UC San Diego

My dissertation, "Schooling La Raza : A Chicana/o Cultural History of Education, 1968-2008," interrogates the function of memory, the politics of representation, and the educational formation of subjectivity in the creation of what I am calling a Chicana/o cultural history of schooling. I focus on the integral role that schooling and educational processes play in the formation of Chicana/o subjectivity as expressed in various forms of cultural production that emerged in the decades after the Movimiento era. I synthesize theories of gender, sexuality, racial formation, multiculturalism, and critical pedagogy in my analyses of Chicana/o cultural production of schooling and education. I argue that formal and informal educational spaces and pedagogical relationships play a central role in activating the emergence and articulation of racialized, gendered, and non-normative or queer identity formations in an array of recent cultural production by Chicanas/os. The artistic and cultural expressions I examine in this project provide an avenue for understanding how Chicanas/os remember and recreate moments of individual and collective educational struggle in the post-Movimiento, 'multicultural' decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These works of Chicana and Chicano cultural production, I argue, attest to the simultaneous oppression and potential liberation of schooling and education in this country for Chicanas/os and other racialized and subjugated groups. In short, "Schooling La Raza" analyzes historical shifts in ideologies of and relationships to education and schooling, while opening up space to imagine alternative possibilities for the liberation of the educated Chicana/o subject