Storytelling and Mothering: A Portrait of a Homegrown,Mexican American Teacher

Introduction: Braiding the Threads of Epistemology, Methodology, and Method

Necesitamos teorías that will rewrite history using race, class, gender, and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries—new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.

—Gloria Anzaldúa (1990), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras

At the heart of this article are the stories of a woman who identifies herself as a “homegrown,” Mexican American teacher (Irizarry, 2007). It is through storytelling with this teacher, Ms. Luna Martinez, that we come to understand how race, class, gender, ethnicity, and motherhood cross borders from the home to the classroom and back again. Although I am focusing here on the life story of one teacher, it should be noted that her story resides within a larger research context. Through portraiture, this article will detail episodes within the life story of Ms. Luna Martinez. However, I would be remiss to totally neglect the other teachers who shared their stories with me.

I met Ms. Luna Martinez as I was beginning life history interviews with Chicana teachers who have lived and taught within the past 80 years in Southern California. All the storytellers in this larger research context are women of Mexican descent, born on both sides of the Mexico–U.S. border. They identify themselves in a myriad of different ways: Mexican, mexicana pero americanizada, Mexican American, Chicana, Latina, and American. They are a multigenerational group, with birthdays spanning generations across the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Each storyteller views the act of teaching as a political, moral, and/or spiritual commitment. This assortment of 11 Chicana teachers has defined ethnic and political identities and view Students of Color students from an assets-based perspective (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Yosso, 2005). Through (a) preinterviews, (b) oral life history interviews, and (c) classroom observations, I document how each one of these Chicana teachers explain connections between their lived experiences and their literacy pedagogies in the K-12 classroom through portraiture.

The intent of this introduction is to offer the epistemological orientation for the methodologies and methods utilized in the study. The three elements of epistemology, methodology, and methods are braided together in interrelated, yet separate strands throughout the research process (Delgado Bernal, 1998b; Diaz Soto, Cervantes-Soon, Villareal, & Campos, 2009; Harding, 1989). Oral history interviews, guided by a Chicana Feminist sensibility, provide a research tool that disrupts dominant ways of knowing and remembering Chicana teachers. Portraiture, as a final product, offers a contextual frame of phenomenon within individual lives.

I bring to this work a Chicana Feminist sensibility as a Chicana-Tejana with Irish roots, as a former classroom teacher, as a teacher educator, and as a mother. These sensibilities inform the guiding epistemology for this study. My work is strategic and purposeful in centering Chicana teachers as Women of Color, as “knowledge holders and creators” (Delgado Bernal, 2002), in the teaching profession. This approach values teachers as intellectuals and teaching as intellectual work (Giroux, 1988). Such an intentional emphasis seeks to counter dominant ideologies that measure teacher effectiveness and student learning through one-dimensional methods.

While positivist scholarship may criticize the insertion of the researcher’s experiences into her empirical study, Chicana feminist epistemology welcomes and honors the researcher’s cultural intuition throughout the research process (Calderón, Delgado Bernal, Pérez Huber, Malagón, & Vélez, 2012; Delgado Bernal, 1998b, 2002; Rocha, Alonso, Mares-Lopez-Tamayo, & Reyes McGovern, 2013). It is akin to what Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997 terms the “personal context.” Cultural intuition offers a particular standpoint from which to understand the life history interviews and classroom observations of Chicana teachers. Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997 maintains that by “noting the perch and perspective of the portraitist, the reader can better interpret the process and product of her vision” (p. 50). For this reason, I try to be transparent about who I am as an educational researcher and how my cultural intuition informs this study.

A Chicana Feminist sensibility to oral life history interviews allows for the complexities, connections, and contradictions within the lived experiences of the Chicana experience (Delgado Bernal, 1997; Johnson, 1998; Montoya, 1994; Pérez & Huber, 2009; Trucios-Haynes, 2000). Delgado Bernal (1998a) maintains,

[Chicana Feminist epistemology] questions objectivity, a universal foundation of knowledge, and the Western dichotomies of mind versus body, subject versus object, objective truth versus subjective emotion, and male versus female. In this sense, a Chicana epistemology maintains connections to indigenous roots by embracing dualities that are necessary and complementary qualities, and by challenging dichotomies that offer opposition without reconciliation. (p. 560)

Such ideologies are important in a world filled with complex contradictions and inconsistencies. Delgado Bernal explains that embracing dualities as both necessary and complementary is an important ideological principle of Chicana Feminism. Furthermore, this approach attempts to explicitly recognize more indigenous ways of thinking and seeks to combat colonial models of research and epistemological racism (Gutiérrez, 2008; Scheurich & Young, 1997).

