Humanities 125 Introduction to Mexican Culture - Summer 2019
About the Mesoamerican Figurine Project
In the summer of 2014, students of Humanities 125:
Introduction to Mexican Culture at Rio Hondo College began to excavate and materialize the human body
and ideology through hand-bone morphology usage (Garcia 2014),
the sculpting of Mesoamerican clay figurines (Garcia et al., 2018), and reflective writing. Drawing from a series of Indigenous
Xicana/o teaching strategies, particularly Gloria Anzaldúa’s (2012) Coatlicue
State (Garcia 2019), students gave birth to their own forms of Indigeneity as
a means to contest ongoing trauma and violence. I (Instructor Garcia) strove to cultivate in all students a
strong sense of agency and empowerment, while meeting student learning outcomes in a humanities classroom.
Of Maya ancestry...
For six weeks, students learned diligently of the rich history and culture of Ancient Mesoamerica, and the living Indigenous family (Garcia and Marquez 2021, Marquez and Garcia 2021). For a number of units students had the opportunity to sculpt clay figurines in an effort to materialize their own views of the human body. But why the human body, one might ask? Through my own research and classroom interactions with student youth and adult learners, I came to understand that empowerment could be manifested through ideas of the body (i.e., small scale body ritual, embodiment), and that students with a concrete sense of the self did better in the classroom, and were active participants in their communities, as opposed to those who lack a strong sense of who they are, their upbringing, and ancestry. The project, is my response, to a rise in trauma signs and symptoms observed among college students in the last ten years. It remains part of a larger worldwide effort, that strives to assist Indigenous peoples and youth live honorable and sustainable lives. The work is in line with the goals of Article 13, and Article 14 of the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples.
Clay-work - a culturally relevant teaching and therapeutic model
So that the baby grows safe in a cradle
This website has multiple purposes... It serves to: 1) bring the stories of Rio Hondo students to a worldwide and online audience; 2) validate the understandings and experiences of Indigenous students as vital to the creation of new humanistic knowledge; 3) bring attention to the benefits of clay-work as a culturally relevant and sustaining, and therapeutic tool in the classroom; 4) give one example of how a decolonizing pedagogy (see Acosta 2007; Gonzalez & Shields 2015; Luna et al., 2015; Tejeda & Espinoza 2013; Toscano Villanueva 2013) works in a community college where as of 2015, 83% of the population is of Indigenous Mesoamerican ancestry; and 5) acknowledge the Tongva/Gabrielino/Kizh Indian land on which Rio Hondo College resides on (see Map 1 and Map 2.).
See main source Los Angeles Public Library
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| Map 2: Gabrielino/Tongva/Kizh map with village places names. Click HERE it’s live! Modeling Indigenous Xicana/o/x Teaching and Learning In the course of 10 years teaching and learning with students at Rio Hondo College has led to the creation of the following models. |