Show notes
In this episode, I interview Cecilia Cabellero and Yvette Martínez-Vu, co-founders of Chicana M(otherwork)—a collective of five Chicana mother-scholars revisioning care work through activism, self-care, teaching, and mothering.
Here, we discuss:
(1) Barriers to self-care and childcare for women of color in the academy
(2) Tools for rejecting unacceptable treatment from others and ourselves
(3) How they’re transcending the logic of permission to do work that nourishes them and their chosen communities
Key insights from the guests:
“Figure out who will support your vision but don’t ask for permission”-Yvette Martínez-Vu
We must reject the notion of “publish or perish”; your words really do shape your experience -Cecilia Caballero
More key themes:
- Being a single mother during PhD program
- Dealing with gatekeeping behaviors exhibited by faculty of color in the academy
- Joyfully electing to leave the tenure track for other teaching opportunities
- Moving beyond microaggressions to microaffirmations
- Alt-ac paths in academic administration
- Post-ac paths in creative writing
- Academic side hustling
- Leveraging the wisdom of curandera healing
Resources referenced in this episode:
- Allied Media Conference
- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
- Cecilia Cabarello, “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces”
- Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Centre: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood” in Representations of Motherhood
- Alicia Gaspar de Alba
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “community-accountable work”
- Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia
- Mary Rowe, “Mircro-affirmations & Micro-inequities”
- Michelle Tellez, “Lectures, Evaluations, and Diapers: Navigating the Terrains of Chicana Single Motherhood in the Academy”, Feminist Formations, Johns Hopkins University Press
- A couple of articles about disproportionately negative health outcomes for female academics of color:
Tamura Lomax, “Black Women’s Lives Don’t Matter in Academia Either, or Why I Quit Academic Spaces that Don’t Value Black Women’s Life and Labor”
Halaevalu F. Ofahengaue Vakalahi and Saundra Hardin Starks, “Health, Well-being and Women of Color Academics”