By employing oral life history interviews as storytelling, I provide nuanced ways to understand individual and collective similarities and differences, in the lived realities of women from similar political, ethnic, geographical, educational, generational, and professional backgrounds. Oral life histories offer an opportunity to explore the perspectives and interpretations of individuals whose stories have been excluded and distorted within research and the dominant imagination (Delgado Bernal, 1998b). Thus, oral life history interviews, as a form of oral storytelling, are concerned with the expression of the subaltern voice (Spivak, 1988) and explicate the need for oral sources with working-class Communities of Color as a way to preserve history and collective memory (Delgado Bernal, 1998b). This method—as it concerns itself with the relationship between story and collective memory—can provide an in-depth exploration into the situated nature of literacy in each of the lives of this group of Chicana teachers. Sociocultural scholars Barton and Hamilton (2000) suggest, “[a] person’s practices can also be located in their own history of literacy. In order to understand this, we need to take a life history approach, observing the history within a person’s life” (p. 14). Oral life history interviews allow Chicana teachers to situate their classroom practices within their own literacy experiences. An oral life history interview, with a Chicana feminist sensibility, values storytelling and works to link literacy events within the development of a collective historical memory.

Oral life histories, within this specific epistemological orientation, require portraiture as a final publishable product to describe the “richness, complexity, and dimensionality of human experience in social and cultural context” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 3). This phenomenological inquiry process interrogates “the expression of goodness [while] documenting how the subjects or actors in the setting define goodness” (p. 9). This is not to say that the portraits are “designed to be documents of idealization or celebration. In examining the dimensionality and complexity of goodness, there will, of course, be ample evidence of vulnerability and weakness” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 9). As an approach that truly “listens for a story,” I am able to depict the lives and teaching practices of Chicana teachers, through the intersections of race, class, gender, immigration, migration, generational status, language, Catholicism, and phenotype (Delgado Bernal, 1997; Johnson, 1998; Montoya, 1994; Pérez Huber, 2010 Trucios-Haynes, 2000). Portraiture allows for such a nuanced understanding of these teachers by situating their lived literacy experiences within a specific context.

Portraiture highlights the nuances of the human experience through a concentrated focus on context. My Chicana cultural intuition has taught me that all aspects of context are significant in painting human experience and meaning. Portraiture establishes a contextual framework, which includes internal context, personal context, historical context, and shaping the context (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Such a framework weaves a background for each of the teachers’ lives and layers a moment in the teacher’s classroom as a single thread within the larger tapestry of the teachers’ lives as Chicanas living in the United States.

The tools of oral life histories create a historical context that provides the frame of remembering and reshaping the past in the present. While Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis (1997) suggests a visual scan of the present to shape the historical context, I interpret this to also include a historical scan of place. Through U.S. Census data and historical research, I provide a framework that historicizes the lived experiences of these teachers.

As the researcher, I employ oral life history interviews through storytelling to contextualize the individual and collective similarities and differences in this group of teachers who share similar gendered, political, ethnic, geographical, educational, generational, and professional backgrounds. Oral life history interviews offer an in-depth exploration into the situated nature of literacy in the lives of Chicana teachers (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Oral life history interviews allow Chicana teachers to situate their classroom literacy pedagogies within their own personal experiences with literacy. Oral life history interviews, with a Chicana feminist sensibility, privilege voices of the marginalized and insist on a close relationship between participants and researcher (Delgado Bernal, 1998b; Spivak, 1988). Storytelling works to develop a collective memory that links individual experiences to larger historical-cultural events.

As the writer, I paint portraits with teacher-storytellers to depict lives and pedagogies through an intersectional framework. The remainder of the essay will offer a portrait of one Chicana teacher from this larger group.

This is the portrait of Ms. Luna Martinez—a “homegrown” teacher who has lived, taught, and raised generations of children over the last six decades in Pasadena, California where she also sometimes goes to church.

Portrait of Ms. Luna Martínez

It was very empowering for me to see what changes I could make with the kids [her students]. And in turn the kids made a change in my own children’s lives.

—Interview, August 7, 2012

I first met Ms. Luna Martinez through her daughter, Keka, a professional colleague and dear friend of mine. I was new to California and thrilled to meet a fellow English teacher who shared a passion for Chicana/o literature. I was already feeling pangs of leaving the high school classroom and was thirsty for interactions with like-minded educators. In this moment, I was very new to the formal research process, having only taken one year of coursework in my doctoral program. As I begin to define and express my research focus, my dear friend, Keka, encouraged me to speak more with her mother. My friend quickly explained one night, after a research practicum class, that her mother could offer insight into how the Chicana/o Movement played a role in her decision to become a teacher—which, at that time, was a theme I thought I wanted to explore in my dissertation. This eventually led to a burgeoning friendship between Ms. Luna Martinez and myself.

