Friday, September 21, 2012

Let us begin...

Xicana Living Pedagogies is a Graduate Interest Group for the 2012-2013 school year that begins with the support of the University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities. 

Purpose: 

Creating safe spaces for Xicanas in academia to gather and reflect while empowering one another through platica, cultural performance, and testimonio is an alterNative epistemology of ceremony as research and a resilient continuum of Indigenous scholarship from time immemorial. As carriers of embodied knowledge, our responsibility as both a cooperative and collaborative community is to enhance and promote codex creations (writing), critical reflection (dialogue), and sacred activism (action). Our ongoing sessions will occur on the fourth full moon cycle (quarterly) in which knowledge will be reclaimed, revitalized, and reintegrated into a larger discourse of Xicana intellectual thought in education and sister disciplines. Community experts inclusive of (art)ivists, local residents, and academics will be invited to share their testimonios--palabra--through creative ways of storytelling. These cultural and scholarly events will be organized and integrated into a community calendar. Our vision is to cultivate and document this project of transformation, implementing indigenous media (print and cyber), to be passed and shared as a Xicana herstorical model of living pedagogy of resistance with 
the next generations of Xicana scholars at the University of Washington. 




As we begin, I know that it was not just me that sought a place to gather and reflect. We need spaces to be in community with one another. As Xicanas living in the Pacific Northwest going through graduate school, sometimes we are isolated from one another. We may see each other in passing, but not sitting to really share with one another. Although we begin as three (Claudia Serrato, Irene Sanchez and Jessica Lozano) today September 21, 2012, may we grow strong together and grow in community, in relation to ourselves and with one another. May we never forget our purpose and the knowledge we hold, that our community holds and that our ancestors hold, this knowledge that is alive in all we do.