A Revolucionista Ethic of Care: Four Mexicana Educators’ Subterraneous Social Justice Revolution of Fighting and Feeding

La Güera’s Positionality: My Own Light-Skinned, Conspicuous Revolution

As the ethical imperative of a Chicana/Xicana feminist research epistemology calls researchers to examine positionality amid intersections of power and privilege so as not to replicate colonial practices (Moreno Sandoval, Mojica Lagunas, Montelongo, & Juárez Díaz, 2016), I must expose my own and the manner in which it shapes this research. I am brought by my own identity and history as a student and later as a teacher. I am the beneficiary of a critical ethic of care that came by way of my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Nellie Castañeda, who taught us Mexicana/o kids the “glory and the tragedy . . . of [our] people, [as] I came to understand how that history stirred in my blood” (Anaya, 1994, p. 123). Her classroom was salve to the physical, cultural, and spiritual woundedness of oppression. Pieces of us existed in her and she in us: She fed our marrow on the beauty of our collective selves. We knew, too, that her own family was not untouched by the agony of subordination nor its power to erode body and spirit. She knew our families, our songs, and the winding path our mother tongue has taken under U.S. domination. She fought to feed us “beyond such chains . . . beyond the . . . hurt” (Martínez, 2002, p. 48), to transform a world that invalidated our ancestors and silenced us in our homeland. Later as a teacher, I too would draw on education as racial, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual reclamation for my Mexicana/o students. When voiced, this stance often resulted in my being labeled racist by some of my mostly White colleagues who insisted Mexicana/o students were “indolent,”“uncaring,”“disrespectful,” or “rebellious” and did not value education. I spoke and lived my social justice revolution in plain view alongside other colleagues across race and identity, “like living in the war years . . . Loving . . . while bombs split outside” (Moraga, 1983, p. 29). While Moraga (1983) speaks of dangerous romantic love between women in a world hostile to lesbians of color, her words illuminate the essence of contested, politicized loving. I loved my Mexicana/o students while bombs split outside—bombs that kept poverty high and graduation rates low, which ensured the zip code surrounding our school was grossly overrepresented in our state penitentiary, and which ravaged our families with health disparities. Together, we sought healing and regeneration through creativity and self-expression, making “spaces for hopes to flourish and grow . . . believ[ing] that atrocities and injustices will not prevent us from flying . . . from soaring” (Martínez, 2002, p. 50). Today, I recognize the privilege that enabled my conspicuous revolution: I have felt neither the racism my darker skinned brothers and sisters have nor the perceived incompetence thrust on accents infused with Spanish. Testimonios of low expectations, segregation, linguistic shaming, corporal punishment—of being called dirty Mexican—have only ever been passed down by the generations above me. My light-skinned güera privilege, English dominance, unquestioned U.S. citizenship, and experience as one of Mrs. Castañeda’s many beloved could not prepare me to see contours of a Revolucionista Ethic of Care. For the nuance of revolución to emerge, I had to listen to La Mestiza who is not always recognized in my face though remains in me—for She is not encapsulated by one body or by one lifetime (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983). I had to enter humbly into my participants’ consciousness landscape (Flores Carmona, 2014)—to foster a kinship with these women that was en movimiento (in flux; Torre & Ayala, 2009). This meant recognizing our bodies and beings as uniquely inscribed maps of conquest (Cruz, 2006; Sánchez, 2003; Yarbro-Bejarano, 1998). While I enact a conspicuous caring in line with critical (feminist) ethics of care, my participants reveal this as a posture of privilege that is dangerous. I upheld these while not disavowing my role in thematic representation, my cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Spivak, 1988), nor my capacity for layering and braiding meaning—and at times even tangling and knotting it—a complexity that reflects in the layered, interwoven nature of present work.

