Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body: Living and Learning Through a Corporal Landscape of Resistance and (Re)generation

Through a Chicana Feminist and Curricular Reconceptualist lens, this article theorizes a Curriculum of the Mestiza/o Body as return to historicized, corporal knowing which takes shape, form, flesh and language in the Mestiza/o Body in order to nourish and arm especially Mexican/Mexican-American (Mexicana/o) young people toward equitable, hopeful educational futures of dignity and wellness. This work is informed within the intellectual, survival legacies of a land-based indigenous-heritage People who have long railed against erasure and distortion within oppressive Eurocentric and hegemonic social constructs. This paper presents a resistant, healing, and regenerative school curriculum, mirrored in the cellular workings of the body itself, through which young People of Color, and especially Mexicana/os, “guilty of nothing but their born color, guilty of being innocent” (Baca, 1990, p. 46) are brought into a learning landscape wherein their—our—histories, ways of being, thinking, learning, and loving are central bloodlines of classroom practice.