Disrupting Power from Las Rajaduras

Abstract

I was a child when I was first captivated by the energy of the parties my neighbors, Ilea and Cucho, would have. When I was eighteen, I dipped my toes in the waters of La Regla de Osha for the first time. I have since spent decades swimming in it, being healed by it, and nurturing my faith because of it and other spiritual paths my journey has taken me onto. I put it away, like a secret when I began studying to become a teacher. Throughout the years after, I eventually opened up to some, but overall stayed quiet about my beliefs because I thought the academic world and the spiritual world could not exist in the same space. Following the summer of a biopsy scare, during my third year in my doctoral program and final year in K-12 classrooms, I found Gloria Anzaldúa and testimonio, and my worlds began to merge. My research began to expand from one quantitative study to a three-study dissertation that also included a systematic literature review and post-qualitative inquiry. My post-qualitative inquiry was a testimonio of resistance that included all of my work until then, alongside the belief systems that had been my foundation in persisting and resisting systemic bias within the ivory towers of K-12 and academia that are perpetually trying to marginalize Latinas. Grounded in testimonio traditions (Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Pérez Huber, 2008; Solórzano & Bernal, 2001) in both theory and praxis, along with post-qualitative inquiry (Kuntz, 2015, 2021) and translanguaging/linguistic justice (Aponte-Safe et al., 2022; Díaz, 2008; Torres & Vásquez, 2012), this work embraces storytelling as a means of survival and transformative knowledge-making. This is my story from the cracks/las rajaduras (Anzaldúa, 2015) – one voice to join the collective voices seeking to shift paradigms and disrupt the powers that try to force us to assimilate, hide, and silence who we are.