Look! A Whore.

"Look! A Negro." Frantz Fanon, BSWM

PART 1: A Story

You bundled up in your wool coat, doubled checked the contents of your bag (microphone, iPad, iPhone, wallet, notebook, pencil case, chargers), and grabbed your travel mug. You’d read on a travel blog that you’d need to bring your own to-go mug in Spain because it was common to sit in a café rather than take your cafécito to go. You headed down the stairs and out onto the streets of La Latina, an auspicious name you thought, for the neighborhood where you were staying while doing field work for your soon-to-be-completed dissertation. You walked by two fruit shops and ducked into the café bar. You ordered a cortado and ignored the smirk on the face of the barista, a middle-aged man with dark hair and eyes. He tapped his finger angrily on the counter when you attempted to pay by putting the euros in his hand. You realized that he didn’t want to take money from your hands but that morning you’d decided he was just grouchy. You left some coins, a tip, on the counter and he pushed it back at you and dismissively snapped that he was insulted at the gesture and that he made enough money without having to take yours. You shrugged your shoulders and walked out, trying to find your way to the bookshops you were told would have the materials you needed. At the first bookstore you were ignored even though you asked for help twice. You found the Africa section near the front of the shop and you collected every copy of a book written by an Equatoguinean author. You’d come to Spain to collect as many books on history, politics, race, and literature, as well as to conduct interviews with diasporic and exiled writers from the only Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan African nation-state. You piled the books onto the counter and to the surprise of the clerk you paid over 300 euros for your new collection.

You decided to skip the second bookstore because you had only 20 minutes before your first meeting with a retired Spanish political scientist whose area of expertise was Equatorial Guinea. You’d agreed to meet at the corner of the department store El Corte Inglés but you hadn’t secured a SIM card and without wifi your cell phone did not work. You told him you’d be wearing a burgundy coat, and that you had brown skin and curly hair. You thought that would be enough for him to spot you. You headed to the corner of El Corte Inglés and stood under the awning near the bus stop avoiding the drizzling rain. Ten minutes turned into twenty and twenty into forty. You paced a bit and kept your eye out for this señor. You’d gotten a little turned about and didn’t know where you were or how to get back to your apartment. After almost an hour you decided to ask the woman standing next to you to make a phone call on her cell phone and even offered to pay her a few euros for the trouble. You’d felt comfortable asking her because she reminded you of your mother, a short, fair-skinned, late-middle aged woman with a seemingly kind face. Little did you know that your request would be met with disdain. Perhaps it was the sound of your Puerto Rican accent, your fast-paced talking, or your Blackness. She pressed her purse tightly and replied: no. No, you could not use her phone and what were you doing in Spain anyway? You explained that you were a doctoral student doing research and that you were waiting to meet someone you were supposed to interview. She didn’t believe a word you said but she was your only hope at the moment, so you pressed on. Señora, you can hold my phone while I make a phone call on yours you offered – knowing that your smartphone was more valuable than her flip phone and perhaps that gesture would put her at ease. She acquiesced only after you made the suggestion twice and clutched your phone in her hand giving you an icy look as you triangulated your location with your contact. When you finally found each other, the old man scolded you for being on the wrong corner. You accompanied him to a café where he talked to you about the exceptionality of African dictatorship and how its violence went beyond any colonial influence. African violence, he pressed, was its own phenomenon altogether. You countered his argument to no avail and suddenly became distracted. You were being watched. You realized that the waitstaff and a few patrons were looking oddly at you and your interviewee.

One evening a few days later you’d gotten lost on the metro and with no cash in hand you had to walk back to La Latina. As you came up from the station you realized you were on a desolate street. Three men walked out of a building and you approached them asking, “¿permiso, me pueden ayudar?” Two of them brushed past you and the third one yelled, “¡NO ME HABLES!”. The fury flew out of your throat and whatever you said to them made one of the men double back and apologize to you but even then, he wouldn’t tell you what direction La Latina was. After about an hour of walking you found your way back to the apartment.

