An Indian Woman's Journey through the Academy in America

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.

[Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.]

—Gloria Anzaldúa 2002, Foreword

I am a woman of color and an immigrant from India. When I came to this part of the world in 1986, I was twenty-six. At that time, no bridges existed for me to cross the academic, social, cultural, linguistic, emotional gaps and challenges I experienced in the Western world. I had to build the bridges brick by brick with a lot of effort and hard work to survive and move forward.

In the spring of 2019, at the age of sixty, I received my PhD in the area of language, literacy, and culture from the College of Education housed at a well-known land-grant university in the southwest part of the United States. Currently, I am employed as a full-time associate professor of English at a community college affiliated with the same university. To reach these landmarks in my life, I had to journey through long and arduous roads and unknown terrains. I faced challenges, endured difficulties, and negotiated my way through them, which were unlike all the sociocultural and academic experiences I had before I came to this part of the world.

In India, I was a tenure-track instructor of Bengali literature at a university founded by the Nobel laureate poet and educationist Rabindranath Tagore. In 1986, I came to Canada to join my husband, a graduate student at a university in Calgary. Since there was no opportunity for me to teach Bengali language and literature and my English speaking and writing abilities were limited, I started at the very bottom of the job market. To supplement my husband's meager stipend, I began working at the Burger King for minimum wage. Later, I worked at a daycare center for nearly six years. As much as I enjoyed and appreciated learning new ways of making a living in a new country, I routinely suffered humiliation and discrimination at these workplaces because of my race, gender, and ethnicity, and for my inability to communicate effectively in English. Being geographically apart from my family, friends, and my country, I experienced deep alienation, which intensified with the treatment I received from the mainstream society. Separated from my family, community, culture, and language, I felt lost and hopeless, and it left deep and lasting wounds in me. Cindy Cruz in her 2006 article "Toward an Epistemology of a Brown Body" questions, "[H]ow does the brown body know [injustice and discrimination]?" (60). I experienced racism and xenophobia—both covert and overt—in academia and in society. I was made to feel shame and inadequacy for not having proficiency in English and for my Brown body. I asked myself in moments of despair how long I would survive. How long would my resolve and my spirit last? I experienced pain, fatigue, and relentless tension. Yet, these struggles forced me to survive and thrive in academia. My academic experiences—both positive and negative—gave me confidence that helped me develop convivir, the praxis of working within the academic community in America (Delgado Bernal et al. 2006). I persevered and eventually carved out my place in higher education.

Surviving through and Thriving in Graduate School

In 1993, I moved to America from Canada. After eleven long years, I reenrolled in school and started taking undergraduate English courses from the university. I worked hard in raising my proficiency in English, and I enjoyed being introduced to American, British, and international literature through these courses. Conceptual understanding came easily to me since I already had strong foundational knowledge in literature and language from my previous master's degree in Bengali. Having enough and strong academic credentials, I soon joined the master's program in the English Department in 2000. In 2005, I received my second master's in English and, as part-time faculty, began teaching general education English composition courses at the community college of the university. In 2012, I was accepted into the doctoral program in the College of Education...