Learning and being in community: a Latina feminist holistic approach to researching where we live

ABSTRACT

Since college, La Puente, CA has been the focus of my research and activism from bilingual education, sanctuary to by-trustee area school board elections. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I returned to live and research in this city of my childhood and where my immigrant grandparents eventually moved to in the 1950s from Nicaragua and Sicily. Rooted in home lessons, research experiences, participation in community struggles, and informed by Chicana/Latina and other women of colour feminist methodologies, this piece uses storytelling and poetry to reflect on the politics and possibilities of researching where we live. In particular, it highlights the epistemological and methodological pushback, along with the benefits and lessons learned over a life course of learning from teachers, becoming neighbours, and studying educational inequalities. Unique to my Latina feminist approach are the enduring relationships that have unfolded over the course of three decades of being able to (re)search, learn, live, and organize in community.

KEYWORD:

• Latina feminist approach
• community-based research
• holistic approaches to learning
• living
• and organizing in community

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from the thoughtful feedback by my brother Enrique C. Ochoa, mother Francesca P. Ochoa, longtime friends Estela G. Ballón, Edith Wen-Chu Chen, and Kimberly D. Nettles-Barcelón, and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 My parents’ path to teaching was through the California community college system. They attended Mount San Antonio Community College and East Los Angeles College respectively and met at California State University, Los Angeles where they both transferred and completed their undergraduate degrees and teaching credentials.

2 From 1986–1997 while I was an undergraduate and then a graduate student in the University of California system, the tuition and campus fees were a third of today’s inflation adjusted tuition (Pickoff-White 2014).

3 For a detailed discussion of some of Trump’s rhetoric and policies, see Louie and Viladrich (2021) and Kulig et al. (2020).

4 Building from Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) chapter ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’ in Borderlands/La Frontera, I intentionally use the word taming here.

5 Nonetheless, the book is now out of order with no plans from the press to reprint it.