In Dialogue/ En Diálogo Volume II Call for Submissions Fall 2024

Tejidos Fostering Endurance Amidst Sociopolitical Turmoil in School Communities

Volume 2

Topic: How does the ideology of comadrerismo, its spirit, serve us to describe our webs of care, endurance, and solidarity which folks are creating in response to the often hegemonic xenophobic, anti-education assault.

Anti-educator sentiment fomented post pandemic with calls for book bans, a rewriting of history books to exclude the stories of marginalized and minoritized people, and anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT), anti-Ethnic Studies (ES), and anti-Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) rhetoric while conservative fringe interest groups usurped the educational landscape (Banda et al., 2023; Miller, Liu & Ball, 2023). We are experiencing a top-down hegemonic xenophobic distrust in education, in educators, and in critical thinking, coming from a place of fear and racist ideologies often masked in Christian conservatist ideals (Miller et al., 2023).

The message to young people has been that understanding their world and its history is poisoning their mind and indoctrinating them with leftist propaganda and that their voices and agency do not matter. Both schools and community spaces serve to hold young people and often attempt to insulate them from the toxic political landscape and prepare them for it, but this work has become increasingly difficult. At times, guiding students to find their own voice and have a safe space to develop their identity and discuss identity is done in tandem with young people’s families and sometimes, despite their families (Cumings, 2015; Beschorner et.al. 2021). School leaders, educators, adults on school campuses, campus partners, and community activists whose vocation has been to guide young people in understating the world, themselves, and their agency, must continue their work in the context of this tension that aims at destroying the critical bonds they foster. As Natalie Núñez, a Professional Learning Specialist wrote in our first volume, “I never imagined that a frequent negotiation between doing what I feel is right and protecting my livelihood would be part of my existence as an educator in the public-school system” (pg. 99).

Ideological clarity is one guiding pillar in what educators and community activists do, they need relationships, to be in solidarity with others to enact and endure, particularly in this context filled with sociopolitical turmoil. The extant hegemonic xenophobic climate we are experiencing leads us to wonder, what do these relationships look like? How are folks building? How are they enduring? How does the work change when done in community and solidarity, and within a climate of heightened distrust and orchestrated chaos?

Indeed, there are webs of care that are coming together to continue this critical work, and the response to the assault we are experiencing has been from a feminist lens. These webs of care some have described as comadrismo - camaraderie, comrades - that have evolved from the very places those who reject a holistic and liberatory education are trying to shut down. Barragán Santoyo & Pérez (2023) write,

As Ribero and Arellano (2019) point out, ‘comadrismo refers to a feminist reciprocal relationship among women’ that can be utilized as a mentoring model (p. 336). Through building ‘trusting kinship relationships,’ women that are committed to anti-racist work can thrive and have a deep impact in their respective disciplines and classrooms (p.45).

Furthermore, authors explain that comadrismo can be used to describe the relationship between “...women who share common goals, values, and seek to utilize their bond to advance the betterment of their surrounding community.” (p. 44) and that they use their lived experiences to build community and trust while taking care of each other.

This solidarity building and flow of reciprocity in webs of care as defined by the concept of comadrismo is what will strengthen us to endure and fight back during these tense times. And as Barragan Santoyo & Perez (2023) write, “...building and embodying comadrerismo includes grounding ourselves in a Latina epistemology of care” (p. 45). Nievez Martinez et al. (2016) surface “authentic care to critical educators” to affirm that relationships and community are a cornerstone in education. Without a community of care, we cannot care for our communities.

We want to extend the ideology of comadrerismo, to harness its spirit, and attempt to describe our newly created realities by webs of care, endurance, and solidarity which folks are creating in response to the anti-education assault. When we bring these different webs of endurance together in dialogue, we generate a new social fabric for change, a new tejido that strengthens our resolve to care for one another and protect our young people as well as empower them and ourselves to foster new realities. As Nieves Martinez et al. (2016) boldly state, this “is a call...of the ways we can heal and renew our commitment to serve our students and communities” (p. 311).

Edna Chavez, who was 17 at the time, spoke to thousands who rallied at the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. in 2018 calling for gun control. She bravely spoke about her and her community’s reality with gun violence and outlined what she hoped to see. Her plea to educators and policy makers was simple, “we should feel empowered and supported in our schools” (Democracy Now, 2018). Supporting the work of young leaders like Edna is done in community and through community care- folks coming together in webs of endurance amidst this often-toxic educational landscape and sociopolitical turmoil. This issue seeks to highlight where these webs of endurance, these tejidos that generate a new social fabric for change are happening and how they are sustaining critical work:

Between families- educators

Between families

Amongst teachers

Amongst staff

Amongst students

Between staff and teachers

Between teacher-students

Community activists and partners

School board leaders and constituents

Intergenerational

In digital spaces, social media

Nonprofit organizations

We call on contributors to depict the webs of endurance in images or words in English, Spanish, bilingually to:

talk about the tension itself, the methods of endurance and role of comadrerismo, Latina epistemology of care, the social fabric for change/new tejido and

reflect on how they are not only weathering the attacks from ultra conservative groups or from within amidst social political turmoil, but also pushing back to advance critical praxis and care.

We also invite you to consider some of the following questions:

What’s working/advancing?

What learning is happening within these webs that is unique, that doesn’t happen without those personal connections, that comadrismo?

How are these spaces sites of learning, knowledge exchange, reflection and metacognition and community care?

What kind of learning, reflection and community care, comadrismo, can happen here that may not happen elsewhere?

For information on manuscript length and formatting, please visit the for authors tab on our website: https://journals.calstate.edu/dialogue/information/authors

Submissions Due: October 31, 2024

To submit, go to: https://journals.calstate.edu/dialogue

Contact: Yesenia Fernández or Maggie Landeros, Editors College of Education

California State University Dominguez Hills

indialoguejournal@gmail.com