Mixing mediums, mixing selves: arts-based contemplative approaches to border crossings

Abstract

In this paper, in collaboration with a friend, who is an artist and a licensed counselor, I use a mixed-medium art project to enact Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorizations of nepantlera. I do so by making visible how I operate from the liminal space that Anzaldúa terms nepantla, as a transnational woman of color in US higher education. Using Anzaldúa’s framework of autohistoria-teoría, I integrate fragmented storytelling, art-making, and theorization, exposing the wounds that accompany my movement through personal and professional spaces in academia. Critical to this exploration are a sense of isolation and exile, unsettling understandings of home and belongingness, and the deep excavation of wounds that maintain and proliferate divisions between self and other. Such divisions offer sites of interrogation into our complicity with our oppression through denying power that comes from within, waging war on ourselves, and venerating oppressive externalized power structures.

Keywords:

• Arts-based research
• transnational
• de/colonizing
• contemplative inquiry
• border crossings
• nepantlera
• autohistoria-teoría
• critical autoethnography

Notes

1. I do not italicize non-English words to maintain the de/colonizing move performed by Gloria Anzaldúa, to not make that which is non-English appear a Other, as awry, as needing a different type of treatment.

2. Empire refers to the network of national and global power structures that create, maintain, and proliferate inequities that privilege certain groups, hierarchically organizing human beings, their value, and the countries in which they live.

3. I was able to purchase a house in my neighborhood as a result of my class privilege, solely based on my salary I earn as an associate professor. The purchase of the house was primarily driven by a need for a place to stay that was affordable within my means.

4. A labyrinth walk is a walk through a maze that is usually circular. One is encouraged to walk mindfully, without concern about the outcome. There is no right or wrong way to walk the labyrinth; the goal is simply to arrive at the center when the walk ends. Some people believe that focusing on a question and walking mindfully to the labyrinth’s center will provide deeper insight to help resolve the question.

5. Although my ethnic heritage is South Asian, at times my Brown skin has been misread as Black by my White colleagues and superiors. I have been told that my non-White skin renders me Black in the eyes of some White folks. This reductive labeling falsely conflates my cultural experiences with the experiences of Black people in the US. At other times, because some people of South Asian heritage have achieved class privilege in the US, the ‘model minority’ label is applied, masking or erasing our collective struggles and our experiences of being Othered in various ways within and outside academia. Assumptions that equate hard work with class privilege fail to acknowledge the micro- and macro-level challenges people of South Asian heritage face. Class privilege does not immunize South Asians or Asians in general against various intersecting social structures of oppression that the ‘model minority’ label ignores. I raise this point not to advance a victim narrative, but rather to highlight the risks of pitting oppressed groups against one another, creating a sort of oppression Olympics. Such a colonizing trope distracts us from the work we can do and the power we can wield by working together across differences as anti-oppression activists.

6. First-generation immigrant parents often attempt to preserve their cultural heritage by raising their children based on romanticized cultural ideals, even when the current generation in the homeland no longer identifies with or observes these traditions (Handa, 2003).

7. A traditional one-piece garment of Indian fabric that is wrapped around a woman’s body, usually over a blouse and a long petticoat skirt.