ABSTRACT
As an act of cleansing and survivance, I have chronicled the structural racism I have endured as the only Afro-Latina associate professor within the Social Sciences Department. I have documented the blatant comments and surreptitious practices designed to: inculcate imposter syndrome, question my epistemic credibility, and make me disappear. It’s all there, as incoherent scribbles on post-it notes, as slightly more coherent: journal entries, social media posts, text messages, and emails. I have often thought of throwing this emotional archive away; it takes up a lot of my physical and heart space. Something, that I cannot name, quizás mi abuela or los espíritus de otras académicas feministas, who haunt academe, have convinced me to keep and share them with other nepantleras. Briefly, una nepantlera is a threshold person, skilled at pivoting between and bridging discordant worlds, because they are “multi-cultural, multi-voiced, multiplicitous” (Ortega 79). Soy una nepantlera por muchas razones, because I am: a Black Dominican woman estranged from my Latinx heritage, an insider with rich embodied knowledge, who is too often positioned as an outsider—because of my academic degrees. In this chapter, I make sense of the living museum of anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism I have survived, as found letters to Barbara Christian and Gloria E. Anzaldúa.
