prepare us to enter the labor marker, we were not taught basic labor rights, what to expect in a contract, how to report sexual harassment, the importance of union and collectivization, salary expectations, or salary negotiation. As women, we were 18-year-old female high school graduates, unaware, and unprepared for an exploitative and extractive world. Figure 6.2 High school graduation. Romina and her high school volleyball coach To incentivize internship completion, only those who completed their internship could access a graduation ceremony organized and funded by the school. Fernanda and other classmates 74 who refused to complete their internship and chose higher education were deprived of an equally important and symbolic moment for their families: graduating from high school, an opportunity that means emotional, economic, and family sacrifice for most families. A group in our class decided to organize our own graduation, with artistic acts, students’ speeches, and a small reception with food and drinks for our families. Besides my family, from all the teachers I had through high school, only my volleyball coach attended my graduation. I saw her briefly. She gave me a white hand-made paper flower and told me how proud she was (See Image 6.2). First-Generation University Graduates: Biographic and Academic Refusal Technical secondary education was established in Chile in 1965. This alternative was initially created to provide paid employment access, with the caveat that this educational route did not discourage higher education. Until recently, the option of accessing higher education for a student in a technical school was close to impossible. However, with the expansion of higher education, private and public, available scholarships, and bank loans, students from technical schools with good academic standing began to attend both public and private universities (Lopez et al., 2018; Ortiz, 2009). This context challenges traditional public universities in Chile. For instance, foundational higher education establishments like the Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile are highly selective institutions that historically have reproduced elite groups based on social, generational, economic, and cultural capital (Brunner, 2012; Brunner & Uribe, 2007; Quaresma & Villalobos, 2018). Entering these elitist and traditional university spaces then represents an educational trajectory and biographic rupture that many students graduating with a technical degree navigate alone. First, they are usually the first generation to attend higher education, so the educational demands of higher education are a completely new experience. In this transition and educational trajectory and biographic rupture from technical school to university education (Lopez et al., 2018), 75 it is the students’ individual responsibility and effort to bridge the created gap in content, gather academic resources, social and cultural capital to navigate unfamiliar expectations. Early in our third year of high school, Fernanda and I knew we wanted to access higher education. We refused the trajectory offered to us by our technical high school. We were quite sure of our dislike for the job we were being prepared for and the mind-numbness that came with it. We were both drawn to humanities, but we were not sure how to get there. Our technical school offered little to no guidance in our educational and professional trajectory beyond high school and our technical degree. Our path toward higher education was a personal journey, and we only had each other. Every step of the way was untraded soil for us. We navigated the options, loans, scholarship applications, paperwork, and applications alone. Además, que a nosotros tampoco nos iban a orientar vocacionalmente en el colegio. Porque como era un liceo técnico, no había ningún estímulo a la educación superior, entonces, nadie te iba a estimular en la búsqueda. No había preguntas problematizadoras en torno a si queríamos o no ingresar a la educación superior. En caso de querer ingresar, qué queríamos estudiar, eso fue en nuestra generación por lo menos, una búsqueda muy personal. No fue nada estimulado por el sistema. Y por nuestros padres diría que fue algo más generacional de que entremos a la universidad para superar condiciones de pobreza. (Fernanda, personal conversation, May 22, 2021). As anticipated, our preparation as students in a technical school did not match the demands of higher education in many ways. This academic and biographic rupture demanded important investment from us and our families. Our school did not offer the necessary curricular content included in the university entrance exam (PSU) or test-preparation (math, language, history), so we decided to find an after-school test preparation school. There were many across the city, many affordable ones. Our parents, understanding the importance of this economic investment, supported 76 our decision. It was a family investment. Even though our parents were not familiar with university applications, our parents knew very well how to navigate bureaucratic requests. They knew public institutions like the back of their hands (i.e., municipalities, hospitals, social workers, etc.). They knew where to go for specific paperwork (e.g., socioeconomic status, certificates, etc.) and who to talk to. They had to navigate complex systems seeking resources long before I needed to, so they were strategic and quick. Gender and Generational Rupture Past, present, and future meet at the same space and time in the process of rememory. In this case, transgenerational refusal to gender expectations have set up a path for later generations. My mom would recount her mother’s rememory about her struggle to attend school as a child. In her story, I see a deep refusal to what was available for her. She then chooses to find her own way. I see this as the beginning of a trajectory that sets up a path to which I am committed today. I see the transgenerational effort and wish for autonomy and freedom in the context of prescribed roles. I see a young woman’s refusal to conform, a refusal she passed onto my mother, then passed onto me, that I now embody. “Tu abuelita siempre me contaba esto,” my mom would begin to tell me. “Ella se arrancaba de la casa con una tortilla de pan, harina tostada, y un caballo. Ella quería aprender a leer y a escribir, pero su mamá quería que se quedara a cuidar a sus hermanos.57 Maternity and domestic life have been posited as the only option for previous generations of women of low income, rural, and limited educational opportunities. Education and a profession seemed like impossible dreams. Such was my grandmother, aunts, and my mom’s experience. But the truth is, for generations women in my family have struggled for economic independence and freedom to choose. My grandmother was tenacious 57 Your grandmother would always tell me this. She would run away from the house with a tortilla bread, toasted flour, and a horse. She wanted to learn to read and write, but her mother wanted her to stay and take care of her siblings. 77 in that endeavor, although her will could just take her so far in the face of societal gender inequalities. Our mothers’, aunts’, and grandmothers’ options were limited to motherhood and domestic life. It was a generation of women that experienced class, gender, and educational subordination. A prevalent gender and class issue that extracts autonomy, time, and choices from women. Such form of violence is sustained by laws that delegitimize women’s autonomy and self- determination: punitive anti-abortion laws, salary disparities, restrictive and inflexible workspaces, absence of sex-education in schools, absence of a wide coverage of women shelters, women’s health centers, etc. At the same time, such forms of subordination, institutional, and state abandonment often limit women’s freedom to escape domestic violence, leaving inhospitable workspaces. A generation of women whose dreams of education and economic independence vanished when they had their first child and/or got married. Traditionally, home-related unpaid labor such as child- reading, housekeeping, meal planning, grocery shopping, etc. falls the hardest on women and girls. This remains a prevalent issue. A 2015 national survey in Chile (Undurraga & Hornickel, 2021) revealed that 48,9% of women participate in unpaid caregiving and domestic work, while 36,2% of men participate in this kind of work. Women dedicate 3,27 hours a day, while men invest 1,79 hours. Additionally, 20,9% of women are outside paid job positions because of caregiving and domestic responsibilities, in comparison with the 0,4% of men under the same category. A prevalent issue among previous generations was the inability to exercise their rights over their own bodies. Although women in our previous generation (our mothers) had a sense of self- determination and choices available to them in relation to motherhood, birth control, education, etc. these were often not available for low-income, racialized women like my grandmother, aunts, and my mom. Awareness of options and resources were unequally distributed based on socioeconomic and educational background. Decisions over their bodies were often made for them by people in 78 positions of “authority” and hierarchy: husbands, physicians, nurses, priests, and university-educated women. As described in Chapter 5, such was my grandmother and mother’s experience. I always knew that I was not a “planned child,” although my mom always says that she was happy to know she was expecting another child besides my brother. As a joke, my brother would always tell me that I was an “accident,” and unplanned child. Sad, I would come to my mom and ask her if that was true. She always responded that I wanted. However, motherhood, wanted or not, was often not my grandmother’s, aunts’, and mom’s decision to make. Recently, as adults and friends that we have become, I asked my mom directly. She responded, “No planeaba tener otra guagua. Yo quería trabajar, salir adelante, tener más opciones. Ya estábamos acostumbrados con tu hermano, ya teníamos un ritmo.”58 Although there were choices for women, for low-income, racialized women like my mom, those decisions were often made by people who were supposed to know better, like physicians. Even though I had heard this story many times, just now I understand it with all its nuances. My mom hadn’t planned to have another child. In some ways, it was a male OB-GYN. She was having trouble with her method of contraception, so she went to see a doctor. He asked, “¿Cuántos hijos tienes? ¿Qué edad tiene tu hijo?”59 He decided to remove her IUD, it was time to change it. He told my mom to rest and come back in a month. He let her go home without any precautions or alternative forms of contraception. I asked her if she thought it was unfair that the doctor did not give her any alternatives or informed her of the risks. She responds, angry at the memory, “¿Qué les va importar? A ellos no les importa lo que uno quiera. Seguro pensó que yo estaba muy joven y que tenía que tener otro hijo.”60 58 “I wasn’t planning to have another baby. I wanted to work, I wanted to work, get ahead, have more options. We were already used to each other with your brother, we already had a rhythm together.” 59 “How many children do you have? How old is he?” 60 “Why would it matter to them? They don't care what you want. Surely he thought that I was very young and that I had to have another child.” 79 Like my persistent grandmother, my mom wanted to study as well. She is smart, thinks and cares deeply, and is passionate about learning. She was indeed a good student with a strong drive to pursue a career, “to be a teacher,” she told me once. Despite constant economic constraints, husbands or family demands denied women in my family the economic independence that came with work or education. When she mentioned her desire to come back to school, my dad quickly disapproved, and said, “¿Para qué? Si no nos falta nada.”61 By the time my dad’s work began to decay, my mom decided to get a job in the city, “en lo que fuera,”62 she insists when she is reminded of those days. “Lo hice en contra de su voluntad. Él no quería [que yo trabajara].”63 He opposed and got mad at my mom for a while. I was 8 and remember my mom, apologetically, telling me she had to work, and leave the house for hours. I said, “usted trabaje, yo estoy grande.”64 To this day she remains surprised by my response. Again and again, my mother performed and modelled problem- solving and self-relience when needed. And I, her child, was already emboding and replicating her self-relience. For women in my generation with similar backgrounds, demands and expectations have shifted compared to our mothers’ experiences. My generation of women from low-income and racialized families have inherited both the academic dreams and the gendered expectations from previous generations. These expectations carry contradictions in the blend of two different generations’ dreams and gendered experiences. To accomplish one or both, we create a rupture in the expectations of our biographical trajectories as women of the next generation. Such was the case for Feña and Fernanda. For them, their pursuit of motherhood stood in tension with their professional careers, excluding one over the other. Feña, my friend and classmate 61 “And for what? We have everything we need” 62 “In anything that was available” 63 “I did it against his will. He didn’t want me to work” 64 “You go and work. I am old enough” 80 from college, for instance, decided that academia was not for her. Academia couldn’t sustain who she wanted to be, her hopes and dreams, and her call for motherhood. This decision created tensions with her mother, a university professor. She constantly struggled with meeting her mother’s expectations in her education, her womanhood, and her motherhood. These expectations took place vis- à-vis socioeconomic status, age, and gender. Under these terms, to be a daughter, for Feña, was about pleasing her mother’s expectations about her trajectory. Para mí ha sido, en término personal, ha sido como una lucha permanente de complacer a mi mamá especialmente. De poder, finalmente, escuchar las palabras de que ella me diga que está orgullosa, pero de verdad. Igual yo creo que como hija latinoamericana, también hay como expectativas de tu vida. Como que a cierta edad tú tienes que estar en el liceo, a cierta edad… especialmente en nuestro estrato social, tienes que estar en la universidad porque estar en la universidad significa mejor acceso de vida, supuestamente. Porque igual en términos prácticos me di cuenta de que no. Pero, esa es como la expectativa, que