For nearly two decades in the academy, I’ve moved under the moniker, “woman of color.” As a guera, I came to accept my place in that coalition with some reticence. Sure, I had experienced a lot of discrimination growing up as a poor, mixed-race, Mexican American tomboy in rural Nebraska, but for better or worse, my white mother always shielded us from the racial/ethnic component of it, attributing maltreatment to the fact that “rich people hate poor people.” She wasn’t wrong, of course, but she didn’t have an intersectional analysis. Unsurprisingly, there were no Mexican American, Indigenous, or Black culture components to my middle or high school social studies classes, and at the predominantly white Christian college I went to in central Nebraska, the only course I ever had that even remotely approximated ethnic studies was called “Literature...
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Winter 2021