The following day you took the train to Barcelona where you were going to meet with and interview two Equatoguinean writers Juan Tomas Avila Laurel and Remei Sipi Mayo. This would be the first interviews with Equatoguinean writers in Spain and you were excited to meet with them and discuss your upcoming trip to Equatorial Guinea. When you arrived at the station Juan Tomas picked you up and took you to a bookstore and later to the home of Remei. At Remei’s apartment you were welcomed with open arms. She prepared you a meal, talked with you for hours, showed you photos of her grandchildren, and advised you to go to her hometown in Equatorial Guinea ensuring that someone would meet you there. She then asked how you were enjoying Spain. You answered her honestly and told her how you felt isolated, mistreated, and had faced much rude and racist behavior. Even the express train ride from Madrid to Barcelona wasn’t without incident: the Spanish man assigned to the seat next you refused to take it and was reassigned a new seat several rows ahead. Remei listened with a knowing grimace on her face and replied: “Niña, es que creen que eres una prostituta.” She explained that in Spain Black women, especially from the Caribbean were assumed to be prostitutes. Sex workers. Whores. You sat at the table of this beloved African woman writer, surrounded by her books, with your mouth agape. Remei had opened your eyes.

[found image/artist unknown]

PART 2: LA MIRADA

In her 2002 book, Inmigración y género, Remei Sipi Mayo examines the racialized experiences of African women in Spain. She outlines the distinct experiences that propel women from various locations across Africa to Spain. Furthermore, she enumerates the kinds of racialization and quotidian violence experienced by Black women in the diaspora. She names this violence “La Mirada,” or the reductive “gaze” through which Black immigrant women are often seen

Es aquella que surge del exterior o sea de la sociedad receptora, de aquellas

miradas que ante mujeres procedentes de escenarios humanos diferentes tienden

o pretenden encasillarnos, reduciendonos a estereotipos y aplicándonos prejuicios

como, por ejemplo, los referidos a considerar que por ser de un determinado

origen, somos prostitutas, trabajadoras del servicio doméstico y un largo, en

ocasiones, etc. Intentando borrar saberes y riquezas que algunas trajimos y los que

aprendimos aquí como maestras, escritoras, dinamizadoras de grupos, mediadoras

interculturales, etc. (22)

The violence of La Mirada reduces African and Afro-Caribbean women to the roles of sex workers or domestic workers, while simultaneously erasing the rich knowledges and skills they bring from their homelands and eliding the skills and education they acquire in exile or diaspora.

In his 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon examines the ontological and phenomenological (“ontogeny” and “sociogeny”) impacts of anti-Blackness and racialization on Black subjects. Relegated to the “zone of nonbeing” the Black (man) is condemned to continually face the bad faith of anti-Black racism and the “veritable hell” of continued dehumanization (xii). In his chapter “The Lived Experience of The Black Man,” Fanon recounts a quotidian moment of violence, the “passing sting” of a young white boy in France crying to his mother, “Look! A Negro” and “I’m scared” (90). This chance encounter, among others, forced Fanon to see himself “in triple,” to understand the lived experience of the Black man as embodied, and to see the sociocultural schema of white supremacy yield to an embodied racialized schema(92).

Fanon has long-been critiqued for his parsimonious discussion of gender and sex in general, and his terse discourse on Black women in particular. Yet, in the days after the revelation that during my doctoral fieldwork I was perceived as a whore, I kept thinking about that oft-cited chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. In my imagination the little French boy of Fanon’s story grew into the Spaniards (both men and women) who looked at me like a sexual object with no value. Within this colonial white supremacist heteropatriarchal system Black women are reduced to their racialized sex and potential to perform illicit sex acts. The fact of Blackness, for Black women, is to become the container for sexual labor, to labor for the white imagination. Gendered racialization is a production of a series of limiting categories, spaces, placements in the world. Thus, thinking about the “space between the legs,” as articulated by M. NourbeSe Philip, is a critical site to think about how Black women speak within, between, and beyond histories of oppression and contemporary forms of quotidian violence. [1]

A Black Latina perspective adds to these African and Caribbean meditations on the permanence of gendered anti-Black racial structures and attitudes. To be clear, sex work is work, perceived promiscuity is a social construct with all-too-real impacts, and the word “whore” is both fatuous and laden with meaning. In this case, the attitudes and actions I experienced in the field revealed to me how Black women assumed to be prostitutes are conceived as: suspicious, interesadas, needy, desperate, cunning. It is also imperative that we link this tacit understanding of Black women’s bodies/being as part of transnational networks of the sex trade that thrive in the Caribbean through economies of sex tourism and matrices of exploitation. [2] The space afforded to Black Latinas by La Mirada in a world mired by ongoing colonization and coloniality, is wretched.

