Towards a Cuerpo-Territorio Sex Education: Indigenous Latinx Girlhood in Diaspora and Intergenerational Coming of Age Stories

Judith Landeros

What do we know about girls? coming of age experiences in public schools in relation to the body, sexuality, reproductive health, and menstruation? Research about Indigenous and Latinx girls and their sexuality and reproductive health has been constructed around teen-pregnancy prevention and shame, hyper-sexualization, good/bad girl dichotomy, and disciplining the body through clothing, food, and hygiene. I focus on the experiences of menstruating bodies in-school and out-of-school contexts, specifically Latinx and Indigenous girls and gender expansive youth that is grounded through an Indigenous and decolonizing education lens. Reshaping the historical narratives about Indigenous women?s bodies, sexuality, and menstrual practices is deeply interconnected with interrogating racial projects of Latinidad, Mestizaje, the Casta System, land dispossession and displacement, and the material and discursive implications it plays in Indigenous livelihoods in diaspora and in the everyday experiences of Indigenous girls. I draw from Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Red Medicine frameworks and engage in intergenerational community-based research in Central Texas and ask: What are the intergenerational (children, youth, elder) coming of age (menstruation) stories of Indigenous Latinx girls in diaspora? This collaborative research project is organized to address three key areas: (1) Indigenous Latinx Girlhood & Coming of Age; (2) Curriculum of the Cuerpo-Territorio analysis with a focus on sexuality, reproductive justice, and menstruation education; and (3) Archival and Oral History/Narrative Analysis from a Curandera historian approach.

About Judith Landeros

Judith Landeros is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. Her research interests are at the intersection of girlhood, traditional healing knowledges, and reproductive health education. Her dissertation is an ethnographic and decolonizing archival project grounded in an Indigenous and decolonizing lens in education. Through an intergenerational collaborative project, she focuses on the coming of age experiences of Indigenous and Indigenous Latinx girls in diaspora and (re)membering women?s erased epistemologies about reproductive health, menstruation, and sexuality. Judith is a former bilingual early childhood teacher in Chicago Public Schools. She earned her M.S.Ed. from Dominican University and her B.S. in Social Policy and Latinx Studies from Northwestern University where she received the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.