tienes que estudiar en la universidad una buena carrera. Después, tienes que casarte también con una persona que sea aprobada por tu entorno65. (Feña, personal conversation, May 12, 2021). Feña still works tirelessly to heal from the harm created by prescriptive, gendered, and academically limited expectations by her surroundings. For her, to be a mother is an act of freedom, she reflected. “Cuando uno da a luz,” she continued, “realmente no estás dando a luz solamente a un hijo o a una hija, te estás dando luz a ti misma también, algo de ti nace de nuevo”66 It is a kind of love she had never felt. She explained that motherhood was a healing act because you piece together the good 65 Personally, for me it has been, it has been like a permanent struggle to please my mother, especially. To finally be able to hear her telling me that she's proud, but for real. I also think that as a Latin American daughter, there are also expectations of your life. Like at a certain age you have to be in high school, at a certain age... especially in our social strata, you have to be in university because being in university supposedly means better access to life. Because even in practical terms, I realized that no. But that is like the expectation, that you have to study a good career at the university. Then, you also have to marry a person who is approved by your environment 66 81 things about your childhood, while you understand and transform those experiences that caused you harm. In attending to haunting memories, memorias que son porfiadas y se quedan demanding healing and change, Feña has been able to address her own haunting memories, transgenerationally heal and undo mother-daughter severed relationships, set a path anew and establish the kind of relationship she hoped for herself while honoring and transfering the good experiences to her children. Fernanda and I have also experienced a certain pressure and contradictions from our family. Our families were immensely proud of our accomplishments, we were special and one of a kind. Yet, there is an ongoing pressure to accomplish both academic and professional success, while also maintaining a more traditional female role. Breaking from previous generational patterns and expectations, we understand and engage in motherhood differently. For women of our generation, the focus remains on supporting our parents to access what we could not access as children and provide economic security. This is only possible while furthering our professional career. The choice and possibility of having children, if at all, becomes equally important as maintaining a steady income. Van a haber personas de nuestra generación que no quieren tener hijos. Que hay personas de nuestra generación que no van a tener más de un hijo. Entonces, como que las necesidades de consumo cambiaron. Ya no es tan solo tener una carrera universitaria, tienes que tener estudios de postgrado. Y eso ya no es una decisión, el mundo laboral te lo exige. Entonces, siento que hay un quiebre de biografía de superar como la condición de pobreza en la que estuviste.67 (Fernanda, personal conversation, Mayo 22, 2021). 67 “There are going to be people of our generation who don't want to have children. People of our generation who are not going to have more than one child. So, consumption needs changed. It is no longer just having a university degree; you must have a postgraduate degree. And that is no longer a decision, the workplace demands it. So, I feel like there's a biographic break to overcome, like the poverty condition you were in.” 82 For Fernanda, motherhood and professional roles are a balancing act. She and her partner resist intergenerational gender roles for two reasons: she believes that it is important for our generation to allow and work for an equal distribution of caregiving responsibilities, where male partners reclaim their fatherhood and equity in caregiving roles in concrete ways. Fernanda rejects sacrificing her work and professional career to devote herself solely to motherhood. She fights for the right to mother and love her son and for her right to love her career and grow professionally. Para mí es un tema crucial no abandonar el mundo laboral…defiendo mi derecho de hacer lo que amo en la vida. Porque uno ama ser mamá. Yo amo a mi hijo, eso no está en duda, pero yo también amo otras cosas. (Fernanda, personal conversation, Mayo 22, 2021). Like Fernanda and Feña’s mothers, my family embodies the expectations of previous generations and their hopes and dreams of freedom and wholeness. Growing up, to have an education was heavily emphasized. The only area where I had to excel. It was the only way out of our poverty and economically constraining conditions. I was, however, also pressured to follow a more traditional path. ¿Hasta cuándo estudias?” was always my uncles’ and aunts’ questions while I was at college in my second B.A. to be a secondary English teacher. Most of my cousins my age and older were married, with children, and/or working full time. “Quiero poder conocer a tus hijos,” “No [te cases, te embaraces, críes hijos] muy vieja.”68 I did not define my real relationship with motherhood until much later. I never imagined that not having children was even an option. Having children remained a must despite my desire to learn, read, do research, teach, and walk new paths. When we talk about children, my mom tells me, “Me gustaría que tuvieras un bebé, para que tuvieras la experiencia.”69 A female cousin my age once told me, after I said that I wasn’t planning to have children yet: “Ser 68 “I want to meet your children,” “Don’t [get married, get pregnant, raise children] too old.” 69 “I would like you to have a baby, so that you have the experience.” 83 mamá es un sentimiento que no se parece a ningún otro. Es amor verdadero.”70 I responded that I know what it means and what it takes, physically, emotionally, ecologically, and economically—but I wanted to grow in other ways as well. I want to have and love other experiences first. My response is often followed by their once-upon-a-dream memory, of the time they could no longer pursue their dreams of independence and autonomy. Being able to choose to “grow in other ways” and say that “I want to have and love other experiences first” is a privilege that stands on our grandmothers’ and mothers’ struggle for freedom and wholeness. My grandmother inculcated the importance of education as a path towards more opportunities, the opportunities they want for themselves and wished for the next generation. In a similar way, my mom taught me the same lesson through a rememory of my porfiada grandmother’s escapes on a horse to go to school and learn to read. Conclusion Colonial and patriarchal economies and societies are enshrined in low income and racialized women’s subordination and sacrifice, entangled in dispossession, exploitation, and extraction of freedom and wholeness. Our relationship with our futurity, our place, time, and opportunities of intellectual growth was determined by colonial hierarchies of class and gender already in place and out of our control. Educated in segregated classed and gendered educational trajectories, our high school trained us to enter the job market at an early age, deeming other life and academic skills (critical and creative thinking, active citizenship and public participation, self-advocacy, feminist understandings) expendable. In this sense, those in the elite –settler-colonizadores (King, 2019)—remain in their positions of power, generationally accumulating land, cultural, economic, and political capital through schooling. And us, low-income racialized young women in a technical school are trained to 70 “To be a mother is a feeling unlike any other. It is true love.” 84 be and remain economically subordinated: work at an early age, in a school that did not provide tools to protect ourselves from exploitation, dehumanization, low-wages, or create a path into other educational possibilities beyond a technical degree (e.g., Ortiz, 2009). Moreover, in educational spaces teachers, knowingly or unknowingly, reproduce classed, raced, and gendered practices in the classroom through pedagogies and curricula that are onto-epistemological silencing for students. Students, however, are not determined by these practices. As I describe in Chapter 7, although students’ onto-epistemological wholeness might be discouraged, it remains within and will eventually emerge and flow naturally. The previous generation of women in my family stepped into spaces (with people) that dispossessed them, stripped them from their autonomy, their time, alternative personal trajectories, and the possibility of a kind of love that doesn’t require a sacrifice of any kind. Still, when they decide to have children, women continue to leave their careers in higher numbers than men do. As if one excludes the other. This is, in Fernanda’s words, a normalized romanticization of gender, racial, and class subordination that pushes first-generation women out of professional spaces. Freedom is a place, Gilmore (2017) reminds us. In this case, educational, labor, and home spaces remain subtractive of women’s choices, even when they overcome limited educational trajectories, classed, and gendered obstacles. However, transgenerationally, mothers and grandmothers have built possibilities and places of freedom by performing resilience and self- reliance as the only option for survival. Generational reorientation is a struggle and a healing process. It encompasses intentional and conscious decisions whereby motherhood and career paths are not mutually excluding, bounded, and fixed. It entails multi- and cross- generational rememory and attention to haunting memories that make colonial and patriarchal technologies, patterns, and expectations visible. These settler colonial patterns inhabit physical/spatial, bodily-spatial, material, 85 and symbolic realms that kept previous generations of women subordinated, controlled, and disciplined. 86 Chapter 7 Wounded Memories and the Coloniality of English Context of this Work In the last few months of 2019, the world was in flames in front of my eyes. Across the globe, a sense of entangled forms of socioeconomic, gender, and racial injustice sparked social movements and riots. Protests and occupations amounted to unveiling long-standing colonial systems maintained and furthered by elite and white settler neoliberalism (Speed, 2017) in the form of racial, gender, and class violence and dispossession. Far away from my home, Chile, I impatiently watched the biggest uprising since the 70s through unfiltered social media. I saw people mobilized by one of the most basic human rights: dignity, in all its forms. Hundreds of protesters were injured by police. Informally this moment was described as a social and political awakening to state abandonment to secure equitable access to quality and dignifying public and social services (education, health, clean water, etc.), living wages and retirement funds, end of gender violence and femicides, among many other issues, rooted in neoliberal reforms (e.g., Budds, 2013; Fraser, 2019). These encounters lasted months, suspended only by the rising of one of the deadliest pandemics in modern times in March of 2020. These ongoing uprisings were described as a social awakening to undignifying living conditions, which was followed by what has been called a “Constitutional Awakening,” the realization that injustices and inability to create structural change required a constitutional change that would replace the rampant neoliberal ideology at the core of the Pinochet’s constitution (Asaldi & Pardo-Vergara, 2020; Green-Rioja, 2021). A few months into the pandemic, I was unable to voice the uncertain, the unnamed, the never-ending losses of lives and loved ones had gone because of COVID. In Minnesota, where I began this chapter in 2020, the killing of George Floyd by policeman Derek Chauvain sparked ongoing riots and demonstrations across the state and the nation against police brutality in Black and Brown communities. Months later, with horror, we watched the footage of the murder shown in 87 the trial. George Floyd pleaded for 9 minutes and 26 seconds, “Please, I can't breathe, please man, please.” The faces and stories of young Black and Brown people murdered by police and white- armed men did not receive the same media attention but were deeply felt and voiced by communities and activists across states: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aurbery, Adam Toledo, and many others. Memories of Onto-Epistemological Silencing Facing my own familial pandemic tolls, I was unable to find the words in Spanish or English to give words to the loss, the pain, the mourning. And there I was, reading How to Make Art at the End of the World (Loveless, 2019), wherein I felt like it was, in fact, the end of the world, without words. An uninvited visitor, a haunting memory (Gordon, 2008; Rhee, 2021), took me back to a place of pain, in a different time and space: I was back in my phonology class at the university. My body was stiff sitting on a chair that was part of a circle of chairs where the rest of the class was sitting. The air is dense. Our phonology professor was sitting in front of us. Feeling the void in my stomach and my throat, I begged quietly to myself “por favor, que no me toque” “que me salga el sonido.”71 This recurrent memory comes every time I speak in English with someone new or I speak in public. In my English learner and speaker self, I embody the haunting memories while learning English at the university; the recurrent impossibility of knitting words together because of the fear of being mocked by a professor, and the onto-epistemological silence of being unable to fit or translate myself into English. Unfair, I always conclude. Growing up, English was all around me, in and out of school, and yet, the language and words I learned didn’t quite reflect my surroundings, my experiences, my driven curiosity, or my historical and sociocultural self. I also thought of the historical, social, and political silence surrounding social unrest in the English language that I 71 “Please, let it not be my turn, please let the sound come out” 88 observed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in Chile, while the same seemingly passive students were gathering in assemblies, protesting, and taking over their school. I also thought of the irony that after seven years immersed in dominant English-speaking spaces, I still couldn’t voice loss or translate the stories I grew up through the pure contours of the academic English language. Amid ongoing global unrest, I wondered how we may challenge the cultural construction of the