Critical Ethics of Care and Critical Feminist Ethic(s) of Care

This work is fed by hopeful histories of school spaces led by educators of color, predominantly Black but also Mexicana and Latina women, who have used critical and expressly feminist ethics of care as antidote to inequity and White supremacy. This has been well documented in racially segregated communities of the Jim Crow South (Foster, 1993, 1998; Henry, 2006; Siddle Walker, 2000, 2001) and to a lesser extent in Spanish-speaking rural Mexican/Mexican American and Chicana/o communities (Donato, 1997, 1999; Gonzales-Berry, 1994; Maestas, 2011; Sosa-Provencio & Sánchez, in press). Most recently, it is evidenced in insulated Latina/o communities in Chicago, Tucson, and New York (Mercado, 2016; Rolón-Dow, 2005; Valenzuela, 1999, 2016). Mercado (2016) draws on Antrop-González and De Jesús (2006), De Jesús (2007), Sosa and Gomez (2012), and Cammarota (2004) to note that while poverty, racism, educational underfunding, and racially segregated schooling harm Latina/o youth, access to Latina/o educators is “beneficial if it equips children to both withstand prejudice and societal demands imposed by the discriminatory forces of exclusion and neglect” (p. 29). While care that is both critical and feminist is well established (Córdova, 1994; Cruz, 2006; Delgado Bernal, 2006; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983; Pesquera & Segura, 1993), decades of ethic of care scholarship continue to center White feminist frameworks wherein care is feeling with another and reminiscent of intimate maternal relationships (Blum, 1993; Noblit, 1993). This ostensibly colorblind and emotive care positions educators “not attempting to transform the world, but . . . allowing ourselves to be transformed” (Noddings, 2003, p. 34) and renders politicized action on behalf of the cared for as the degradation of care (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1992). In the same vein as the feminist movement’s “sisterhood” has been critiqued by women of color for overlooking power at intersections of race, class, and sexuality (Collins, 2009; Delgado Bernal, 1998; hooks, 1994; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983; Pesquera & Segura, 1993; Sandoval, 1990), Chicana, Latina, and Black feminists challenge White feminist care as silent regarding power, privilege, and the heavy educational histories and Eurocentric pedagogies children of color face (Garza, 2009; Knight, 2004; Rolón-Dow, 2005; Thompson, 1998; Valenzuela, 1999; Wilder, 1999, 2000).

Valenzuela’s (1999) work in a predominantly Mexicana/o school community signals a seminal departure from White feminist care, establishing a critical care enacted authentically and publicly to bring about a “more humane vision of schooling” (p. 62). Valenzuela’s foundational work (1999) details the aesthetic care of White-dominant schooling in which empathy and sentimentality are problematically contingent on students’ high academic marks; she juxtaposes this with authentic care, a holistically nourishing political framework of caring that obscures the lines between school and home to dismantle injustice through connectedness to students’ epistemologies and everyday lives. Subsequent research reveals educational spaces informed by critical care frameworks that weave community knowledge and students’ lived realities and academic needs to navigate the complexities of schooling, power, and privilege (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, 2005; Godinez, 2006; Ware, 2006). Critical ethics of care drawing from Black Feminism (Collins, 2009; hooks, 1994), Chicana Feminism (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983), and Latina Feminism (Delgado Bernal, Elenes, Godinez, & Villenas, 2006) have been termed critical and feminist ethics of care. These meld intellectual rigor, cultural and historical consciousness, epistemologies of home, and love for one’s people to fortify youth of color to rise up in worthiness to transform inequities. Critical feminist ethics of care illuminate life-giving forces of community and mind/body/spirit epistemologies, the ubiquitous and intersectional nature of oppression, and the legacy of women of color as community (re)builders “feeding people in all their hungers” (Moraga, 1983, p. 132). In seeking to understand and reveal the critical feminist ethic of care these Mexicana educators operationalize, it is important to recognize that, as U.S. Mexicana/Chicana women, they descend from Mexicana and Mestiza women who have carried the weight of nourishing resistance on their backs and in their hearts for millennia (Martinez-Cruz, 2011; Poniatowska, 2006; R. C. Rodríguez, 2014). The following section details the critical feminist ethic(s) of care of Mesoamerican female warriors and deities of war/harvest, death/life as well as 19th- and 20th-century female Mexican revolutionaries (Martinez-Cruz, 2011; Poniatowska, 2006). These epistemologies may reveal foundations of a Revolucionista Ethic of Care; most significant perhaps, they also provide historical constructs of female warriors and revolutionaries that participants embody, challenge, and reincarnate.

