Academia Sin Fronteras: Lupe Gallegos-Diaz on Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social¹

Lupe Gallegos-Diaz is the director of Chicana/Latino Academic Student Development at the University of California–Berkeley (UC–Berkeley), where she focuses her work on multiculturalism in two distinct forms: first, multiculturalism as something in which students must gain competency to prepare for life in a diverse and interconnected world; and second, multiculturalism as an institutional commitment for which higher education must be held accountable. In her work as an educator, she draws on and contributes to several national organizations, including AAC&U affiliate Campus Women Lead and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), each of which works to build institutions that draw on the combined strengths of multicultural women as an asset for twenty-first-century higher education. On Campus with Women recently spoke with Lupe about how MALCS, for which she is currently administrative coordinator, traverses boundaries between local and global spaces and challenges ideas of identity as fixed and immutable. The following comments are drawn from that conversation.

I learned about Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) as a graduate student. I was finishing my master’s degree and had started my PhD program when my colleague Helen Lara-Cea in the Department of Ethnic Studies introduced me to MALCS. Going to a MALCS summer institute opened up an entirely new area for me. As a graduate student, I was one of only a few Chicanas and Latinas on campus, so attending a summer institute with Chicana and Latina faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students was an amazing experience.

MALCS’s purpose is to support Chicanas, Latinas, and indigenous women in higher education by providing safe spaces where they can engage in dialogue about their research and ideas. The organization has really helped young Chicanas and Latinas survive in the academy by illustrating that they can become faculty members and still work in their communities. It creates spaces where participants can work through their feelings, ideas, and strategies for their research in a community of peers.

But MALCS works across communities as well as within them. The organization focuses in part on preparing students, staff, and faculty, for a twenty-first century that is very diverse. We don’t work in isolation; we look for allies and collaborate with a range of communities.

Thinking Sin Fronteras

Each year, a different institution hosts MALCS’s summer institute. This year’s host was California State University–Los Angeles, and the theme was Against Fear and Terror: Una Nueva Conciencia Sin Fronteras². The theme originated in ongoing issues affecting Chicano and Latino communities, including immigration, immigration policy reform, and challenges facing undocumented students. Families in Chicano and Latino communities are experiencing fear and terror as their families are divided by deportation. College campuses now include many undocumented students who came to the United States as children, have gone through the US educational system, and yet can’t finish their educations here because they don’t qualify for public financial aid. These issues are currently affecting many campuses, and MALCS members are engaged in helping and advocating for undocumented students.

At the institute, we explored the idea of a new consciousness sin fronteras, asking what it would mean to live in a society where daily existence was not driven by whether a person was documented or not or by whether they lived within certain geographical borders and not others. The challenge we identified at the conference was that of moving beyond fear and terror and determining what it means to have dignity, to live, to survive. Many conference presentations asked how we as scholars can work through some of these issues. We explored the question, how, through our scholarship, can we draw on spirituality, reconnect with our history and our political past, and reach out to movements in parallel communities? The immigrant Muslim community, for example, has faced similar challenges related to exclusion, marginalization, and poverty. So the theme sin fronteras speaks to what is going on with many different communities both locally and around the world.

Sin fronteras also speaks to emerging issues of identity. For the past few years, MALCS has grappled with transgender issues and the challenges faced by people who are transitioning. Because MALCS is a woman-centered organization, we have had many conversations about who is eligible to attend the institute. Our policy has been that the plenaries are open to allies, and we ask men not to attend the workshops. But what does this mean for people who are in the process of transitioning? Sin fronteras is an area where boundaries are very fluid, and we are looking for ways, through policy and practice, for ourselves and our allies to be in those fluid spaces. We had a beautiful opening plenary that examined transgender issues in MALCS as well as in the larger community and society. It’s very important to open dialogue and develop relationships that help us understand these complex situations and multifaceted identities. And the most exciting and difficult challenge is determining how we as an organization can move from engaging in dialogue to developing a set of practices and policies that guide our work.

Teaching Sin Fronteras

The topics that have arisen in recent conversations at MALCS have resonated with me as a Chicana and a multicultural educator. In my work at UC–Berkeley, I have been helping students understand some of these ideas using the concept of transcommunality, developed by John Brown Childs from the University of California–Santa Cruz. Childs describes transcommunality using the metaphor of the Native American longhouse, where several smaller communities coexist under one big roof. This concept of transcommunality can help students understand how we as people can respect each other even if we disagree with each other, how we can have separate communities and yet still come together as members of the local or the global community. In a society that compartmentalizes people into boxes, how can we find circles that connect us?

We’re all interconnected. What happens on the other side of the world will eventually have an impact on people in the United States, whether through our food, our economic situation, or other channels. And that’s true closer to home, too, where Chicana, Latina, and indigenous students, faculty, and staff often have direct ties other countries. The violence associated with cartels in Mexico has ripple effects, particularly for those who have family there. A culture of terror exists in Mexico right now. How does that culture affect us in the United States, and what role do we have in creating it? What is our responsibility as a society intertwined with Mexico as our neighbor? We need to find humane ways to think about borders, to understand the fluidities and the changes that are currently in play.

Borders also exist between academia and our students’ communities. I try to help students understand that they can be scholarly activists, or active scholars: that they can earn their PhDs and still be part of the communities from which they came. Students, particularly those who are new to the system and those from working-class backgrounds, often feel that they should be earning money and helping their families. They feel guilty for being in school. But in reality, they can do research and still be part of their communities—in fact, in certain ways, they can probably help their communities more effectively with an education. Doing research is being active, depending on how that research is applied and what effect it has on the community. When nonprofits and faculty come together for research, for example, everybody wins. This is one area where MALCS helps facilitate connections for students and faculty.

Planning Sin Fronteras

As MALCS moves ahead, we are looking forward to great transformation. We have a new fiscal agent, the Chicana/Latina Foundation, and that partnership is giving MALCS stability and opening up possible growth around shared missions. We are building an endowment. We are discussing moving the summer institute from an annual schedule to a two-year or eighteen-month cycle and offering additional writing retreats in between to support people finishing dissertations, books, or articles. Our website is becoming more interactive as well: we have a blog, and we are starting listservs focused on different interests. We are excited about all these developments and are looking forward to our next steps as an organization. We invite potential members and allies to learn more at www.MALCS.org.

Editor’s note: Lupe Gallegos-Diaz is a member of the Campus Women Lead Project on Inclusive Excellence. If you want to raise questions at your institution about how women can advance inclusive leadership in higher education by building multicultural alliances, consider bringing a Campus Women Lead workshop to your campus. For more information, visit our website at www.aacu.org/campuswomenlead.

¹Sin Fronteras: Without Borders; Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social: Women Active in Letters and Social Change

²Una Nueva Conciencia Sin Fronteras: A New Consciousness without Borders