N o T i t l e .
(11) Y fuimos de empaque a empaque
Tras tierra y tierra
Y ojalá pueda
Volver a vivir
(12) Porque fui de empaque y de empaque
Plantando semillas en tierras
Que yo no nací
(13) I have been taught by my elders how to tell stories; through rhythmic narration we record, in hymns we witness: we exist in the present always.
(5) I came into being and my brain panicked. Everything that existed everywhere, in every position and direction was too much. I saw, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted everything too much. This intensity overwhelmed me, and words became difficult to form and speak because of my over-exhausted brain attempting to keep track of all that was developing a structure and pattern around it. Even now, if I am feeling too much, my brain will work too fast for my mouth to follow; eventually, it will freeze. When I was younger, I avoided this overflowing pain by not talking. At 5 years old, my godmother tied a bell to my wrist so if she called out for one of her “stars” as she would call all the children she took care of, she would be able to know I was safe if I shook my little wrist in random directions.
(6) Panic awoke in me a need to know, patterns are how I understand the world around me. My special interest, when being practiced, allows me to regulate the overwhelming sensation of feeling too much. Before the age of 12, I was learning about physics and mathematics from my godmother’s children’s book library she kept in her garage turned day care center. I would take the books and hide away in my cousin’s closet, who noticed and later added glow in the dark stars all over the inside of it. She created a galaxy inside a safe closet space.
(18) My research will be guided by my theoretical framework that demonstrates a triangular visualization of a historical, spiritual, and environmental account of child consciousness. Through this framework, my dissertation aims at tracing the ways child consciousness aids in a particular form of organization that is absent from cartesian logic despite the presence of colonial position. I plan to explore the following potential research questions by conducting semi-structured interviews utilizing asset mapping and story-telling with Latine/x youth in the east side of Salinas: (1) what are the depiction(s) of children positioned in and across geographical spaces/spaces that have been historically, spirituality, and environmentally extracted?; and (2) how are their funds of knowledge being informed by geographies rooted in epistemics both outside the U.S. and within the context of settler colonial landscape shape child consciousness in the practice of (re)imagination? I intend on incorporating walking archives and other community members into this study to explicate how first-generation adolescent experiences of familismo, cariño, and funds of knowledge shape adolescent perception of geography and position.
(7) I was never raised to separate my mind, body, and soul from one another. I have always refused the premises of cartesian logic, and historical, spiritual, and environmental accounts have informed my sense of being through archival work, storytelling, and freedom dreaming. Utilizing my framework, strawberry fields, walking archives, and glow in the dark stars demonstrate the ways child consciousness holds within its scope the ability to freedom dream and (re)imagine and (re)organize through and by its confined realities, spaces, and time particularly due to its proximity to walking archives who guide it through its own navigation and journey across its geographical landscapes beyond the conceptualization of borders and through the earth.
Canción de Alma (Muerte): A History of Brown Death in Salinas Valley
(11) Y fuimos de empaque a empaque,
Tras tierra y tierra,
Y ojalá pueda
Volver a vivir
(7.5) Jose is the mayordomo[1], he knows we get paid by the box and not the hour. My brain recognizes, acknowledges, and (re)organizes him throwing my strawberries on the ground and my cousin decorating her closet with glow in the dark stars as categorically contradictory to one another, and all at once it becomes confused, angry, and stubbornly bound to my desire to retaliate.
(8) The women around me taught me to be kind to the earth and he literally threw freshly picked fruit on the ground because it lacked appealing aesthetic, they looked too much like strawberries. I wondered deeply why he would do that to a 12-year-old. Before I figured it was above my pay grade, I found the most perfectly curved, perfectly red, juiciest, sweetest looking strawberry of them all.
(9) Autism made me an empiricist. My grandmother sings about chaos being a transition, we become something different as we come to know ourselves. From my godmother’s library, I knew “chaos” to be particles reorganizing themselves into a new formation that is actively guided by and through the gravitational relationship they have with one another. I wondered about what that meant for my position in the world, in this field, with this strawberry in my hand, and I asked myself: what is the gravitational relationship we have with each other and how will that demand a reorganization of how we are navigating our gravitational relationship? And then I ate it.
(10) Eating the strawberry was childish and I recognize that.
On the Mathematics of Coloniality: Spirituality and Walking Archives
(1) Cartesian thinkers never convinced me; before I had Descartes, I had my grandmother, and my spiritual archive was a physicist.
