Cimarrón Pedagogies

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About the author

Lidia Marte is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras campus). She graduated with a PhD and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her other publications focus on food, place-memory and Dominican diaspora.

About the book

Cimarrón Pedagogies is a testimonial account of how to use Critical Auto-Ethnography as main strategy for undergraduate research projects. The pedagogical approach here shared is a form of marronage, that help us create—at least in the classroom and for one semester—small liberated spaces, bridging the individual and the collective, private and public, past and present, the poetic and the political, and the local/global negotiations in our students’ lives. Researching the ground of student’s everyday experiences through their personal perspectives is a form of engaged pedagogy utilizing experiential, project-based and place-based assignments, as well as other experimental strategies. Through an auto-ethnographic project the feminist phrase “the personal is political” is felt, not just pondered, researched and theorized, generating multiple insights and empowering students to create their own ways of liberation and to document their own cultural histories. This auto-ethnographic narrative is an homage to teachers and mentors, and a celebration of life-long selfdirected learning as embodied in the author’s own educational roots and routes. The book will be useful for college instructors and teachers as well as undergraduate and graduate students for diverse courses ranging from anthropology to the humanities. The guide to the research project and the appendix are also useful for any reader interested in researching and documenting topics of significance to their local lives and to their communities.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mapping Educational Contexts, Relations and Histories

Chapter One: What Is Ethnography? Qualitative Methodologies and Academic Narratives

Chapter Two: Critical Auto-ethnography: Mapping Personal Root and Routes through “Native” Ethnography

Chapter Three: Critical Auto-ethnography in the Classroom: Auto-ethnographic Projects, Toolkit for Critical analysis and Course Design

Chapter Four: Cimarrón Pedagogies: Marronage, Critical Education and Liberation Paths

Bonus Track: Mapping the Calendars of My Educational Roots and Routes

Appendix: Teaching Resources

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my dearest friend and colleague, Natalia Biani, for being a compassionate witness, first reader and first editor of this book manuscript; without her enthusiasm for the contents, unconditional support, bilingual expertise and insights this work would have not existed. To the series editor at Peter Lang, Yolanda Medina, for her support and editing help since the book prospectus stages. I thank her for believing in the potential of this book and in my ability to complete it. I thank Peter Lang Publishers, for the risk and vision to publish this kind of work. I am grateful to my current and former students; without them this book would have not been necessary; I thank them for helping me remain a student and for inspiring me to continue teaching. I thank those who gave me permission to use samples of their work and evaluations. I thank all of those who did not drop my courses, being open minded and courageous to try the tools I offer, for letting me be a witness to their visions, struggles and cultural histories, and for nurturing hope, the certainty that new generations will help us create more sustainable, just and joyful worlds. Thank you to colleagues who read the manuscript and gave their endorsements.

Thanks to the Department of Sociology & Anthropology (DSA), University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras Campus), for support with accommodating schedules and course-load negotiations to have the time-space to focus on the completion ←ix | x→of my work. Gracias and bows of respect to our DSA chairs over these years, Jorge Giovannetti, Jaime Pérez (an ethnographer who teaches constantly through his kindness, humor and humbleness), and Lanny Thompson. To the chairs’ side-kick angels, administrative assistants, Mildred, Denise and Mari Carmen, for their kind help and for saving us from going mad with paperwork. Thanks to Dr. Ana Maritza Martinez, at one point, dean of the School of Social Sciences, for her time and kind support in moments of job crisis. Kind thanks to Bárbara Abadía-Rexach, innovative scholar, dedicated teacher and friend, for the collaboration to visit mutually our classes, learning from each other’s teaching styles. I am grateful to colleagues in the Comité de Personal of the DSA (especially to Jorge and Juan José), who—unbeknown to them—helped me return to Puerto Rico to complete my healing and to fine-tune my teaching. Thanks to Carlos Guilbe, a brilliant geographer with an ethnographer’s heart, for his support of my work, for his inspiring commitment to his teaching, for his friendship and refreshing sense of humor. Thanks to Viviana de Jesús, Paola Schiapacasse and other colleagues whose names are many to list, and to the “sin par” Donato, at the LabCAD. Thanks to Isar Godreau and Mariluz Franco, for their anti-racist and de-colonizing work that we have been using at UPR to further pedagogies of liberation, and for offering mentoring resources for undergraduate research. Thanks to the cleaning and maintenance crew and administrative staff from different schools and departments, for their work, and for their contribution to help create a community of solidarity in campus. I will be forever grateful to Carole Counihan, Samuel Wilson, Jonathan Shannon and Deborah Kapchan, for their mentoring and support all these years. Many years ago, Val Episcopo, at St. Edwards University (Austin, TX), asked me to explain my approach to using auto-ethnography in the classroom, to her also goes my gratitude, and here is my answer.