language learning classrooms (Awayed-Bishara, 2021) as spaces of pedagogies of cruelty (Segato, 2018) and onto-epistemological silencing (e.g., Rhee, 2021; Bhattacharya & Kim, 2020). Spaces of onto- epistemological silencing are places where students need space to bring their full selves, explore their sociopolitical contexts, and their own biographies that include people. In other words, attend to the intertwined connection between knowing and being (ontology and epistemology). Onto- epistemological silencing represents a normalized marginalization and erasure of local contexts, ways of knowing, creating knowledge, participating in public spaces, etc. (Kumaravadivelu, 2016; Bhattacharya & Kim, 2020). Silencing and erasure are colonial logics in the language classroom that privilege decontextualized academic materials and methods. These English language learning experiences were not lived in isolation. Therefore, I frame this piece as a multi-voiced and collective process of educational rememory (Rhee, 2021) and women’s reconstruction of herstories. Rememories in this piece unveil “secret places of pain” (Lorde, 1982 cited in Rhee, 2021, p. 18) as a shared space. I thus weaved with my own memories of Kathy’s and Feña’s experiences and voices (refer to Sisters’ Portraits in Chapter 4). Together, we navigated the challenges and trauma of learning English at the university level. I begin this chapter by localizing and defining onto-epistemological silencing which I describe as insidious colonial practices constructed and sustained in restrictive and rigid learning spaces where students’ full selves are suppressed by harmful pedagogies (e.g., a pedagogy of cruelty) that silence ways of being, knowing, 89 and doing in the pursuit of adopting and performing a specific language, accent, and native persona from an affluent background. In what follows, I examine experiences that shape my identity as a language learner and educator. Onto-epistemologically, who I am as a scholar, student, and language educator in the U.S., embodies my own language experiences shaped by rigidness, trauma, and silencing teaching practices. In the same way, these experiences and memories make me challenge positivistic, structuralist, and native speaker-oriented methods in language teaching and learning. Thus, this chapter is also a counter-story that hopes to create a path of possibilities in language education. In the next sections, I describe the purpose of this work as an entanglement of onto-epistemology, identity, and memory as relational, dialogic, and spatiotemporally entangled. Onto-Epistemologies at the Periphery Media, language educators, and institutions play a central role in recreating narratives and experiences of coloniality in language education in the form of oppressive spaces. The onto- epistemological knowledge of English language teachers in the “periphery” (Canagarajah, 2012) is key to challenging dominant language narratives, practices, and ideologies informing teaching practices transnationally that adhere to colonial languages such as English (Motha, 2006; Pennycook, 1998). Similar to autoethnographic work within educational sociolinguistics (e.g., Canagarajah, 2012; Motha, 2006; Yazan, 2019), this multi-voiced and collective educational rememory work centers counter-stories and learning experiences that are not often told, known, or seen due to their commonality that makes them unremarkable (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001). As a decolonial process, I author and examine shared learning experiences and the ways that broader and insidious colonial epistemologies in language teaching practices and discourses take place in the classroom as “cultural productions” of difference (e.g., Pennycook, 1998). Therefore, as 90 a rememory and decolonial process, I dialogically and collaboratively describe acts of violence as an act of refusal and voice reclamation. Only after naming those haunting spaces, it is possible to envision a language pedagogy that nurtures decolonial and onto-epistemological wholeness (e.g., Lugones, 2003). One that allows the learning community to see, name, and challenge white settler colonial practices, extractive economies of accumulation, and death of everything living and sustaining life. Teaching, learning, and research are dialogic practices that have transformational and emancipatory potential. As this work is not meant to be “a practice alone in the world” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 765). By eventaliz-ing (López López, 2017)72 shared experiences, I seek to “produce analytical, accessible texts that can change us and the world we live in for the better” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 764). In other words, as an educational piece, it serves as a mirror and a window (Bishop, 1990; Sleeter & Carmona, 2017) through which readers reflect on their own experiences and can see empowering possibilities for themselves and their learning experiences. It is a decolonial piece intended to create reflection, raise consciousness, and create change in the personal and social context. Memories and onto-epistemology. Our understanding of memories and experiences shape who we are and how we know. Memories are living and continually changing, as we learn and gather experiences. Even when heard a thousand times, a story is filled with multiple and nuanced lessons available for the reader or listener (See Chapter 3). Bochner (2012), for instance, reminds us that as we grow older and encounter new experiences, our relationship with events and people in the past changes. In other words, our memories of events are open to revision and new lessons, as we participate in social interactions across social contexts. In a similar way, identity is not fixed (Gray & 72 Ligia (Licho) López Lopéz (2017) describes event-alizing or Eventalization is a form of inquiry that historcizes and makes visible events. In this piece I continue what Dr. Allweiss and I started in our project, to capture moments, memories, and herstories that haunt that unveil pervasive colonial logics. 91 Norton, 2015), but informed by our social interactions nested in social, political, and economic contexts, across time and space. Language as an important identity marker also occupies an important place in our biographical trajectories and experiences; how we navigate, negotiate, perceive, and invest ourselves (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Pavlenko, 1997). Through collective and dialogic rememory, I explore the historical, sociopolitical, and ideological contours of my language learning and teaching experiences. These memories move and act like ghosts; they are embodied memories that haunt and have come to be part of my English-speaker self. Socioeconomic and Ideological Contours of English in Chile During the dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), a neoliberalizing and globalizing agenda was set into motion. Chile was the world’s first “neoliberal experiment,” which informed its implementation in neighboring nations. Authors have described this as a neoliberal coup (Inzunza et al., 2019) engineered by an elite group of policymakers known as the Chicago boys, trained in Economics by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago during the 70s (Mönckeberg, 2001). Neoliberal reforms set in motion weakened the state’s role as the warrantor of social rights and incorporated a new socioeconomic paradigm of competitiveness, and the privatization of previously nationalized industry and public services (e.g., education, health, retirement pension systems), which affected communities across socioeconomic, gender, geographic, racial, and age groups. This new economic and political identity was solidified in the illegitimately approved 1980 Constitution during Pinochet’s dictatorship, without public input, by a fraudulent plebiscite (Heiss, 2020). In current times of global neoliberalism, English is commodified, promoted, and provided an elite status. Constructed as a form of linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, Park, Wee, 2016), English learning is considered a valuable linguistic currency, an individual asset, and a form of cultural capital that allows enhanced opportunities in the global market (Bourdieu & Thompson, 1991; Niño Murcia, 2003; Pennycook, 1994/2017). Thus, language is exploited to construct a specific persona. 92 This entrepreneurial linguistic relationship, however, reinforces neoliberal practices and the privileged status of English over local languages (Kubota, 2015). Moreover, considering the unequal distribution of resources, segregated education across the globe, and unequal access to dominant languages such as English, language learning often becomes a gatekeeper to social mobility, citizenship, migration, and new job opportunities (De Costa, 2010; Villar et al., 2017). Dominant discourses legitimizing English learning in Chile are found in newspapers, media, and national curricular standards. For example, a critical analysis of the discourse present in three Chilean popular newspapers revealed important themes in relation to a dominant discourse surrounding the English language (Glas, 2008). In such dominant discourse, education, progress, and economic pressures are described as intertwined wherein the English language is presented as a language of the global market and as important for the economic development of the region. This finding is supported by descriptions of English as “the language of business,” “a universal language,” also describing English learning as an “imperative” and a “need” in a global and competitive market (Glas, 2008, p. 114). There is also a strong emphasis on increasing language competence in the nation to participate and gain international recognition. This sense of competence is closely tied to a sense of individualistic gain (increase in salary) and potential access to material gains. These are discourses that seek to influence the ways English is positioned in the national curriculum. A critique of low levels of English is presented as a national concern, arguing for new teaching methodologies for English learning in public schools. This issue, however, is widespread in low-income and segregated public schools, and an unfamiliar scenario across private, bilingual, and wealthier schools. As the upcoming sections describe, the teaching of the English language (and the learning of other colonial languages such as French, and Spanish) embodies colonial paradigms of difference, hierarchy, and imperialism. The spread of English to the Global South and its current given status is 93 not innocent, it is not common sense. Instead, its status and spread are advanced by colonial, capitalistic, neoliberal epistemologies, and economic interests. At the same time, English advances these understandings through its teaching methods, embedded ideologies, and fixed goals (e.g., De Costa, 2010; Pennycook, 1998, 2017). In fact, historically, English (and other dominant colonial languages) has been in a reciprocal relationship with the spread of dominant economies, socioeconomic paradigms, and structures (Macedo, 2019; Pennycook, 2017). English All Around but Never About Growing up in the 90s in Chile, amid this radical neoliberal and globalizing process, I witnessed the circulation of international symbolic and material elements, that is, social, cultural, and economic understandings and artifacts. The English language rapidly occupied the socioeconomic and linguistic landscape as a desirable additional language. English was all around, as an important cultural capital (Niño-Murcia, 2003). It rapidly replaced the teaching of French in schools. Figure 7.1 Artifact: First Spanish- English bilingual dictionary bought used at a local market In conversations with other English teachers, I often ask, ‘why did you choose English teaching as a career?’ Often, they responded, ‘because of music.’ Music in English and English- speaking international artists dominated radio stations’ playlists. My dad’s and my brother’s favorite 94 music soon became my own: The Beatles, Sam Cooke, The Platters, Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd, etc. My love for music quickly turned into a love for words in English and a search for an understanding of lyrics. As a self-taught learner, I spent most of my high school years learning everything that caught my attention: words, sounds, phrases. At first by ear, I would try to understand the word and find it in my red and tattered second-hand English-Spanish Collins dictionary that my mom bought at the local market my first year of high school (Figure 7.1). I carried this dictionary everywhere I went, especially when listening to music or when I had found a new word, or when I would translate song lyrics. High school English was very easy for me. My technical high school mostly focused on rote memorization of long lists of verbs, conjugations, and vocabulary, filling in the gaps, and very little creative written or spoken activities. Although I also spent much of my middle and high school years curious about the Japanese language and listening to music from anime, my attention was eventually overpowered by English. English was all around me: music, books, publicity, all over the internet. By the time I had to choose a career based on my interests and economic opportunities, I thought English literature and linguistics were a good fit for me. While learning English, however, school and university curricula rarely mirrored or represented my own social commitments and background as a low-income, first-generation, brown female. English was all around, but it was never about looking critically at the social, cultural, and historical contexts wherein I was immersed. The Coloniality of Language Teaching . . . it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, and colonize. (bell hooks, 1994, p. 168) Learning a language can be a powerful, liberating, loving, and transformational experience. However, as an instrument of oppression and colonization, it has and continues to assimilate, erase, 95 silence, and colonize onto-epistemologies, memories, and relationships. Colonial languages were and remain an intrinsic and essential part of the epistemological, territorial, and human project of colonization. For instance, English language teaching (ELT) was the product and crucial part of the projects of colonialism (Pennycook, 1998). As a common cultural process in the language classroom, Othering colonial discourses and practices still adhere to English language education, such as the hierarchical dichotomous construction of ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native’ speakers, boundaries