I sit on the floor with a cushion for comfort as she brushes and braids my hair while she sings of stars birthing life.
My grandmother always spoke of our location in the universe; I belong with her always.
(2) While we have yet to discover the how’s and the why’s, we do know that upon the first sliver of a trillionth of a second the universe expanded at such a fast pace that its entire existence seemed to look the same in every direction throughout every position. What emerged from this creation was a presumable sameness (everything), everywhere, all at once.
(3) Even more fascinating, particles then suddenly began to blip out of seemingly nothing(ness) due to quantum effects causing random fluctuations, forming more matter than antimatter. From this process, called baryogenesis, a particle called baryons formed and began forming structures that then were formed into stars. Later, old stars died by matter of exploding into supernovae. The elements that came out of this explosion became the basis for life on Earth. From there, a smaller structure called life also formed on Earth. I am a very literal thinker; I essentially explained how we are all stardust.
(4) Our scarcity of knowledge about the galaxy is not due to lack of research, we have always questioned the nature of our galaxy and its particularity and position within the universe. The universe, having no center, does not rely on our knowledge of its positionality. Our location within a universe that binds us to its existence matters because we are the reason and driving force that questions our positionality regarding space, time, and being.
(16)I refuse the Cartesian position that the Andromeda Galaxy is something apart from my being, or the strawberries that Jose threw on the floor. The historical, spiritual, and environmental teachings of the women who protected me and Mother Earth have provided me with knowledges that assert the ways we are bound up with Andromeda. The women around me were physicists and storytellers, and their stories trace our navigation across geographies, and the ways we have decorated the geographies that have bound us to the Earth and shaped our consciousness. I am bound to my desire to nourish the epistemic knowledges and histories of my ancestors and continue them in my own ways, through my own understandings of how I am positioned in this earth, in this current historical and political moment in time. Throughout geographies and mathematics, my walking archives use their songs depicting their stories to guide me through my own expansion, and in the way I create difference in a universe that once began with what I was taught by my teacher in 4th grade was sameness but already understood due to my grandmother’s songs was everything, everywhere, all at once.
Lo que he aprendido, es porque lo veo: An Environmental Materialization of Freedom Dreaming
(12) Porque fui de empaque y de empaque
Plantando semillas en tierras
Que yo no nací
(14) I decided to retaliate[2]. My friends and I would work all day with two goals: not get our boxes thrown out and find the best-looking strawberries so we could eat them ourselves. We would take pictures of our strawberries and compare them with another. If we found more than one “perfect” strawberry, we would save it so our friends who did not have so much luck had a strawberry to eat with us. My papi[3] was the first adult working in the fields to entertain my defiance; he laughs, winks at me, and shows me his strawberry before he bites into it. Some adults also joined, but it was considered to be something that “the children” were doing. We did not stop child exploitation or the overproduction of produce and its inevitable contribution to food waste, or anything at all, really. We did, however, come to understand that our specific location and positionality in and within the fields, put us at an advantage: we were the gatekeepers between the best picked strawberries and the grocery stores.
(15) It was childish, and that was the foundation on which my understanding of how child consciousness develops practices rooted in freedom dreaming was founded. I had not yet learned to compartmentalize my being in accordance with cartesian thought. To me, they have always been connected, my first teachers: my grandmother in her living room (que viva La Esperanza, Ameca, Jalisco), my mother in the kitchen and then fields (arriva Watson), my madrina in a garage she transformed into a daycare center (arriva Castroville, CA), my cousin who made a galaxy in her closet with a bookshelf and snacks from our neighbors store placed in her living room entrance, and whatever made me eat that strawberry (por Salinas, CA), have always aided my curiosity and imbedded in my being always is a speculation of Cartesian reason.
(17) What came out of stars in a closet, bells on my wrist, strawberries on the floor, braided hair, fields, physics, Ángela, Maria Olga Lydia, Maria de Jesus, and Lourdes, shaped me. The geographies they navigated informed the ways they nurtured and taught me the ways of understanding my being and the histories they have passed down to me aid me in the ways I navigate my understanding of self. My research inquires not on how geography confines and separates us across borders, but how geography aids us in understanding the ways we are particularly and literally creating difference within the confinements of Cartesian positioning of sameness, and how our understanding of this difference can provide us with further understanding of the universe and not just our position within its confinement but our connection to its process of being and transforming.