Inmensa Fe en la Victoria: Social Justice through Education

Throughout my higher education studies, I have been involved in several student organizations that rally behind cultural enrichment, racial justice, and empowerment efforts for oppressed communities. After my undergraduate studies, I worked for a nonprofit organization that was devoted to providing equal education to poor and minority students in schools. In both of these community and professional environments, talk of equality and social justice surrounded me. Students, professors, coworkers, and activists all expressed their commitment to creating social justice and equality, and I was able to witness how those concepts filtered into their daily practices. Some of their actions contradicted their preachings, but many of their actions also confirmed them. Along the way, I decided that social justice and education would become my lifetime commitments as well.

Today, as I seek to develop my career as an activist scholar, I dedicate myself to learning how to best realize this vision of justice through education. I believe that the best way to do this is by studying the lives of people who have made this same commitment. It is especially important to consider the experiences and perceptions of students who are engaged in activism against oppressive conditions such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism because it is through them that we can learn how to incorporate social justice into our academic lives. For years, these students have been creating their own supplementary education as the traditional curriculum has failed to address their specific struggles and histories. Moreover, as these students formulate their identities, they develop visions for the world in which they want to live. An understanding of these experiences and visions is crucial for forwarding the goals of social justice education because without the perspective of students, educators will find themselves unable to meet their students' needs. Hence, this article will introduce a case study or testimonio of a young woman who is an undergraduate student involved in a struggle for justice. ¹ Through her, my hope is that we can learn something about our goals as social justice educators.

Methodology

This case study stems from a larger project in which I studied for four years a student advocacy organization at the University of California, Los Angeles. The organization, Raza Womyn, is a Chicana/Latina student organization founded in 1979 and officially recognized at the University of California in 1981. I became interested in learning about the organization and the women who participate in it after attending their fourth annual Chicana/Latina conference in March1999. The members of Raza Womyn organized a full day of workshops, dialogue, and performance for the purpose of creating consciousness and awareness about issues pertaining to Latinas and Chicanas. They stated in their conference program that the desire to "carry on the tradition of struggle of economic, political, and social justice" guided their work. They were particularly interested in advancing an ideology of change that they called "re-constructing revolution." The mujeres, the women, explained that they pushed themselves beyond old definitions of revolution that fight against racism but fail to struggle against other -isms and phobias, such as classism, sexism, and homophobia. ²

While my research examines both the organization and the women who participate in it, this article focuses on the experiences of one participant in particular. She is the one member of Raza Womyn who has consistently been the center of focus of my study. Her name is delia. ³ She is twenty-two years old and in her fifth year of college. When I first met her, she was nineteen and in her second year at UCLA. The data in this article date back to my first extended encounters and discussions with her.

I have formally interviewed delia on five occasions for a total of fourteen hours, which included two focus group interviews and three individual interviews. The focus group interviews took place on March9, 2000, and April1, 2001, at UCLA. At...