Mexicana/Mestiza Care Legacies: Fighting For and Feeding People in All Hungers

Mesoamerican history reveals what I term a fighting and feeding epistemology that stands in the legacy of Ometeotl—the Two God of Mexica/Aztec cosmology wherein male/female, light/dark, and death/life are but completions within a universe made whole in complexity (León-Portilla, 2009; Martinez-Cruz, 2011). Female war/harvest deities emerge in Mesoamerican pictorial códices depicting women simultaneously as hardened warriors, protectresses of life and limb, and loving nurturers. During Tenochtitlán’s growing military empire, limbs of women who died in childbirth were said to hold powers of masculine might. Under the protection of Toci, midwife grandmother goddess of harvest, birth, and war (Martinez-Cruz, 2011; Salas, 1990), and within the stronghold of Her uterine altar, the steam bath, midwives and women healers locked in ferocious battle with soldiers and male youth to protect this “feminine locus of power from the masculine national project” (Martinez-Cruz, 2011, p. 42). The centrality of a fighting/feeding epistemology is exemplified by the enduring nature of the preconquest Náhuatl feast day of Toci on September 16 wherein bare-breasted women warriors simulated battle, sparring and squirting milk from their breasts to display feminine potency (Salas, 1990). Toci’s feast day was subsequently anointed by Mexico’s 1810 battle cry of independence from Spain under the flag of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Catholic Patron Saint whose image blurs and bleeds across that of Mexica Earth/War Mother goddess, Tonantzin Coatlicue (Gallegos, 2002). For many, Our Lady of Guadalupe is the incarnation of Mexico’s radical cultural blending, mestizaje, for she is “alien, and yet she is also native . . . [for] the triumphant Guadalupe/Tonantzin [our mother] is brown” (R. C. Rodríguez, 2014, p. 39). She has been called the “catalyst of Mexican nationalism” (Salas, 1990, p. 24) and has been marched into battle painted on banners, stitched on clothing, uttered on the lips of warriors, and is still central to human rights battles for Mexico’s Indigenous Peoples (Gallegos, 2002).

These women warriors and deities capture what Martinez-Cruz (2011) terms womb-knowing, the nurturing and protective epistemology at the heart of Mesoamerican societies. Modern manifestations of womb-knowing emerge across Mexico’s 1810 War for Independence, 1846 U.S./Mexico War, and perhaps most visibly during its decade-long 1910 Mexican Revolution (Azuela, 1916/2000; Poniatowska, 2006; Wolf, 1969). The Mexican Revolution in particular features a fighting/feeding epistemology. It is said of one female soldier that her rifle “lay . . . for eight years . . . beside her metate upon which she ground the maize for tortillas” (Beals, as cited in Salas, 1990, p. 39). Within the Mexican Revolution, soldaderas fulfilled “traditional roles as mother, war goddess, warrior, tribal defender, sexual companion” (Salas, 1990, p. 44). While womb-knowing traces back thousands of years (Martinez-Cruz, 2011), the centrality of women has also been idealized and manipulated by centuries of colonialism and male supremacy that venerate the maternal and yet virginal female archetype while denigrating the lives, desires, actions, political rights, and flesh-and-blood bodies of women and girls (Rosas Lopátegui, 2002; Trinidad Galván, 2016). Octavio Paz (1985), perhaps the embodiment of Mexico’s love affair with patriarchy, reveals a national narrative of the Mexican Revolution as a “return to the maternal womb” in Mexico’s communion, “[w]ith herself, with her own being” (pp. 148–149). In romanticizing women as his own life is fraught with misogyny (Rosas Lopátegui, 2002), Paz reflects not only the often schismatic consciousness of his national origins but also the global contradictions of male supremacy that have shaped the experiences of women of color in colonial and postcolonial times. This narrative underscores two of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) foundational assertions regarding the failings of the intellectual’s clamouring consciousness to critique or disrupt imperialism: The intellectuals’ desire to represent the Third World Female in the nostalgic search for lost origins further entrenches patriarchy and cloaks her evermore in shadow; furthermore, exalting the mythical purity of either gender or class insurgency chiefly serves the colonial project. One soldadera in particular resists this fetishizing: “I saw no romance in it. We were just poor people fighting for our stomachs” (Quinn, 1972, p. 21). I, too, learned to resist the clamoring intellectual speaking and theorizing through my formal training and through my preconceived understanding of care. There were moments when my participants’ assertions of identity and society or their resistance to my approach and early theorizing caused a collision, a choque, in my vision of the world. In line with Torre and Ayala (2009) who note the decolonizing critical reflection emerging from such choques, a Chicana feminist Testimonio methodology sharpened my ability to see complexity, troubled the historical depictions of female revolutionaries I was perhaps seeking, and allowed the fullness of who these women are for Mexicana/o children to shine bright.

