Theorizing Home in the Academy: Chicana Doctoral Student Testimonios From the Borderlands

Our Physical Home

The city of Brownsville is located at the southernmost point of the state of Texas, directly north and across the border from its sister city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and México. Even with a growing border wall and militarized checkpoints, residents of the area do not make the distinction between the two countries. We tend to refer to each place as “el otro lado,” denoting either country’s placement on the other side of the Rio Grande River—or the Río Bravo, as it is named in Mexico.

Both of us grew up transnationally: Although our families held residence first in Matamoros and then in Brownsville, we often crossed the puente al otro lado. Nydia feels she was very fortunate to live on the border, transnationally:

Because we were able to live in Matamoros with my grandparents, my parents were able to save enough money to afford a mostly one-on-one private education in Brownsville for me from the second grade through the fifth grade. I remember my mom telling me how special it was because we had to drive across the bridge to get to school every day.

Despite having to cross the border to go to school, eventually immigrating to the United States, learning English as a second language, and growing up as working poor, we are so grateful. We recognize the opportunities we have had access to in our educational journeys as a result of our families’ sacrifices, the advocacy of our educational gatekeepers, and our border culture.

Given the largely homogeneous environment in which we grew up, our social identities were never called into question. They were not necessarily salient. This changed when we enrolled in predominantly White institutions of higher education, where our ethnicity, gender, and social class were made known to us. Estee recalled a specific moment where social class became salient:

In one of my advanced economics classes, our professor lectured that Cameron County has the lowest SES in the state of Texas and that Brownsville is the poorest city of its size in Texas. My best friend and I took most of our classes together. He was from Flower Mound, and on that day, we also learned that his city, conversely, was the wealthiest of its size. I felt awkward sitting next to him, sharing space with him, as our class lecture “outed” me as poor.

Higher education made us into “the Other.” The ways we grew up, the place that we called Home, appeared to be diametrically opposed to the White norms of our respective institutions. Over time, and especially into graduate school, we acculturated into these educational norms, which moved us further and further away from the Home that made us.

Despite being geographically far from Home, the borderlands have followed us to the academy. We do not fully belong in our predominantly White institutions, but we no longer fully belong Home either. The physical border on which we grew up has been replaced by a meta/physical border on which we firmly stand.

Theorizing Home, Writing Our Stories

Our choice to lean on Gloria Anzaldúa was intentional. She, too, grew up in the Rio Grande Valley—just over an hour away from Brownsville, in a small town near Edinburg. In many ways, she precedes us: Her theories named and described the experiences we, too, would have just a few decades later. We write in her honor.

Gloria knew how unique our Home was. Like us, she found Home both in Mexico and in the United States, although she was never fully accepted in either location. As a result, the three of us are part of a new race, half and half, neither (Anzaldúa, 1987). As threshold women, we are acutely aware of both sides, and we are especially adept at negotiating these dualistic social worlds because “when we have all sorts of oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develop this faculty so that we’ll know when the next person is going to slap us” (Anzaldúa, 1987, pp. 60–61). It is an embodied politic born out of necessity (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983).

When the two of us met one another at the academic conference, we immediately gravitated to one another and committed to a relationship. Subconsciously, probably, we knew we needed one another. The other person represented a little piece of Home in the academy: seemingly foreign but existing in spite of it. From then on, for about 3 years, we engaged in a weekly virtual writing group with one another. We held one another accountable for finishing our dissertations, but we also used the time to catch up. We talked about Home: raspas de leche (Nydia introduced Estee to them), whose high school won the soccer state championship that year (Nydia’s high school, most recently), and Valley tacos (unmatched by anyone). We made references that, likely, only the two of us would get.

