ABSTRACT
This critical narrative study examines the ways in which educational spaces create avenues of activism for some of the most marginalized members in our society, such as undocumented Mexicana Indígena-Migrante women. Dolores Cruz’s counternarrative serves as a testament to the liberatory potential of educational spaces that live out a vision of social justice. Such spaces counter deficit models and violent pedagogical practices, but also make students’ prior knowledge and culture indispensable to the pedagogy of the classroom. This narrative also highlights the educational experiences of the author, Daniela Conde, who is also a Poblana Mexicana Indígena-Migrante woman, in navigating institutions of higher education in the United States as a first-generation college and graduate student. Both counternarratives provide instances of pedagogical violence that detail forms of erasure while simultaneously enacting their agency through their activism against these pedagogical borders. Dolores Cruz, as both a student and parent, and Daniela Conde manifest their humanity and politics through a Poblana Mexicana Indígena-Migrante Praxis. An analysis of Dolores’s narrative and Daniela’s self-narrative provides a compelling historical, intergenerational discourse with implications for educators who serve migrant adult learners and students.
