UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation investigates ten Latina women’s daily praxis of resistance against forms of oppression and how their praxis is related to their freedom dreams for social change. Using liberation psychology and decoloniality as guiding paradigms, this study bears witness to Latina women’s creation of more liberatory worlds. Participants were recruited through flyers posted in and around Santa Cruz county. Participants were invited to participate in a workshop to share testimonios of their daily life experiences, challenges, hopes and dreams, as well as partake in a series of activities to learn about themselves and others (e.g., letter writing to a loved one). Following the workshops, participants were invited to participate in one-on-one interviews to elaborate on information they shared during the workshop. All participants were invited at the end of the study to participate in a member check event to learn about the preliminary results of the study, provide input, and create a collective zine to share results of the study within the community. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis in conjunction with the Listening Guide. The feedback received during the member check event also guided analysis. Results demonstrated that women’s daily praxis of resistance involved healing the wounds of different forms of racial capitalist settler colonial fragmentation between knowledge of the past, present, and future, bodies (their own, bodies of others, and bodies of land), and communities. Specifically, women in the study: (1) helped their sons to (re)connect with their cultural roots and (re)learn a connection to the earth, (2) worked on healing the relationship between themselves and their bodies through a praxis of radical self-love, which had implications for healing their relationship to the bodies of others and cultivating love for others across difference, and (3) with the help of community, they worked on healing their connections to community and to themselves through the support of chosen family, mutual aid practices, and community pedagogy. Furthermore, women’s freedom dreams for social change demonstrated an understanding of the interconnectedness between personal and collective liberation. This dissertation concludes with implications, limitations of this study, and future directions for research.