Found Image/Artist Unknown

PART 3: BLACK IN THE FIELD

I have been thinking about the surveillance of Black people both in public and institutional spaces, and the confluence of both.[3] In January 2014 I was conducting a final round of interviews and material collections for my dissertation which focused on Blackness and the literary, aesthetic, and political relationship between the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic) and Spanish-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa (Equatorial Guinea). After a week of awful experiences in Madrid, some of which I outlined in Part 1 of this post, I traveled to Barcelona to the home of writer and editor Remei Sipi Mayo. That afternoon Remei listened to my stories, commiserated with my pain, and affirmed my experiences. Unlike the many other (white Spanish and mestizo Latinx) scholars with whom I’d come to share these experiences, Remei didn’t brush the story away or reduce the blatant gendered racism I’d faced as simply “rudeness” or “Spaniards being in a rush”. Instead, Remei was one of the few faithful witnesses to my experiences and she stood alongside me helping me to reckon and recover from the deep impact of those violent interactions.[4]

Each year I tell this story to my graduate students during our “Responsible Conduct of Research" discussions. I share my experience as a Black Latina in the field for two reasons: first, to expand their understanding of field work and transdisciplinary research in the humanities, and second, to foreground the ontological experiences of Black women researchers as a way to underscore how gender, race, and gendered anti-Blackness impact the experience of scholars in the academy in general and in the field in particular.

Graduate and government institutions offer scholars in humanities and the humanistic social sciences training on archival and field work including various forms of data collection and primers on ethical human subject study. These trainings, however, are crafted in universalist terms and often assume that the scholar in the field, in the archive, and in the world, is a white man. As such we are trained to approach field and archival research as if these spaces/places would welcome us, nurture us, and accept us as they would if we were white male scholars. To be clear I was not totally naïve in my scholarly endeavors. As an Afro-Boricua -a colonial subject- going to Spain for research I was aware that I might face racism. Yet, I was also endowed with a false sense of security offered to me by my training in Comparative Ethnic Studies and by the financial resources given to me by the top public institution in the US. That is to say, I was expecting racism in general yes, but not the kinds of gendered racism and xenophobia that made quotidian encounters unsafe.

The latest uprisings in the wake of extralegal and police violence against Black people in the US has ushered in a bevy of public letters by Universities and Colleges across the US promising “accountability” and increased “diversity” efforts. If research institutions are indeed committed to recruiting, retaining, and otherwise supporting students who are radically racialized and gendered, students who are underrepresented, and students who are first-generation, then they must reject the normative underpinnings of their research agendas, trainings, and methodologies. This will not be addressed by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training but rather by rethinking the colonial categories of research, the human, and the intimate impacts of anti-Blackness inside and outside the ivory tower. As the Combahee River Collective argued in their 1977 statement, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Thus, as we continue the important work of abolishing the current systems of unfreedom endemic to capitalism and coloniality, we must continue to make critical changes to our conceptions of knowledge production. One such way to do this is to take the experiences of Black women and racialized and gendered subjects as the point of departure for a profound reimagining of the practices of all scholarship.

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Notes:

[1] M. NourbeSe Philip A Genealogy of Resistance: and other essays. Mercury Press (1997). See also, Katherine McKittrick, "'Who do you talk to, when a body's in trouble?: M. Nourbese Philip's (Un) Silencing of Black Bodies in the Diaspora" (2000).

[2] For more on Caribbean sex tourism, sex trafficking, and sexiles see: M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005); Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, “Female Sexiles? Toward an Archeology of Displacement of Sexual Minorities in the Caribbean” (2011); Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture, (2015); Lorgia García Peña, Borders of Dominicanidad: Race Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (2016) in particular the chapter titled “On Bandits and Wenches”;

[3] For more on surveillance and the state see Simone Browne Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015). For more on the experience of “archiving while Black” see John Hope Franklin, “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar” (1963) and Ashley Farmer, “Archiving While Black” (2018).

