Mobile Arte Museos: Creating Spaces Through Nepantla

Abstract

about a carne asada fries burrito? Some of these foods are considered more U.S. American (i.e., donuts) and the others more Mexican (i.e., pan dulce), and others reside in-between food worlds (i.e., carne asada fries burrito). As defined by Gloria Anzaldúa (1999, 2012, 2015; Keating, 2009), the border is an ideological site called nepantla—a Nahuatl word that refers to the process of living in-between worlds. Nepantla is ambiguous, tense, and contradictory. One who passes through this threshold is “suspended between traditional values and feminist ideas, [and doesn’t] know whether to assimilate, separate, or isolate” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 127). The authors of this instructional resource are three students and one faculty member, all Chicana/x identifying, at a Hispanic-Serving Institution on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands (Figure 1). Our privileges and disadvantages vary depending on our skin color, age, sexual orientation, class, gender, and language(s) spoken. Nepantla is a space that we negotiate every day. For example, some of us were raised to be mothers and wives as our Mexican mothers were, but we were not raised to value education and career as is emphasized for women in U.S. culture. The tension between the two can be frustrating, painful, and disorienting. We create mobile art spaces using borderlands foods as an entry point into the process of living in-between worlds. For example, carne asada fries are a way for us to describe how our two worlds merge at the intersection of fries (American food) and carne asada (Mexican food). Neither fully American nor Mexican, our lives are a borderlands patchwork. In this instructional resource, we introduce the concept of mobile art museums. We frame our museos through nepantla (or living in-between worlds). Next, we outline a three-step process of writing visual testimonios, and creating and traveling our mobile museums. We then provide pedagogical prompts for educators.