Somos la dignidad rebelde: On Mexican Indigenous praxis of resistance pedagogy, no longer misappropriated under US “innovative” methods

ABSTRACT

The “Rainbow Journalism” (RJ) course was a way to proactively channel the devastating effects 45 had on the CSUSB community. This article focuses on the decolonial tactics of RJ, which are simultaneously founded in the transfronteriza experiences of the author and Xicanx, Africana, Feminist, Queer resistance approaches. Both have root in post-colonial Indigenous and Africana methods of resistance found in Latinx modos of survival/preservation. Current decolonial pedagogies proposed by people of color are explained using washed-out mid-twentieth-century pedagogical terms (i.e., situated learning, participatory action research, community service learning) that oversimplify the precursory resistance pedagogy, while erasing our historia.

KEY WORDS:

• Xicana pedagogies
• forms of resistance
• experiential learning
• indigenismo
• decolonial

Acknowledgment

This article is dedicated to Judith Urbina, with love eternal.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Yellow journalism refers to journalism that seeks to capitalize on exaggerations, ill-representations, and the spectacle of the “other.” Stuart Hall (1997) used “the other” to identify and deconstruct the way difference is adjourned to groups rather than individuals through the hypersexualization, dehumanization, exploitation, and abuse of images of people of color that suddenly stand to represent a massified other.

² In this case, we take mainly from Mexican-US history, but parallel forms of resistance are found throughout all of Latin America.

³ One different from the Mexican nationalist homogenizing efforts, also referred to as indigenismo.

⁴ Spivak refers to it specifically as “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (1996, p. 214).

⁵ Our ways.

⁶ Freire learned this from working together with Indigenous people of rural Brazil.

⁷ Ways, cosmovisions.

⁸ Mexico is the most dangerous “peaceful” country for journalists (after Syria, which is at war). Journalists are murdered to be silenced or killed in the line of duty. Between 2003 and 2017, more than 1035 professional journalists have been murdered around the world (Reporteros Sin Fronteras, 2017).

⁹ Protector, guiding spirit, with the power to transmogrify, transform.

¹⁰ List of the disappeared students: (1) Felipe Arnulfo Rosa; (2) Benjamín Ascencio Bautista; (3) Israel Caballero Sánchez; (4) Abel García Hernández; (5) Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz; (6) Doriam Gonzales Parral; (7) Jorge Luis Gonzales Parral; (8) Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas; (9) José Luis Luna Torres; (10) Mauricio Ortega Valerio; (11) Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa; (12) Abelardo Vázquez Peniten; (13) Adan Abraján de la Cruz; (14) Christian Tomás Colón Garnica; (15) Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola; (16) Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz; (17) Israel Jacinto Lugardo; (18) Julio César López Patolzin; (19) José Ángel Navarrete González; (20) Marcial Pablo Baranda; (21) Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías; (22) Alexander Mora Venancio; (23) Bernardo Flores Alcaraz; (24) Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo; (25) Jorge Álvarez Nava; (26) José Ángel Campos Cantor; (27) Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza; (28) Giovanni Galindes Guerrero; (29) Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz; (30) Cutberto Ortiz Ramos; (31) Everardo Rodríguez Bello; (32) Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre; (33) Martín Getsemany Sánchez García; (34) Jonás Trujillo Gonzales; (35) José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa; (36) Leonel Castro Abarca; (37) Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez; (38) Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal; (39) Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño; (40) Antonio Santana Maestro; (41) Marco Antonio Gómez Molina; (42) César Manuel Gonzales Hernández; (43) Saúl Bruno García (GIEI, n.d.).

¹¹ In the RJ course, these concepts are explored in a deeper way through praxis, where students from Comm 409 become guías into and through Nepantla; they teach their new colleagues through the sharing of real-life personal experiences, analysis, and debate.

¹² https://www.csusb.edu/dreamers-resource-center.

¹³ http://thecoyotepack.weebly.com/aodg .