[4] For more on faithful witnessing see, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez, “Faithful Witnessing as Practice: Decolonial Readings of Shadows of Your Black Memory and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” (2015), Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (2020); Maria Lugones, Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalitions Against Multiple Oppressions, (2003)

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[this post was first published on 1 July 2020 on the Black Latinas Know Collective site]

in a time of love and fury [part 1]

ONE.

"tell them that she even though she called the police a few times when he hit her she would [later] drop the charges. [we] could not use [that evidence] in court. he got away with murder." 

Vanessa Otero, 21, oldest daughter, second of four children, kind, intelligent, beautiful, funny, popular, serious, diligent, loving. Vanessa at 21: a junior studying Psychology at Jersey City State and working part-time, a daughter mourning the recent loss of her father, a sister/cousin/niece, the delight of the family, a newlywed who lived with her husband of two years above the laundromat owned by his parents. Vanessa was 21 when she was killed in 1997, a bullet from a sawed-off shot gun pierced the right side of her forehead. Vanessa whose casket was positioned so the left side of her body faced the mourners because the stitching on the fatal wound could not be hidden. Vanessa whose famously long curls were shorn to the shoulder, a necessary cut we were told, in the failed effort to save her life. Vanessa's husband Jose Mendoza had arrived from his DJ gig drunk, violent, ready to fight. Knocky, his best friend, told us later that Jose had planned the murder: 'i'm going to kill her tonight' he'd said while they unloaded his equipment from the car and brought it up the two flights to the apartment where Vanessa had been sleeping. Knocky, the only one to hear these words, precursors to the events minutes later, lied on the witness stand, 'he loved her more than anything' he said.  Jose served six years. This is a refusal to bear witness. 

I search online for the news stories, look for the obituary, try to find the reports, and I come up empty-handed. I click page after page, but the internet, it seems, has scrubbed clean what I remember very clearly: being woken up by mami whispering, 'mataron a Vanessa,' and walking to the laundromat by moon-and-street light, waiting for answers. I remember my father, unmoored by the loss of his niece, his suffering only an echo of her mother's and siblings' pain. I remember the line for Vanessa's wake wrapping around 6th and Washington Street and my family inconsolable for all the accompaniment in grief. I remember the reporters and cameras and the papers with photos and the stories about the girl who was so loved in Hoboken. I remember that her burial was on picture day, that I went to school in the afternoon to sit red-and-swollen eyed for my 8th grade photo, that after school my best friend Dana and I went to get a slice of pizza at Benny's where two men joked about how 'the girl probably deserved it' and how she 'probably cheated'. This too, is a refusal to bear witness. 

I asked my aunt for permission to write about Vanessa here. She wants you to know that Vanessa called the police on multiple occasions. Jose had a history of hitting her, threatening her, and she was afraid. She wants you to know that Vanessa dropped the charges every time, that those reports couldn't be used in court. We know that her in-laws, the Mendoza's, knew more than anyone else: they heard the fighting, saw the bruises, negotiated with the police, pleaded for Jose to stop. They'd told Vanessa to leave, to be careful, but they too lied on the stand. This is a refusal to bear witness. 

There were so many possible witnesses to these violences against Vanessa. We know that there is more to Vanessa's life than what the official transcripts and court-documents could ever tell us. We, who hold the memory of her, were not there on the night of October 25th.

 It has been nearly nineteen years since Vanessa. I search and cannot find her. 

TWO.

"The avoidable tragedies of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Falcon Heights Minnesota - and other places we don't happen to have cameraphone footage of."

[NY Magazine 10 July 16. Approval Matrix: Highbrow/Despicable]

When I heard the news of  the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile I was thousands of miles away from Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights.* I was away in Europe and the distance removed me from the immediacy of the mourning, the vigils, protests, the reeling punctuated by love and fear and fury. I witnessed this tumult of feeling from afar, trying to come to terms with how digital technology provided an ability to witness these deaths on social media sites in the form of automatic rolling videos and still photos. Horror on loop. And even as this footage showed so explicitly the violation of human life, many viewers engaged in an act of refusal. Instead of bearing witness to these murders, the video evidence was wielded against the dead over and again in op-eds comments sections, and conservative media (yes, I regularly dive into the chasm of the comments section, but I never feed the trolls). 

