Publication date:
15 November 2010Length of book:
240 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739147795
Transforming Borders: Chicana/o Popular Culture and Pedagogy contributes to transformative pedagogies scholarship by adding the voices of Chicana feminist pedagogies, epistemologies, and ontologies. C. Alejandra Elenes develops her conceptualizations of border/transformative pedagogies by linking the relationship between cultural practices, knowledge, and teaching in everyday life. She analyzes Chicana feminist cultural workers/educational actors re-imagining three Mexican figures: La Llorona (the weeping woman), the Virgen of Guadalupe, and Malintzin/Malinche as epistemological and pedagogical meanings. The three figures represent multiple meanings: traditional views on femininity, religion, and nationalist views on women, yet at the same time, feminists have re-imagined these three figures and developed counter-narratives that can offer alternatives to the traditional meanings.
In developing border/transformative pedagogies, Elenes looks at the significance of historical events, such as the creation of the Mexico-U.S. border, to understand the experiences of people of Mexican descent in the United States. She also examines oral histories of the legend of La Llorona in the Southwest, historical documents on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and Chicana artists such as Ester Hernandez, Yolanda Lopez, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Alma Lopez re-imagining of the Virgen of Guadalupe. The conflicts over the meanings of the three figures can help us understand how Chicanas have used their voices to counter economic and gender inequalities and how pedagogical practices show that cultural productions are sites where forms of domination can be contested and recreated in ways that allow for the creation of alternative identities and subjectivities.
In developing border/transformative pedagogies, Elenes looks at the significance of historical events, such as the creation of the Mexico-U.S. border, to understand the experiences of people of Mexican descent in the United States. She also examines oral histories of the legend of La Llorona in the Southwest, historical documents on the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and Chicana artists such as Ester Hernandez, Yolanda Lopez, Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, and Alma Lopez re-imagining of the Virgen of Guadalupe. The conflicts over the meanings of the three figures can help us understand how Chicanas have used their voices to counter economic and gender inequalities and how pedagogical practices show that cultural productions are sites where forms of domination can be contested and recreated in ways that allow for the creation of alternative identities and subjectivities.
C. Alejandra Elenes makes an important contribution to Chicano/a studies, feminist theory, borderlands studies, and critical pedagogy in one of the first single-authored books about La Llorona, La Malinche/Malintzin, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rather than view these three female figures as static, authentic, or reified archetypes, Elenes uses historical and contemporary sources to document their multiple articulations and meanings within popular culture. The interdisciplinary methods and cross-disciplinary intellectual discourse-which weaves feminist theory and critical pedadogy with US third world scholarship-successfully bridges the academic apartheid that plagues education theory and practice, and in doing so Elenes illuminates why these connectionsare vital to educational strategies, changing communities, and contestations of domination. Drawing on the work of Chicana visual artists and theorists who re-imagine La Llorona, La Malinche/Malintzin, and the Virgin of Guadalupe as borderlands sites of gender, sexuality, race, class, and spirituality, Elenes brilliantly demonstrates how the three figures offer critical pedagogical insight for American experiences inside and outside of the classroom. She names this re-configurative and contested process,