Decolonizing the RGV
Background leading to the spread of existentialism
Being able to derive a critical understanding from my experiences with racism, sexism, and homophobia as a Mexican immigrant living in the South Western United States is one of my proudest accomplishments. My arrival to the Unites States as a thirteen year old represented an unprecedented challenged; from learning a new language, to trying to coexist in an environment that proved both very welcoming and hostile towards my particular subjective embodiment, my experiences have been informed by a number of contradictions. While I encountered a number of great people who offered their support along the way, there were others who, perhaps out of ignorance, managed to instill …show more content…
It is the desire to encourage and facilitate in others the ability to think critically about their material condition, power relations in the world, and how these two influence their lives what compels me to spread existentialism throughout the RGV, in an attempt to discredit inauthenticity and self-deception.
Challenging narratives that promote and celebrate the inauthenticity of the self is not a simple task, but I figured that the process of consciousness raising is understood best if discussed in terms of “Thinking Outside the Box.” The “Thinking Outside the Box” analogy is particularly useful because the vast majority of people have a notion of what this analogy entails. With some tweaking, however, one can move from the popular conception of thinking outside the box to one that is critical of material condition, power relations in the world, and binarisms that constrain our lives (i.e. gender …show more content…
I am the current Vice-President. The way in which Carlos initially envision THC was as action based organization, fully engages with the campus community. When I was invited to join the project, I proposed a framework that was heavily informed by Walter Mignolo’s “Colonial Matrix of Power.” THC’s aim was to create a student coalition integrated by organizations within and outside the university in an attempt to subvert oppression in the five wide domains of human experience (economic, political, environmental, epistemic/subjective, and civic).
For me, the objective was simple: There was no need to reinvent the wheel with every organization. Aligning existing organization was a more practical approach to organize our community than trying to have every single organization tackle issues independently, without backing from others. Only in the instance where there was not an existing organization that could do work on any of the five domains would we seek out to engage a group of students who could potentially create a new organization (i.e. University Dr. Magazine, Pan American Society for Debate and
Background leading to the spread of existentialism
Being able to derive a critical understanding from my experiences with racism, sexism, and homophobia as a Mexican immigrant living in the South Western United States is one of my proudest accomplishments. My arrival to the Unites States as a thirteen year old represented an unprecedented challenged; from learning a new language, to trying to coexist in an environment that proved both very welcoming and hostile towards my particular subjective embodiment, my experiences have been informed by a number of contradictions. While I encountered a number of great people who offered their support along the way, there were others who, perhaps out of ignorance, managed to instill …show more content…
It is the desire to encourage and facilitate in others the ability to think critically about their material condition, power relations in the world, and how these two influence their lives what compels me to spread existentialism throughout the RGV, in an attempt to discredit inauthenticity and self-deception.
Challenging narratives that promote and celebrate the inauthenticity of the self is not a simple task, but I figured that the process of consciousness raising is understood best if discussed in terms of “Thinking Outside the Box.” The “Thinking Outside the Box” analogy is particularly useful because the vast majority of people have a notion of what this analogy entails. With some tweaking, however, one can move from the popular conception of thinking outside the box to one that is critical of material condition, power relations in the world, and binarisms that constrain our lives (i.e. gender …show more content…
I am the current Vice-President. The way in which Carlos initially envision THC was as action based organization, fully engages with the campus community. When I was invited to join the project, I proposed a framework that was heavily informed by Walter Mignolo’s “Colonial Matrix of Power.” THC’s aim was to create a student coalition integrated by organizations within and outside the university in an attempt to subvert oppression in the five wide domains of human experience (economic, political, environmental, epistemic/subjective, and civic).
For me, the objective was simple: There was no need to reinvent the wheel with every organization. Aligning existing organization was a more practical approach to organize our community than trying to have every single organization tackle issues independently, without backing from others. Only in the instance where there was not an existing organization that could do work on any of the five domains would we seek out to engage a group of students who could potentially create a new organization (i.e. University Dr. Magazine, Pan American Society for Debate and