Mixing mediums, mixing selves: arts-based contemplative approaches to border crossings

In this paper, in collaboration with a friend, who is an artist and a licensed counselor, I use a mixed-medium art project to enact Gloria Anzaldua's theorizations of nepantlera. I do so by making visible how I operate from the liminal space that Anzaldua terms nepantla, as a transnational woman of color in US higher education. Using Anzaldua's framework of autohistoriateoria, I integrate fragmented storytelling, art-making, and theorization, exposing the wounds that accompany my movement through personal and professional spaces in academia. Critical to this exploration are a sense of isolation and exile, unsettling understandings of home and belongingness, and the deep excavation of wounds that maintain and proliferate divisions between self and other. Such divisions offer sites of interrogation into our complicity with our oppression through denying power that comes from within, waging war on ourselves, and venerating oppressive externalized power structures.