After I designed a formal recruitment flyer for my doctoral research, I sent out the document to my professional and personal networks. The flyer was an attempt to recruit female teachers of Mexican descent who viewed their teaching as a political, moral, and/or spiritual act. My friend, Keka, immediately responded to my email, sharing that she thought her mom would be a perfect teacher to participate in the study. After sending the recruitment flyers and after the initial conversations with Keka, I did not hear from Ms. Luna Martinez. I thought to myself that she was decidedly not keen on any spotlighted attention—which is very much in keeping with Ms. Luna Martinez’ character. From what I gathered through subsequent texts, phone calls, and interactions with both mother and daughter, Ms. Luna Martinez is a little shy and tremendously humble. She questioned why her story would matter to educational research. In fact, Ms. Luna Martinez revisited this in one of our later email correspondences, “As you know, I was rather hesitant to have you do the interview but our friend Keka kept saying that my story was worthy of being told” (L. Martinez, personal communication, May 28, 2013).

A couple months after I sent out the recruitment flyer and a couple of months after not hearing from Ms. Luna Martinez, I was invited by the Luna Martinez family to attend a birthday celebration. During this family gathering, Ms. Luna Martinez beckoned me over to a corner in the backyard. As she sat and petted her dogs, she asked if I was still accepting participants for my research project. Sunset was almost over—there was still a slight glow in the sky. “Of course, I am,” I replied. And she casually mentioned that she would be interested in participating. I literally wanted to jump up and down, I was so excited. From just the bits that she had shared with me, earlier in our relationship, and the additions that Keka had provided over the years, I knew Ms. Luna Martinez had a powerful story to share. Although internally I was jumping up and down with excitement to have an opportunity to speak with Ms. Luna Martinez, I tried to calmly arrange a time for our life history interview. About a week later, I returned back to her home, and this time with two coffees and pan dulce in hand to begin storytelling.

Ms. Luna Martinez is a tall woman with broad shoulders. She wears her salt and pepper hair in a style that frames her face. Her brown eyes are very expressive and almost twinkle when she smiles. Smiles come easily to Ms. Luna Martinez and she can, in midsentence, transform her face from one of concern to joy in seconds. Her children also share her expressive brown eyes and easy smile. Ms. Luna Martinez often quietly chuckles with her smile. She is warm, down-to-earth, unassuming, and one of those people that I would describe as “having a big heart”—it is so apparent throughout her demeanor that she truly cares about other people.

Having only recently retired from the teaching profession, Ms. Luna Martinez left with more than 30 years of service in Pasadena Unified Public Schools (PUSD). During her time in PUSD, Ms. Luna Martinez worked both as an elementary and secondary teacher in the Spanish language and English language arts secondary classrooms. She recently retired two years ago from teaching English language arts and English as a second language with seventh and eighth graders.

Home is an important component of Ms. Luna Martínez’s story; indeed, her home is the place where she felt comfortable enough to agree to an oral life history and to share her stories with me. She embodies the theme of home in her storytelling about her students, children, and family. She is a lifelong resident of Pasadena, California. She was born, educated, raised her own children, and has spent her entire professional teaching career in Pasadena—she also sometimes goes to mass in Pasadena. Ms. Luna Martinez embodies a “homegrown” teacher in the community.

Ms. Luna Martínez stays firmly grounded and visible within Pasadena, which provides opportunities for deep relationships with students and their families who also reside within Pasadena. Upon first entering Ms. Luna Martínez’ last classroom before she retired, I was struck by the 20-ft long photographic collage of her current and past pupils, which entirely engulfed one of her classroom walls. Her classroom was on the second floor of the main campus building. It had large windows that took up the east-facing wall. Her classroom was organized into round tables where about eight students could sit.

Similar to her own home, Ms. Luna Martinez had many photographs of her family and students decorating the classroom and several framed photographs displayed throughout her classroom on small tables and bookshelves—which gives the classroom a homey feel. Within the collage of photographs are the generations of students that Ms. Luna Martínez has taught throughout her career. In some families, she has educated all of the siblings. She frequently finds, by asking students questions about themselves, the family relationships between her current students and her former students as parent and child, siblings, cousins, and even between madrinas and padrinos and their ahijadas/os.

One framed picture sits on a bookshelf near Ms. Luna Martinez’ desk. The photograph displays one of her current male students with his padrino, one of her former students, on the day of her current student’s confirmation. Such generational connections are symbolic of Ms. Luna Martínez’s story within the city.