between language accents and pronunciations, and what counts as ‘authentic’ language (Rosa & Flores, 2015). This narrow view of languages and communities reproduces a limited representation of multilingual English-speaking communities in the global context; it silences multicultural and multilingual experiences of language learners socio-politically and culturally situated (Kumaravadivelu, 2016). Vignette: Two flags and a prayer. On my first day of English class in high school two main tasks were required: flags and a prayer. For the first task, we were asked to draw, color, and glue two flags on each side of our English notebook: The British on the front and the American flag at the back. All our notebooks looked the same. On the first day of class, our English teacher—who was Catholic—asked us to write on the first page of our notebook what she started writing on the chalkboard: Pater Noster, Our Father in Latin. During the beginning of each English class, we would stand up and recite Pater Noster in Latin. Our teacher thought we would seem more cultured. Despite the widely promoted sense of objectivity and neutrality in applied linguistics and language teaching, colonial borders still permeate bi/multilingual language teaching and learning experiences and possibilities, in the form of racial and accent hierarchies (Flores & Rosa, 2015), categorization of native vs non-native that “[affirm] Eurocentric values and epistemologies in students who are not White” (Motha, 2006, p. 498). Thus, language teacher education “is not a neutral endeavor” as 96 “[p]edagogies, methods, and assessment practices are imbued with racialized ideologies, hierarchies of language preferences'' (Motha, 2020, p. 15). Kumaravadivelu (2003) describes the concept of methods as a colonial construct rooted in marginality with four interrelated dimensions: scholastic (e.i., contemptuous Western treatment of local knowledge), linguistic (i.e., disregard of local languages; emphasis on monolingualism; the privilege of English as a language of instruction and privileging native speakers), cultural (i.e., the native speaker as the focal point of cultural dimension, cultural assimilation), and economic (i.e., the engine behind the colonial construct of a method, that is trade, exploitation, settlement). A dialogic and collective rememory is a space of encounter that enables language teachers and teacher educators to vocalize embodied haunting memories and examine why they remain porfiadas. The haunting and la porfía de la memoria73 point to the embeddedness of the coloniality of English language education. The Clashing of Worlds: University Socioeconomic Disparities O sea, yo me tenía que preocupar de si tenía que cocinarme, que tenía que trabajar o hacer dinero para buscar las fotocopias. Vendía chocolates, era una talla para ellas, pero era mi dinero para poder pagar mis fotocopias. Entonces, yo igual te vi como en esa misma onda de “tengo que resolver.”74 (Feña, personal conversation, May 13, 2021). My classmates, Feña and Kathy, and I describe these years at our university through a shared realization of our own experiences in education as shaped by socioeconomic segregation and disparities. As a public university, anyone with the required score on the selective University Entry 73 The stubbornness of memory 74 Feña describes socioeconomic differences and insecurity that was not shared by other classmates: “I mean, I had to worry about whether I had to cook, that I had to work, or make money to pay for photocopies. I sold chocolates, and it was a joke for them, but it was my money to be able to pay for my photocopies. So, I saw you in that same boat of "I have to solve.” 97 Exam (PSU) could enter the English language and linguistics programs. To our advantage, there were no English test requirements of any kind. There was, to our disadvantage, no language leveling, no mentoring, or additional language labs for first-generation, low-income students, from educational trajectories that did not match the skills and capital necessary to navigate the university culture and a program completely taught in English. As we entered university spaces, for Kathy, Feña, and I the English language was the piece that unveiled underlying socioeconomic, cultural, racial, and educational segregation. On the one hand, we met students who were completely different from classmates we have had up to that point. They spoke English with ease and comfort, almost like they were bored of how easy it was for them. They could argue and develop their opinion on any topic in English. Their behavior and use of Spanish were different from the rest of us. We were from completely different socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic contexts. They had traveled and lived in English-speaking countries. They have attended bilingual schools, owned, drove cars, and had parents who own businesses. They spoke up, advocated for themselves, and would approach professors as equals. As opposed to our reasons to enter this program, some of them were there to maintain and increase generational levels of wealth and privilege. Some of them seem to not care about being there. On the other hand, there were students who were first-generation, from other regions of the country, whose academic educational trajectory from a technical degree to a university context had not prepared them to navigate academic expectations and demands in strategic ways (Lopez et al., 2018). Students whose high school English was minimal and insufficient for the demands of an immersive context contended with a sink or swim approach to the mastery of English. Students who were there because this was a result of a family and community effort to overcome conditions of poverty. Kathy, Feña, and I were part of the latter. In my case, being accepted into the program was the one chance I had. My granted socioeconomic support and scholarships were the deciding factor 98 to attend this university. I didn’t know, however, how unprepared I was for what came later. There were hidden rules and strategies on how to invest one’s efforts and time. How and when to study, read, and write. How to be in class, advocate for myself, and occupy spaces that were not designed for me but to reproduce elite groups’ status and push the rest to the margin lines (Brunner & Uribe, 2007; Quaresma & Villalobos, 2018). Socialized Gender Subordination and Silencing Children and young people from families with low-income, modest, and reduced educational attainment are not able or allowed to self-advocate and voice demands that would benefit them, protect them, and prevent them from being/remaining vulnerable. From an early age, I was discouraged from speaking up. Because I behaved loudly and creatively as a child, I was soon considered a troublemaker. Through school and different forms of socialization, I was taught silence, docility, and obedience, traits that described a “good student.” I, however, inherited the porfía (disobedience) from my mom and grandmother. Although I was shy and quiet, I was resilient and porfiada. I kept on surmounting the challenges despite excluding efforts at university spaces. Vignette: Porfiadas, the quiet niece and the talkative aunt. When she was 3 years old, my niece loved to play with playdough, especially when I sat at the table with her and taught her to make fruit shapes from playdough molds. When she got bored of fruits, I made a round little ball (pelota) and gently pushed it, and it rolled into her hands. Excited, she laid on the floor and threw the ball until it got flat. She came to me, gave me the playdough back and uttered words I did not understand. “Ota, ota, ota.” Embarrassed, I tried to decipher what she wanted to say. She kept repeating the same words. Then, to adapt to my inability to understand her, she placed her hands together and moved them in circles against each other. She was repeating my hand movement when I was making the playdough ball. She wanted me to make another “pel-ota” (ball). 99 At three years old, my niece was refusing to speak through words. The two words that she would voice clearly was “no quiere.”75The rest were hand signs that were perfectly clear to me. As opposed to her mother, I always admired her tenacity to choose signs over spoken language to communicate--and to use her own learned hand and facial expressions with adults. Her worried and adamant mother described her as deficient, delayed, and even autistic. Her silence was a big problem for her. Afraid that there was something wrong with her, my niece was promptly taken to a phono-audiologist, psychologist, a language school, and an after-school. No time to lose. She had to start talking like the other children her age. The conclusion was that she had voluntarily chosen not to talk but understood and followed games and directions accordingly. In contrast to my niece’s voluntarily chosen silence, I often remember adults calling me “a parrot” because, as opposed to my 3-year-old niece, I just could not stop talking. As a little girl, I was loud, active, creative, fearless, and antithetic to school spaces. My first-grade teacher was not ok with this, so she would call my brother to complain about my behavior. I was a troublemaker due to my boredom and eagerness to choose fun over worksheets. I would finish tasks too fast, decide that I did not like them, or decide that making friends was more interesting and better use of my time. Rigid, fixed, and developmental understandings lead professionals and educators (and in some cases, parents) to describe children as “deficient” or troublemakers. Very young, I was already classified as a troublemaker. Troublemaking, Shalaby (2017) notes, is engendered by school systems, and is not something children or young people are. Specifically, Shalaby asserts that “Schools engender trouble by using systems of reward and punishment to create a certain kind of person— “a good student”— 75 “I don’t want to” 100 a person suited for the culture of schooling” (p. 152). Through schooling, religious practices, and family rearing and socialization, I learned to pursue reaffirmation as a “good girl” and “good student.” Schools, especially schools hosting low-income, racialized, and modest families, expect children and young people as young as 3 years old to sit still, be quiet, follow directions, and conform to arbitrary rules. In this sense, Shalaby (2017) warns, The child who deviates, who refuses to behave like everybody else, may be telling us— loudly, visibly, and memorably— that the arrangements of our schools are harmful to human beings. Something toxic is in the air, and these children refuse to inhale it. It is dangerous to exclude these children, to silence their warnings. (p. xxxix) As a girl and young woman in a Catholic and low-income community, pedagogies of silence flowed across social spaces. I hid my voice very young. Across social interactions with adults, I was taught docility, to never speak up, contradict, speak out of turn, or advocate for myself in front of adults or figures of authority. I was taught to “turn the other cheek.” Afraid of failure and punishment, through schooling, I became quiet, shy, and “obedient”—I got used to someone else having control over my moves, decisions, and possibilities. Some professors reinforced those traits, rather than guide us to challenge them from a gender and feminist perspective. I was also raised Catholic in a family that actively participated in church. Gender disparities were visible everywhere. The priest was like a god himself. Nuns were quiet, accepting, humble, and obliging. Every Sunday, I could see them arriving with the priest’s recently ironed, pristine, and clean white clothes. I learned that patience, silence, sacrifice, and forgiveness were desirable female traits. The image of a self-sacrificing and suffering mother shaped the ways women behaved, resisted, and moved across church spaces. For women, these were expected and desirable characteristics. Priests held symbolic power of knowledge, education, blessing, praying, confession, forgiveness, and readings of the main sections of the bible. Adopting docility, silence, and obedience, leave young 101 women like myself vulnerable to violence and abuse when navigating public and new spaces (jobs, higher education) where pedagogies of cruelty and dispossession run deep. Despite her deep religiousness and faith, my mom refused to remain docile, silenced, or obedient at home, neighborhood, or church spaces. Her limits and boundaries were clear. She performed self- protection and independence across spaces and critiqued the sexist and homophobic attitudes of church members. I saw her interacting differently with figures of authority: teachers, the elderly, priests, professionals, and doctors. She would become silent, obedient, and never asked any questions. Once we would leave the office of the person, my mom would tell me that she wanted to ask questions or that she disagreed with the person. At the university level, I replicated the same actions my mother performed, what I knew and was taught to do when interacting with figures of authority: obey, not to question, and respect them. I never thought I could have a casual conversation with them, much less ask for support. In class, afraid of being classified as “deficient” by a professor, I remained. Unlike more privileged students in my program, I had never really spoken English before. Although my knowledge and skills were strong in the “silent” tasks (listening, reading, and writing), my grades in speaking tasks differed greatly from the at which skills I was strong. Oral examination weighted 40% of the grades for the whole year, whereas all the grades for the classes that counted towards English (including grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and English practice) added up to make up 60%. This meant that if one failed the final oral exam at the end of the year, one could potentially fail a whole academic year. In short, evidence of English-speaking mastery, fluency, and accuracy was decisive in determining what was valued, how were evaluated, and how we were perceived if we did not perform accordingly. The Olympus and the Master I was taught that professors were figures of authority and deserving of respect regardless of my own opinion. This was even more evident in my program. There was a certain narrative around 102 our professors, especially the ones that would decide which one of us had passing level of English and deserved special treatment. Students ahead of us would describe them as gods, beyond anything human. They embodied the knowledge and mastery we did not possess (See Image 7.2) –they displayed native-like accents, had been abroad, had out-of-this-world listening skills, and had the power to decide who would have a miserable time in the program. Their offices were on the top floor. Jokingly classmates would say their floor was the Olympus and they would come down to share their wisdom and knowledge. For us, going up to that floor meant mostly two things: final oral exams or grades. Our names and grades were displayed publicly. Publicly they would announce who passed or failed. They were, after all, teaching in one of the most prestigious and elite public universities. They also embodied a certain class and status. Their English was BBC English, and the readings and materials portrayed a specific context: white, middle-class, leisure-like conversations: in the garden, on holidays, and in the office. Besides their cultural capital and English language skills abilities, some professors would exercise and show their power and superiority through their “gained” right to shame and mock students, just as they had experienced it before us, we were told. Kathy describes it as, “Era un acoso académico. Cuando tú te cortas un dedo te limpias la herida y te pones un curita. Aquí los profes lo que hacían era que tú tenías una herida y no dejaban que esa herida cerrara, te la apretaban y era como una tortura, sangre, para que te des cuenta de que tú nunca vas a ser lo suficientemente bueno, nunca vas a hacer las cosas suficientemente bien, ‘nunca vas a estar a mi nivel.’” 