Mexicana/Latina Campesinas Cultivating Knowledge: A Collective Agri-Land-Based Education in Rural Washington State

Rosalinda Godinez

In her collaborative ethnographic project, Rosalinda documents Mexicana/Latina Campesinas’ agricultural land-based education. Agricultural land-based education encompasses Mexicana/Latina Campesinas’ fil (field) literacies or examples of how they read, act, move within agriculture while simultaneously working and teaching with each other and their children. She articulates Mexicana/Latina Campesinas’ teaching practices as pedagogies of barbiar (harvest)–a powerful teaching practice that aims to be co-embodied, experiential, and spiritual to relate to the land, the crops, and womxn’s bodies as the content and teacher itself from which one can learn. Importantly, Rosalinda argues that through Mexicana/Latina Campesinas’ engagements and movements, they are demonstrating not to be passive workers but intersectional social actors that create teaching moments, knowledge, and new identities to live and work with dignity. Given that this project is invested in collaborative efforts and narrative claiming, she relies on participatory (Irizarry & Brown, 2014) and art-based research methodologies (Leavy, 2017) to gather the women’s testimonios (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga & Flores Carmona, 2012) and creative poetry as opportunities to re/claim identities, stories, and education systems.

About Rosalinda Godinez

Rosalinda is a Ph.D. candidate in Social and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. As an educational ethnographer, her research interweaves critical, interdisciplinary, and Chicana/Latina feminist perspectives to learn more about how people teach and learn in various contexts. Rosalinda considers education as the social and cultural practice of movement, imagination, and community. Her work is deeply rooted in social justice orientations, lived experiences, and her desire to establish collaborative partnerships that honor the literacies (as social practice) of womxn and communities of color.Rosalinda holds an M.A. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Sociology from Washington State University. Throughout her tenure as a graduate student, she has contributed to an educational ethnographic project in an elementary school in the larger San Francisco area and has taught Sociology courses at Hartnell College.