Her roots in Pasadena begin with the childhood migration of her parents from the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Jalisco to Texas, and then later to Pasadena, where they eventually became homeowners. Despite discriminatory housing practices during that time, she describes that her parents were able to buy a home in a White area of town:

Mom had to pass as White. I have pictures of mom, so mom could pass as White. She didn’t take Dad with her to buy the house. And so that’s how they got the house. The neighbors didn’t talk to mama. Then one of the neighbors was being snoopy. My sister, the middle sister that passed away, was climbing up the stairs when Mama was hanging up the clothes. So the neighbor comes and grabs Cristina and hands her to mom and then they started talking. She asked if my dad was African American. And mom said, “No, we’re Mexican.”

Her parents’ experience offers a microcosmic glimpse into the Mexican American housing experience during the twentieth century through the lens of Pasadena. It also demonstrates the pride her parents and Ms. Luna Martinez feel in identifying as Mexican. While Pasadena often conjures up images of whiteness and affluence, Ms. Luna Martínez suggests a different story that includes Mexican American resistance strategies amid a White power structure that aimed to enforce racial segregation in housing.

Light-skinned Mexican Americans have frequently passed as White to gain access to housing, employment, education, and social acceptance (Martinez, 1997). The 1940s signaled a time when Mexican Americans were racially defined as White, although treated and segregated as a culturally inferior “White” ethnic group. ¹ It was not until the 1970s, when Ms. Luna Martínez was completing her college career, that Mexican Americans were legally considered a racial group different from White. ²

This single story highlights the ways constructs of whiteness have historically controlled property and material realities within a collective experience (Harris, 1993). The varied realities of Mexicans living in the United States, in relation to whiteness, highlight the diversity in phenotype across this ethnic group, as well as the influences of Indigenous, African, and European roots across this group (Menchaca, 2001). The phenotypic, and perhaps social, proximity of some Mexican Americans with African Americans is reinforced by the inquiries of Mr. Luna Martinez’s neighbor. This neighbor’s question also highlights a historic demographic change in Pasadena during the 1940s and 1950s. During those decades, post–World War II, the African American population of Pasadena grew steadily (Gaines-Carter & Mathews, 1986). This growth reflects a pattern of movement during the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the Jim Crow South moving into more Northern and Western states (Wilkerson, 2016).

The shift in population with the growth of Latina/o and African American communities in Pasadena, in addition to the legal spotlight that Brown v. Board placed on racially segregated schools, created an opportunity for the federal government to intervene in the Pasadena public schools. The federal government mandated that something be done to shift school populations. In 1970, the Pasadena School board put forth a busing policy to ensure that “all schools should have populations as similar as possible to the whole district’s ethnic composition” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1972).

Ms. Luna Martínez identifies the onset of Pasadena busing as an important contextual factor in her experience. She explains that when she was a high school student, [the high school] “was still basically very White”:

I graduated in 1971 and court-ordered busing started in 1970. I guess, we Latinos added some color to the school, but there weren’t that many Latinos there because the emphasis was busing of African American students and not Latino students. The Latinos, we were just sort of lost, and tried to fit in as best we could.

Again, this moment signifies the racial experience of Mexicans living in the United States. Historically, the United States has categorized Latina/os according to a binary White–Black racial measurement that has defined American segregation policies. This simplistic, reductive categorization has created problems for individuals like Ms. Luna Martinez. She highlights this through her experience with busing in which Latina/os—and, in most cases—Chicanas/os Mexicans, have been segregated by custom, rather than by law. Hence, they are left in limbo with regard to federal desegregation regulations within a White–Black framework.

Identifying with this history and with Pasadena as home is significant for Ms. Luna Martínez. Within this understanding, Ms. Luna Martínez very much embodies an “activist-mothering” stance. She has worked with students in the Pasadena community through various educational support programs for first-generation college students and states, “I thought of the kids in Upward Bound and Puente as being my kids.” Ms. Luna Martínez demonstrates a familial relationship with her students by maintaining strong connections to former students. On occasion, she has been known to act as a mediator between administrators and her students when their own families are unable to make school meetings.

Ms. Luna Martínez’s activist-mothering is indicative of her leadership skills and role within her school and the community. Throughout the day, during passing periods and lunch, a consistent group of former students stops into the classroom to greet Ms. Luna Martínez, give her a hug, and write on the board. Sometimes, the students will rewrite the assignments in their own “font.” Other times, they write little messages like, “Ms. Luna Martínez loves Jenni” or “Jenni loves Ms. Luna Martínez” or “Jenni was here.” Many of the students are high school juniors and seniors who had Ms. Luna Martínez as ninth graders.

