Roberto D. Hernández | San Diego State University (original) (raw)
Books by Roberto D. Hernández
Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative, 2018
National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly g... more National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.
In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.
Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.
Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border
Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and... more Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world.
As an intervention in the philosophy of education discourse, which tends to assume the university is a neutral space, this collection will be of particular value to students and scholars working in philosophy of education, Latina/o philosophy, Africana philosophy, social epistemology, education, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to intellectual activists in the United States, south of the border, and around the world.
Papers by Roberto D. Hernández
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2023
In this essay, I foreground a distinct form of “world” traveling articulated by decolonial philos... more In this essay, I foreground a distinct form of “world” traveling articulated by decolonial philosopher María Lugones, one that makes possible the varied projects of world making, or prefiguring the future worlds we want to inhabit, not constrained by what I have called the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. I reflect on Lugones’s expansive notion of world(s) and “world” traveling. In turn, I analyze how Xicano encounters and world/“world” traveling through not only Amerindia (that is, the Western Hemisphere) but also historic Al- Andalus and Aotearoa (New Zealand), can fundamentally help us rethink Xican@ indigeneity in relation to contemporary global indigeneities. This necessarily entails an unthinking of the nation-state form as the only form of national coherence, and the emergence of a new form of horizontal intraworld and interworld communication and world making guided by loving perception and a politics of liberation as praxis.
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies, 2022
Since the advent of Chicana and Chicano studies, its scholars have proclaimed a commitment to lib... more Since the advent of Chicana and Chicano studies, its scholars have proclaimed a commitment to liberatory knowledge. While the field embraces different intellectual frameworks and tendencies, some with a contentious or contradictory relationship to tenets of Marxist thought, the purpose of Chicana/o studies has always been in line with Karl Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" (1888). 1 In other words, its purpose is not just to create knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to provide the intellectual and epistemic bases from which we engage in practical-critical activity to transform our communities and the world around us. This was the spirit behind the 1968 "blowouts," when students walked out of L.A. Eastside schools, demanding education that would be relevant to our realities and would equip students to ameliorate the existing conditions of racism, discrimination, poverty, and other social injustices. The same demand was evident when Chicana/o students, under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front, went on strike for five months in 1968-69 alongside Black, Native, and Asian students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley. The strikers' call for creation of a Third World College recognized that knowledge constitutes a terrain of struggle in its own right, one that can be advanced only through practical-critical activity that bridges the divide between the university and our communities. As early Chicana/o studies scholar-activist Reynaldo F. Macías reminds us, "The Chicano Movement shared some of the goals of other contemporary movements" and was "inspired by the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles around the world, and so advocated self-determination, the agency of Chicanos, as a primary mode of acting in the world" (2012, 2).
Tabula Rasa, Vol 25 (july-dec): 249-265, 2016
This article analyses the ways in which Le Parti des Indigènes de la République in France mobil... more This article analyses the ways in which Le Parti des Indigènes de la République in France mobilizes and re-signies the term indigene (or indigenous), from its original use in the French colonial context as a word to describe colonial subjects irrespective of place of origin. In the process, Les Indigènes highlight and make explicit what they call a “postcolonial colonialism” that continues into the present with regards to France’s relationship to its former colonial subjects and their children, particularly made evident with France’s Muslim population. As such, they shatter the normative politics of recognition that other ‘minority’ populations often embrace and instead advance a decolonial praxis of the affirmation of life, self and being.
Tabula Rasa, No. 25 (julio-diciembre): 265-282, 2016
Resumen: Este artículo analiza las maneras como el Partido de los indígenas de la República en Fr... more Resumen: Este artículo analiza las maneras como el Partido de los indígenas de la República en Francia moviliza y resignifica el término indigène (o indígena), a partir de su uso original en el contexto colonial francés como una palabra para describir los sujetos coloniales sin diferenciar su lugar de origen. En el proceso, les indigènes destacan y hacen explícito lo que llaman un «colonialismo postcolonial» que se mantiene en el presente en lo que respecta a la relación de Francia con sus antiguos súbditos coloniales y sus hijos, que se pone en evidencia específicamente con la población musulmana en Francia. Como tales, ellos destrozan la política normativa del reconocimiento al que otras poblaciones «minoritarias» muchas veces se acogen y en su lugar proponen una praxis descolonial de la afirmación de la vida, el ser y el yo.
This paper examines the limits of 1960s and 70s social movement narratives that privilege student... more This paper examines the limits of 1960s and 70s social movement narratives that privilege students/youth as primary agents of change. It argues such accounts epistemically reproduce the temporal logics of modernity/coloniality in its obsession with novelty for novelty's sake.