76(Kathy, personal conversation, May 23, 2021). 76 “It was academic bullying. When you cut your finger, you clean the wound and put on a Band-Aid. What professors did here was that you had a wound and they didn't let that wound close; they squeezed it and it was like torture, blood, so that you realize that you will never be good enough, you will never do things well enough, ‘you will never be at level’” 103 Figure 7.2 Artifact: Academic text that shows the emphasis on phonological structures Pedagogies of Cruelty and the Mastery of English “Thus, when we talk of ‘mastery’ of the Standard language, we must be conscious of the terrible irony of the word, that the English language itself was the language of the master, the carrier of his arrogance and brutality” (Pennycook, 1998, p. 6). While practicing and learning English at our program, mastery of the language was the main goal. In this sense, “mastery” is seemingly secured through prescriptive teaching of the language that follows rigid, positivistic, and colonial understanding of the learner and learning process. Fear, shame, and anxiety were concomitant feelings with the process of attaining “mastery of the English standard.” In this context, pedagogies of cruelty were an intrinsic part of the language learning experience. Segato asserts (2018) that pedagogies of cruelty relate to cosification of life: “actos y prácticas que enseñan, habitúan y programan a los sujetos a transmutar lo vivo y su vitalidad en cosas”77 (p. 11, also in Chapter 3). Furthermore, pedagogies of cruelty normalize the landscape of suffering and dehumanization whereby low levels of empathy are necessary to accept suffering, 77 Acts and practices that teach, habituate, and program subjects to transmute what is alive and its vitality is turn into things” 104 silencing, and death as normal. When I asked Kathy how she would describe the culture of our program, she brought back the conversations we would have as undergraduates. She described, "Yo diría que de los profesores el 50% te ayudaban o estaban más o menos neutros o hacían que tu estancia angustiosa fuera un poco más amena. El 50% de los profesores hacían prácticamente que la universidad fuera tortuosa y se sintiese casi como un infierno, así como que no me pregunte, por favor que me salga el sonido para que no me haga repetirlo otra vez y que no haga un comentario terrible en frente del grupo.”78 (Kathy, personal conversation, May 23, 2021) Depending on students’ ability to perform close to native-like mastery, some professors recognized students’ humanity and “deserving” or having an “innate gift.” For instance, in phonology classes and practice of English sounds, a professor showed lower empathy for students who they considered deficient. In turn, a professor would recognize a student’s potential, futurity, and humanity if they were deemed “proficient,” having good listening, comprehension, and production (writing and speaking) skills. In our case, early on, Kathy, Feña, and I (and most of the students in our cohort) discovered that, although we were the top students in high school, it was not enough, either we had “it” (the gift) or not. If we did not have this innate gift, we had to pay by multiplying our efforts, facing shame, and reaffirming one another. And, above all, we only had each other. Together we studied, practiced, ate, read, passed, and failed classes. Vignette: Pedagogies of cruelty and onto-epistemological silence. My relationship with English at college was filled with fear, shame, and anxiety of not advancing at the expected pace, fitting within the expectations of the “ideal” speaker, and eventually failing. These 78 I would say that 50% of professors helped or were more or less neutral or made your distressing stay a little more enjoyable. 50% of professors practically made the university experience tortuous and almost feel like hell. Feeling like “please don’t ask me, please let the sound out so they don't make me repeat it again and make a terrible comment in front of the group” 105 emotions ultimately led to silence. At the university, we practiced dialogues in phonetic transcription, week after week, a million times. We were expected to replicate whole conversation passages’ rising and falling intonation and connect cluster sounds, repeatedly, until we sounded “native.” “A cold does not take away your [English] accent,” our professor would say to communicate that there were no excuses when practicing sounds in English. Our professor would model a section, reading it out loud. Then, it would be our turn, one after other, to repeat the same section, mirroring the same sounds, intonation, and pauses. We would sit in a circle so we could see each other. As soon as we made a mistake, she would respond with a sarcastic joke, asking us to repeat the section again and again until we reached her ideal target. The jokes and her request for repetition landed like harsh criticisms. All lights and looks on that person. Jokes and repetition requests were, however, distributed unevenly. Some students were never made fun of, corrected, or asked to repeat. Others were weekly asked to repeat over and over the same word, a sign that they were not doing it correctly. Today, there is still a sense of trauma in the cruelty and agony of having to mirror the English of the person who shames you, mocks you, and sees you as deficient. Figure 7.3 Artifact: worksheet used in phonetic practice sessions, titled “Television” 106 As Rhee (2021) asserts, educators ignore or forget the intricate connection between ontology and epistemology, that is, the inseparable link between who we are, our experiences, and how we know (e.g., contextual, historical, sociopolitical, generational knowledge, family biographies). For example, one common recommendation for learners of English is to adopt a persona, “think in English, don’t think in Spanish” and “find someone you admire and adopt their way of speaking” (e.g., Banda, 2003; Nandhini & Madhan, 2016). In adopting these practices, students are asked to silence their own onto-epistemological entanglements, remove who they are, how they know, and their sociohistorical cultural selves from the target language. In creating such an English-speaking persona, we were to adopt unfamiliar practices such as eating “biscuits” and talking about “where we were flying next,” and which places we would visit after landing at Heathrow airport in the U.K. Like many in my cohort, I hadn’t been at an airport, let alone being abroad. Vignette: THINK in English. I still feel embarrassed and ashamed when my Spanish speaking self takes over when I don’t know or mispronounce a word, or when people do not understand because they are not used to my accent. One common mistake that was a source of shaming by peers and professors in our program was the “intrusion” of sounds from the Spanish language. In Spanish, my mother language (due to Spanish invasion of South America and posterior “Chilenization” and settler-colonialism), a word with an initial “s” sound followed by another consonant (a cluster) is not only rare but very difficult to pronounce (e.g., school, stop, snow). What most Spanish speakers often do when encountering such a cluster is to intuitively add a vowel to create a syllable (the combination of a consonant and a vowel). In our (rote-memorization) speaking practice, if the initial “s” in “stop” was not pronounced loud and clear, we risked being heard reading “estop” rather than “ssssstop,” followed by our professor's sarcastic public shaming. I remember trying hard and even exaggerating the “s” sound (and I still do), so I would not be perceived as 107 adding the feared “e” vowel before an “s.” I dreaded and bullied my interfering Spanish- speaking self. The goal was to sound, think and behave like a native speaker of a certain place and class (BBC English, specifically). A professor once advised me: “The problem, Romina, is that you need to THINK in English.” Every Friday afternoon, I spent hours practicing before my English production sessions, and anxiety would translate into a cold sweat and shaking hands during class, and hopelessness after class. After months of deliberation, I went to my phonology professor’s office. “I get very nervous in our sessions,” “I do much better when I practice with my classmates,” I explained. Her response was, “you know, there are pills you can take to reduce the stress...” Conclusion Professors in English oral practice tried quite hard to eradicate my Spanish-speaking self through shame, creating and reaffirming hierarchies, sort to shaming and mocking practices to correct students, and ultimately as narrated in the vignette above, by blaming and pathologizing students for their own “failure.” These forms of pedagogies of cruelty and onto-epistemological silencing are colonial and Othering practices, whereby dominant and prestigious linguistic standards and specific onto-epistemologies are chosen and imposed while shaming and disregarding linguistic and cultural backgrounds of language learners. In other words, language learners are expected to adopt a “zero” stance—i.e., to show no vestige of a mother language, linguistic, or onto- epistemology of their own. At the same time, language learners are Othered and perceived in deficient ways if their cultural and linguistic selves emerge. Within this colonial educational framework, educators and peers serve as a colonial “white listening subject” (Flores & Rosa, 2015), one that promotes and celebrates the “mastery” (Pennycook, 1998) of a dominant standard, and “Others” those who do not attain such mastery. One professor did so by mocking “intrusive” sounds from our mother language, Spanish. We mocked each other too. I felt tiringly and deeply 108 embarrassed for my speaking skills throughout the program and after. Under such pedagogies of silence, mother languages and sounds become marginalized, stigmatized, and undesirable, rather than being honored as rich linguistic and cultural repertoires and powerful multisemiotic meaning- making resources that support language learners as they navigate complex social spaces. An ideology of hierarchy and a bounding nature of languages is embedded. Scholars continue to critique such artificial borders built and reified between languages based on ideological beliefs such as nativespeakerism (Holliday, 2005; Yazan, 2018) and linguistic racism (Baker-Bell, 2020) that reaffirm the existence of a target, a “standard,” and “pure” language. In short, educational language spaces and practices can be spaces of onto-epistemological silencing and normalized cruelty. Therefore, it is crucial to understand that as educators, we are not innocent bystanders in the reproduction of linguistic, classed, raced, gendered discriminatory practices in the classroom that create onto-epistemological silencing experiences for students (Peercy et al., 2019). Suffering, shaming, and anguish are the words that describe our experiences in some classes in our program. This ultimately led to silence in many ways. We silently begged “please don’t ask me,” “please let me understand what she is asking,” while our hearts raced, regretting ever choosing that program. However, we did not know of any other alternative. We just had our inherited resilience, survival skills, and desire to keep on going. Learning a new or additional language is a personal, generative, exciting, and often vulnerable journey. This is specifically true of languages such as English, rooted in coloniality, where learners are expected to “master” it and “sound native.” Often, language learners experience pain, anxiety, and trauma after learning a language. If not in a safe, encouraging, and affirmative environment, different skills in a language (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) can trigger negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, shame, and frustration (Pishgadam et al., 2016), and ultimately onto-epistemological silencing. These emotions may become an important part of a 109 learners’ relationship with the new language and their self-perception, and subject positionality (Kramsch, 2009); that is, the way learners present themselves discursively, socially, psychologically, and culturally. Bilingual and multilingual learners often experience onto-epistemological silencing in the way of creative silence, within the constraints of language learning boundaries. Under positivistic and restrictive pedagogical practices, language users’ “cultural and linguistic identities turn out to be obstacles that stand in the way of the goal of being ‘native-like’” (Hwang, 2017, p. 84). Due to language classrooms’ prescriptive goals and genre, learners’ curious drive is also restricted. For instance, Yohan Hwang (2017) describes how the English courses he took restrained his creativity. He then realized that “the lack of creativity and personal voice in L2 writing were connected to grammar and translation-oriented pedagogies” (p. 83). Today, the memories I described earlier inhabit me in the form of internalized linguistic oppression, a soul wound (Valenzuela, 2008). For a while, I thought that my experiences of trauma and practices of maltrato (mistreatment, abuse) in the language classroom were the way to learn a