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  • From Invisibilized to Conocimiento:When Injustices Happen by and with "Our Own"
  • Bianca N. Haro (bio)

Speaking up and speaking out. In thinking about how I might contribute to this special issue, it occurred to me that, over the course of my career as a first-generation Chicana graduate student, speaking up and speaking out has been one of the most difficult things to do. I've learned that the ivory tower often relegates graduate students with intersecting marginalized identities, Women of Color1 (WoC) in particular, to positions of relative powerlessness. What I have found to be most striking through my experiences as a Chicana graduate student is the extent to which I have faced marginalization at the hands of men of color who purport to be social justice-oriented and aware of power dynamics. My lived experiences have taught me many would-be allies simply use social justice-oriented language but are not in solidarity with and for WoC. I have found theory of the flesh useful (Moraga and Anzaldúa 2015) to re/member and relive the pain and trauma felt in my body throughout graduate school, specifically inflicted by some of these men of color. With that foundation and through the path of conocimiento (Anzaldúa 2002), the Spanish word for consciousness and understood as epistemology, I offer this essay to speak up and speak out and to name the racial and gender violence I have experienced as a graduate student. I speak from the flesh to begin my own healing process. [End Page 134]

When I was accepted to graduate school, I was beyond excited to be in a program that had a large number of Faculty of Color. What I did not see at that moment was the underrepresentation of WoC in the department. At the time, my Chicana feminist lens was underdeveloped, and I did not realize the extent to which WoC were and are invisibilized in academia. Until I experienced otherwise, I naïvely presumed that everyone, whether peers or faculty, were truly social justice-oriented. However, early on I realized that academia has been and remains a "boys' club." Ultimately, my six years of graduate school have proved to be painful. I experienced becoming invisible in both subtle and overt ways. As just one small example, the principal investigator (PI) of a study I was invited to work with "forgot" to add me to a research team email listserv, an omission I only became aware of after a Latino2 peer forwarded the message to me. I have also experienced my scholarship being stolen. After presenting at a conference, an audience member—a tenured male professor of color—used my ideas and published a piece mirroring research from my presentation. It is these two events that I hope to speak up and speak out about for myself and for other WoC who have been betrayed by "our own."

I matriculated as a graduate student immediately after earning my bachelor's degree. Building upon my undergraduate research, I entered my graduate program eager to understand the relationship between schools and prisons and the effects of this institutional link for young Latinas. My eagerness, however, was short-lived, crippled by imposter syndrome. I was visibly one of the youngest students in my cohort, and I routinely found that I was comparing myself to peers who had entered the program with a master's degree. During my first year, a PI was conducting a large study examining the educational and life experiences of successful young men, and I was invited to be part of the study. The team consisted of six men; two Latinos and four African Americans, two of whom were faculty members. I was excited yet nervous to be on the team. It was motivating to work alongside all People of Color, yet I was worried to be the only WoC and, again, the youngest. I worried the men would not take me seriously, that they would dominate discussions. In other words, I feared the ways patriarchy would manifest. Yet I took the position as an opportunity for growth.

I became one of the site leaders for a school, interviewed over thirty...

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