gm3133@nyu.edu

 

Four ideas stood out for me reading Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: the need to decolonize our knowledge; the necessity to write/create/do through the self, while getting rid of the ego; the mestizaje of knowledge itself; and the power to transform social reality that language and world-making have. While only the mestizaje of knowledge is causing me a little trouble understating how Anzaldúa (and Keating) sees it as not problematic, not appropriating and not extractive, I understand where it comes from (as well as the year and conditions in which Anzaldúa was writing), but these idea of progress present around mestizaje, and the ability to take from other cultures such as the Tolteca and the Náhuatl is conflicting for me, specially because I consider my personal history to be entangled with indigenous knowledges, but not those, and actually, some that might even be at conflict with them; would that mean that I still have the capacity to synthetize other’s spirituality and symbolism and incorporate it into my own? Or that others could do the same with mine because their goal is to create a superior way of being, thinking and doing? She says: “I enact spiritual mestizaje—an awareness that we are all on a spiritual path and share a desire that society undergo metamorphosis and evolution, that our relationships and creative projects undergo transformations. This book explores the quest for greater consciousness and other dimensions of reality by challenging the basic premises.” (44) Well, even if I don’t share the exact same idea of mestizaje as progress (an idea attuned to José Vasconcelo’s Cosmic Race), I do share the sentiment of holding these knowledges against social violences. Anyhow, in what follows I will give one example to expand on the other three points I stated at the beginning.

Too often we hear people easily disregarding spiritual and alternative practices and knowledges that do not correspond to what Western schools teach, we see that from basic school to grad school. I will give one brief example of an alternative learning practice that, because of its unusual, and almost magical approach has found many obstacles in its path. My mom works as a basic-school superintendent, and in 2018, one of the school directors under her supervision had a man come to her school and work with children who were facing academic, intellectual and even personal (mostly with their families) issues. The objective of the project was to help the kids overcome those difficulties through a method that enabled them to read and “see” without the need to use their eyes (here’s a short video about it); he would have an open doors policy where anyone (allowed by the school) could come into his classroom and observe what was going on, and even try to acquire the skill themselves. He would have some of the children’s parents volunteer and assist him during the hour they weekly worked together. What my mom, the director and everyone saw there were blindfolded kids running around without tripping, reading, using the whiteboard to solve mathematical problems, and what’s more interesting, they saw kids with intellectual impediments and “attitude” concerns regularize and start getting more and more involved in their regular classrooms as well as start becoming outstanding students. However, the unusual method started raising questions among some of the other parents who thought that what this man was doing without receiving any payment was suspicious and a trick. That resulted in the end of the program and the slow but sure regression of the kids’ new abilities, attitudes and learnings.

When Anzaldúa accounts for how people often are in disbelief of her incorporation of spiritual indigenous, alternative and creative practices into her theorical work, I recognize the same has happened multiple times and in many different ways, coopting the possibilities of new perspectives that could become very tangible tools for transformation. We’ve been taught that whatever does not fit into Western conceptual frames of understanding, should be discarded or left only for “non-formal”, serious spaces. The kids my mom saw, were being taught that whatever they had been told before about their (and their ego’s) personal reality and possibilities did not necessarily have to correlate with what they wanted and could actually achieve. This symbolic reassurance gave them actual power to see while blindfolded, and that capacity sparked a new way of seeing things for them, it transformed their reality in a concrete way and the reality of those around them. But it also makes sense that this person sought to work with kids with “problems” first: these kids would be able to notice the changes easier than kids that were already doing well in their objective-formal-constrictive-“anti-magical”-Western-classrooms. The former, because they had already been torn apart by those spaces, would be able to gather those pieces (as well as their life general experiences, such as the author poetically describes in chapter 5) and do what Anzaldúa calls the Coyolxauhqui imperative, to use them to re-construct themselves.