ABSTRACT
This autoethnographic inquiry examines the intersection of elder epistemology and subtractive education, exploring how one abuelita countered her granddaughter’s divestment of Mexicanness. I demonstrate how the grandmother used abuelita epistemologies to navigate this tension and resist the assimilative pressures felt by her granddaughter from school by consistently modeling, at home, a love for Mexican language and culture. I argue that grandmothers play a vital role in rooting young people to their linguistic and cultural assets, a sacred function that many Mexican elders have preserved and brought forward from the precontact era in the Americas to the contemporary era.
