De-Academizing Early Childhood Research: Wanderings of a Chicana/Latina Feminist Researcher

Abstract

In this article, I frame critical questions about discourse and power when centering marginalized populations in research. This critical Chicana feminist analysis of early childhood research illuminates (a) the bifurcation of the academy and the comunidad, (b) voice as ilusión, (c) research as colonization, and (d) the United States' cultural invention of universal needs. Destrenzando (unbraiding and unraveling) research foregrounds and interweaves the personal, political, historical, and cultural into a messy text. In this messy text, the initial subject of our gaze is the participants, but it ultimately ricochets back to the researcher, our research methods, and to questions of (de)colonization.

Keywords:

• Chicana feminism
• early childhood research
• critical reflections

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank C. Alejandra Elenes for reviewing drafts of this manuscript and the blind reviewers and Enrique Murillo, Jr., who offered great constructive feedback.

Notes

¹The metaphor of destrenzando is taking Derrida's concept of deconstruction and adding a Chicana/Latina epistemology. Much like González's (2001) concept of trenzas y mestizaje, destrenzando brings my sociopolitical and historical consciousness, my strategic essentialism, to the deconstructive process.

²All names of institutions and people have been changed.

³EST … L is used to show that English is not necessarily the only other language young immigrant children are learning. In fact, for many of the immigrant children I worked with as a teacher, they often brought with them two to three languages. Thus English as a second, third, fourth language or EST … L seems more appropriate of a label.