Vamos a caminar: utilizing a Chicana/Latina feminist walking plática methodology to honor the brown body and facultad

Abstract

Following the tradition of Chicana/Latina feminist nuevas teorias and methodologies, I offer walking pláticas as a qualitative research methodology that honors the brown body and facultad to examine our relationship to the spaces we traverse, live within and mutually shape. Walking pláticas is a reclamation of research methodologies that dismantle the white colonial gaze through a recentering of the brown body as a critical corporeal, political, and geographic site of analysis. In this article, I propose to move beyond the understandings of space as the neutral and apolitical backdrop on which life occurs. The strengths of walking pláticas include the consideration of spatiality as key to exploring how people make sense of, are influenced by, and shape space—a great methodological tool for critical educational researchers seeking to understand the role of geography and the physical and social places and spaces on Communities of Color.

Keywords:

• Chicana/Latina feminist methodologies
• pláticas
• walking pláticas
• brown body
• facultad
• space and place

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Daniel G. Solorzano, Dolores Delgado Bernal, Veronica Vélez, Mayra Puente, Socorro Morales, and Alma Itzé Flores for their love and support on this manuscript. I am also thankful to the collaborators that allowed me to learn more about the use of walking pláticas.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I use the terms space and place interchangeably while understanding that scholars across disciplines theorize them as different yet related concepts. Critical geography scholar, Soja (as cited in Aoki, 2000), states that “space defines political boundaries as well as private property—constructing, ratifying and reproducing community and individual identities pre-existing distributive inequities—and then, importantly, making those outcomes seem ‘natural’” (p. 923). Tuck and McKenzie (2014) understand the multidimensional significance of place as “sites of presence, futurity, imagination, power, and knowing” in social science research (p. xiv). These examples highlight the divergence and convergence across space and place by diverse scholars and fields of study. I also note that my understandings of land, space, and place come from my experiences as a non-Black and non-Indigenous Mexicana immigrant in the United States. I acknowledge that as a settler my theorization differs from those of Native American and Indigenous Peoples. Lastly, I recognize that my conceptualizations and applications of space, place, and the land will continue to evolve over time.