Entre el Sur y el Norte

List of Figures

Figure 2.1: SEQ Fotografía\*ARABIC 1 Directora y Maestra Leticia Gallardo en su viaje a Los Ángeles, California en el 2015. Source: Xóchitl Chávez

Figure 2.2: SEQ Fotografía\*ARABIC 2 Workshop 1. Identity. Source: Xóchitl Chávez

Figure 2.3: SEQ Fotografía\*ARABIC 3 Proceso de composición colectiva de la letra de la canción “Tocamos como mujer”. Source: Mercedes Alejandra Payán Ramírez

Figure 2.4: SEQ Fotografía\*ARABIC 4 Workshop 4. Conducting a band tips. Source: Mercedes Alejandra Payán Ramírez

Figure 2.5: SEQ Fotografía\*ARABIC 5 Despedida del First Transborder Gathering of Indigenous Women Musician in Santa María Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, Oaxaca. Source: Miguel Angel Santiago Martinez

Figure 4.1: Yacatsol. Source: Iris Rodriguez←ix | x→

Acknowledgments

Much gratitude to all the contributors for being a part of this book project which started during one of the most violent administrations in recent memory and was completed in the midst of a pandemic that has ravaged Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in Turtle Island and around the globe. We honor your intellectual work and creative vision to decolonize teaching/learning spaces and are grateful to learn from you on this journey. Thank you Peter Lang for your support in publishing this important contribution to decolonial studies, education, and Chicana/x/o Studies. A special thank you to the editor of this series, Margarita Machado-Casas, for your incredible guidance and support in bringing this book to life. We also thank our mentors – Marie “Keta” Miranda and Josie Méndez-Negrete for nurturing our activism and scholarship throughout the years – and students and colleagues in the Mexican American Studies program for affirming music in academia. And mil gracias to our SOMOS MAS family in San Antonio for building a community of activist scholars-teachers-cultural workers who are decolonizing education and transforming the culture of schooling in San Antonio and beyond.

Decolonizing Pedagogies entre el Sur y el Norte: Healing, Resistance and Social Change through Music

The life-giving power of music has sustained the survival of Chicana/x/o, Mexican, and Indigenous communities over five centuries of conquest, occupation, colonization, and resistance. Within the spirit of the creation-resistance (Rodriguez, 2014), this book examines music as a site of anti-colonial struggle and decolonial praxis in schools and communities within and beyond the colonial border that divides Mexico and the U.S. Premised on the emancipatory notion that schools–part and parcel of the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano, 2000) – can engender a decolonial imaginary and praxis (Pérez, 1999), we compiled this reader to provoke consciousness and cultivate decolonial approaches to teaching and learning through the critical study, performance, and creation of musical expressions. Moreover, this reader examines music as a site of healing, remembering, revitalizing, restoring, celebrating, returning, connecting, and envisioning possibilities for humanization in schools and community-based teaching/learning spaces (Smith, 2012).

As scholars committed to decolonization as a political, epistemic, spiritual, and cultural project across the continent, we examine transcultural understandings and solidarity between and across subaltern peoples of the Global North and the Global South, with particular attention to Chicana/x/o music. Music provides ways to critically explore epistemic erasures, disrupt colonial narratives, and create spaces for transformative consciousness among children and youth, particularly around issues of economic domination, migrant rights, transborder resistance, institutionalized racism, epistemic and cultural erasure, and educational inequity. We hope this collection can add ←1 | 2→to the growing possibilities towards decoloniality in our communities and abroad.

There currently is not a text that focuses solely on decolonizing education through Chicana/x/o, Mexican and Indigenous music, though scholars of Chicana/x/o music have worked to interrogate, question, and analyze music in ways that have established groundwork to further push for decolonial readings of Chicana/x/o musical expression. The contributors in this volume engage various decolonial schools of thought and connect these with Chicana/x/o borderlands epistemologies to offer new insights on how teacher-scholar-musician-activists can decolonize, indigenize, and challenge Western imperialist practices inside schools and community spaces, from K-12 classrooms, academia, and communal learning/teaching spaces. We offer new articulations on music, pedagogy, and decoloniality that take place within and across the political locations of what post-development scholars refer to as the “Global South” and the “Global North.” Scholars like Boaventura de Sousa Santos argue that coloniality is reinscribed through global capitalism within and across southern territories and nations, which are often referred to as the Global South, and northern territories and nations, which are often referred to as the Global North. Within this framework, the “Global South” includes those countries and territories that are victimized by the Global North’s “voracity of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and all their satellite-oppressions” (Santos, p. 3–4, 2014). In challenging these dehumanizing relations of power, we call for a “decolonial turn”—a paradigm shift that requires us to center our own epistemologies in our collective efforts to dismantle coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2011).

It’s important to note that the contributors in this book do not analyze coloniality from a place of a disembodied knowledge; on the contrary, they write from their own lived experiences as Chicana/x/o and Indigenous educators, transborder activists, musicians, and scholars who create, research, sustain, and teach music to cultivate consciousness and decolonized subjectivities, and offer new ways of coming to knowledge through sound, voice, and movement of the bodyspiritmind. Martha Gonzalez (2020) writes about the artistic and activist work of Chicana/x/o “artivistas” and the importance of “convivencia,” or “being present and engaging together in mind, body and spirit via participatory music and art practice” (p. 13). We acknowledge that decolonization is not an abstract in the global imaginary, nor a metaphor for other social justice projects (Tuck & Yang, 2012), but realized in our communities’ creative expressions. Creating music, whether for spiritual, political, or pedagogical purposes, is a part of what Raza Studies scholar Roberto “Cintli” Rodriguez (2015) calls creation-resistance, where the act of ←2 | 3→creating and resisting (reacting against) are both equally important strategies for humanization and social justice.¹