ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I revisit the reflexive journaling I maintained between February 2015 and September 2016, when I initially developed the Intersectional Competence Measure (ICM) for my dissertation study (Boveda, 2016). When I was a doctoral candidate, I was also an adjunct professor at Florida International University (FIU), a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in my hometown Miami, Florida. The ICM measures pre-service teachers’ understanding of intersecting sociocultural identities, and how schooling in the United States is implicated in the intersectionalities of minoritized students, including those with disabilities. At the time of my dissertation study, all of the tenure-line faculty of the doctoral program were White. A substantial number of participants in the study were undergraduates who self-identified as Hispanic or White Hispanic (Boveda & Aronson, 2019). Descriptors like Hispanic, Latinx, and People of Color are often used as essentializing terms in the United States to categorize people of multiple ethnicities, diverse colonial histories, and distinct intersectionalities (see Boveda & Bhattacharya, 2019). As such, I argue that darker-skinned Latinx 1 students and faculty—in my case, a Black, Afro-Latina at an HSI—may experience microaggressions and Racial Battle Fatigue (RBF) regardless of the significant percentages of minoritized students at the university.
