Materialized Practices of Food as Borderlands Performing as Pedagogy

In this paper, I examine the interrelationship between borderlands, food, and ways in which they perform as pedagogy. First, I define borderlands in relation to art. Second, I discuss food and borderlands as authenticity, hybridity, and race/body. Lastly, I examine various fields of pedagogy including public, border, and food pedagogy and consider how they relate to food. I suggest that the interrelationship between borderlands and food can be used as a pedagogical tool to teach and learn about liminality, tension, contradiction, and hybridity. The hybrid spaces of consumable borderlands challenge food purity and yield unexpected foods such as carne asada fries and hotdog tamales. An important concept of border pedagogy, borderlands can be employed to decenter, reterritorialize, remap and create new knowledge through food materials and processes. The entanglement of public, border, food pedagogy, and tamales is a complicated and dense process wherein knowledge collides with the in-between. Further, the knowledge connected to the experience of dialogue, making and eating food as borderlands enters a liminal space between knowing and not knowing and varies with each encounter

UTRGV COVID-19 Visual Journal

UTRGV College of Fine Arts ARTS 3381 Art Education: Theory and Background students are creating COVID-19 Visual Art Journals on Instagram. They are documenting moments, changes, and challenges in their lives during this pandemic. Some are taking on an activist stance to send out social and health messages. Assistant Professor of Art Education, Christen Sperry García, MFA, PhD teaches ARTS 3381 and has adapted the course for the current online arena

Nepantlando: From borderlands foods to classroom acts of Nepantla

The border, as defined by Gloria Anzaldúa, is conceptually marked by an ideological site called nepantla—a Nahuatl word that refers to a space existing in-between worlds. Nepantla is a performative site for visual art and writing. Making borderlands foods is an active space that exists in-between worlds. Using a performative approach to writing and image, I theorize nepantla through food, language, identity, and race. The process of nepantlando is a teaching practice of performative visual art and studio writing. Art and teaching are inseparable in nepantlando. As nepantla is a knowing and understanding of living in-between worlds, nepantlando is a creative doing of living in-between worlds