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187 7 decolonizing Chicano Studies in the Shadows of the University’s“heteropatriracial”Order Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo Chicana Feminism is the refusal to participate in colonial activity. —Teresa Córdova, “Power and Knowledge, Colonialism in the Academy” I came to Chican@ studies as a young student at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1990s. The school and university system had kept me from accessing the histories of people who shared roots with me, the poetry of people that spoke like me. There was a profound resonance indicative of something you’ve been unknowingly thirsting for, the foreshadowing of something that will be with you for a long time. Most importantly, I developed a language and analytics through which I could imagine a resistance to the structures of oppression that had produced the multitude of violences that crossed my path as a young Chicana/Mexicana border migrant. The university was among the hostile institutional structures that, like the experience of many that came before me and after me, persistently reminded me of my exteriority.1 I drank from the spirit of survival that glistened off the pages of tell-all testimonios and resistance literatures. The one constant among teachers and mentors at UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University , where I later pursued graduate study, was their passion—the deep love and conviction they shared for their communities and for what they taught. That love was contagious and inspires me to this day. I write this as a kind of love letter to Chican@ studies, to honor my teachers (inclusive of students) and to honor the spirit of resistance, struggle, and social transformation that their dreams imagine. I write knowing that imbricated within the revelatory practice of naming and assessing the institutional violence we experience in academic institutions as queer/trans/mujeres femenistas lies the possibility for deep transformation. I write at the moment that marks my temporary exile from Chicano 188 · ana ClarISSa rOjaS dUrazO studies.2 Weathered from the battles of colonization begun long before me, I seek other grounds from which to continue the struggle. The battle waged is a battle forged at the institutional site where colonial politics emerge through the invention of nation projects that order difference within the site of the university. As these politics play out in the twenty-first century, the battle aims to control, subdue, and exteriorize—if not exterminate—recalcitrant queer, trans, and feminist Chican@ politics and subjectivities. For some of us, our queer and feminist decolonial politics render us dangerous subjects to Chicano studies because these politics threaten to unhinge the imperial university’s tethering toward a colonial heteropatriarchal Chicano studies. This chapter concerns itself with the ways the imperial university’s “heteropatriracial ” ordering engenders a heteropatriarchal Chicano studies that “exiles” Chicana feminist and queer subjectivities by attacking, subordinating , and externalizing us. This story is less about me and the institutional actors it involves than it is about the history and trajectory of imperial projects to inscribe and rearrange imperial subjects through the university. This story is about all of us at the university because we are all implicated as imperial subjects in imperial projects, and our survival depends on our ability to recognize, disentangle, and dislodge the complicated terms of our engagement. Chicano studies is not separate, nor is it immune to these politics; rather, it operates as a location from where the colonial and neocolonial battle against us ensues in the twenty-first century. In the neoliberal imperial age, attacks on ethnic studies and Chican@ studies not only are engineered from outside these academic units but emerge from within its very ranks when Chicano studies colludes with a heteropatriracial colonial project. In 2008, I accepted a tenure-track position at California State University, Long Beach, in Chicano/Latino studies. Within days of beginning my post, I found myself fending off a series of attempts to demean, intimidate, silence, and recruit me into the politics of a heteromasculinist Chicano studies. I was not alone in my experience; there was a revolving door of arrivals and departures by Chicanas and queer Chican@s that preceded and followed me; one senior scholar shared with me the soul wounds of a decade of surviving Chicano studies. In the years that followed, a few of us built and nurtured a community of Chicana feminist insurgencies to continue the decolonial work begun long ago at CSU–Long Beach. From 2008 to 2012, we rose up to transform Chicano studies into a queerer...

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