Browsing by Subject "Testimonio"
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Item Colonization 2.0: the evolution of inequality in a South Texas School District(2018-05) Barnes, Michael Christopher; Valenzuela, Angela; Sharpe, Edwin; Reddick, Richard; Brown, KeffrelynIn “Américo-Paredes” Independent School District (APISD), there is a prevailing sense of unity and pride, represented by a popular phrase: ¡Somos familia! While some organizations seek to cultivate a sense of ‘family’ to strengthen organizational cohesion, in APISD this notion is derived from a common set of cultural experiences. Most of the educational community—from teachers, to administrators, to school board members—attended the district as students, at times representing families with multiple generations of participation. For elder “Hispanics” (Mexican Americans), shared experiences include being subjected to punishment from “Anglo” (White) teachers or principals who swatted students’ hands (and rears) when they spoke Spanish. This system of abuse, rooted in racism, was symbolically challenged during a student walkout in 1968. The ensuing political conflict accompanied a steady decline of jobs and sustained White flight that gradually reduced the Anglo population of APISD’s twin cities. Effective political organizing increased the power of Hispanic school board members who soon attained an enduring majority. However, decades later, performance outcomes for Hispanic APISD students (99% of students) continue to lag behind more affluent, White peers statewide. Despite Hispanic board members’ historically under-examined role in the academic literature, research affirms their performance has a significant effect on student achievement. For APISD, I conduct a critical ethnography (Foley & Valenzuela, 2005) rooted in a series of transcribed life histories of Hispanic members of the school board past and present (1960-2016), and former classmates. I find that while Whites may have left Américo-Paredes in increasing numbers after 1968, Whiteness remained. My research questions include: (a) To what extent do life histories of board members and classmates reflect a narrative of oppressive schooling? (b) What systems of power, leadership, and schooling, both historical and contemporary, affect troubling events that transpire at APISD? (c) Do these factors contribute to schooling as a sustained cycle of socialization?Item Education’s closet : the curious incident of the missing narratives of Queer Latino social studies teachers(2021-05-06) Montemayor, Steven Ray; Salinas, Cinthia; Franquiz, Maria E; Payne, Katherina; Brown, Anthony L; Flores, Tracey; Epstein, TerrieThis critical narrative qualitative study focuses on the stories of three Self-Identified Queer Latino social studies teachers. The stories the participants share is well documented using testimonio. The three participants each have a unique critical lens to share regarding their experiences of seeking to challenge the heteronormative curriculum, confronting the homophobia embedded in K-12 schools and finally utilizing subversive and overt ways to incorporate Queer narratives into their classroom teaching. Utilizing intersectionality, the participants share how their race and sexuality are entwined regarding their identity and teaching. The participants' stories allowed for a theoretical analysis through the frameworks of Latino Critical Theory, and QueerCritical Theory. These stories shared by the participants seek to inform on the need to better understand the epistemological stances Queer Latino social studies utilize in their teaching and the ways the participants disrupt dominant narratives and discourses in social studies education.Item Representations of Central Americans in CISPES-sponsored Texts during the Central American peace and solidarity movement(2014-08) Centeno-Meléndez, José Alfredo; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole MarieThis study examines the representations of Salvadorans and other Central Americans in film, visual, and written texts used by the Dallas chapter of CISPES during the eighties. Drawing from Susan Sontag’s scholarship on the ideological workings of war photography and Elizabeth Barnes’s work on sentimental literature, I show that pamphlets created and distributed by CISPES relied on over-saturated images and written descriptions of state-sanctioned physical violence inflicted on Central Americans in order to generate sympathy for the other. While the representations of Central Americans in CISPES pamphlets as feminized and docile subjects were strategic in showing the oppressive conditions that the U.S. helped fund, these images also overlooked the fact that Central Americans played essential roles in their fight against their countries repressions and U.S. foreign policies. As such, I turn to a medium where Salvadorans had the opportunity to speak out about their own experiences during the U.S.-backed civil war. I analyze the Dutch documentary film El Salvador: Revolution or Death? (1980) and argue that individuals showed their subjectivities and agency even when introduced as victims of state-sanctioned violence. This documentary did not solely rely on over-saturated images of violence on the Central American other—it provided peasants with an international platform to represent themselves, albeit still through a mediated form. In-between harrowing scenes showcasing dead and brutalized bodies were also instances where Salvadorans challenged assumptions of their political ineptness and reminded U.S. residents of their own prominence within the Central American solidarity movement.Item "To know how to speak" : technologies of indigenous women's activism against sexual violence in Chiapas, Mexico(2012-08) Newdick, Vivian Ann; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Speed, Shannon; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Ghosh, Kaushik; Ballí, CeciliaBetween 1994 and 2012, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) established a contested zone of exception to neoliberal governance in southern Mexico and women's-rights-as-human-rights universalism reshaped international development and activist discourse. Within this context, Ana, Beatriz, and Celia González Pérez pressed claims against a group of Mexican Federal Army soldiers for rape at a military checkpoint in 1994. A rare instance of first-person denunciation of rape warfare, the Tseltal-Maya sisters' own powerful representation of the physical and procedural violations committed against them forms the starting point of this analysis, which proceeds from there, chapter by chapter, through communal, national, and international representations. Centering the women's speech, then moving to what are conventionally understood as broader fields of discourse produces new ways of understanding violence in relation to nation, culture, and gendered sociality. Though in 2001 the human rights commission of the Organization of American States upheld the women's claims, as of this writing (2012) the Mexican state has neither awarded reparations nor prosecuted the accused. I argue here that the women's unmet demands for collective and individual justice produce a novel language of protest which I call denuncia (denouncement) rather than testimony. Denuncia, I argue, puts the physical and the social body at the center of claims against sexual violation; enacts coraje (courage, rage) rather than petitions for recognition of truth; exposes the nationalist ideology of racial mixing that informs the production of testimony in Mexico, and establishes new audiences for its own reception despite the regimes of everyday violence it foregrounds. Formulated amid military occupation, denuncia exposes the gendered intimacy--control of the food supply, inhabitation of public-private architectural spaces, colonization of local enmities--that gave rise to military rape, which I call here "domestic violence." Denuncia emerges to refute the neoliberal discourse that links indigenous culture, gender, and violence just when the material basis of indigenous livelihood is under siege. This dissertation's method would not have been possible without almost twenty years' engagement with Tseltal and Tojolabal-Maya men and women who have formed part of the Zapatista movement. This long-range perspective has engendered a form of feminist scholarly accountability that cultivates listening to ground critique on the terrain of self-determination.