At a different conference, we casually mentioned our standing writing group to a colleague, Michelle Espino, and she told us we should write about it. She made us realize how remarkable our relationship was. And so, we wrote. We each wrote four journals, using Google Docs, about our experiences in the academy, and we talked about Home. We then shared these papelitos guardados—our most vulnerable written thoughts and feelings (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001). Using the Comment feature and Google Hangouts, we engaged in pláticas, responding to one another’s testimonios. Platicando, reflexionamos: Our stories were reflected back to us and took on new meaning based on our sharing (Espino et al., 2012).

What we came to realize is that we are igualadas in the academy. Francisca de la Riva-Holly (2012) compares us with domestic workers in novelas: subalterns who seek the same privileges as la patrona but will never receive the same respect. And so, we are given a choice to respond accordingly. bell hooks (1990) tells us,

Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, of making culture, towards that revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible? This choice is crucial. (p. 145)

With these words in hand and heart, we choose Home. For us, choosing Home has become a psychocultural commitment to our own integrity as scholars and educators. From our attire to our methodologies, Home anchors our lives and informs our choices.

Many resistance strategies are learned in the Home and serve as a cultural knowledge base that aids in our academic persistence—that armors us for not-Home (Espino, 2016). The importance of involving our families in our academic pursuits and the significance of pulling other Latinxs/Chicanxs up with us are the lessons learned in the home that are at odds with the capitalistic, individualistic, and extractive nature of the academy.

Therefore, choosing Home is a direct challenge to the White supremacy that undergirds the academy and purports that our Homely ways of being and knowing are unwelcome. Although the academy pushes us to sever ties with Home, we (re)embody as “Brown and Valley” women and scholars (Cruz, 2001), fusing these supposedly disparate yet consonant locations (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981).

Nuestra autohistoria is our ofrenda: the result of our (re)telling and (re)living. We forged our journals, our conversations, our prayers into a story that Nydia narrates below. May it represent possibility for other borderland scholars. May it emit light and air.

Nuestra Autohistoria

I set my laptop on the kitchen table and text a quick message to Estee letting her know that I’m online. As I wait, I slowly flip through a binder of transcriptions for my dissertation. With each turn of the page, I am reminded that I am, indeed, a researcher now. My focus shifts from the text to my fingers turning the page breaking my reverie. A vivid image floods my mind as I recall one of my grandmother’s rituals back home and the way her fingers, short and creased just like mine, moved along the rosary beads as she prayed. With a smile, I thank the Universe for humbly reminding me that these stories are sacred. I make a mental note to share the moment with Estee. She would get it.

I hear the distinct Google Hangouts call tone, click the Answer button, and adjust the screen as Estee’s face comes into view. We scheduled these weekly virtual meetings to write together, but we also use the time to check in on each other. I begin telling her my story. I describe how the term researcher evokes images of a bearded White man and our conversation shifts to the ways we were socialized to think about research. Although we did not go to the same university, both Estee and I majored in economics at predominantly White institutions. Perhaps this training was why I imagined a White man, we mused, and too, why we both started our doctoral programs thinking we would be quantitative researchers.

Our paths as qualitative researchers had emerged in distinct ways. My path started to solidify after a preconference for the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. For Estee, the impetus was a critical theory course. “Conventional modes of data collection just seemed reductionistic and diminutive after that class,” Estee said, pausing to take a sip from her water bottle, “and then, I started integrating more Chicana feminisms into my research methods and my praxis. I feel more myself in this way, so I don’t wanna sell out.” We talk a lot about the concept of selling out. It seems like we’re on the brink of it every week. I share with Estee how I am reminded of the character of Miss Jiménez from the one-act play, Los Vendidos, by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez. In the play, Miss Jiménez insists that her name be pronounced as the anglicized “Jim-en-es.” In some ways, I feel like academia demands the same kind of performance from us—in small ways, like the way we pronounce our names, but in larger ways too, like the way we choose to do research.