language effectively. I had to “sacrifice” something and “pay my way in” like my professors eventually did. “What hurts you makes you stronger,” I often heard, “growing pains, that’s all,” I would tell myself to numb the trauma. These were part of a learned pedagogy of survival and rationalizing my experience. This specific understanding of normalized suffering speaks to a broader ideology of meritocracy and cruelty that sustains our dehumanization and naturalizes the maltrato that we endure in a globally patriarchal, settler-colonial, and capitalistic society and economy. I grew up with stories of maltrato and onto-epistemological silencing at school, at home, at work, and at hospital spaces while being born (see Chapter 4). In Closing Rememory and practices of testimonio are acts of critical hope and refusal. My mother, her mother, and my friends over the years persistently gathered and kept them alive to unveil haunting 110 memories and spaces of pain because they were able to see, imagine, and pursue an otherwise for those they loved: their sisters, mothers, sons, and daughters. Similarly, rememory and critique of pedagogies of cruelty in the language classroom requires a decolonial imagining; the ability to see cruelty to change said inherited and insidious practices of cruelty. (e.g., Figueroa, 2015; Lugones, 2003) As a college student, very few exemplary educators showed me and taught me alternative routes to language learning, even when they critiqued traditional teaching methods. One professor embodied an otherwise, an alternative. Her ways of being and doing outlined possibilities in education that did not entail cruelty, bullying, or silencing. I was almost graduating from the program when I had the opportunity to reclaim my love for languages, learning, teaching, and intentionally seeking counter-pedagogies. Figure 7.4 Artifact: A poem a professor chose to practice English 111 Vignette: Mending of the self. At our college program, there were few but key professors who understood and empathize with students from low-income backgrounds and were the first generation to attend a university program. In my 3rd year in the program, I met one of the most experienced professors in our program, she was about to retire. She had taught and trained the younger professors in the program. She was one of the professors everyone talked about as being widely known and respected in the field. The way people talked about her was different: she taught and helped students without critique or shaming practices. During her class, she offered support with additional practice sessions. Her office was peaceful, quiet, wall to wall covered in books, an inviting place just like her personality. At the beginning of our time together, we sat, and she asked questions about my background, in a soft and gentle voice. Then she handed me a piece of poetry to practice my English. Poetry? I thought. Even in my English literature courses, I felt that poetry wasn’t meant to be understood or read aloud. They were privileged pieces. This time, the stanzas, however, were accessible, calming, and repetitive in a soothing pattern. The kind of poetry I would like to write, I thought. She gave me little tasks after every session: find comfortable pauses for myself, provide rising and falling intonations within each section, check specific vowel sounds for unfamiliar words, and focus on one specific sound at a time. Her space, her voice, and her peacefulness were something I was craving. I felt safe enough to make mistakes. Later she encouraged me to find pieces I liked to practice, such as news pieces, stories, or poetry. In choosing what to practice, I began to find the sounds and pauses everywhere. Any writing piece looked like something I wanted to read out loud. She showed me how to love words and sounds again, away from anguish, shaming, and silence. 112 Vignette: Untranslated. It’s been seven years away from home, families, and friends. My world is completely worded, negotiated, and read in English. When I talk with my family over a video call, I keep losing words. I just can’t remember nouns, verbs, and adjectives in Spanish, a language I have been speaking for 34 years. Those silences, however, are filled with my mom’s voice, stories, and memories. And I am lucky that she is faithful to the details. Then, what do I lose when I am losing my Spanish? I don’t gain fluency, proficiency, or a native-like identity. Here, they will never understand me fully, untranslated. There is always someone who will understand some other thing and will pretend that that’s what I meant (Journal entry, August 2020). - I speak an English that most people here in the US would take the ungranted freedom to describe as “great” or “decent.” They cannot understand my oversharing, bluntness, and unfiltered talk. Often, I wish their “how are you” was an invitation to sit and talk and share our life stories; an invitation to skip the superficial dance that includes weather and temperature. So, when I meet someone who wants to skip this dance, I hold them tight, because I have found a piece of home and I can go on, untranslated (Journal entry, June 2022). To Henry, José, Marisol, Alyssa, Alex, Vivek, India, Rachel, Jungmin, family and many other friends. 113 Chapter 8 A Path Towards a Transformational Language Teaching and a Polydisciplinamorous Pedagogy Continuing the themes presented across this dissertation, in this chapter I discuss alternative possibilities in the language classroom from a pedagogy nurtured from the refusal and the need of healing long-lived wounds. Coloniality of English and language education do not only take place in actions of overt violence and death. Coloniality in teaching and learning spaces moves quietly, in normalized pedagogies of cruelty and dispossession as it is onto-epistemological silencing, that is, a form of cosification and dehumanization. Pedagogies that reinforce onto-epistemological silencing often focus on the mastery of disciplinary knowledge (e.g., Andreotti, 2021), and incorporate colonial content, ways of knowing, and ways of imagining. Onto-epistemological silencing can take diverse forms. As a colonial technology embedded in social spaces and intersubjectivity, it seeks docile, static, and disciplined bodies removed from their stories, memories, and ways of relating. For instance, often educators disregard the interlocked nature of ontology and epistemology in teaching and learning (Rhee, 2021) resulting in erasure and dispossession in complex and overlapping ways. Epistemological silencing often takes the form of imposition of dominant and hegemonic content, ways of understanding, knowing, and relating to the content. For instance, disregarding students’ freedom to create meaning, to relate with others in their learning, and ways of knowing by privileging content transfer and accumulation, and mastery of skills (Andreotti, 2021; Shahjahan et al., 2021) rather than how students are positioned, who and how they want to be in the world (Ohito, 2021). Epistemological silencing also relates to educators’ often overpowering assumptions and beliefs of who students are, who they are expected to be, what is valued in them, and what their potential is according to what they see within the boundaries and genre of the classroom. For instance, when a student is perceived as disengaged or rude because they do not meet the teacher’s eyes or remain silent in class (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008). 114 Ontological silencing also takes the form of the imposition of dominant ways of being, doing, and relating in the classroom that relates to colonial, positivist, and capitalist ways of being. For instance, teaching practices that focus on individuality and competition rather than collective work as natural in community-oriented contexts; assuming that students conform to prescribed gender roles and expectations; or assuming students’ trajectory and their futurity are determined based on the school they are attending (college-oriented vs technical, vocationally oriented as presented in Chapter 6). Colonial epistemological silencing in the language classroom then denies participants’ possibilities of dialogic encounters of shared experiences. It is a kind of silencing that precludes participants from seeing colonial entanglements, and eventually changing individual and shared experiences of dispossession, ongoing hemispheric death, and experiences of wholeness in language learning spaces as described in Chapter 7. As a descendant and product of colonization, raised in a conquistador-settler state, socialized into hegemonic anti-indigenous western knowledge, it has been a recent but relentless process to untangle and unlearn various deep and dominant epistemological and societal “common senses” (Kumashiro, 2004), purposes of (second, foreign language) education, and my social and political responsibility as an educator and a language educator. Thus, considering the latter and the purpose of this chapter, I seek to dismantle practices that reproduce and are rooted in “neutrality” and coloniality. In this chapter, I describe this move away from endemic frameworks of silencing and neutrality that prevail in language education. I see language teaching as a thread that weaves learning beyond disciplinary and geographical borders; it weaves together culture, language, students’ disciplinary and social justice commitments, and the larger community. As a humanizing response for myself and my students, I visualize alternative transformational learning spaces and opportunities in my own teaching that reject colonial, positivistic, disciplinary, epistemological boundaries, and hierarchies in the language classroom. I 115 focus primarily on my work in the Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum program (CLAC) at the Residential College of Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University79 (MSU). The CLAC Program was a generative space to trace new possibilities in my teaching and professional development. I was able to draw from all students’ disciplines and available resources through the CLAC program and position myself as a participant, learning with and from students’ curiosity and transdisciplinary knowledge. I frame this language practice and experience through transdisciplinary and polydisciplinamorous frameworks that offer multisemiotic and contextually rich, collective- and self-driven experiences, and alternative paths to language learning and engagement (see Byrd Clark, 2016). The teaching and learning moments that I share in the following pages are not meant to be a one-size-fits-all pedagogy. This practice emerged in a specific context, fostered, and stimulated by student participants’ shared objectives and interests, a transformational approach to learning by CLAC program mentors, and school leadership’s support (e.g., Dean, program director, faculty across RCAH, among others), students’ commitment, access to creative freedom and resources afforded by the school context and their own dialogic and interdisciplinary elasticity. The CLAC Program The Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is a program designed to provide spaces for interdisciplinary encounters and collaborations through the learning of languages and cultures within RCAH. Because it is shaped by the faculty and RCAH’s course offerings and students’ disciplinary interests and commitments, the CLAC program often offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary work, providing alternative learning opportunities for the learning community, students, and educators. If interested in language(s) and culture(s), students may expand their major, 79 For publishing purposes, I will anonymize MSU and college. 116 language(s), and disciplinary knowledge from a contextualized, interdisciplinary, transnational perspective. In particular, the CLAC program in RCAH includes the support of Language Fellows to work alongside and facilitate these opportunities for students. With the collegial cooperation of administration, faculty, students, and language fellows, the CLAC program opens learning opportunities such as visiting speakers, Film Series, Culturally Speaking Events, Integrated Language Options, etc. As a Spanish language fellow, the CLAC program was a generative space to explore teaching that challenged traditional boundaries and purposes within language education embedded in practice, content, and expected outcomes. To attend to all my students’ voiced interests, I had to work cross-disciplinarily and ecologically towards transformational learning. This way, we could look at cultural and historical components of Spanish, while exploring the roots and nuances of social injustices through students’ disciplinary interests (art, cinema, theater, cuisine, history, forestry, etc.) and curiosities. Hence, every semester, topics and projects would be developed in connection with students’ disciplinary interests and transnational contexts. Spanish ILO Integrated Language Options is a language immersion opportunity offered to all students of all language proficiency levels. It requires only attendance and participation from students. There are no grades or credits required. ILOs are individualized, student-centered, project-based, collaborative, and inter-and trans-disciplinary language learning spaces. Due to its nature, ILOs vary from semester to semester. ILOs’ content and goals for the semester are defined by students in collaboration with a language fellow. Inter-and trans-disciplinary in the Spanish ILO is given by the weaving of diverse intellectual and disciplinary interests within the learning community. Students from different majors and disciplines come together, maybe for the first time, to collaborate and draw from their own creativity, curiosities, and underlying social commitments. Therefore, the teaching of ILOs needs to be closely connected to students’ communities, lives, and possibilities in relevant and responsive 117 ways. In fact, learning and knowledge creation are not confined to the walls of a classroom or a particular language, but are deeply connected to reflections about the world and communities. And what’s more, students’ learning is materialized in a final collaborative project. The project is presented at the end-of-semester school showcase, an event that is opened to students and faculty, which also expands learning opportunities for the wider community, surmounting the traditional confinement of classroom walls. Pedagogical and Epistemological Underpinnings The pedagogical and epistemological underpinning encompassing my teaching describe language as a living and social practice at the core of human and transformative