Participants

I used criteria sampling and chain sampling (Marshall & Rossman, 2010) to recruit four female Mexican/Mexican American educators who teach predominantly Mexicana/o students. I elected for this small group to foster intimacy and trust (Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Pérez Huber, 2009). Participants include (1) Diana, a 6th- to 8th-grade social studies and history teacher; (2) Rosa, a 6th- to 8th-grade mathematics teacher; 3) Priscilla, a 9th- to 12th-grade health and law studies teacher; and (4) Sylvia, a 9th- to 12th-grade English and ENLACE teacher. These women educators in no way represent all Mexicana educators. However, as descendants of Mexicana/os and Mestiza/os who have survived and resisted centuries of oppression through a multiplicity of seen and unseen tactics (Castillo, 1996; Córdova, 1994; Sandoval, 2000), their voices and classrooms may impart wisdom and mechanisms for enacting teaching as social justice.

Research Site

I chose this midsized city along the U.S./Mexico border for several reasons: It has a large Mexican/Mexican American population—Mexicana/o families who have both been here for centuries and are newly arrived comprise the vast majority in K-12 schools. Second, this historically rural community is undergoing great change, coexisting and fighting for space amid one of the fastest growing urban sprawls in the nation, composed chiefly of White middle- to upper-class retirees. Finally, I chose this site because of my own intergenerational ties to the “Mexican side of town,” which fosters cultural intuition in me and a heartfelt investment in the outcomes of Mexicana/o families (Delgado Bernal, 1998). I chose this site not for this reason alone but also because it provided third- and fourth-hand connections to schools. Through family connections, I contacted one Mexicano educator at the dual-language charter middle school, which was my first school site. He began the long chain through which Diana and Rosa agreed to participate. In recruiting Priscilla and Sylvia, I contacted area high school principals. ⁹ One male principal allowed me to recruit teachers fitting the criteria of Mexican/Mexican American and female. Three teachers met criteria and two elected to participate. At the time of data collection, 57% of the city’s population was Hispanic/Mexican/Mexican American, nearly 40% spoke a home language other than English, and 23% lived below the federal poverty line (U.S. Census, 2010). Hispanic children comprised 76% of district enrollment (Anonymized District Office of Accountability, Assessment, and Research, 2014). ¹⁰

Data Collection

Over the course of one academic year, participants’ intergenerational Testimonios were communicated by multiple data collection methods: (1) two 60- to 90-minute individual semistructured interviews, (2) five 90- to 120-minute focus group interviews providing reflective and discursive spaces for emerging Testimonios (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012), and (3) four 5-hour field observations per week wherein each day was dedicated to observing one participant within classrooms, hallways, and lunch areas. Data were also collected through (4) my own reflective researcher journal, (5) photographic elicitation (Diaz Soto et al., 2009), and (6) participants’ reflections around their growing consciousness/conocimiento (Anzaldúa, 1987), which was further shaped by colleagues, family members, and students.

Data Analysis: Braiding Meaning in a Sacred Space

In this . . . sacred space, our goal is to arrive at a healing state of Mestiza consciousness—to envision the erasure of marginalization in which both Chicanas and their allies come together without masks and with a true commitment to those confined to the margins. (Diaz Soto et al., 2009, p. 760)