It is our memories of home that keep us from selling out. We are motivated by the desire to bring honor to our families back Home. We know that we’re lucky in many ways, and that earning a PhD is a very big deal for anyone, but it is especially so for Brown Valley girls like us. “This PhD vale la pena,” Estee says, “and I don’t want to dishonor my home and my family, and I feel that a way I could potentially dishonor them would be to distance myself from Home—not in geography, because I’m already physically far from home, but from what it means to be Brown and Valley.” To the extent that it is possible, each of us integrates home in everything we do. I dress Brown and Valley when I put a flower in my hair. Estee speaks Brown and Valley when she uses Spanglish—and not just with Spanish speakers. We both “tone it down at conferences” that are—and feel—White, but not because we’re scared or uncomfortable. It’s protective, in that we anticipate having to defend our actions and words in ways that would needlessly consume a lot of our energy. But Home is where we can let our guard down. In other settings, we are presumed incompetent, so we have to be ready to respond in ways that prove our worth. At Home, there is relief from that weight. Both Estee and I yearn deeply to feel this all the time—to just be, without explanation.

We spend the next 45 min writing. Our check-in conversation spurring me on and helping me focus. As I look over my field notes, I come across a note I had scribbled to myself and underlined twice—“ask about her cross necklace.” The reminder was in reference to an interview from that day, but it made me think back to a conversation Estee and I had at a conference last March. She had gone home to Brownsville over Spring Break, and I was eager to hear about her visit. “Really loving your Virgen de Guadalupe earrings, by the way,” I told her as we settled into some chairs near the conference hotel lobby. “Brown and Valley,” she said to me, smiling. We had started using this phrase in our conversations with each other to name the everyday ways we honored Home in academic spaces.

As she touched her earrings, Estee expanded,

This past visit home made me feel like I was detoxing from Whiteness. I couldn’t help but bawl—bawl—with some of the faculty in the leadership program I was facilitating. “You have no idea what it’s like to have to defend your Brownness to everyone, all the time,” I told them.

Estee had been working with LeaderShape at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley back Home. In that time, she began to feel the weight that her shoulders were carrying back in Florida. “I had not realized how much this constant explaining and educating, really, had worn on my body,” she said:

It wasn’t until I felt relief when I was in the Valley. When I started hearing compliments over my earrings, and they weren’t followed with questions about what they meant. That’s what Home is to me. It means wearing my earrings and only getting compliments—not questions like, “Who is that? What does she mean?”

I thought back to the feeling I had when I’d written that note myself. I felt proud to have been so observant and imagined how the student I was interviewing would share a moving story about her family and faith. She did not—it had been a gift from her aunt. She liked it, but she was not religious. I, myself, owned a cross necklace, and if someone had asked me about it, I, too, would have no moving story to accompany it. Once again, I thank the Universe for humbly reminding me of Estee’s story and the ways I had adopted an outsider role in my effort to be a good researcher. Moments like these remind me that I want to be Brown and Valley always, and I cannot do it alone. It must be in community with others or I will revert back to my training.

The timer dings and I check back in with Estee. Like most days we meet, we touch briefly upon the writing we accomplished and then delve into any insights we gained, challenges we encountered, messages we received from the universe. Looking down at her phone, Estee shares how she got a text from the one other Latina in her program whom she had personally recruited to Florida State University. She explains how their text exchange had reminded her of Home. “Each Brown face here carries a little bit of home for me,” she said,

pan dulce and coffee, speaking in Spanglish and laughing at similar jokes, the same dichos that our “buelas tell us, the experiences of marginality—of acute awareness that we are but few, and that we carry our communal knowledge on our backs, that it is our responsibility to educate others—White people—about our lives. We didn’t ask for this responsibility, Nydia, but it’s ours anyway.

I think back to last year and how one of the members of my research group had been applying to doctoral programs. As a way of supporting her as a first-generation college student, I volunteered to visit each campus alongside her, and afterward, we would process each visit together. I remembered how hesitant I felt mentioning these trips to others, especially having heard the stories from incredulous advisors about how Latinx students would bring their whole families to campus. But if not us, if we don’t recruit and uplift our gente, then whom? Whom would recruit, if not us? Whom would tell our stories, if not us? For us, it becomes a nearly unbearable responsibility. “Moments like these have really affirmed my desire to work at an HSI post-graduation,” Estee continues, “because even if I never physically return Home, I want to find Home wherever I go.”