Then on August 1st: Korryn Gaines, a 23-year old mother murdered by police as she cradled her 5-year old son in her arms. Her child, the sole witness, was also shot. Then on August 2nd, news outlets reported the murder of 23-year old  Joyce Quaweay, beaten to death by her husband and his best friend (now former police officers) in front of her two daughters ages 2 and 10-months. There is no footage for Korryn and Joyce and Vanessa. For them we must make the choice to faithfully witness that which can never be seen. We are well versed in this labor. 

We stand at an intersection: state-sponsored and intimate violence. 

How do we witness faithfully at this intersection? In light of widely circulated footage? In the face of refusal? In instances where there is no camera or no documentation? 

THREE.

What do we call this labor? A labor of love and fury. An ethics beyond coloniality. 

In my most recent academic writing (forthcoming) on Latinx Caribbean decolonial feminist thought and women of color feminisms, I propose that what fuels us toward radical relational decolonial praxes is "love and fury." That is, a love of one another across difference, a decolonial love steeped in differential consciousness that strives toward myriad forms of liberation, and a fury ignited by the living realities of coloniality (gender, power, being, knowledge, etc.). 

In the face of state and intimate violence we are told that the "smoking gun" evidence of brutality, of surrender met with mercilessness, can supposedly induce sympathy from the viewing (and purportedly believing) public, and in some imaginaries leads to more reasonable uses of force. And yet, we know that even seeing is not believing when privilege and power (re)write the scripts.  But, faithful witnesses have believed before the ubiquitous video, they remember the evidence that never made it to trial, they read against the tropes that render us eliminable. We have been faithful watchers without having to see.

We know the value of their lives over and against the faulty litmus tests of doubted digital footage, refusals to bear witness, and incomplete archives. In a time of love and fury, which branches farther than our imaginaries, we can choose to be faithful witnesses.  

FOUR.

Vanessa's life and death is scrubbed from the internet, there is no trace of her there. We don't know who she would be now, but we can imagine that she'd be a more beautiful and loving version of herself. 

Notes:

* I was attending an intensive lecture series on Equatorial Guinea in Madrid and later attending the Dialogo Global, a decolonial dialogues seminar in Barcelona.

** The term 'love and fury' bears a striking resemblance to the term 'love and rage' or 'amor y rabia' which is linked to revolutionary and anarchist movements (including the Zapatistas). This term of 'love and rage' also came up in the Dialogo Global (see previous note) during the lectures of Nelson Maldonado-Torres. My use of the term does not have any known relation to those contexts but rather emerged in January 2016 while I was writing an article on the relationship between postcolonial and decolonial feminisms. In talking about the kinds of oppressions we respond to as decolonial feminist thinkers and activists, I began to feel frustrated and feverish as if there was a ball of fire in my chest and throat, and it was there that the idea for 'fury' came along with with 'love' because it is only through, with, and for love that we can endure such pain. 

on faithful witnessing

My article, "Faithful Witnessing as Practice," was a project years in the making. Early in my graduate program (UC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies) I was exposed to the work of decolonial theorists, the possibilities of Ethnic Studies as heresy, and philosophy from the 'underside of modernity'. One of the texts we read was Maria Lugones' Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages (2003) wherein she briefly introduces the politics of faithful witnessing before shifting focus to the crux of her text on decolonial feminist philosophy.

I was moved by the concept of faithful witnessing, jolted by the formulation of the act on paper and struck by its significance in my own life. How do we witness faithfully? When have we been witnesses, for how long, and to what? And most importantly, how do we interpret what we witness? I wrestled with these questions in the context of my own lived experiences as the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants, as a product of a working-poor family and community, and as the living legacy of colonial subjectship. Over the past few years I have written about faithful witnessing as a literary trope in the work of Afro-Latinx and Equatoguinean writers and have discussed what it means to be a faithful witness to history in my Ethnic Studies and Latino & Caribbean Studies courses at Berkeley and Rutgers.

This spring I was invited to give the keynote lecture at CSU Fullerton for International Women's Day. It was in that context that I first shared publicly some of my own experiences of faithful witnessing. My goal was to show how we can take ideas from the page to better examine our lives, or better yet, to share how decolonial feminisms and women of color feminist philosophy take seriously the experiences of people on the 'underside of modernity' and make space for them to be engaged as knowledge. 

