Get Back to Where You Once Belonged: A Chicana-Apache Professor’s Autoethnography on Racial & Rhetorical Belongings
Recalling second-wave feminist notions that the personal is political, Get Back employs autoethnography to reflect on intersectionality as impetus for inquiry & social confrontation within ethnic studies discourses & decolonial frameworks. My story offers a personal lens to detect biopolitical forces that curtail Chicanx wellness by exploring my family as a fragment of a community ruptured by the Vietnam-American War. I trace these wounds to my sense of racial & rhetorical unbelonging as a first-generation student & professor whose academic pathway results from wartime uprooting.
Through study of my family’s movements from the 1960s to present, I detect gendered & racial biopolitical pathways that reinforce still-extant colonial determinations of bodies that are left to die & that are left to control. I situate private woundedness to confront institutional violations against Chicanx body, voice & autonomy.
My drive is threefold: to position myself as a Chicana-Apache who generates knowledge, to locate research of Chicana & Apache communities within lived experiences, and to expand decolonial methodologies by narrating self & community from internal scholarly positionality. Thus, Get Back contests ethnographical processes that glean cultural knowledge from exterior positionality.
My story is intimate. I reflect on an uncle that I never knew. Sgt. Jesus Ernesto Chavez was nineteen years old when he stepped on a landmine in Hau Nghia Province. Shockwaves of that explosion ruptured my maternal family, amputating members from the only neighborhoods, culture & belonging they had ever known.
While my family sought solace by recalling my uncle’s youthful bravery & patriotism, a broader community protested disproportionate casualties of Chicano servicemen, arguing military action as unethical & sacrifice as wasteful. Unable to endure rhetorics of anti-war while mourning a child whose death must not be worthless, my family relocated outside these discourses, consolidating family income & my uncle’s death gratuity payment to locate a new home base. This base would become my birth & lifelong environment.
Privileged in white-dominant schools in beach cities, my access to pathways expanded because my uncle’s single pathway was to the army. Yet privilege isolated me as a rare Chicana (and only Apache), making me vulnerable in dislocation. I also remained isolated from Chicanx communities that view me as inauthentic since my family broke from Chicano networks, which manifests in my non-native Spanish, the foods I eat, beach I love & customs I never learned.
I am not ashamed of my unbelonging. I am ashamed of forces that stretch me beyond reasonable capacities. As an educator, I muster this resentment to advocate for student need. Ultimately, Get Back urges academia & community to close biopolitical pathways to violence & to open academic pathways populated with validation and opportunity.
Through study of my family’s movements from the 1960s to present, I detect gendered & racial biopolitical pathways that reinforce still-extant colonial determinations of bodies that are left to die & that are left to control. I situate private woundedness to confront institutional violations against Chicanx body, voice & autonomy.
My drive is threefold: to position myself as a Chicana-Apache who generates knowledge, to locate research of Chicana & Apache communities within lived experiences, and to expand decolonial methodologies by narrating self & community from internal scholarly positionality. Thus, Get Back contests ethnographical processes that glean cultural knowledge from exterior positionality.
My story is intimate. I reflect on an uncle that I never knew. Sgt. Jesus Ernesto Chavez was nineteen years old when he stepped on a landmine in Hau Nghia Province. Shockwaves of that explosion ruptured my maternal family, amputating members from the only neighborhoods, culture & belonging they had ever known.
While my family sought solace by recalling my uncle’s youthful bravery & patriotism, a broader community protested disproportionate casualties of Chicano servicemen, arguing military action as unethical & sacrifice as wasteful. Unable to endure rhetorics of anti-war while mourning a child whose death must not be worthless, my family relocated outside these discourses, consolidating family income & my uncle’s death gratuity payment to locate a new home base. This base would become my birth & lifelong environment.
Privileged in white-dominant schools in beach cities, my access to pathways expanded because my uncle’s single pathway was to the army. Yet privilege isolated me as a rare Chicana (and only Apache), making me vulnerable in dislocation. I also remained isolated from Chicanx communities that view me as inauthentic since my family broke from Chicano networks, which manifests in my non-native Spanish, the foods I eat, beach I love & customs I never learned.
I am not ashamed of my unbelonging. I am ashamed of forces that stretch me beyond reasonable capacities. As an educator, I muster this resentment to advocate for student need. Ultimately, Get Back urges academia & community to close biopolitical pathways to violence & to open academic pathways populated with validation and opportunity.