Storying the Self: Pedagogies From [Black] Loopholes in the Making of a [Black] Califas
¹Title: An agribusiness field
Date: 1961-03-21 Collection: Ernest Lowe Photography Collection
Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections
Source: Calisphere Date of access: March 9 2021 03:24
Permalink: https://calisphere.org/item/710c4f78-50b9-4824-aed6-baf72d54f230/
The loophole of retreat…
a dark hole
an attic space
she plots, she plans
she dreams of possibility from within impossible strictures of enclosure and confinement
her escape is immanent, as her imagination is boundless
her enclosure is an incubator for a practice of refusal and a roadmap to freedom.
(Campt, 2019)
I sat in the back of the room, in front of a cracked window. In the distance the police sirens announced their daily rounds, and the students in Ms. Davis’ class did not resist the temptation to yell “ahí, viene la migra!”, pointing fingers at each other suggesting who ICE would take; and, in the process, acknowledging that both migration and criminalization, actively shape their life. Darla entered the room and sat quietly playing with her curls, as her hoop earrings with the word “Original” across them grazed her cocoa skin. As she took a pencil out of her Jansport backpack, she flashed three pins: one that read Black Girl Magic, un barril de horchata, and an apple. Early during the school year, when I first met Darla, I asked how she decided what pins to put on her school bag, she simply said, “Oh, I just really like these because they go with my style. Black Girl Magic, because...duh. My mom gave me the horchata because I like it when she makes it for me. And the apple is cuz I stay reppin’ La Villa,² Miss.”
That day, while Darla described the pins, she also spoke herself into being. Her small collection, more than a youthful aesthetic, is a marker of who she is—a self-proclaimed young Black³ woman of Mexican descent and heritage. But the pins, also pin much more—they outline Darla’s geography, revealing a unique map composed of her blackness and Mexicanidad, available to her as a Black resident of agricultural California.
Title: Farmworkers' children, Westside School
Date: 1961-03-23 Collection: Ernest Lowe Photography Collection
Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections
Source: Calisphere Date of access: March 9, 2021 03:20
Permalink: https://calisphere.org/item/49e58e2d-d653-4f2f-a97d-84bb53de7daf/
Indeed, space is central to racialized student’s interplay and negotiation with power. More than 60 years since Brown v. Board of Education, racially segregated geographies of school opportunity remain largely intact (Tate, 2008). For the majority of youth from racialized communities, these segregated geographies contradict notions of schools as spaces independent from structures of racial oppression (Taylor, 2016). In this way, the interplay between geography, race, and schools highlights how space is a productive way dispossession continues to be made possible through schooling, and how it is successful in teaching youth their position in a racial hierarchy as outlined by white supremacy.
For the past three years, I have been researching the locations, everyday mechanisms, and the legacies that violent geographies have on students of color. In particular, I focus on geographies of anti-blackness as lived, experienced, and exercised in Latinx agricultural California, particularly the Central Coast of the state. Known globally for its plethora of outdoor recreational activities and parks like Big Sur, the history of California’s Central Coast is tethered to land theft driven by the Spanish colonial mission system that developed into rancherias and paved the way for large farming businesses and corporations that mass produce and export the apples, berries, and the variety of greens many Americans eat today. Because of its relationship to land, this geographic area of California is also dependent on the laboring of land. For example, during WWII and after, California became largely dependent on the Bracero Program and imported labor from Mexico to tend to the agricultural fields, thus setting into motion a major contributor to the massive demographic shift that ultimately resulted in the CaliAztlan⁴ we know today; and that obscures other racialized histories and the way their entanglements may give rise to new diasporic roots. As such, the story my research tells is a complicated love and hate affair between marginalized communities, where young Black diasporic youth like Darla engage in the reflexive work of storying the self. Cindy Cruz (2013) describes storying the self as “a theory of the flesh where through interrogating the narratives of the body, the physical realities of pain and subjugation fuse to create a politic born out of necessity” (p. 445). Leave it to a young Black girl, at the nexus of the plantation and la misión, to demonstrate how storying the self, results in a communal, ontological and pedagogical process that facilitates a retelling of the story of place.