Across five focus groups, we five built trusting, reciprocal relationships to share and examine our epistemologies and uncertainties and to achieve (re)flexibility (Luttrell, 2010). I use Diaz Soto’s et al. (2009) Xicana Sacred Space as a data analysis framework for its indigenous concept of knowledge production, which is collective and recursive, and for its departure from the linearity and coerced objectivity of Western research (Smith, 2012; Trinidad Galván, 2015). Using Diaz Soto et al. (2009) and a Chicana feminist research epistemology, we nurtured a sacred, intimate space that validated our cultural intuition, fortified critical consciousness, challenged homogeneity and consensus, and melded shared vulnerability; herein, our protected and sometimes divergent data converged to further enrich analysis across all data sources (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Delgado Bernal et al., 2012). To attain trustworthiness, reciprocity, reflexivity, and methodological creativity (Trinidad Galván, 2015; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), our data analysis method follows Quiñones’ (2016) concept of methodology organized according to the Chicana/Latina metaphor of trenzas (braids), which signifies the woven transmission of knowledge along especially female lines. Before each meeting, I provided participants with all physical copies of data that had accumulated up to that point. These included my transcribed digital recordings of individual and focus group interviews as well as impromptu conversations, field observation notes, copies of photographs shared by participants from their home spaces, and our recursive reflections and analyses, which we wrote onto separate pieces of paper and into the margins of our respective data packets. These data packets grew over time in pages and annotations. Ongoing verbal reflections regarding data strands were recorded in each focus group as subsequent data, which were then transcribed and provided in hard copy for upcoming focus groups. We used pens, markers, highlighters, and sticky notes to name preliminary themes, to connect to familial histories and to the theorizing that was taking place between participants and their family members, and to forge collective themes. At each meeting, these individual data strands were pulled out, touched, examined, and joined with others to make larger trenzas of meaning, or thematic codes (Quiñones, 2016). Emerging themes were plaited (collapsed) to form new themes that encircled us. We pulled these taut by the strength of recursive analysis; the fibers of our inherited, experiential knowing (Hurtado, 2003; Villenas, 2010); threads of tension; and moments of contradiction within ourselves and each other. As these multiple data strands were analyzed in focus group, we braided new and existing knowledge as one interconnected system (Quiñones, 2016). We learned to read, honor, and protect ambiguity within the following findings and to recognize La Revolucionista’s rebellious, untamable spirit in ourselves. ¹¹

Identity Rooted in Land, Corn, Ancestors, and Descendants

At the beginning of the first individual interview, I ask, “How do you self-identify?” For the sake of the reader we use Mexicana, although this decision remains tenuous because Diana, Rosa, Priscilla, and Sylvia blend and bend across and in-between Mexican, Mexicana, Mestiza, Mexican American, Chicana, Xicana, Brown, Latina, and Hispanic. Their fluid expressions of ethnic identity connect thematically perhaps to the subversive Mestiza consciousness and shape-shifting resistance tactics I present as Components 3 and 4. More important, however, as these women weave an identity unbound by language, they reveal that a Revolucionista Ethic of Care finds its life and breath not in opposition only but in the essence of their identities. Who these women are for Mexicana/o students germinates in land, in ancestral corn rituals predating conquest, and in their generational lines (Calvo & Rueda Esquibel, 2015).

Diana was born in Durango, Mexico, and raised in California and New Mexico. She used the terms Mexican-born, a minority woman/child of Mexican parents, Latina, and Mexicana and conveys her identity as growing and dynamic: “It keeps going. There’s no halt . . . it’s looping . . . moving on, it’s not just staying.” She playfully notes the shared “Brown blood” of our research group. In one focus group, she points to a childhood photograph, exclaiming, “That’s me! The little Brown girl!” Diana’s playful use of “Brown” seems to borrow the Chicano movement’s term honoring the shared indigenous heritage of Chicana/o, Mexicana/o Peoples (Córdova, 1994). When asked to describe a photograph she has brought to our third focus group to answer the question, “Who are you for Mexicana/o students?” Diana relays, “For me, teaching and learning was always about understanding who I was and where I came from and maintaining it so in this picture my brother, my sister and I are making tamales. Every year.” As she smiles back at the faces of her brother and sister seated around their childhood table, her tone is resolute—she calls her identity by many names, but it converges in this corn ritual that feeds who she is, states where she comes from, and will long move and loop into her generations and pedagogy. For Rosa, too, identity is anchored even as identifiers at times seem shifting and fluid.

Rosa was born in El Paso, Texas, to a Mexican mother from Juárez. Early on, she distinguishes “Mexican” as a nationality she does not claim: “No soy Mexicana de origen. Yo no nací en México [I’m not Mexican by birth. I wasn’t born there].” In describing her U.S. elementary school peers, Rosa then debunks this notion of nationality, “Todos veníamos de la misma raza. . . . We were all the same, Mexican, Spanish speaking.” In noting la misma raza (same race/culture) from which she and her schoolmates descended (veníamos), Rosa binds her being not to a country but to a culture, a land base, and a language that cross borders without the need to declare citizenship. As Rosa blurs notions of nationality, she lures us into a place where dichotomies play tricks and converge to ultimately relay completion (Pendleton Jiménez, 2014).