encounters. Back in 2017, I entered the Ph.D. program searching for the kind of teaching that would allow students to de-normalize day-to-day gender, class, and racial violence in their lives and transnationally; teaching that would facilitate transformational experiences for students and inspire them to make changes in our world for the better. I thus frame language learning as a living social and contextual phenomenon that has the potential of providing transformative knowledge and learning experiences that can and should be grounded in students’ identities and interests (Canagarajah, 2013). Transformative learning in education is defined in many ways. It is defined as the learning that leads to the revision and unlearning of harming beliefs and harming lived experiences (Cranton, 2016). Slavish (2005) described transformational teaching as the potential to create and promote meaningful change in students’ lives through curricular opportunities for life-changing experiences. Banks (1993) describes transformative intellectual knowledge as one that includes bodies of knowledge that have been historically marginalized from the hegemonic curriculum. It also connects learning to take action in a way that will benefit historically marginalized communities and can further structural justice. In the context of language education, historically and systematically subordinated and oppressed communities’ experiences have been largely marginalized and erased from the curriculum, 118 wherein cultural content is decontextualized, generalized, and remains grammar and communication- focused (Canagarajah, 2005, 2012; Johnson, 2019; Macedo, 2019). In this sense, a transformational language teaching and learning expands beyond disciplinary learning and language acquisition goals, and includes socially just and educational purposes and students’ biographies and stories alongside language learning goals. In this autoethnography, I present an alternative to language education--one that embraces educators’ and participants’ ways of being, knowing, and intersubjective commitments in the world. In line with my onto-epistemological goals, through autoethnography, I engage in a process that considers subjectivity, emotionality, and the many ways the researcher’s ontology informs research and practice (Ellis et al., 2011). Thus, in incorporating non-dominant practices that challenge dominant content hierarchies, mastery of an ideal language, and test-oriented practices, this is a resistance text against colonial and dominant representations. It may also help readers and audiences to reconsider their own learning experiences and possibilities (Bochner, 2012). As a text of resistance and refusal of colonial practices, this autoethnography entails a dialectic experience that considers both the participants, educators, the writer, and the reader and the audience. In other words, autoethnography “is not a practice alone in the world” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 765). It is a socially just act whose goal, rather than focusing on accuracy and generalizable knowledge, “is to produce analytical, accessible texts that can change us and the world we live in for the better” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 764). Furthermore, in dialogue with recent postmodern and critical understandings of language education, I challenge notions that sustain the misunderstanding that language learning only occurs cognitively, in isolation from people’s social contexts, biographies, social justice commitments, and embodied experiences. With this inquiry in mind, I entered the CLAC program and the teaching of the Spanish ILO guided by an ecological and social semiotic understanding of language learning. 119 First, I envisioned this learning space where students’ full selves take the lead, and their voices and interests are honored. Second, language education (e.g., SLA, ELL, TESOL, FLT, etc.) must pave the way to transformative and decolonial imaginings for students and their communities. To do so, I frame language as a place that offers a mirror and window (Bishop, 1990; Sleeter & Carmona, 2017) that allows us to see all living things threatened by colonial and neoliberal technologies of exploitation, dispossession, extraction, and death; that allows educators and students to examine the ways they are positioned within and across insidious technologies of dispossession and extractions. Language as a semiotic and social phenomenon. Since the late 60s social semiotics has moved from the ‘sign’ and ‘structure’ of language to an understanding of language in its social context and meaning-making potential through a wealth of semiotic resources. Social semiotics considers semiotic resources used in communication and how these resources are socially and ecologically afforded (Canagarajah, 2013; van Leeuwen, 2005). From an ecological and an onto- epistemological perspective, to look for learning, van Lier asserts (2000), “it is to look at the active learner in her environment, not at the content of her brain” (p. 247), thus communicative and meaning-making interactions with afforded semiotic resources, whereby semiotic resources can be linguistic, visual (symbols, icons, colors, shapes), embodied (body language), or a combination (multimodal) (Canagarajah, 2013; Fairclough, 2012). In this sense, language use and communication as social practices cross over linguistic borders, shaping and being shaped by social, cultural, ideological, and political contexts (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). Vignette: Where I am From Poem, Ella Lyon. I often start the semester with various forms of introductions over the first weeks. One of my favorites is Ella Lyon’s Where I am From poem, which educators across school levels have incorporated due to the evocative and intimate experience it helps facilitate for students. Across stanzas, students engage and evoke “just the facts of their lives, and the beauty of those facts adds up to a literary show-and-tell 120 about students’ cultures” (Linda Christensen, 2017, p. 20). I begin this activity by scaffolding concepts and specific shared vocabulary that students want to include in their stanzas. The language considered relates to contextualized and multimodal elements and semiotic resources, for example, artifacts at their home or bedroom, childhood toys, identity, family, trajectories, languages, memories, and family stories. I include this activity at the beginning of my classes for three reasons. One, students see themselves and others in their own unique and shared complexities and reaffirm their creative potential. Oftentimes, students see their experiences and memories as unremarkable, as commonalities. Others do not see themselves as creative writers. Second, in language learning settings, this activity adapts to different levels of proficiency. Students write as much and as little as they can appropriate the language and shape their own voices in another language. When students in the ILO write their individual poems in Spanish, they are amazed by how much they can write, almost always a complete poem in their first session. At the end of the poetry writing session, students volunteer to share their pieces. Students completely take over the space at this stage. They read from their hearts, their eyes glow and they laugh, snap, and clap each other’s pieces. I usually ask, did you know you were poets? They usually say no, they never thought that they could even do it in a different language. Transdisciplinary and onto-epistemological language learning. A transdisciplinary and onto-epistemological approach to language learning responds to ecological semiotic affordances and various intellectual modalities. Transdisciplinarity underscores the complex embeddedness of language, culture, and society; it pieces together students’ biographies, personal and learning desires and curiosities, and transformational learning opportunities (Slavish & Zimbardo, 2012). A ground- breaking contribution to language education is the Douglas Fir Group’s (DFG, 2016) transdisciplinary framework. Transcending the boundaries of disciplines themselves, the DFG’s 121 model unveils the multi-layered complexity of language learning and use within three dimensions exerting mutual influence: micro, meso, and macro levels. Broadly, individuals engage with each other (micro level) and draw from all available semiotic and multimodal resources and linguistic repertoires, across different institutional and social contexts (meso), such as schools, family, workplaces, etc. At the macro level, large-scale belief systems, social, economic, and religious values shape and are shaped by social institutions and people. In short, this model represents “the embedding, at all levels, of social, sociocultural, sociocognitive, socio-material, ecosocial, ideological, and emotional dimensions” (p. 24) of language and language users. Similarly, a transdisciplinary language classroom responds to the complexity and multi-layered nature of language and language learners and users. In short, inter-and trans-disciplinary language learning spaces gather a diversity of thinking, doing, showing, and imagining as exemplified by the Ella Lyon’s Where I am From Poem where poems are unique, different, and in dialogue with one another. Unfortunately, historically language classrooms teaching colonial languages such as Spanish, English, or French rarely reflect students’ lived experiences, interests, or sociopolitical contexts of students from marginalized communities (Peña-Pincheira & Dunn, in press). Rightfully, van Lier (2002) asserted that “the linguistic proficiency in everyday settings is incommensurably different from the linguistic proficiency in classroom settings” (p. 145). In fact, contrary to culturally and ecologically responsive language teaching recommendations, as language educators, we create epistemological boundaries—boundaries between content and students’ experiences and temporalities (their lived and living experiences, and how they inform and shape their futurities). We, language educators, have been taught through and continue to reproduce language teaching practices that seem inherent to the language classroom. Practices of mastery focus on language production in the shape of written and spoken language, across four skills: reading, listening, writing, and speaking (e.g., Pennycook, 1994, 1998). We measure progress in the complexity of composition and ability to 122 check skill boxes (e.g., grammar, use of connectors, target sounds, etc.), but we rarely regard students’ social commitments, biographies, transdisciplinary interests, cultural and sociopolitical critical awareness of languages and speaking communities, or the extent in which students’ language learning and use may affect the larger community in educational spaces in transformational, responsive, and relevant ways. In relation to boundaries in the language classroom, van Lier (2010) describes and operationalizes epistemological limitations between the classroom and the real world in terms of boundaries and roadblocks. Some possible boundaries take (1) content and context, the knowledge that matters inside the classroom (i.e., important for tests, teachers’ goals and expectations, which are often useless or irrelevant in the real world), and what students are expected to leave outside the classroom (materially, symbolically, or experientially), (2) role of language, teachers and students’ (im)possible dialogues in relation to power differences and (3) teacher role and identity, that is language and pedagogical practices that guide what it is said or done in the classroom (e.g., testing shapes content, variety of language, activities, textbooks). Unlike boundaries and roadblocks, classrooms can potentially integrate school and society through awareness, voice, authenticity, and agency. For this chapter, these ecological considerations of teacher identity, micro, meso, and macro spaces of social interaction are generative to understand the affordances and limitations of the classroom as a cultural and social space, and the role of English in a school where students engage in social inquiry and transformational demands. Transdisciplinarity and Polydisciplinamory in the Language Classroom Polydisciplinamory is a neologism that transgresses the limits of disciplinary boundaries, fosters intellectual freedom, and centers love and driven curiosity in research, creation, and learning (Loveless, 2019). As a strategic theoretical metaphor, Shannon & Willis (2010) maintain that polyamory allows us to “draw connections between the ways that we love and the ways that we think” 123 (p. 440, in Loveless, 2019). In conjunction with transdisciplinarity, polydisciplinamory in language learning embraces the embeddedness and complexity of students’ identity and expands its reach beyond the language classroom, to who we are, to our social commitments, and to whom and what we care about. In this sense, in the language classroom, learners and educators draw from “diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 6), guided by their passion, love, and driven curiosity while “bridge-building” (Byrd Clark, 2016) across multiple disciplinary spaces and increase the possible learning and meaning available for students and teachers through multimodality and translanguaging (e.g., Pennycook, 2019). In sum, polydisciplinamory and transdisciplinary approaches in language education have the transformational potential for multidimensional and multimodal exploration vis-à-vis languages’ and language speakers’ cultural, ideological, sociopolitical, and historical tensions. It allows students and educators to engage in transformative dialogue, ask relevant questions, and learn from and through many content areas and disciplines and each other. Furthermore, the multiplicity of spaces, voices, and the rich environmental semiotic resources afforded echo and showcase the inherent diversity of biographies, of thinking, being, and doing among our students as they shuttle between various social and academic spaces. Vignette: Ausencias. “Will this happen again?” A student asked after everyone seemed deep in thought and remained in collective silence. At the beginning of the Spanish ILO, in a brainstorming activity, students shared their interests with the rest of the group, building on each other's interests. That semester, among many other related topics (e.g., family separation at the border, mass migration from Central America, intervention of the U.S. in Latin American countries) they chose to learn about dictatorships in Latin America. Some students were learning about this topic in a different class, so they were excited to explore further. This group of students also chose to work on a mural as the final project—an 124 artifact that would later be installed at the end-of-the-semester school showcase. Over the first weeks, we analyzed different multimodal artifacts such as art pieces and murals made by activist collectives during Pinochet’s dictatorship period in Chile. We watched and examined topics surrounding the concept of ausencia (absence) to honor the detained and disappeared80, the kidnapping and illegal adoptions of children during this period. Guided by questions and group work, students watched Historia de un Oso (Bear Story), one exemplary portrayal of ausencia. Historia de un Oso is an Oscar-winning Chilean short film (10:19). The film tells the story of a lonely bear who builds a music box that tells the story of how he lost his family and was captured by circus owners. The creator, Leopoldo Osorio, explains that the film represents his grandfather’s story of exile to England in 1975 after two years of prison (Parasso, 2016). Continuing the topic of ausencia, we analyzed news stories about the experiences of women whose newly born babies were stolen. As a response students wrote questions to the people who kidnapped newly born babies (e.g., priests and hospital personnel). Students' questions led to the topic of medical violence and injustice against women under oppressive regimes. “Will this happen again?” a student asked, concerned. I pointed to the experiences of migrant families separated at the border and experiences of women of Color during childbirth and replied, “It is happening now, right here in the U.S.” Another student referred to Serena Williams' life-threatening experience due to nurses’ medical bias. In fact, research suggests that “pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births for Black and AI/AN women older than 30 was four to five times as high as it was for white women” (CDC, 2019). 