UC Santa Barbara

My ethnographic research draws on qualitative methods of interviews and participant-observation and contributes to the fields of Performance Studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. I examine the cultural work of UCSB folkloric group Raíces de mi Tierra’s dance practices as a group of majority first-generation Latinx students pursuing access to upward mobility within the modern-day landscape of a Hispanic Serving Institution. Due to the simultaneous institutional valuing of “diversity” and the student-dancers’ desire to claim institutional space for their communities revealed in interviews, Raíces is both structurally and politically incentivized to represent “diversity” and produce insular performances of “authenticity” and “tradition,” rather than engage in performance work focused on cultural experimentation (Eduardo Gonzalves 2010). Throughout interviews, dancers expressed a concern with losing their cultural heritage and identity as they face the pervasive pressures to assimilate that come with pursuing a college degree, whether in the Humanities, STEM or the Social Sciences.There is a strong conscious effort amongst Raíces members to represent Latinx and more specifically, Mexican-origin communities and create accessibility to UCSB by performing “traditional” Mexican folkloric dance as the university’s only folklórico group. By enacting a “cultural preservation” paradigm, the group reproduces the “traditional” heteropatriarchal folklórico repertoire in efforts to symbolically signal the Mexican nation and thus claim space in higher education for Mexican-origin communities. Yet, the group has begun to increasingly question the limits of the traditional Mexicaness they are performing, with the emergence of queer and feminist performances of Mexicaness taking place on campus, as well as off, since at least 2013. My project maps Chicanx/Latinx student dancers’ multiple understandings of whether queer and feminist representations are possible in the cultural work of performing Mexicaness. The cultural work of Raices de mi Tierra is shaped by the tension between competing impulses, one toward “cultural preservation” in order to represent and claim space of belonging at UCSB, and another toward “cultural transformation" in order to reimagine Mexicaness to make space for the myriad of gender-sexual identities that members embody. Raíces provides an ideal site to interrogate the contradictions of the gendered-sexual cultural politics that first-generation Latinx college students navigate in performing and making “cultural home” in HSI’s.