One of these students, upon being introduced to me, led me to her own framed picture, which shared a special location on another bookshelf near Ms. Luna Martínez’s desk. The student seemed particularly proud of the picture, which captured her quinceañera. This young woman’s dress was different from the more traditional frilly garment usually worn by a quinceañera; the dress was bright yellow and in a charro style. In mentioning this to Ms. Luna Martínez, she remarked that yes, her dress had been specially tailored. Ms. Mares López also described the student’s quinceañera and the unique cactus centerpieces.

Other teachers and administrators in the school notice the type of familial relationships that Ms. Luna Martínez builds with her students. Ms. Luna Martínez shared that, while she purposefully creates these types of ties with her students (“her kids”), others do not always appreciate such close relationships. She describes one example:

Last year we got a new principal. For some reason, he has continually questioned my ability as a teacher. One day, he stopped me in the hall and said something to the effect that, in talking to the older students about me, whereas he did not ask the students, they came out and told him that they did not do the work in their classes for themselves. But because they loved me and they knew it was important to me, that they do the work. He looked puzzled, and it was quite evident that he was bothered. I could only think how foolish he was and how detached he was from many of our students.

In this quote, one sees how Ms. Luna Martínez interprets why her students turn in work. While the students may not want to do work, they do it because they “love her.” Ms. Luna Martínez suggests that the type of familial relationship she cultivates with her students motivates them to do work. This depicts, from a teacher perspective, the type of caring relationships that Angela Valenzuela (1999) describes in her ethnography with Mexican American youth. In creating such relationships, Ms. Luna Martínez enacts “other-mothering” by stepping into a “mother-teacher” role where she demands high quality work from her students while offering the necessary social-emotional and academic support to complete it.

Ms. Luna Martínez’s identity as a teacher is very much tied to the perception of herself as a mother. When asked to talk about who she is as a person, Ms. Luna Martínez emphatically declares, “When I see who I am, I would like to see myself first as a mom. That’s what I feel is most important for me in my identity of who I am.” As she discusses the importance of motherhood, she looks upon two photographs of her family, which includes three children, two biological children, and a nephew who she has raised as a son. The emphasis that Ms. Luna Martínez places on mothering comes from a deep respect for her own mother who passed away as she entered her first days of high school. She remembers, as a young child, holding motherhood and her own mother in high esteem:

I remember at my elementary school here in Pasadena, Madison Elementary, there was a big assembly every year. And those of us that were the hall monitors, we’d go up and get our award from one of the PTA moms. When the PTA mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “a mom.” Everybody in the audience just started laughing. But, in my mind, that to me was the greatest job you could ever have. I think, basically, it was because of the high esteem I felt for my own mother.

As highlighted previously, Ms. Luna Martínez intimately ties her roles as a teacher and a mother within a single existence. Ms. Luna Martínez develops close relationships with students through motherly care (Foster, 1993). Angela Valenzuela (1999) suggests that a caring pedagogy is culturally relevant. The Mexican American students in her study describe the best teacher as someone who “‘helps you to be a better person book-wise and social-wise,’ and ‘loves Mexicans and the Spanish language we speak’” (p. 157). Ms. Luna Martínez accomplishes a culturally relevant teaching practice through the books, assignments, conversations, and relationships she cultivates with students.

During one lesson, Ms. Luna Martínez introduced an autobiographical book by Francisco Jimenez entitled The Circuit: Cajas de Cartón, which is a series of linked stories that follow the life of a family who travel “the circuit” harvesting crops throughout California. Ms. Luna Martínez began by asking students to define “circuit.” One student described a personal experience in his summer basketball league where the coach had youth athletes run circuits. Another student said, “a circuit breaker, like we have in our house.” In both instances, Ms. Luna Martínez affirmed the students’ responses by saying things, such as “Taylor gave us a great example” and “yes, exactly, that’s the definition most people know.” She then transitioned into the title of novel, connected the different students’ examples to define “circuit,” and then highlighted specific ways they are used within the book.

Ms. Luna Martínez explained how “circuit,” in the context of this story, described the migratory pattern of farm workers through the lens of her own personal experiences. She did this by first asking her seventh graders if “anyone has family that dealt with working in the fields?” Many students responded, “no”; and some did not reply. Ms. Luna Martínez shared the experiences of her father as a farm worker. She described, once, as a small child looking at her father’s feet, and asking him why they were discolored. He explained to her that his toes had become infected with frostbite one winter, while he worked in the fields. Ms. Luna Martínez informed the class that her father mostly worked with cotton and pears. She concluded her familial story by stating, “these stories affected my life.” Ms. Luna Martínez transitioned back to the novel by identifying the title and author while pointing to the book. She asks, “What does the term ‘migrant farm worker’ mean?” No students responded, and Ms. Luna Martínez suggested they “think of it in terms of a monarch butterfly” (Field notes, October 4, 2012).