Latin@s in the World System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, 2005
Through a consideration of the "Peace and Dignity Journeys," a hemispheric indigenous movement th... more Through a consideration of the "Peace and Dignity Journeys," a hemispheric indigenous movement that coordinates a spiritual run from the southern tip of Tierra de Fuego, Argentina in South America and the northern reaches of Chickaloon, Alaska in the North, this essay looks at Chicana/o engagements with indigeneity from the 1960s Chicano Movement period through the turn of the century.
Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands, Edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia, 2012
This article analyzes the politics, poetics and implications of the concomitant concerns expresse... more This article analyzes the politics, poetics and implications of the concomitant concerns expressed in the shared lyrics of three songs across the distinct musical genres of ska/punk, hip-hop/rap and corridos. Specifically, it interrogates Tijuana NO’s (w/Frost) “Stolen at Gunpoint,” Los Tigres del Norte’s “Somos Mas Americanos,” and Aztlán Underground’s “Decolonize” to articulate the need for a shift in the spatialtemporal frame of anti-border social movements.
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of renaming , where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions ...
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of renaming , where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions ...
borderlands e-journal, 2017
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of re-naming, where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions of a deferred politics of aspiration rather than a politics of action.
Decolonize the City! Zur Kolonialität der Stadt - Gepräche, Aushandlungen, Perspektiven, 2017
Institute For the Study of Social Change, Oct 27, 2006
This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization... more This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization, and segregation. Specifically, it investigates the economic and political forces that led to boundary changes in San Ysidro, California. Prior scholarship on municipal annexations has focused primarily on the procedural mechanics and local dynamics that inform municipal boundary changes. This paper argues that this approach is “too local,” and suggests that global capital flows and forces play a powerful role in municipal annexations. Through a world-systems lens and a legal history of cities, this paper also provides a framework for rethinking municipal annexations as reenactments of colonial enterprises at a metropolitan scale and considers the implications this framework has on ongoing debates about citizenship.
The geopolitical divide that separates the United States and Mexico has long been a region plague... more The geopolitical divide that separates the United States and Mexico has long been a region plagued with violence, but one that has given birth to a distinct border gnosis, a unique form of knowledge construction among subaltern communities. Corridos (border ballads) have functioned as one from of subalternity that creates an alternative discourse in the border imaginary. This article examines the analysis and critique found in corridos that speak to issues of violence along the border, specifically with regards to the McDonalds Massacre in San Ysidro, California in 1984 and the shooting death of Ezequiel Hernandez at the hands of Marines engaged in joint border operations in Redford, Texas in 1997.
Ethnic Studies Review
Hernández, as the current chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACC... more Hernández, as the current chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), reflects on the “Love Letter to Chicanx Studies.” The author affirms observances within the “letter,” including its considerations of the future of the field, and suggests that we enhance intergenerational knowledge sharing. Hernández presents a provocation on the ultimate goal of liberation as it relates to training and privileging scholars trained in Chicana/o/x Studies, and asks us to think more deeply about how we “do” the work and serve our communities. Finally, he asks that we recover our “Third world” subjectivities and reaffirm our commitment to struggles for shared liberation.
Keynote Addresses by Roberto D. Hernández
In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and ... more In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, I historicize and problematize the concept and uses of civility when considered within a constellation of other associated concepts. Civility is not an abstract absolute concept that has only one available meaning. Given the context of an overarching coloniality of language and communication in which our discourses operate, too often we reproduce and reify that which we claim to be challenging. As such, civility also produces particular conceptions of incivility that can challenge, but can also serve to reinforce the problematic and often taken for granted idea of civility as tied inextricably to a colonial project. Instead, I propose a re-reading of the concepts of civility and incivility that explodes the limits of our understanding of both towards a distinct decolonial horizon that attempts to evade the logic of coloniality, which has restricted our ways of thinking the two concepts outside of a reinforcing of colonial power. I take serious the question, inspired by the Zapatistas, “Is another civility possible?
Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative, 2018
National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly g... more National borders are often taken for granted as normal and necessary for a peaceful and orderly global civil society. Roberto D. Hernández here advances a provocative argument that borders—and border violence—are geospatial manifestations of long histories of racialized and gendered colonial violence.
In Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.
Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music.
Hernández’s approach is at once historical, ethnographic, and theoretically driven, yet it is grounded in analyses and debates that cut across political theory, border studies, and cultural studies. The volume concludes with a theoretical discussion of the future of violence at—and because of—national territorial borders, offering a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/coloniality-of-the-us-mexico-border
Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and... more Decolonizing the Westernized University: Interventions in Philosophy of Education from Within and Without provides a sharper understanding of the crisis and the responses to the westernized university at multiple sites around the world.
As an intervention in the philosophy of education discourse, which tends to assume the university is a neutral space, this collection will be of particular value to students and scholars working in philosophy of education, Latina/o philosophy, Africana philosophy, social epistemology, education, cultural studies, and ethnic studies, as well as to intellectual activists in the United States, south of the border, and around the world.
Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2023
In this essay, I foreground a distinct form of “world” traveling articulated by decolonial philos... more In this essay, I foreground a distinct form of “world” traveling articulated by decolonial philosopher María Lugones, one that makes possible the varied projects of world making, or prefiguring the future worlds we want to inhabit, not constrained by what I have called the epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality. I reflect on Lugones’s expansive notion of world(s) and “world” traveling. In turn, I analyze how Xicano encounters and world/“world” traveling through not only Amerindia (that is, the Western Hemisphere) but also historic Al- Andalus and Aotearoa (New Zealand), can fundamentally help us rethink Xican@ indigeneity in relation to contemporary global indigeneities. This necessarily entails an unthinking of the nation-state form as the only form of national coherence, and the emergence of a new form of horizontal intraworld and interworld communication and world making guided by loving perception and a politics of liberation as praxis.
Aztlan: A Journal of Chicana/o Studies, 2022
Since the advent of Chicana and Chicano studies, its scholars have proclaimed a commitment to lib... more Since the advent of Chicana and Chicano studies, its scholars have proclaimed a commitment to liberatory knowledge. While the field embraces different intellectual frameworks and tendencies, some with a contentious or contradictory relationship to tenets of Marxist thought, the purpose of Chicana/o studies has always been in line with Karl Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" (1888). 1 In other words, its purpose is not just to create knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to provide the intellectual and epistemic bases from which we engage in practical-critical activity to transform our communities and the world around us. This was the spirit behind the 1968 "blowouts," when students walked out of L.A. Eastside schools, demanding education that would be relevant to our realities and would equip students to ameliorate the existing conditions of racism, discrimination, poverty, and other social injustices. The same demand was evident when Chicana/o students, under the banner of the Third World Liberation Front, went on strike for five months in 1968-69 alongside Black, Native, and Asian students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of California (UC), Berkeley. The strikers' call for creation of a Third World College recognized that knowledge constitutes a terrain of struggle in its own right, one that can be advanced only through practical-critical activity that bridges the divide between the university and our communities. As early Chicana/o studies scholar-activist Reynaldo F. Macías reminds us, "The Chicano Movement shared some of the goals of other contemporary movements" and was "inspired by the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles around the world, and so advocated self-determination, the agency of Chicanos, as a primary mode of acting in the world" (2012, 2).
Tabula Rasa, Vol 25 (july-dec): 249-265, 2016
This article analyses the ways in which Le Parti des Indigènes de la République in France mobil... more This article analyses the ways in which Le Parti des Indigènes de la République in France mobilizes and re-signies the term indigene (or indigenous), from its original use in the French colonial context as a word to describe colonial subjects irrespective of place of origin. In the process, Les Indigènes highlight and make explicit what they call a “postcolonial colonialism” that continues into the present with regards to France’s relationship to its former colonial subjects and their children, particularly made evident with France’s Muslim population. As such, they shatter the normative politics of recognition that other ‘minority’ populations often embrace and instead advance a decolonial praxis of the affirmation of life, self and being.
Tabula Rasa, No. 25 (julio-diciembre): 265-282, 2016
Resumen: Este artículo analiza las maneras como el Partido de los indígenas de la República en Fr... more Resumen: Este artículo analiza las maneras como el Partido de los indígenas de la República en Francia moviliza y resignifica el término indigène (o indígena), a partir de su uso original en el contexto colonial francés como una palabra para describir los sujetos coloniales sin diferenciar su lugar de origen. En el proceso, les indigènes destacan y hacen explícito lo que llaman un «colonialismo postcolonial» que se mantiene en el presente en lo que respecta a la relación de Francia con sus antiguos súbditos coloniales y sus hijos, que se pone en evidencia específicamente con la población musulmana en Francia. Como tales, ellos destrozan la política normativa del reconocimiento al que otras poblaciones «minoritarias» muchas veces se acogen y en su lugar proponen una praxis descolonial de la afirmación de la vida, el ser y el yo.
This paper examines the limits of 1960s and 70s social movement narratives that privilege student... more This paper examines the limits of 1960s and 70s social movement narratives that privilege students/youth as primary agents of change. It argues such accounts epistemically reproduce the temporal logics of modernity/coloniality in its obsession with novelty for novelty's sake.
Latin@s in the World System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, 2005
Through a consideration of the "Peace and Dignity Journeys," a hemispheric indigenous movement th... more Through a consideration of the "Peace and Dignity Journeys," a hemispheric indigenous movement that coordinates a spiritual run from the southern tip of Tierra de Fuego, Argentina in South America and the northern reaches of Chickaloon, Alaska in the North, this essay looks at Chicana/o engagements with indigeneity from the 1960s Chicano Movement period through the turn of the century.
