Letter from the Editor

 

 

Scholarly Articles

Tucson’s Maiz-Based Curriculum: MAS-TUSD Profundo

Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez

Roberto Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Mexican American & Raza Studies Department at the University of Arizona. He is a longtime-award-winning journalist/columnist who returned to school in 2003 in pursuit of a Master’s degree (2005) and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications (Jan. 2008) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He received his Bachelor’s degreee at UCLA. His current field of study is the examination of maize culture, migration, and the role of stories and oral traditions among Mexican and Central American peoples. He has a forthcoming book: Centeotzintli: Sacred Maiz – a 7,000-year Ceremonial Discourse.

 

Imputing Out the Native: How Census Practices Can Fuel Native American Population Decline

Katie Valenzuela

Katherine Valenzuela was born and raised in Oildale, California, where she has over ten years of experience in youth advocacy and community organizing. She was a member of the Central Valley Tribal Environmental Justice Transportation Collaborative and currently serves on the Transportation Work Group for the Sacramento Coalition on Regional Equity. Katie has done extensive research on Native American identity and regional nonprofit networks, presenting her work at academic and community gatherings across the nation. Katie graduated from the University of California at Davis with bachelor of science and master of science degrees in Community and Regional Development. She is currently the policy advocate for Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit civil rights law firm that works with community groups to confront systematic racial and income inequality in the areas of transportation, housing, education, and climate justice.

 

A Mestizaje of Epistemologies in American Indian Stories and Ceremony

Margaret Cantú-Sánchez

Margaret Cantú-Sánchez is a doctoral candidate in the English PhD program at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Currently, she is working on her dissertation, entitled “The Third Space of Education: A Site Bridging Education and Educación through a Mestizaje of Epistemologies,” which examines how the assimilationist and patriarchal pedagogies of the US education system affect Latinas’ connections to their cultural communities as portrayed in literature and testimonios. She is currently working on developing a theory referred to as a mestizaje of epistemologies, which argues that a balance of multiple types of knowledge, specifically from one’s culture and institutions of learning, is necessary to balance multiple identities and knowledge.

 

Reviews

Amoxtli: An Indigenous American Rhetoric and Poetics

Lydia A. French

Lydia French recently defended her dissertation, “Sonic Gentitud: Literary Migrations of the Listening Citizen,” in the Department of English and the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research into listening and literature, or aurality and writing, has led her, more recently, into explorations of the roles of the Mexica and Mixtec codices in contemporary U.S.  pedagogy. Lydia is pleased to embark on a new career at Houston Community College, where she hopes to extend in practice her understanding of the codices/amoxtli as teachers of both listening and poetics.