ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss how we have worked toward bridging critical race and Chicana feminist theories in our scholarship to provide us with a methodological space for sustaining meaningful relationships with our communities, theorizing lived contradictions, and healing in the research process. Each of us explain how we have carved this methodological space in our own research projects, situated within an awareness of permanent, indestructible racism (Bell, 1995) and simultaneously embracing a state of in-betweenness, contradictions, and liminality (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2002). We explain our collective approach as a critical race feminista methodology—a form of praxis that embraces a desire for memory prior to colonial violence, and a nostalgia for an epistemological wholeness that can move us toward spiritual activism and the transformation of research paradigms. This methodological approach brings an anticolonial perspective that disrupts the claimed neutrality of the research process, encourages collaboration between researchers and participants, and necessitates authentic engagement.