On this particular day, Ms. Davis, Darla’s teacher, was preparing to close a unit on the Civil Rights Movement. At the beginning of the unit, Ms. Davis shared with me that she really wanted her students to think critically about the experience of “the Black people,” and wanted her students to think through how “people coming together” can lead to change. With 96% of the student body identifying as non-Black Latinx (particularly Mexican-America/Chicanx) and 80% qualifying for free and reduced lunch (California State Board of Education, 2018), Villa High perfectly mirrors La Villa and its distinctly disposable yet essential Latinx population—a contrast to the rest of its white county. For these reasons, youth at Villa High pay homage to La Villa’s long history of activism and involvement in the farm labor and Chicanx Movement by staking claim to La Villa as an act of resistance to white hegemony. For many Black youth in agricultural California, particularly Black diasporic youth whose whole being is underscored by Mexican and/or other Latinx ethnic backgrounds, segregated geographies mean navigating landscapes often overdetermined not just by whiteness, but also by the likes of Chicanx nationalist ideologies. This legacy, though rich in its capacity to resist white oppression, falls short from making anti-blackness obsolete because it has made Black life an impossible part of La Villa’s landscape. As Ms. Davis' comments demonstrate, “the Black people”, and their Black bodies, are irreconcilable with her students, and are outside the spatial parameters of Villa High...despite the presence of Darla in her class. No wonder Darla wore her pins proudly.
Title: Chicano farmworker children playing on a tractor
Date: 1961-03-23 Collection: Ernest Lowe Photography Collection
Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections
Source: Calisphere Date of access: March 9, 2021 03:37
Permalink: https://calisphere.org/item/56887198-8c52-47d0-afba-3a157062642f/
As I sat in the back of the class, Ms. Davis explained that she was going to play a mainstream Hollywood movie and that the assignment was going to be a reflection of the movie's historical accuracy. Thus, scene after scene underscored by the typical overrepresentation of violence against black bodies of the Civil Rights Era, students reacted with discomfort, whispering “oh shit”, followed by moments of complete silence. For Darla, however, depictions of violence against Black people did not evoke any type of response. As a matter of fact, the violence marked onto Black bodies was a burden she herself had spoken of many times. For example, during a community building activity in another class where students shared their most salient identity, she shared that her blackness was at the forefront not because it “made her stand out” but because, she said, “it’s part of the reason why my brother is always in jail and some of my cousins aren’t.” In demarcating why her embodied blackness was central to her being through her brothers racial profiling, Darla presented a different narrative to those of her non-Black Latinx classmates whose salient identities were underscored by Mexican folklore, Catholic religion or popular culture. In that moment, I witnessed how through centering her marked self, through storying the violent relationship of difference between her blackness and her family’s brownness, Darla uncovered a new layer to La Villa’s texture, when one of her classmates' reactions to her comment was “I never thought about Black people in this town.”
As the movie progressed, Darla melted onto her desk until finally laying her head and pineapple hair on her arms, indicating that she had lost complete interest in the movie. In fact, Darla did not say anything that day during class except for a small snarky comment when, in the movie, several years pass and the main character (who is Black) is shown as a much older man. As this particular scene progressed, Darla slowly sat up, elegantly raised her head and slowly put her hand on her mouth in a slightly pensive way and said “there is no way that man aged so quickly. Not even my abuelito looks like that,” making the girls in her table crack up with her assertion that the depletion of the Black body that the movie portrayed was not only violent, it was violently unrealistic.
Cindy Cruz writes that “for young people whose lives often intersect multiple oppressions, it is in the reflexive work of storying the self where youth of color begin a process of developing a critical consciousness through an interrogation of their own bodies” (Cruz 2013, p. 442). In other words, it is through the corporeal where youth story the self, offering the “possibility of reconstructing social memory.” In this way, and as many Black, Indigenous and women of color have written (see, for example, the work of Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, and Gloria Anzaldúa), the body becomes a vestibule landscape capable of creating new and different geographies that alter the knowability of space. However, as Darla shows, the work of interrogating the narratives of her marked body—here I am talking about the scars and lesions of criminalization she carries in her flesh and the neglect of her presence by her teacher and classmate who “didn’t think about black people in the town”—is a violent pedagogical site. Therefore, in making sense of her Black conditions of being, Darla draws on her kin—her brother, her grandpa, her mom’s horchata—to reinstate a different type of living in La Villa that offsets and balances her classmates’ imaginaries of herself, Black bodies and of La Villa’s landscape itself.
These are the registers of a slave girl who dreamed into
life practices of self-care, intellectual fortitude, and
fiercely defiant forms of love and connection, of which
we are proud beneficiaries.
