>
Lidia Marte
Cimarrón Pedagogies
Notes on Auto-ethnography
as a Tool for Critical Education
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marte, Lidia, author.
Title: Cimarrón pedagogies: notes on auto-ethnography as a tool for
critical education / Lidia Marte.
Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2020.
Series: Critical studies of Latinxs in the Americas; vol. 25
ISSN 2372-6822 (print) | ISSN 2372-6830 (online)
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019049911 | ISBN 978-1-4331-7536-7 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-7535-0 (paperback: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7537-4 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-7538-1 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-7539-8 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology. | Research--Methodology. | Critical pedagogy. |
Educational anthropology.
Classification: LCC GN316 .M367 2019 | DDC 305.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049911
DOI 10.3726/xxxxxx
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
© 2020 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
About the author
Lidia Marte is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras campus). She graduated with a PhD and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her other publications focus on food, place-memory and Dominican diaspora.
About the book
Cimarrón Pedagogies is a testimonial account of how to use Critical Auto-Ethnography as main strategy for undergraduate research projects. The pedagogical approach here shared is a form of marronage, that help us create—at least in the classroom and for one semester—small liberated spaces, bridging the individual and the collective, private and public, past and present, the poetic and the political, and the local/global negotiations in our students’ lives. Researching the ground of student’s everyday experiences through their personal perspectives is a form of engaged pedagogy utilizing experiential, project-based and place-based assignments, as well as other experimental strategies. Through an auto-ethnographic project the feminist phrase “the personal is political” is felt, not just pondered, researched and theorized, generating multiple insights and empowering students to create their own ways of liberation and to document their own cultural histories. This auto-ethnographic narrative is an homage to teachers and mentors, and a celebration of life-long selfdirected learning as embodied in the author’s own educational roots and routes. The book will be useful for college instructors and teachers as well as undergraduate and graduate students for diverse courses ranging from anthropology to the humanities. The guide to the research project and the appendix are also useful for any reader interested in researching and documenting topics of significance to their local lives and to their communities.
“A definite resource to decolonize our classrooms. Marte’s use of auto-ethnography as a pedagogical tool provides a powerful challenge to ethnography’s most objectifying tendencies, while offering us clear methods to empower our students and transform our classrooms.”—Arlene Davila, Professor of Anthropology and American Studies, New York University
“Marte’s concept of cimarrón pedagogy is an imaginative, much needed theoretical and practical guide to classroom teaching. Especially crucial in the present political climate in the Americas. This book combines Marte’s inspirations from decolonization literatures and auto-ethnographic methodologies to create safe spaces of learning and critique. This book is a welcome addition to our ongoing concerns about effective ways to engage western epistemological legacies and engender new understandings and visions.”—Aisha Khan, Professor of Anthropology, New York University
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my mother, Silvia Angélica de la Cruz, for her fierce cimarrón commitment to learning and to her children’s education, and for migrating to the North so I could have access to a higher education that she could not obtain for herself. I am paying with this book a debt of gratitude to her irreverent attitude and her life-sustaining teachings. To my sister Silvia Argentina Marte, who picked up the task where my mother left it, who have continued taking care of my wellness where ever I happen to live, and now here in San Juan, Puerto Rico; for her delicious foods, moral support and the example of her strength and dignity even under the most un-auspicious circumstances. I also dedicate this book in memoriam to my beloved Brian Stross, for his anthropological teachings, his humor, love of food and music, for his commitment to social justice and for his unconditional friendship. This book is in part a response to Stross who (in different occasions and in different ways) asked me why I cared so much about teaching, and I could not answer him coherently at the time. Even though it is too late now for him to read this book, I feel at peace now with my answer.
With this book, I am paying a debt of gratitude also to my formal and informal teachers and mentors, who have taught me how to learn throughout my life. I am grateful for the tools they shared, which further individual and collective liberations, critical consciousness and radical imagination. I thank them for challenging me to recognize my power to produce small spaces of autonomy for myself and others, to re-invent a more dignified life and to represent and create archives of my own history. Thanks to Eugenio García Cuevas, who first exposed me in the 1980s to critical tools and political economy, and introduced me to the work of Aníbal Ponce, who has become, ever since, a model and avatar for my teaching. I dedicate also this book to an unsuspected mentor, to Jormiguita, for her twin flame friendship and for the jewel of her children’s stories, which I consume avidly. I am learning through her stories
