By Dinorah Cortés-Vélez
Teaching Spanish language to heritage speakers at Marquette University has offered me a new way of looking at my role as a college educator of color teaching in a North American university whose student body is predominantly white, but in which there is a steady growth of the Latinx student population.
I pose my experience of personal and pedagogical engagement with this student constituency as an example of what I call “radical vulnerability,” a classroom methodology that entails a practice of horizontal engagement with the feelings of students from a place of humility, mentorship, and healthy boundaries.
The first important point to understand about the heritage students I teach is that they are breaking new ground as they map new paths of intellectual hope within their own familial histories. Many are first-generation college students trying to navigate the complexities of succeeding in college while having more than one job. Most of their families have no familiarity with what it is like to be a college student. Another pressing challenge they face has to do with overcoming a sense of linguistic “worthlessness” and of a lack of “historical viability,” due to their dual cultural identification.
Consequently, for many of these students reading the work of a border-crossing thinker like Gloria Anzaldúa constitutes more than “learning.” It entails acquiring a tool that allows for hope and survival. Anzaldúa’s chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” from her book Borderlands/ La Frontera has proven to be particularly groundbreaking for Latinx learners. I have seen many a student shudder when they read her powerful declaration of being rooted in the experience of language: “So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language.”
For Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, associate professor of Spanish at Marquette University, Jesuit educators ought to co-create learning spaces for experiencing the full range of emotions elicited by Borderlands/La Frontera (Aunt Lute Books, 1987/2012), by border-crossing thinker Gloria Anzaldúa. Photo courtesy of the English Department at the University of California, Davis.
I have been shaken to my core when reading the letters that I have them address to Anzaldúa after discussion of this chapter. For many of them, Anzaldúa’s coinage of “linguistic terrorism” becomes a passage to recognition of an open wound in need of dressing. I have seen the pride in their eyes when we read passages in Spanglish from Anzaldúa’s incantatory book out loud in the classroom.
With these lessons, they are learning first and foremost about their existential, historic, and linguistic viability. They are learning to love themselves and their language as well as the rich history of pain and beauty that comes along with it.
As teachers, we must open spaces for experiencing the full spectrum of emotions elicited by a writer such as Anzaldúa. To be truly effective, our teaching must be grounded in the body, underscoring the importance of sensations, remembrances, and emotions in the learning process as much as the importance of thoughts. For teachers, one of the main fruits of this type of engagement is intellectual humility, which allows us to see ourselves as learners alongside students who also have valuable lessons to offer.
One assignment I offer to promote this embodied knowledge consists of having students write a culinary memory of their ancestors. Students are encouraged to reminisce in a piece of creative non-fiction about their most beloved familial dishes with special reference to the way they experience those dishes in a sensorial manner. In this way, they are able to learn about self through the senses and in connection with remembrance and with their familial histories. This kind of assignment facilitates the conditions so students of different walks of life can create bridges of intellectual dialogue, in its truest form and essence, of the kind that recognizes in difference a unique opportunity for intellectual growth from a ground of intellectual curiosity and humility.
I have found that enabling students to be vulnerable in this way involves putting themselves on the line for the sake of truer, freer, and more meaningful connections with others. According to African American writer Audre Lorde, “that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” Lorde speaks from her position as a Black lesbian poet who elevates her voice in an impassioned and powerful defense of those who have been traditionally silenced. For a writer like Lorde, the visibility of vulnerability is akin to breaking away from censorship and silence.
As a conscious mode of being-in-the-world, vulnerability commands a certain type of attention, a delicate understanding of our ingrained interconnectedness as human beings. From that place of fragility, we can choose to build each other up with the tender tenacity of the weaver’s hands that knit a beautiful fabric. Our existences are tightly woven together like the threads on a loom. Accepting the fact of this essential interdependence entails the vulnerability to embrace our shared fragility. Embracing this fragility, in turn, opens us to our shared humanity by encouraging more compassion with one another.
Dinorah Cortés-Vélez is associate professor of Spanish at Marquette University. This essay is an edited version of a longer chapter in the recently published e-book, On the Vocation of the Educator in this Moment, edited by Jennifer S. Maney and Melissa M. Shew.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Greg Rakozy via Unsplash.