(Campt, 2019)
I start this piece with Tina Campt’s prose and return to it because in writing about Darla alongside Cruz, I am reminded of Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography entitled Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, which documents Jacobs' life as a slave, including how she gained freedom for herself and for her children by hiding in an attic for several years. The twist, however, is that Jacobs’ hiding place was located within a house in the very plantation she had “escaped” from. From this liminality, Jacobs writes that the attic was her loophole of a retreat, an enclosure that was simultaneously a space for enacting practices of freedom—practices of thinking, planning, writing discerning letters, and imagining new forms of liberation. In this way, her loophole of retreat is where Jacobs engaged in a process of storying the self, and where the self becomes a reflexive project and ongoing narrative.
Where are the boundaries of Darla’s loophole?
Title: Girl sitting on front stairs of house
Date: 1960-09-03 Collection: Ernest Lowe Photography Collection
Owning Institution: UC Merced, Library and Special Collections
Source: Calisphere Date of access: March 9 2021 03:34
Permalink: https://calisphere.org/item/a0e9fc15-01aa-4acc-9f26-03284b0c926b/
There is an important lesson to be learned from young Black diasporic girls: understanding the emergent process of their being requires an attention to social and community histories, where life stories are situated in an analysis linked to social history and geography. In doing so, as Darla so cleverly demonstrates, these narratives become embodied truth-tellings that account for both time and space. Darla feels Harriet Jacobs. And so, I asked, but really it is Darla who prompts this question with the very condition of her [Black loopholing] existence, what does a conceptualization of space based on the mutual respect for another, rather than on resistance practice that lead to spatial ownership, uncover for the spillage of blackness in places “they” never thought blackness existed?
Footnotes
¹All photographs in this article are taken by Ernest Lowe and are part of a UC Merced’s Special Collections. In 1959, Lowe joined the staff of Pacifica radio station KPFA and documenting the lives of migrant farm workers. The photographs in this collection document the lives and struggles of the farm-working communities in California's Central Valley.
²La Villa is a pseudonym, and the Spanish colonial term for “town”. Though geographically expansive, the social texture of the agricultural central coast of California is quite tight, insofar that any identifiable information, as nuanced as possible, would be readily legible to any person in the broader community. I chose the name “La Villa” as a way to anonymize, not through the process of finding names that allude to specifics of the town in my ethnography, but rather as a way to anonymize through the collective, shared experiences of violence and survivance distinct to the Central Coast of California. In this way, La Villa can be thought of as not just a physical location, but a set of interlocking geographical structures always in relation to each other and defined by the colonial structure that facilitates land ownership and land labor.
³In my writing, I follow the same orthographical movida as Savannah Shange (2019), who writes that the capital B in Black signals “the specificity of the racial condition of Black people” whereas blackness (with a lowercase b), “as a state of being, blackening or any other derivative terminology” underscores a more “capacious and permeable” than the ascriptions of Black” (p.169). In other words, Black marks the spot, the body, while blackness is more fluid. That one-drop rule, doe.
⁴CaliAztlan is a compound word derived from California and Aztlan, where Aztlan is the home of the Aztecs and the onto-epistemological orientation for a Chicanx subjectivity. CaliAztlan is a nod to the complicated relationship California (and therefore, those Californians of Mexican descent) has to Mexico, and Los Estates: California was once Spanish colonial land, then Mexican land after Mexico became independent from Spain, then it became US land after the US-Mexico war. After all that, the US not only “borrowed” Mexican labor but it created a violent and fractured border that continues to define much of the relationship between the US, as a nation state, and its Mexican-America/Chicanx citizens. #Imperialism is #messy.
References
Brent, L. (2013). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Simon and Schuster.
Campt, T. (2019). The Loophole of Retreat- An Invitation. E-Flux Journal, 105(1).
Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ youth of color video making as radical curriculum: A brother mourning his brother and a theory in the flesh. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(4), 441-460.
Shange, S. (2019). Progressive dystopia: Abolition, anti-blackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Duke University Press.
Tate IV, W. F. (2008). ‘Geography of opportunity’: Poverty, place, and educational outcomes. Edu Researcher, 37(7), 397-411.
Taylor, K. Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Andrea del Carmen Vazquez is a PhD student in Education and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research is located in the anthropology of education, anti-blackness in schooling, Latinx migration, and youth; and engages Black Geographies, women of color and feminist theory. You can learn more about her, and her work, at lavazquez.com and on Twitter at _LaVazquez_.