Critical Race Feministas: Living and Learning in the Borderlands

This book examines Chicana/o and Latina/o educational experiences through the lenses of Chicana Feminist Theories (CFT), Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW). Independently, each lens offers important insight to the study of Chicana/o and Latina/o education. Yet, the intersection of these approaches can be described as a nepantla (a Nahuatl word meaning land in the middle or a borderland of transformation ), or hybridity of theoretical frameworks, that insists on a deeper study of multiple positionalities in education including the roles of the mind and body by transcending disciplinary boundaries and building bridges between theoretical frameworks that inform activist scholarship in education. As such, this nepantla is a gateway to new understandings in the field of education offering theoretical, historical, cultural, political, pedagogical and experiential knowledge as the means for living and learning in borderlands. While this approach is discussed within the context of Chicana/o and Latina/o education, these perspectives may also be helpful for looking at the education of other marginalized communities.

Through these interconnected/interdependent lenses the authors highlight how Chicana/o and Latina/o communities’ intellectual, cultural, material, social, and emotional resources constitute historically accumulated knowledge. While the field of education is interdisciplinary by nature, for many decades, few went outside traditional disciplines or theoretical frameworks to study the education of Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, often resulting in deficit and assimilationist theories of Chicana/o and Latina/o educational attainment.