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Notes
1 Intergenerational teaching is a political reality. No escaping it. It is an easy way of mapping wounds that often leaves us lost, in very dark places. It is painful as the F word.
Someone please inject me some anesthesia!
I am sorry. Anesthesia is not for you.
What’s left in the medical kit is rum, beer, gin and tequila.
Please, anything! Just help me forget the pain of loosing my dignity!
2 We are getting buried alive.
The mor(Ψ)ality rate has its origins in books, sick books.
3 “I write this cartography from my own particular political, historical, and intellectual location, as a Third World feminist trained in [Canada], interested in the questions of culture, knowledge production, and activism in a local context. The maps I draw are necessarily anchored in my own discontinuous locations.” Chandra Mohanty16
4 Luz Carolina Rodríguez, my daughter, in a self-portrait unlearning act towards understanding the trauma, pain, and suffering through the mapping of an intergenerational memory collective. The pain of her mother, of her grandmother and the women before her. Rupture happens in cycles to spiral our movement to transgress, to break away from colonialism, to free ourselves intergeneration-ally. In communion with community. She heals for herself and for us. My aunties and their aunties would not approve if you just sat there starring through the lens of squared-box theoretical notions tie to the bondages of classist empathy or putting us in comparative charts of terminology.
My daughter was 7 years old when she asked why the memories she had of her father were of anger. Questions. The gateway to start the liberation. Hector Orlando Calito Gómez happened.
His marks of beatings and torture were something I did not want my daughter to see until she was old enough. But here we were, tracing back a historical thread. Her father grew up with anger and pride as his companions. A child is supposed to worry about playing soccer. This recollection eventually took her back to colonialism in the ugliest ways possible, through bleeding wounds. I warn you: falling into the trap of classist empathy, in the name of education, as educators and educators in the making is going to hurt. You will have or you may have had many young women like Carolina already as students.
THIS is a call to action because recognizing the tensions we face in the hallways, in meetings, in academic interactions, and in the micro-aggressions dressed with diplomatic Band-Aids are not an invitation to reproduce that violence with others. Let us think about how we reproduce this violence demanding proof of intellect with grades, for example. Transformative learning does not go in the same sentence as grading. Ever. We must stop comparing students. It is inherently colonialist.
What you see in these self-portraits of my daughter is not for anyone’s validation. This is an act of untrapping more than 500 years of violent memory in full color.
In the book The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami, a Moroccan slave by the name of Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori, taken by Spanish conquistadores in an expedition to the New World narrates the following: “I know that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.”
5 As a mom and educator, tracing the stories of intergenerational trauma responds to my political duty to heal. My own healing will minimize the pain of another generation. My daughter, as a student for life, barely fathoms the motherly and fatherly environments her seeds grew up in. Her silence is the only dignity I need as a fuel for my lessons. She asks: “Mom, how can we know ourselves in space without following the path of our lineage and knowing where we come from and why we are here knowing that we have survived two major colonizations, the American and the Spanish? I respond: “Not only through indigeneity, Carolina. Blackness too. Let’s not just shake our asses to cumbia, salsa, mambo, tango, merengue, bachata, Kizomba without looking at me and recognizing the blackness in us. Your grandfather, my father, has been historically erased, denied and culturally displaced from the imagination of Salvadorean culture today.”
6 And all you
Faithless doubts
Will not destroy
The rising spring
In me.
Carol Lynn Pearson, Beginnings
7 Picture 1492 through the recreation of the spicy narratives: chile huaque, chile chamborete, canela, achiote, pimiento gorda, banana leaves to unwrap a colorful text that speaks truths about the universe.
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Notes on contributors
Clelia O. Rodríguez
Dr. Clelia O. Rodríguez is a global scholar, speaker, mom and auntie, born and raised in El Salvador. She earned her MA and PhD from the University of Toronto. Before holding a Human Rights Traveling Professorship where she taught in the United States, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Ghana. Prior to teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education about Settler Colonialism and Pedagogies of Liberation, Popular Education, and Anti-Discriminatory Education, she was a Gender Academic University Advisor in Bolivia, as part of a partnership between CECI and Global Affairs Canada. Recently, she has collaborated with at the University of Fort Hare teaching postgraduate workshops. She is the founder of SEEDS for Change, a transnational educational platform bringing together Black, Indigenous and People of Colour to create pedagogies of liberation. She is the author of Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain(Fernwood Publishing, 2018) and is currently working on her second book titled, The Politics of the Uterus. She is committed to Social Justice Education, Decolonizing Approaches to Learning, Critical Race and Cultural Theories, and Gender and Women’s Studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, in the Journal of Popular Education, Critical Pedagogy and Militant Research in Chile, the Black Youth Project, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, Radical Teacher, Postcolonial Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, among others. Her forthcoming article “Fui, soy, seré: (Mal)nacida. (Mal)criada. (Mal)hablada. (Mal)educada. (Mal)aventurada” will be published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies.