Learning and being in community: a Latina feminist holistic approach to researching where we live

Since college, La Puente, CA has been the focus of my research and activism from bilingual education, sanctuary to by-trustee area school board elections. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I returned to live and research in this city of my childhood and where my immigrant grandparents eventually moved to in the 1950s from Nicaragua and Sicily. Rooted in home lessons, research experiences, participation in community struggles, and informed by Chicana/Latina and other women of colour feminist methodologies, this piece uses storytelling and poetry to reflect on the politics and possibilities of researching where we live. In particular, it highlights the epistemological and methodological pushback, along with the benefits and lessons learned over a life course of learning from teachers, becoming neighbours, and studying educational inequalities. Unique to my Latina feminist approach are the enduring relationships that have unfolded over the course of three decades of being able to (re)search, learn, live, and organize in community.