80 In Chile, during the 1973 Pinochet dictatorship around 40,000 people were tortured, and around 3,200 were killed or disappeared (forgingmemory.org). 125 As I write this section, I see ongoing dispossession and violence against women and young children in Afghanistan as an oppressive regime rises, and the ongoing invasion of Palestine and Ukraine continues to taking lives of women, youth, and children. “Will this happen again?” Unfortunately, yes. Hence, critical intercultural and historical dialogue in the language classroom remains a “decolonial, ethical, and political” must (Granados-Beltran, 2016, p. 175) to create critical awareness of global structures taking place across nations. Transdisciplinary and polydisciplinamory learning present rich multimodal exploration of experiences often absent in language learning classrooms and materials. In these intellectually and linguistically rich and flexible environments such as in a CLAC Program, I can honor my own experiences as a language learner and educator by reconstructing them as transformational experiences for my students and myself. In the exploration of their motivation and driven curiosities, students engage in immeasurably rich multimodal content that includes visual and auditory art pieces, storytelling and counter-narratives, memory literature, cultural artifacts, dance, music, and news pieces. Students also make agentic decisions based on what they love, what drives them, and the changes they want to see around them. In short, transdisciplinary and polydisciplinamory approaches in bilingual and multilingual environments allow rich interaction and connection with language, culture, and historical elements, by centering students’ commitments and lives beyond the language classroom, while attending to their desired language learning experiences. Vignette: Climate change and ecological soundscapes. As we start thinking about our project, it becomes clear that ILO students this semester come from different majors and disciplines: art, forestry, theater, photography, graphic design, etc. However, they all share the same interest: climate change, climate anxiety, and ecology. Two moments were taking place at the same time in different parts of the world: #StopLine3 (or #NoLine3) in the U.S. and #NoADominga in Chile. Both were projects that showed the cosification and extraction 126 of life, and the accumulation of profit (Segato, 2018; Peña-Pincheira & Allweiss, forthcoming). The upcoming week I shared videos and vocabulary related to ecology, flora, fauna, and nature endangerment, specifically focusing on El Archipiélago de Humboldt and Dominga. #NoADominga emerged as a response to a mine megaproject engineered to extract copper and iron in El Archipiélago de Humboldt. The archipelago is a National Reserve located in the south of Chile. It is described by international organizations as a unique and irreplaceable sanctuary due to its rich biodiversity: 560 marine species, an immense amount of endangered sea animals (dolphins, whales, fishes, birds, otters, and the endangered Humboldt Penguin), a great concentration of krill which is essential for the survival of migrant whales. We explore the names of animals, food names, and the goals of the Dominga Project. In the end, students had to write three questions about the archipelago, animals in the area, and Dominga. Here we stopped to discuss both in English and Spanish why #NoADominga. We looked at the construction plans, the threatening amount of contaminated water entering the sanctuary, and who were the main beneficiaries of ecological zones of sacrifice in Chile. Our project started to take shape as we brainstormed about materials, what to include, and what was the purpose. As an educator, I was there to push us to think and engage further–not only learning ourselves, but sharing with the wider school community. Slowly students took ownership of the project, even outside our meeting hours. The project was a multimodal artifact that included a mural, animation, and soundscapes. On a 48x48 hardboard panel (see Figure 8.1, 8.2, and 8.381), students painted the seawater with acrylic paints, creating waves and texture with the paint. They recreated the different islands that 81 Images have been included here with students’ consent. 127 comprise the archipelago with recycled materials such as textile, cotton, egg cartons, and cardboard. They drew and painted endangered animals. Meanwhile, another couple of students built different size pipelines from recycled tubes wrapped with aluminum foil. Coming from the tubes into the water, black pieces of paper and fabric resembled contamination by oil leakage. Further into the project creation, I asked them about including movement and sounds, something that shows the threat and urgency that #NoaDominga entails. One student said, “I think I know how to do it. I have done it in theater before.” Over the following weeks, she developed a minute-long soundscape that gathered all animals, sea waves, and water sounds, all fading into metallic and industrial sounds, ending in silence. An animated visual projection accompanied the sounds. After its installation, students included a description in English and Spanish to contextualize the piece for a diverse audience. On the day of the showcase, professors, and students from other classes joined. Spanish ILO students and I stood close by to answer any questions. Standing in the back, I saw groups of people come close and stand and listen to the animal sounds. When the sea animal and water sounds started to fade, from the pipelines a hand-shaped oil spillage began to leak and spread, quieting sounds more and more, while the metallic sounds became loud and piercing to the ear. I was surprised by the audience’s gasps and “noooo!”s as animal sounds were completely gone, covered by loud and overwhelming industrial sounds (See video here). 128 Figure 8.1 Artifact: Students describing their project and brainstorming Figure 8.2 Artifact: Students at the early stages of their project at RCAH Studio Art 129 Figure 8.3 Artifact: Finalized project presented at RCAH Showcase Conclusion This project was powerful and transformational for me, the students, and the audience that attended the showcase. Its remarkableness does not lie on any one particular element, but in how all semiotic elements: colors, shapes, diversity of animals represented, the sounds, the language, and the movements. All these semiotic resources are entangled in one powerful message that communicated the feeling of urgency about the extractive and cosificating nature of neoliberal and colonial patterns that seek to “transmutar lo vivo y su vitalidad en cosas” (Segato, 2018, p. 11). In keeping these urgent topics marginalized from curricula, class discussions, and explorations, as educators we are not contributing or advancing students’ participation in embracing and working towards transformational possibilities within their social contexts, across communities, and transnationally. 130 This is an ongoing and life-long journey for educators. It requires a radical imagination in education. My first semester teaching the Spanish ILO was daunting and overwhelming. The teaching and learning I wanted to see was something I hadn’t seen or done before, only described in theoretical ways. When I stated in the CLAC program, I replicated some “dominant” practices that I was critiquing, such as staying focused on spoken and written language and pushing other language experiences and possibilities aside. It took patience and flexibility. I learned that it is an ongoing work to move away from the ways I was taught a language. Language learners should not need to forfeit their full selves, what they love, care for, and what they are committed to in order to have a specific ‘voice’ in another language. They should have access to all semiotic and meaning-making resources to express themselves, enhance their voices, visualize their dreams, and utilize their privilege to contribute to social change. As dominant beliefs about language learning flow across language classrooms, I often see concerned faces when I use poetry as an introductory language activity. These are often adults who have already learned one or more additional languages. I read these looks as a sign of the unusual of these practices for some people who like me experienced quite restrictive—if not harmful—language learning spaces. In this chapter, I described that as a language teacher in a multilingual world, language learning goes beyond written and spoken language and grammar. In fact, teachers from all disciplines should be looking at their practice and teaching materials as windows to the world, and examine: What are my guiding underlying beliefs and goals in teaching youth? How is my teaching creating equitable spaces in the world? How am I supporting my students in seeing vast possibilities for them and their communities? A polyamorous and transdisciplinary work incorporates the multilayered complexity of language learning as a living and social activity (DFG, 2016). They facilitate individual and collective experiences in the community, foster students’ interests and voices, and support transformational work within and beyond education spaces. 131 Chapter 9 Tea-colonize Yourself I have lost count of the many hot and warm cups of tea I have had throughout the piled-up months, pages, and drafts that make this dissertation piece. Some of them got cold when I would get caught in rememory encounters where family stories, my mom’s voice messages, and family photographs would drag me into a completely different time and space, and listening and mapping out the details. In moments when colonial entanglements would hurt again like they hurt my mother’s mother and sisters, I would get up, boil some water, and prepare something warm to drink from my favorite cup. The warmth would feel like my mom’s warm hug, like a warm hand in the distance. My mother’s pedagogies (Villenas, 2006) taught me these daily resting and grounding practices, a resource that helps me return home, to my mother’s and father’s love that defeats time and space through a cup of tea. Vignette: Tea-mo. On special occasions, my mom puts away the quick and instantaneous tea bags that are characteristic of rush hours and workdays. They are deemed unworthy of today’s special tea experience. On these occasions, my mom takes out a glass container that stores dry tea leaves, a teapot, and cinnamon sticks. Almost effortlessly, she mixes all contents in the teapot and sets it on the indirect heat at the top of the kettle. My mom wasn’t taught to say te amo (I love you), so it is rare to hear her say it to me or my brother. Her love is different. Her love has the smell of freshly brewed tea with cinnamon sticks. That’s her way of saying tea-mo. 132 Figure 9.1 Artifact: Romina and her mom on the day of her baptism Vignette: [Tea]colonize yourself. Brewing tea is decolonizing magic in a cup. It brings you back to your full self. From beginning to end, the process of making tea grants the gift of wholeness. Because most things need attention, time, and warmth, it teaches you patience. It teaches you to wait. It teaches you to listen to what stands in plain sight. To stop wandering, because yesterday, tomorrow, are the communion of today. This moment. So, listening to the water boiling, timidly whistling, I am ready. Wait for the tea to brew, soak in the hot water to rest, and mix in with the sweet. You raise the cup, close your eyes as you drink and ground yourself in the moment. That moment is all yours. The warmth soothes you, soothes your hands, soothes your throat, your chest. The fog dissipates. You are now ready to thread those words that refuse to be written on that tired paper. But the warmth of your tea pieces together your heart, body, and soul, that for a while feel like scrambled eggs. Whole again. It clears your mind from your taught and learned impostor thoughts. When you finally give up to the hostile and inhospitable academic world, and the adopted self-imposed demands convince you are small. So small that the increasing stress does not fit in your shrinking 133 body. You are not enough. You shrink. You are not smart. You shrink a bit more. You could have, should have, shouldn’t have. You shrink so much that you are a tiny being inside an emotionally, mentally, and spatially crafted beast with a starving belly. A beast that is visibly ecstatic that you don’t fight back. You sip your tea. It brings you back to the ground, whole, to your full self, to your full-size self. Tea, calm and warm, like a mother’s hands wrapping your neck, ears, and face with a wool-knitted scarf in winter, brings you back to yourself. Safe. 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