The final 45 min of our writing time together are a blur to me. I keep thinking about Estee’s comments and how over the fall semester, as I was helping students with their scholarship applications, I met with their parents too. In fact, for one of my students, I translated the scholarship essays prompts into Spanish and encouraged her to talk with her mom (who only spoke Spanish) about her family history, to ask questions, and to listen so she could incorporate what she learned into her essays. Then, I asked to meet up with her mom, and when I did, I brought my mom too. From my own research, and the research I had read, I knew that by involving the family, there was the potential to activate community cultural wealth, and if I didn’t follow my own advice, follow my heart, follow those best practices, how could I ask others to do it?

The week before the application was due, the students would come to my apartment every day after school and my mom would come over to cook for us. I also invited a handful of my closest friends to join us for final edits. My mom got this idea to have them read each of their essays out loud once they’d completed all their edits and we’d all listen and cry and process what was read. To me, it was like putting my heart of home together with all the research I’d read about role models and validation theory. For both Estee and myself, Home is not just this distant memory. It’s always present. We will forever have Home in our hearts, and as such, it influences nearly every part of our research and praxis.

Epilogue

Both of us have since graduated with our PhDs: Nydia serves as a tenure-track faculty member at the University of San Diego, and Estee is an adjunct lecturer at Texas Christian University. As we shared earlier, our gratitude abounds: for our families’ sacrifices, the advocacy of our educational gatekeepers, and Home. The blood of our ancestors courses through our veins and has lifted us to this point. May we continue to honor them in everything we do.

To close, we would like to recall a conversation we had about Estee’s mom. Truly, both of our mothers—powerful matriarchs—have profoundly shaped our academic journeys. Nydia’s mom served as a peer debriefer throughout her dissertation and went to her defense. Estee’s family went to her dissertation defense also. Upon being announced as Doctora Hernández, Estee’s mom ran to her, enveloped her in her arms, wept, and whispered in her ear, “Nunca pensé que llegaría este momento.” “En verdad yo tampoco, Mami,” Estee exhaled and laughed.

It’s worth saying that throughout her life, Estee’s mom had verbalized this prayer many, many times. Every time Estee met a new goal—studying abroad in France for a semester, for example—her mom would say, “Nunca pensé que mi niña viajaría a Francia,” in exaltation. Nunca pensé que mi niña haría tal y tal. She would never have imagined her daughter achieving all of these things. It wasn’t that she thought little of Estee! These notions were simply out of the realm of possibility for her. We grew up poor. Estee’s parents have but a middle-school education. Both of us were the first in our families to graduate from college, creating pathways for our siblings after us. We are the incarnations of our families’ deepest prayers.

When Estee traveled Home for LeaderShape, she decided to delay her flight back and stay with her family for a few days. While there, she had a conversation with her mom about all the places she’d traveled to over the past school year—for conferences, for consultations, and so on. Her mom repeated her typical prayer, “Nunca pensé que mi niña viajaría tanto.” But this time, behind tears, she admitted how she felt fear when Estee decided to move away for college. How she knew that once Estee left Home, she would never come back:

Obviously, she didn’t mean literally—I was home at that moment, and I go home once a year. I think she meant that I would never be the same person—that the same girl who left for college wasn’t going to be the same girl when she came back to visit. That there would be space between us once I went to college—physically and metaphorically. I wish it would have occurred to me to respond to my mom in that moment. I wish I would have had words ready to share. I would have told her that I have never left Home—that I always carry Home with me, wherever I go.

Estee speaks the words now that she couldn’t share then: Mami, la escuela me cambió, eso sí, pero sigo siendo la niña del valle. After all, if being Brown Valley girls in the academy has taught us anything, it’s that it’s not either-or. As threshold women, we are both.