These momentary glimpses into the classroom of Ms. Luna Martínez demonstrate her culturally relevant literacy practices. She consistently attempts to link the content material to the students’ lives by asking them to name and define words, like “circuit” and “migrant farm worker,” from their own experiences.

Although students may not have direct experience with migrant farm work, this type of labor remains an important part of labor history and Ethnic Studies. In a classroom of almost all Latina/o students, in a school community where 62.2% of all students identify as Latina/o, and in a region where more than half of all Latina/os identify themselves as Mexican, the teacher’s decision to highlight the experiences of Mexican Americans is deliberate. Ms. Luna Martínez, in choosing these examples and these types of literature, is making a clear statement about Mexicans and Mexican Americans as “knowledge holders and creators.” Ms. Luna Martínez welcomes the lived experiences of her students by encouraging them to use their life as a unit of analysis. The inclusion of their “funds of knowledge” validates students’ lives as cultural beings and asks them to reflect on the meaning-making within their experiences. Ms. Luna Martínez scaffolds and models these types of personal connections to the material through the use of her own familial stories.

Culturally relevant practices are important to Ms. Luna Martínez because of her own experiences in Pasadena and Los Angeles schools. Some of her most salient memories come from her later years as a high school student and college student at Pasadena High School, Pasadena Community College, and the University of Southern California, respectively. She recalls one of these moments as a high school student in an Advanced Placement history class:

Here, in Pasadena, we were sort of in a vacuum of what was going on in the rest of the world in the late 1960s, early 1970s. So hearing about the student walkouts in LA schools and stuff, and I’m asking my dad “what’s going on?” And my dad was very protective of not wanting me to know what was going on because of what he had gone through as far as the American Dream and fitting in. So I had an Advanced Placement history class. I was between a B and an A in the class, so she [the teacher] told those of us that had a B+ that if we did this special research project, we could bring it up to an A. So I thought, “Ok, I’m going to do it on what’s going on in LA.” I do this research. I’m really getting involved in it. Like, at night, instead of doing my homework, I’m reading, reading, reading. I thought I had a really good presentation. This is during eleventh grade and there’s no way I’m getting in front of the class [to present], but I did. I was very proud of myself that I was going to go up there. I think I probably got through what would be a paragraph of my presentation, and she told me to sit down. She turned bright red. And she said, “You’re lying, you know none of this what you’re saying is true. This is not going on.” And she was just furious. I thought, you know, she was older; I thought she was going to have a heart attack or something. And the class was just looking at me. I put my head down and went to my desk. . . . I sat down, and, a week later, she apologized that she had to give me B+ in the class, but I needed to realize that these things were basically propaganda. That it wasn’t real. That it was being pulled out of proportion.

This experience marks an important moment in the critical literacy development of Ms. Luna Martínez. It offers a moment of exposure to the powerful student voice within the Chicana/o movement in East Los Angeles, just 10 miles south from her Pasadena home. The 1960s and 1970s marked a wave of reform and revolution internationally. The liberation movements throughout Africa and Asia overthrew European colonial powers, and students throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe were protesting unjust racial, economic, and educational conditions.

In this instance, Ms. Luna Martínez experienced a microaggression—a covert form of racism that powerfully affects the lives of people of color through “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’” (Pierce, Care, Pierce-Gonzalez, & Wills, 1978, p. 66). Without actually calling Ms. Luna Martínez a “liar,” the teacher attempts to discredit her research and the larger Chicana/o movement as a myth. It is this moment that I see as a pivotal point of Ms. Luna Martinez’ decision to become a teacher. It is through this hurtful moment that she decides that she wants elementary and secondary students to have teachers who value their insight and knowledge. From my vantage point, it is in this moment that Ms. Luna Martinez begins to weave all of the lessons from her “pedagogies of the home” and articulate political clarity around herself as an educator.

Although Ms. Luna Martínez’s high school offered over five different languages as a world language requirement, Spanish was not offered. Ms. Luna Martínez reflects on this moment here:

I didn’t even think to ask, why aren’t you offering me Spanish? I’m going over the list again and thinking, “Mom said French is a lot like Spanish, so I’ll take French.” Given the way I am now, given my experiences, I could have asked [my counselor], “why aren’t I being offered Spanish”? But I didn’t at the time. I went through high school taking French, and then I wanted to get back to what I felt were my roots. And I took Spanish [at community college].