For Priscilla and Sylvia, who descend from many generations unfolding in the same U.S./Mexico border region of this study, identity is also beyond language and deeply connected to place. In an individual interview, Priscilla tells me, “I’m Mexican. . . . I’m not from Spain” and further contextualizes her identity in the struggle to maintain Spanish, which is the language of her mother’s ancestors and her father’s first language, but is not her dominant tongue. Priscilla laments, “We’re losing it . . . for my son, I want for him to know Spanish . . . but my Spanish is broken.” During one focus group, however, Priscilla conveys her identity not in loss nor brokenness but in (re)growth, “[It’s] branching out too. We’re taking who we are out there and bringing it back and constantly growing and coming back.” Priscilla conveys her pedagogical strength source briefly through a photograph that mirrors Diana’s of her siblings, though without any coordination on either part. Priscilla smiles at the serendipity of the moment and exclaims, “Look at my little tamale maker! [pointing to her 4-year-old son].” Priscilla and Diana illuminate their ethic of care as a shared connectedness to corn, to place, and to teaching as the commitment to cultivating ancestral practices within generational lines.

For Sylvia, too, teaching Mexicana/o children means nurturing an identity bound in place and in connection to ancestral rituals to mend the loss, separation, and brokenness that Sylvia, Priscilla, and their families still resist. She is perhaps the most vocal of her frustration with terms unable to capture her identity, which she describes as from here. As a child, Sylvia used Mexican American, but she says,

When I went to college, there was no Hispanic bubble. It was White. . . I was never White. . . . I don’t know that I like any of the terms . . . I’m not one thing . . . I do struggle . . . labeling myself . . . [but] not for lack of identification . . . I’m from here. I grew up here.

Sylvia recalls that she felt like

not the right kind of Mexican. . . . I don’t speak the language, and I just felt such a deep separation . . . [as a child] I would go have some atole [cornmeal cereal] in the morning with grandma . . . how do I translate that into the kids?

Sylvia’s words seem to reflect Priscilla’s not only with regard to language loss but also in terms of an unshakable generational continuity. In their words and in photographs brought to relay foundations of their pedagogy, these women echo the intergenerational continuity vital to Indigenous Peoples (Moraga, 2011; Moreno Sandoval et al., 2016; Smith, 2012). Within them reverberates an identity “derived not from one’s nation-state citizenship but from one’s . . . millennia-old relationship to maíz [corn], the continent, and the universe” (R. C. Rodríguez, 2014, pp. 3–4). They evoke a framework situating Mexicana/os, Chicana/os as deceremonialized, detribalized Indigenous People(s) of the Americas—okichike ka centeotzintli, a land-bound People whose flesh, according to the Mayan/QuichéPopol Vuh, is formed of maíz (Calvo & Rueda Esquibel, 2015; Martinez-Cruz, 2011; R. C. Rodríguez, 2014). As such, a Revolucionista Ethic of Care is spurred by Testimonios of resisting oppression but also by knowledge of the need for caution.

Urgency to Dismantle Oppression and Knowledge of the Peril of Open Resistance

Protective Mestiza Consciousness: Fighting and Feeding Behind the Blur of Mestizaje

At times, these revolutionary educators reveal themselves plainly. During one classroom observation, Diana hands out flyers for an upcoming immigration rally: “We want all of your families to come to talk about justice for Mexican-Americans, Indian Americans, cualquier American que merece respeto social y dignidad [any American who deserves social respect and dignity].” For Rosa, the spirit of “revolution” speaks candidly in her first individual interview, “I tell [students], get an education . . . para que no se los traten como Mexicanos. Que no se vayan al field [so they won’t treat them like Mexicans . . . don’t work the fields].” While Rosa’s words may stress meritocracy seemingly without implicating larger dynamics of economic exploitation, their subtext is written as the daughter of a woman not afforded formal education. Rosa seems to use treated like a Mexican as structural critique for the normalization of manual labor for her Mexicana/o people, which education may challenge (Quijano & Ennis, 2000). Priscilla, too, plainly reveals her commitment to teaching for equity and dignity as she addresses her 12th-grade law students:

Become acquainted with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . . It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, your race, age, these are all basic rights that we are all entitled to . . . each one of [you] is assigned an article.

