Comadres among Us: The Power of Artists as Informal Mentors for Women of Color in Academe

Abstract

In this article, we, colegas/colleagues of color, explore the ways in which the literary and artistic contributions of Gloria Anzaldúa, Octavia Butler, and Frida Kahlo have inspired, nurtured, and profoundly influenced our personal and professional lives as academics. We underscore the importance of mentoring for women of color in academe and educational leadership, particularly the psychosocial functions associated with informal mentoring. Further, we discuss how the lives and contributions of our “mentors” impacted our scholarly journeys, framed by third-wave and decolonial woman-of-color-feminism. In this article, we offer an alternative consideration for women of color in search of suitable mentors, concludes by sharing the lessons we learned from the artists. Thinking about mentoring from the position of alterity adds to the general mentoring discourse and serves to inspire women to consider alternatives when seeking mentorship to reach academic and professional goals.

Keywords:

• mentoring women of color
• decolonial women-of-color-feminism
• informal mentoring

Notes

1. A term used in the United States that “forges links between women from distant and dispersed locations (both geographic and socioeconomic) by positioning them—and recognizing that they have been positioned—within particular history of exclusion, oppression, and resistance” (Ramirez, 2002, p. 384). These women often embody simultaneous positions and intersectionalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, and/or exceptionality.

2. Anzaldúa writes of nepantla as the “site of transformation”, the place where different perspectives come into conflict and where you question the basic ideas, tenets, and ideas inherited from your family, your education, and your different cultures … Living between cultures results in “seeing double,” first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another. Seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent. Removed from that culture’s center, you glimpse the sea in which you’ve been immersed but to which you were oblivious, no longer seeing the world the way you were enculturated to see it. (2002, 548–549).