Even though Ms. Luna Martínez is of Mexican descent, she did not grow up speaking Spanish. The influence of Americanization, acculturation, and corporal school punishments caused many Mexican American families within Ms. Luna Martínez’s parents’ generation to encourage English over Spanish.

Such experiences are characteristic of the time period. This miseducation of Mexicans about Mexicans has been used to subjugate, devalue, criminalize, and pathologize people of Mexican descent. In a response to the dominant colonial and deficit perspective toward Mexican Americans in schools, Ms. Luna Martínez entered the teaching profession. Her Spanish professor at Pasadena Community College, also of Mexican descent, played a role in guiding her to this career choice, reminding her that other Chicanitas/os should not experience the same type of dismissive and destructive education that she had endured (Duncan-Andrade, 2005).

The East Los Angeles school walkouts of 1968 proved to be instrumental in the critical literacy development of Ms. Luna Martínez. As a teacher-candidate in the Teacher Education Department at the University of Southern California, Ms. Luna Martínez sought to intern with one of the most prominent teacher-leaders of the 1968 school blowouts, Mr. Sal Castro. She describes the first meeting she had with the school principal at Belmont, the high school where Mr. Castro taught after his political involvement at Lincoln High School:

When I went to meet the principal at Belmont . . . I said that “Sal Castro is here. Could I please observe his classroom?” And you know the man’s just looking at me, but I couldn’t read his expression. And he said, “Well I would like you to go to the reading class. I see you’re an English major and maybe you can meet him in the hall or I’ll set it up.” Elexia, between the time of getting from Belmont to SC—because I didn’t drive, I used to take the bus to SC—by the time I got from there, the principal had already called SC and said he didn’t want me on his campus.

In this passage, one sees Ms. Luna Martínez actively seeking the type of culturally relevant political education that Mr. Castro embodied. While the principal at Belmont was adamant about not having an “agitator” like Ms. Luna Martínez on the campus, she was eventually permitted to stay as a student teacher with the reading teacher. Mr. Castro would, however, come to the reading class each day and invite Ms. Luna Martínez into his classroom. Every day of her student teaching tenure, she gladly accepted.

Moments like this are important to highlight within Chicana/o history. While many of the student and teacher activists are highlighted in understandings of the Movement, there continue to be missing stories of educators, activists, artists who were deeply affected by the political action during this time period. Often, the smaller acts of resistance are ignored in more popular renditions of the era. It is in these quiet moments, at home and in her classroom, that Ms. Luna Martinez enacts her resistance.

One way that Ms. Luna Martínez ensures her students will have a meaningful and positive educational experience is by including their cultures directly into the English language arts curriculum. On one particular day, Ms. Luna Martínez was discussing a segment from Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street—a popular Chicana/o novel that is often taught in secondary schools. She had made copies of a vignette from the chapter entitled, “My Name.” Ms. Luna Martínez began the activity as a “read-aloud” and later asked other students to read sections of the vignette. She explained “vignette” as something that could stand apart from a book or could be read with the entire book. She also connected “vignette” to a previous assignment on autobiographical essays to contextualize the particular, personal writing style of Sandra Cisneros.

Ms. Luna Martínez draws from students’ prior knowledge on autobiographical essays and describes the vignette as a short story inspired from the author’s life. The opening line of the vignette begins, “In English, my name means hope.” Immediately, Ms. Luna Martínez stops reading, and asks,

Ms. Luna Martínez validates the language that the students speak by including Spanish into the official script of the classroom. All of her students in this class are English language learners; almost all of these students are Spanish speakers, except for one young boy who speaks Armenian.

The next person to read is a Latina student with full shoulder-length brown hair held back by a headband. Every so often, Ms. Luna Martínez stops her to check in with the students for understanding and cultural references. In one part, Cisneros describes the music of the main character’s father, “like sobbing.” She stops with the word “sobbing” and asks the students what it means. Students respond with things like, “cries,” “sad,” and “mad.” Ms. Luna Martínez pushes the students further by making a connection between sobbing and La Llorona. She asks the students, “What does La Llorona do?”

The students reply that she cries a lot because

While La Llorona constitutes part of a culturally relevant folklore among Mexican communities, Ms. Luna Martínez next asks students to think about the type of music that Cisneros could be describing. Students respond in the following ways:

During this exchange, students mention four different genres from within the Mexican musical tradition—corridos, romanticos, mariachis, and rancheras. Ms. Luna Martínez does not interrupt while the students call out different types of music. Rather, she waits for the students to provide all of their examples before asking a student to continue reading out loud.