For Sylvia, “revolution” comes by way of student-centered inquiry projects preparing her ENLACE students to testify to numerous stakeholders for policy reform to the institutionalized inequities brought on by standardized testing.

But even as educational access and equity reverberate in their pedagogy, they also build layers of concealment around these. I present the following incongruities cautiously. Analyzed outside of a Chicana feminist research epistemology, these may discredit and dichotomize them as either of a colonized or liberated consciousness, both of which reinscribe patriarchy (Spivak, 1988). This comes to light through Rosa during our first focus group. Rosa expresses frustration with college professors who told her,

“You have to go out there and advocate for yourself! . . . You have to stand up.” . . . It’s like, why?! I’m not oppressed! Ooh, I hate that word! “You are the oppressed” . . . I feel like a roach being pressed.

As Rosa denounces an identity shaped by resistance or oppression, she problematizes this one month later when I ask if teachers ever treated her unfairly for her identity:

Because I only spoke Spanish, yes. Por ser Mexicana [For being Mexican] . . . they put you in these little groups, like the lower level it was yellow . . . I knew I was with the dumb kids. And I hated that so much.

Sylvia’s assertions, too, would present me with a clashing discontinuity (Torre & Ayala, 2009): “My mom would say, ‘Never say Chicana, those are the radicals’ . . . You don’t have to go out there and be pushy, like, look at me look at me, I’m Chicana, I’m proud.” Her words seemed to reflect the passivity imposed on Chicanas and Mexicanas “born into a culture of silence . . . Catholicism . . . taught us the values of piety, humility and bearing our crosses in silence” (Córdova, 1994, p. 175). Sylvia notably does not critique White male supremacy or Mexicana/o Hispanic patriarchy which delineates “radical” and idealizes female passivity, even as she enacts a bold social action pedagogy in her classroom. Neither my positionality, out-loud critical feminist ethic of care, nor early classroom observations could prepare me to see their revolution amid these layers. I knew these Mexicana educators fight to academically prepare Mexicana/o students to thrive in a world that does not view them as equals, but I could not yet see the ways in which they also complicate, obscure, and disavow this work as well as dominant constructions of resistance and revolution.

The decolonial examination of practices and consciousness painfully reveals that not one of us is impervious to centuries of White supremacy and global patriarchy or its contradictory discourses that exploit and romanticize women of the laboring class (Moreno Sandoval et al., 2016; Trinidad Galván, 2016). The silencing that comes through Rosa and Sylvia’s data is one we learn, yes, at the breast of our mothers, who have perpetuated it and fiercely resisted it as well (Villenas & Moreno, 2001). My aim is not to canonize these women, to diminish their contradictions or to sculpt a monolith of “woman” or the “system” they navigate (Spivak, 1988). These women defy good/bad, colonizer/freedom fighter dichotomies. It is the totality of who they are and what they do in the lives of Mexicana/o children that matters and that this work illuminates. Their indefinable complexity is perhaps epitomized in Tonantzin/La Virgen de Guadalupe, whose essence lies somewhere amid Indigenous warrior mother/earth goddess and Spanish saint who ushered in the largest Catholic conversion of Indigenous Peoples to date (Castillo, 1996). This history and the changeable nature of their words, which I expand on further in the Weapon of Tongue section, underscores the futility of extracting some pure consciousness from especially women of color who have long carved dignity and agency for themselves and their children by meeting interlocking and schismatic discourses and dynamics of oppression with a multiplicity all their own (Spivak, 1988). These four women, too, are shaped though not determined by these forces. Though their work is complicated by ideologies steeped in European Imperialism, their wisdom is sharpened by years of confronting these as well. They resist and heal the damage of harsh conditions in their generations through La Revolucionista’s reframed weapons of Body, Spirit, and Tongue.

Untraceable Weapons of Body, Spirit, and Tongue

The following subsections detail Diana, Rosa, Priscilla, and Sylvia’s Testimonios of confronting racism, sexism, and linguicism as well as the ways in which they enact and embody La Revolucionista and Her shape-shifting armaments to form a Revolucionista Ethic of Care.