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During my first year as a graduate student, I was bombarded with many issues that I was ill-equipped to deal with. I felt an urgency to situate the way I was treated and contextualize my experiences as a Latina in academia. Without a safe space to discuss my experiences and grievances, I began to think more critically about the advice I was often given: to keep my mouth shut. What are the implications of such advice? How many scholars of color in academia are encouraged or forced into silence? In an effort to answer these questions, I embarked on a process of counter storytelling1 with Latina professors, in order to learn about their experiences in higher education2 to explore how issues of race and gender are manifested in the lives of Latina faculty.
The counter stories of Latina faculty detail how factors of race, gender, and class stratify educational and professional opportunities in higher education. I weave their testimonios to reveal the complex identities of Latinas. From personal encounters to institutional practices, these Doctoras confront pervasive racism and sexism throughout their careers. Through their testimonios, I seek to consider how opportunities and constraints impact issues of race and gender in the academy, and to address the multiple identities and forms of oppression that Latinas negotiate in academia today.
The key to the power of their counter stories is both understanding and unpacking the differential meaning of silence. It is crucial to interrogate emotion and pain in the face of racial and gender oppression that may underlie counter stories and the silences that surround them.3 Silence is often a result of oppression and the role that power and politics plays in the production of knowledge. Shame, guilt, and oppressive exclusionary forces can induce silence. Margaret Chon (1995) underscores silence as the denial or lack of recognition that we are being raced and gendered. Silence can work as a control to dampen the trauma of racialization and pretend that incidents never occurred (Chon, 1995, 27). Yet silence is both an involuntary and voluntary mechanism to deal with oppression. Silence can also include active resistance, the antithesis of passivity. Thus, we must read silences multivalently to consider the dynamics that surround them, the various...