April 15, 2025
In her groundbreaking book, Empowering Latina Narratives, author Margaret Cantú-Sánchez examines the nuanced experiences of Latinas/Chicanas within the U.S. educational system. Cantú-Sánchez not only identifies the challenges Latina/Chicana students face but also offers a roadmap for overcoming them, making this book an essential resource for scholars, educators, and students committed to culturally inclusive education.
We recently had a chance to interview the author and ask her about the book.
How did your research and/or personal experience lead you to write this book?
My research is entrenched in my personal experiences, and this is especially true for this text. I often tell the story of how I came to this kind of research and I mention it in my introduction. When I was in graduate school, working on my doctorate at UTSA, I came across an author/scholar by the name of Gloria E. Anzaldúa. We read a book called Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. I was shocked to read this book because the author was from the Rio Grande Valley, she was talking about Mexican American history, literature, culture and a lot of what she was discussing I was not familiar with. Yet I related to her experiences of being a Mexican American. What spoke to me was her education experience in which she describes encountering discrimination as a Mexican American girl growing up in Texas. I felt angry, curious, and inspired. I was angry because I had never heard of this author or book, even though my family comes from the Rio Grande Valley area. I was angry for students who would never read her book because it was not taught in schools, or at least not until graduate school. I was also curious to learn more about my own culture, and I was inspired to explore this idea of how Mexican American and other Latinx students learned to navigate discrimination in school. So, Borderlands was literally the catalyst that inspired me to look at literature, testimonios, and pedagogical practices where Mexican American and Latinx students encountered discrimination in schools, but found way to resist and strategize to navigate these systems of learning through the power of storytelling.
Your title sets up the conflict between “education” and “educación.” Can you describe what this conflict looks like for students today?
Today I believe this conflict between education and educación still persists now more than ever and has even become exacerbated given the current political situation in our country. I distinguish between the two terms by referring to “education” as this institutionalized learning we are taught in United States schools, which is primarily Anglocentric and designed to assimilate minority students. In contrast, I define “educación” as the home or cultural knowledge, the consejos (advice), cuentos (stories), and other elements we learn from our families, communities, and cultures. I argue that oftentimes, these two kinds of epistemologies may conflict with one another. For example, at home, we may sit around the kitchen table or help prepare food and while we are doing that our grandmothers, aunts, and other family members will be sharing advice, gossiping, telling family stories. This is valuable knowledge that we pick up from these moments with our cultures and families. Oftentimes at school the sharing of these stories or advice in those spaces is not welcome or teachers do not give students the space to bring in the stories of our families. This can also extend to language barriers: school is seen as an English-only space, versus home, where one can speak Spanish or whatever home language dominates that space. Many students talk about this idea of not being able to speak in Spanish to friends when they are working on group projects and some even talk about being discriminated against or disciplined if they try to do so. In short, this conflict persists when we continue to marginalize Latinx students’ prior knowledge, which includes cultural ways of knowing, their stories, literature, history, etc. This can create identity conflicts for students who just want their cultures, identities, and communities to be validated at home and at school.
In Chapter 3, you apply your theory of a “mestizaje of epistemologies” to Barbara Renaud González’s Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? For those who might not be familiar with this text, what is it about and how does it connect to your theory?
Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? is one of my favorite texts. I read it when I was working on my doctorate degree and the issues explored in the text highlight this education/educación conflict and my concept of a “mestizaje of epistemologies.” The book is about a mother and daughter and it’s about both of their stories. It begins with the mother’s story, Amada, who is a young girl from a working-class family in Mexico who is desperate to escape her life, so she marries the first man who asks. She experiences abuse and eventually runs away to the United States. In the U.S., Amada marries a Tejano and has many children, but the story then shifts to her daughter, Lucero. The story wavers between Amada and Lucero’s perspectives of living in the United States as they both try to navigate what it means to be Mexican and Mexican American women. When Lucero goes to school, she starts to experience a conflict of identity and loses a sense of belonging at home and school. At school, she tries hard and does well, but that means leaving behind things like her Spanish, and the other Mexican American children scorn her decision to assimilate. At the same time, this alienates her from her mother. Amada notices this distance that emerges between herself and her daughter and works to help Lucero maintain her cultural identity and pride in their family’s histories by sharing family stories throughout the novel. Eventually, both women find ways to reconcile their past experiences and traumas through storytelling and sharing those stories with one another. I argue that this reconciliation or strategizing emerges via a mestizaje of epistemologies, where Lucero learns how to juggle being both Mexican and American and she does this by remembering her family’s stories and sharing them with the world.
It might be an understatement to say that the U.S. education system is in a moment of extreme change, with schools and educators experiencing heightened scrutiny and criticism. Do you have any advice for educators and/or students who are navigating this moment?
I often teach a course titled “Approaches to Teaching Multi-Ethnic Literature.” Admittedly, this course is getting more and more difficult to teach because realistically much of what I talk about in the course teachers cannot teach or discuss because of newly established laws especially in Texas. However, my advice for educators is to look for those glimmers of hope. They are out there, and we can look to the past for examples of how to find that hope as women of color and other minorities have done so throughout the years. The past can teach us so much about resilience and what we can overcome. I would also encourage both educators and students to use their voices to share their stories, whether that is through poetry, testimonios, speeches, social media, etc. Our stories are powerful and empowering—that is one thing they cannot take away from us no matter how hard they try. We will always remember, and we have a duty to preserve those stories and memories.
What are you working on next?
Currently, I am working on applying this idea of radical hope leading to love and joy as resistance, in particular as we see it via pedagogies, literature, and history. “Radical hope” was a concept utilized by women of color during the Third Wave of Feminism to maintain hope and use it to inspire others in the face of discrimination and opposition. Pedagogically speaking, I turn to scholars like bell hooks who ask us to look to joy and love in classroom spaces, and we can do that when we invite our students to share their stories as we examine the stories of minorities throughout literature and history. I think right now the world could use some hope, joy, and love. We need to find our way back to these things, and literature is one avenue to do that.
Margaret Cantú-Sánchez is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s University, teaching composition and multi-ethnic and Latinx literature. Her research focuses on decolonializing pedagogies, immigration, border studies, and Chicanx feminist theories. Her publications include approaches to teaching Latinx literature, examinations of contemporary Latinx literature, and applications of Chicana third-space feminist theories. She is the co-editor of Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa, which offers inspiring ideas for the classroom and community utilizing Anzaldúa’s theories and concepts.