This moment creates a “Third Space” in which students pull from their “funds of knowledge” to infer the type of music playing in the story. Inference is an important English language arts skill that is addressed within Common Core Secondary ELA standards. Ms. Luna Martínez does not comment on which type of music she thinks is playing. Allowing the students to provide their own examples, without giving any definite answers, can develop literacy skills that are nurtured from students’ experiential backgrounds to analyze written text. Ms. Luna Martínez deliberately chooses literature that is relevant to the cultural and ethnic identities of her students to create opportunities for text-to-self connections. From the enthusiasm in the students’ responses, it appears that they see their lived experiences as a valuable tool for literary analysis. Furthermore, while some of the students use examples that are not explicitly within the Mexican musical tradition (e.g., song from Titanic, instrumentals), Ms. Luna Martínez does not deter the students from expressing their opinions and visualizing this literary scene.

Ms. Luna Martínez is a homegrown teacher who intimately understands the importance of culturally relevant classroom practices, given her own experiences in Pasadena high schools. One may speculate that such experiences are at the core of Ms. Luna Martínez’ approach to the English language arts classroom. Through her specific culturally relevant practices, she encourages her predominantly Latina/o students to bring their families and communities into the official classroom script—a reality that she did not have as a young person in public schools. Her approach as an activist–mother–teacher allows Ms. Luna Martínez to view all students as her children. As a “mommy-teacher,” she is extremely caring and, at the same time, equally demanding in her expectations of her children.

Finishing the Braid

In concluding this glance into the life of Ms. Luna Martinez, I would like to offer two distinct, and yet interrelated, considerations for the readers. The first is a methodological consideration of oral life histories, and the second concerns itself with the implications of a “pedagogies of the home” approach in the classroom.

As the introduction to this special edition suggested, there are clear ethical concerns in employing oral life histories as an interview method (Lanford, Tierney, & Lincoln, 2018). One of the biggest concerns, and perhaps my personal moment of self doubt, which I face as an oral life history researcher revolves around the question of representation and agency. As an oral life history researcher, I wonder as follows: Did I authentically capture the essence of Ms. Luna Martinez? Even after she contributed to a final version of the portrait, are there pieces that she wished I would have elaborated on or deleted? How will her family respond when reading this portrait? The moments that I left out, should they have been incorporated? In implementing oral life histories, is a story really ever over?

I have written this portrait as a glance into one individual’s life amid teaching in the county of Los Angeles—one of the nation’s most populous public school systems. Among the roses of Pasadena, we find Ms. Luna Martínez who has lived, educated, and raised generations of children over the course of the last three decades. Embedded within her classroom are her stories of home, family, and school. In her portrait, Ms. Luna Martínez describes growing up in time where conversations about racial inequities were tense in the lead-up to a federally ordered school desegregation policy. She suggests that her own experiences, in a newly desegregated high school, have influenced her teaching.

Leslie Marmon Silko (1977) writes about the resilience that stories provide: “They [stories] are all we have, you see/ all we have to fight off/ illness and death” (p. 2). Ms. Luna Martinez’s story works to counter deficit, majoritarian narratives that inflict harm on Communities of Color. Her story radiates moments of survival and resilience with the potential to uplift and inspire Communities of Color. Her story highlights the experiences of one teacher who develops deep relationships with “her kids”—her students—to embody “pedagogies of the home”:

The pedagogies of the home extend the existing discourse on critical pedagogies by putting cultural knowledge and language at the forefront to better understand lessons from the home space and local communities. For example, because power and politics are at the center of all teaching and learning, the application of household knowledge to situations outside of the home becomes a creative process that interrupts the transmission of “official knowledge” and dominant ideologies. (Delgado Bernal, 2001, p. 624)

Throughout her story, Ms. Luna Martinez emphasizes how her parents explicitly taught her to be proud of being Mexican. In fact, she self identifies as “Mexican”—not Chicana. In this way, the pedagogy of the home propelled her to seek out mentors who also proclaimed their Mexicanidad, literally and quite famously, for the entire world to see. This important cultural knowledge from her home extends into her own classroom where she deliberately includes household knowledge as part of her classroom’s official knowledge. As a “homegrown” teacher who embodies a “pedagogies of the home” approach in the classroom, she connects with students through a familial and communal kinship.

Ms. Luna Martinez offers me “critical hope” (Duncan-Andrade, 2009) as a teacher and mother who, in the small moments, creates autonomous classroom and home spaces, despite outside pressures.