Performing the U.S. Latina and Latino Borderlands, Edited by Arturo J. Aldama, Chela Sandoval, and Peter Garcia, 2012
This article analyzes the politics, poetics and implications of the concomitant concerns expresse... more This article analyzes the politics, poetics and implications of the concomitant concerns expressed in the shared lyrics of three songs across the distinct musical genres of ska/punk, hip-hop/rap and corridos. Specifically, it interrogates Tijuana NO’s (w/Frost) “Stolen at Gunpoint,” Los Tigres del Norte’s “Somos Mas Americanos,” and Aztlán Underground’s “Decolonize” to articulate the need for a shift in the spatialtemporal frame of anti-border social movements.
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of renaming , where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions ...
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of renaming , where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions ...
borderlands e-journal, 2017
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some l... more This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of re-naming, where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions of a deferred politics of aspiration rather than a politics of action.
Decolonize the City! Zur Kolonialität der Stadt - Gepräche, Aushandlungen, Perspektiven, 2017
Institute For the Study of Social Change, Oct 27, 2006
This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization... more This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization, and segregation. Specifically, it investigates the economic and political forces that led to boundary changes in San Ysidro, California. Prior scholarship on municipal annexations has focused primarily on the procedural mechanics and local dynamics that inform municipal boundary changes. This paper argues that this approach is “too local,” and suggests that global capital flows and forces play a powerful role in municipal annexations. Through a world-systems lens and a legal history of cities, this paper also provides a framework for rethinking municipal annexations as reenactments of colonial enterprises at a metropolitan scale and considers the implications this framework has on ongoing debates about citizenship.
The geopolitical divide that separates the United States and Mexico has long been a region plague... more The geopolitical divide that separates the United States and Mexico has long been a region plagued with violence, but one that has given birth to a distinct border gnosis, a unique form of knowledge construction among subaltern communities. Corridos (border ballads) have functioned as one from of subalternity that creates an alternative discourse in the border imaginary. This article examines the analysis and critique found in corridos that speak to issues of violence along the border, specifically with regards to the McDonalds Massacre in San Ysidro, California in 1984 and the shooting death of Ezequiel Hernandez at the hands of Marines engaged in joint border operations in Redford, Texas in 1997.
Ethnic Studies Review
Hernández, as the current chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACC... more Hernández, as the current chair of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS), reflects on the “Love Letter to Chicanx Studies.” The author affirms observances within the “letter,” including its considerations of the future of the field, and suggests that we enhance intergenerational knowledge sharing. Hernández presents a provocation on the ultimate goal of liberation as it relates to training and privileging scholars trained in Chicana/o/x Studies, and asks us to think more deeply about how we “do” the work and serve our communities. Finally, he asks that we recover our “Third world” subjectivities and reaffirm our commitment to struggles for shared liberation.
In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and ... more In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, I historicize and problematize the concept and uses of civility when considered within a constellation of other associated concepts. Civility is not an abstract absolute concept that has only one available meaning. Given the context of an overarching coloniality of language and communication in which our discourses operate, too often we reproduce and reify that which we claim to be challenging. As such, civility also produces particular conceptions of incivility that can challenge, but can also serve to reinforce the problematic and often taken for granted idea of civility as tied inextricably to a colonial project. Instead, I propose a re-reading of the concepts of civility and incivility that explodes the limits of our understanding of both towards a distinct decolonial horizon that attempts to evade the logic of coloniality, which has restricted our ways of thinking the two concepts outside of a reinforcing of colonial power. I take serious the question, inspired by the Zapatistas, “Is another civility possible?
This essay re-articulates white genocide as a fiction of white supremacy to instead call for col... more This essay re-articulates white genocide as a fiction of white supremacy to instead call for collective mass ontological "white" suicide through tracing the historical fiction of whiteness and racial thinking.
This course is an introduction to the intellectual, cultural and political history of the interdi... more This course is an introduction to the intellectual, cultural and political history of the interdisciplinary field of Chicana/o Studies. We will consider the social and institutional context in Mexico and the United States that shapes the identities of Mexicans in this country to better understand how and why the field of study emerges at the height of the Civil Rights and Chicano Movements. We will investigate the gendered-dynamics and mobilizations of diverse groups including farm workers, youth, students, community activists and artists over time. In particular, we will explore key themes such as labor rights, education, racism, sexism, immigration, Vietnam and other wars, police brutality, class exploitation, political exclusion, and cultural awareness/recovery. We will also address diverse ideologies, theories and legacies of the Chicano Movement and of Chicana/o Studies and consider their relevance for contemporary debates and scholarship on issues affecting Chicana/o-Mexicana/...