I told three anecdotes, one of which I will excerpt below, and then explained what was violent/dangerous about the encounters, who acted as a faithful witness, and why these kinds of interventions matter:

1. The first example was about the commitment to transformative justice in the face of domestic violence - an ethics that I was was aligned with as a personal politic but knew little of as a concept until I attended an incredible talk by Mia Mingus.  
2. I then discussed my experience as an Afro-Puerto Rican graduate student doing field work in Madrid and Barcelona. I shared how my body politic and Caribbean inflected Spanish was interpreted on the streets of Madrid and how one of my interviewees in Barcelona acted as a faithful witness on my behalf.  
3. The third example (excerpted below) was about my time working as a medical interpreter when I was an undergraduate. That experience underscored the reality of medical ethics and cultural competency at the intersections of community clinics, undocumented migration, and institutional/structural racism. 

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"My job at the free clinic was to be an interpreter between the patients, mostly undocumented Mexican and Latino families, and the doctors. Like many first-generation Latinx children, I spent a lot of time as a child interpreting for my mother at the welfare office, with school officials, and between my father and the landlord of our tenement. Through those experiences I witnessed first-hand the racism, disregard, and lack of compassion that working-poor and immigrant families faced in these institutional/academic/residential spaces. My training at the clinic instructed me to interpret word-for-word the patient’s symptoms and the doctor’s directives. So for example, if the patient said “me duele el estomago,” I would tell the doctor, “my stomach hurts.”  Many mothers came to the clinic with their children and whenever they explained symptoms like headaches, faint breathing, and stomach pains, the doctor would inevitably say “they need to stop feeding the kid so many tortillas” or “limit the tortillas.” As a medical interpreter I was not allowed to interject or to clarify the directive of the doctor or offer more than a direct translation of the tortilla directive. One day a Dominican mother came to the clinic with her son, suffering from similar symptoms. The doctor listened for a minute and said “tell them that the son needs to stop eating so many tortillas.”  Now, because I was Puerto Rican I knew that tortillas were not a staple of my neighboring islanders' diets. I turned to the doctor and said, “Dr. they are Dominican, they don’t eat tortillas" but he instructed me again to translate the 'limit the tortilla message'. The boy's mother then told me to translate “we don’t eat tortillas” but within a few seconds the doctor was ready to move on. This tortilla story is somewhat funny (if you are familiar with difference amongst Latinxs) but also illuminates the kinds of structural and institutional violence that affects people of color and especially women and children which represented the majority of the patients seen in these spaces.

So, how is this violence? The medical institution was exposing families to harm by reducing their illnesses to dietary causes and by making sweeping assumptions about the cultural practices of their Latinx patients - most of which were women and children, an already vulnerable population. Who are the witnesses in this context? Due to the intimate and protected nature of medical care bilingual medical interpreters, health care advocates, and the patients themselves (perhaps child translators in tow) would be some of the few people who could bear witness to these structures of oppression. However, what is important here is not only the possibility of seeing oppression, but also the politics of how we interpret what we witness. Due to my own experience as a child translator on the one hand, and college student on the other, I recognized the difference in treatment depending on the patient's racial/ethnic/class status. What are some possible interventions? I recognize now that at 19 years-old I had a limited perspective on what I could do to help thus, I did not have a method beyond translating to the best of my ability and attempting to develop methods of circumventing the doctors' disregard by further dialoguing with the patients in small and hidden ways. In retrospect, I could have potentially reached out to other translators, clinic staff, and/or tried to access resources to bridge the divide and help build cultural competence or advocated for more Latinx doctors and staff."

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This clinic experience was the example that most resonated with the students at CSU Fullerton, (a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution), and after my talk many of them shared similar stories. Translating was a formative experience for me as a child and became an act through which I could bear witness to, and attempt to disrupt, the disrespect and oppression that my parents faced. As a young adult in the clinic, I was witness to the kinds of oppression and lack of care these families faced and this too shaped my worldview. Now as a professor at Michigan State University, a researcher, and a writer, I have the opportunity to articulate the significance of those experiences through the philosophical concept of faithful witnessing and as part of women of color feminist ethics. We cannot afford to forget that women of color, children, and peoples on the 'underside of modernity' act as faithful witnesses against oppression. It is a tool for survival and resistance and it shapes our knowing and how we produce knowledge. 

In this way, my article on faithful witnessing was a lifetime in the making.