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- Hello.
My name is Daphne Taylor Garcia
and I am a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies
here at UC San Diego.
My research focuses on decolonial philosophy.
Decolonial philosophy is the study of how colonialism
has shaped the world we live in
and examines the social relations created across generations
and geographies as a result of it.
Importantly,
I also examine how we might forge new modes of existence.
Let me begin with a question for you.
What do you say when you are asked to specify your race?
Especially on official forms
where limited options are given.
What...
What do you put down?
The US census asserts that Mexican, Puerto Rican,
Salvadorian, Dominican, the Dominican Republic, et cetera,
are places of origin and that race is either White, Black,
American, Indian or Asian.
My own family is of indigenous African European
and Chinese lineage.
My father was half Black and half White born in Trinidad
and my mother was born in central Mexico.
Like many but not all, people from the Caribbean
and Central Mexico, my parents were ambivalent
about how they communicated their racial identification
to their children.
They of course told us about our African
and indigenous ancestry, but tended to refer to themselves
as Mexican, Trinidadian and West Indian.
My father along with his mother and siblings
moved from Trinidad to Toronto, Canada in the 1970s,
the birthplace of his father.
When my father was already in his 30s,
we moved to Scarborough, predominantly migrant community
that at the time was largely Caribbean.
My father had met my mother in Mexico city years previous
when she was part of the cleaning staff where he stayed.
He asked her to move with him to Toronto to start a family
and she agreed.
The fact that neither of my parents spoke about identity
in ways that resonated in Anglo settler context,
created a situation in which I generally knew
some of the facts of my lineage,
but I didn't have a sense of a homogenous racial
nor national identity.
My own physical appearance
didn't provide any clear direction either.
So this created challenges for answering the question
that I often received which was, what are you?
Census and other official forms push us to identify
in particular terms and to pick only one category at a time.
The fact that Mexican arguably operates as a racial category
in the United States is not acknowledged
and there is no rule made to contend with the fact
that terms can change meaning across time and space.
For many of us,
these questions of racial identity
can be difficult to answer
because they assert not only that everyone
is only one of these racial categories at a time,
but that we should immediately know which one to select.
Many Latinxs are told that their responses are incorrect
or that their responses make little sense.
This problem has led to multiple revisions
to how the census question is asked
to try to coax a "correct answer."
Part of my research is to answer why this is happening.
Why is it that so many people of indigenous lineage
in Latin America do not know who their relatives are?
And why do so many people of African lineage
in Latin America not identify as Black?
I also respond to the question, what exactly are we?
From the start of my college days at Trent University,
a small college about an hour and a half from Toronto,
I made a decision to focus on the social, historical
and philosophical questions about colonialism
and took courses that would help me understand
why it is that so many of us remain
in the lowest income brackets over generations
while being politically and socially marginalized.
In fact, if it wasn't for the critical theory
of philosophy courses I took,
I would have probably dropped out of college entirely
because I did not feel that the other courses I took
helped explain my reality.
So I focused on taking courses that taught me about
colonialism, critical theory and existentialism,
a particular branch of philosophy.
But I didn't plan to go to college at all.
So all of these questions I had about history, philosophy
could have gone unanswered.
For whatever reason,
neither of my parents talked to me about going to college.
It wasn't on my map as something I needed
or even wanted to do.
It was actually a high school teacher
who suggested that I should consider becoming a teacher
and I then learned about a college program
that offered support services to someone like me
who had to figure out post-secondary education on her own.
So I applied to Trent and only to Trent.
I figured if I didn't get in, college was not meant to be.
My teenage brother who was 14 at the time
came to live with me while I went to college.
We decided it would be good for him to spend some time
in a new context and to hopefully focus on school as well.
For the last two years of my college degree,
I focused on my coursework
while providing a home for my brother.
I applied to UC Berkeley for a PhD program in ethnic studies
and was accepted.
It was there that I had the opportunity
to examine the history of Spanish colonialism
and to think about the material, psychological
and intellectual legacies of multiple colonialisms.
I have now spent about half of my life in California.
A common US response to Latinxs
who are unsure of their racial identity is to insult them
for their apparent ignorance.
Another response is to insist that they should identify
as either Black or indigenous and derive them if they don't
or conversely tell them that they should not identify
as either one.
My research takes this approach.
First, I do not take people as givens
nor as stagnant entities,
but rather as conscious beings who are always in a process
of becoming.
How they understand their place in the world today
can change with new information, new experiences
and new vantage points.
I also center in my research, working class Brown people
who struggle to answer the race question
as not necessarily ignorant,
but rather as telling us something important
about the history and experiences of colonialism
in the Americas.
That premise led me to seek to understand the conditions
that make the response to the question of racial identity
possible.
My work is about connecting us to our histories
to explain these issues,
naming the ideologies that keep us from understanding
why it is that most of us remain economically
and socially marginalized
even after many people who look and sound exactly like us
have been here for centuries
and to embrace the study of colonialism and coloniality
to facilitate seeing ourselves accurately.
This involves facing our history,
understanding how it connects to other people's histories,
examining our perceptions of ourselves and of other people,
imagining the world we want to see
and then figuring out what we can do to bridge the gap
between the world we want and the world we have.
A part of that process is questioning the demands
being placed on us when we are asked to choose a race.
It also requires examining how the decisions we make
impact others.
If you are watching this video,
it's because someone has put college on your radar.
For first-generation Latinx students,
you will be the first in your family to have a chance
to study your history, politics, artists and philosophers.
Note that my own story of getting to be a professor at UCSD
was not linear nor is it a common story.
I didn't even mention the many jobs I had
or the breaks I took in between degrees
nor that I was a mature student when I started.
Whatever your path is, remember that going to a university
like UCSD is a possibility.
Ethnic Studies, the department I work in
is a field that emerged from social movements
and centers the perspectives of the colonized.
Here you can find a small
but growing community of Latinx faculty
who are here for you to learn from, talk to, get help from
and to find an intellectual community with.
So come to UCSD and take ethnic studies.
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