Cindy Cruz

Interests

Teaching

Homeless youth,LGBTQ Youth,Critical ethnographic methodologies,Social and cultural analysis,Cultural Studies and Education, Critical Pedagogy,Foundations of Education,Feminist Methodologies,Interviewing Youth, andU.S. Third World Feminist Pedagogies.

Research

U.S. Third World and Decolonial Feminisms, Testimonio,Schools and LGBTQ youth,Digital Queer Youth,Digital Queer Literacies,Homeless youth,Youth and Violence,Latinos in the Education Pipeline, andViolence against LGBTQ Communities.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Chapters

• Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ street youth doing resistance in infrapolitical worlds. In Teresa McCarty and Arshad Ali (Eds). Research Methods in Critical Youth Studies: A Practical Guide, (pp. 175-186). Routledge(pp 175-186). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203585078
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  When feminist philosopher and popular educator Maria Lugones (2010) talks about a resistant sociality, I recognize this way of being in the world with others; one in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) street youth share with each other gossip and information about jobs, teachers, social workers, the police, and their security guard agents. These spaces away from the scrutiny and examination of those in power, when queer street youth compare their experiences and analyze power, become locations of creativity and possibility. A resistant sociality also makes space for the queer youth to rest without harassment, smoke and laugh with friends, dress provocatively with new-found clothes, dance to publically taunt onlookers, but also dance to enjoy their own and each other’s bodies. It allows youth to release the “muscular tension” (Fanon, 1963, p. 17) accrued from constant negotiations with teachers, police, and medical personnel.

Journals/Publications

• Cruz, C. (2024). CALIFORNIA. Kenyon Review, 46(Issue 1).
• Zaino, K., Brockenbrough, E., Cruz, C., Johnson, L. P., & Nicolazzo, Z. (2023). “It’s This Practice of Being With”: A Kitchen-Table Talk on Queer and LGBTQ+ Educational Justice. Equity and Excellence in Education, 56(Issue 1-2). doi:10.1080/10665684.2022.2158400
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  This kitchen-table talk examines what queer and trans* ways of knowing, being, and doing offer to movements for educational justice. We begin by sharing artifacts that illuminate our relationship to queer and trans* justice in education, and from these personal experiences, we explore the tensions and possibilities of queer and trans* dis/embodied epistemologies, with particularly attention to the power of intergenerational coalition building. Ultimately, we highlight how we can practice being with and for one another in the face of ongoing ideological and material violence against queer and trans* people within and beyond educational contexts.
• Cruz, C. (2019). Reading This Bridge Called My Back for pedagogies of coalition, remediation, and a razor’s edge. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(2), 136-150. doi:10.1080/09518398.2018.1533150
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  AbstractIn this article, I examine the engagement of pre-service teachers with US feminist of color theory. Centering coalition relations, re-mediation, and dialogic narrative, I argue that the field of women of color thought is pedagogical in thinking through the intersectional and multidimensional problems of teaching and schooling, particularly when working with under-resourced schools and displaced and dispossessed students and their families. A framework based on the intellectual labor of US women of color, where the pedagogies of coalition, re-mediation, and dialogic narratives create powerful epistemological interventions that support pre-service teachers as they think about the complex problems of schools in this era of the defunding and the dismantlement of public education. It is a US women of color pedagogy that engages teachers in developing alternative accounts of their relationship to the world, how these new accounts are unavoidably theoretical and provide a starting point for new thinking ...
• Cruz, C., & Pillow, W. S. (2019). Theorizing the razor’s edge of love and rage in research and praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(Issue 2). doi:10.1080/09518398.2019.1576948
• Cruz, C. (2016). On an Ethnography of Surveillance: A Commentary. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 47(Issue 1). doi:10.1111/aeq.12137
• Cruz, C. (2013). LGBTQ Youth of Color Video Making as Radical Curriculum: A Brother Mourning His Brother and a Theory in the Flesh. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(Issue 4). doi:10.1111/curi.12022
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  This essay examines a video poem curriculum for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) students of color at a continuation school in Los Angeles, California. In this close reading of a video poem that draws from a larger research project of a community-based learning curriculum, I have found that for LGBTQ students of color whose lives often intersect multiple oppressions, it is in the reflexive pedagogical work of "storying the self" (Goodson, 1998) where they develop a critical consciousness through an interrogation of their own bodies as they confront HIV, survival sex, and violence. The racially queered self/body, particularly in media work, becomes a rich representational tool used to facilitate reflection and praxical thinking about the multiple, often simultaneous experiences of Latino and African American LGBTQ students. It is in this pedagogical space where the urgency and necessity of a radical politic emerges from the analysis of intersection and intermeshment in student experiences, and where a "theory in the flesh" that is derived from youth bodies may literally save your own life. © 2013 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
• Cruz, C. (2012). Making Curriculum from Scratch: Testimonio in an Urban Classroom. Equity and Excellence in Education, 45(Issue 3). doi:10.1080/10665684.2012.698185
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  Testimonio, as a genre of the dispossessed, the migrant, and the queer, is a response to larger discourses of nation-building and has the potential to undermine the larger narratives that often erase and make invisible the expendable and often disposable labor and experiences of immigrants, the working class, African Americans, and others. This essay explores the use of testimonio in urban classrooms in Los Angeles and its use as a mediating tool in critical thinking and community based learning projects. I argue that there is a pedagogy to testimonio that is intersubjective and accessible and that, under certain circumstances, re-centers and revitalizes curriculum in this era of standardization and accountability, a hearkening to social justice movements that begin in education. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
• Alarcón, W., Cruz, C., Jackson, L. G., Prieto, L., & Rodriguez-Arroyo, S. (2011). Compartiendo nuestras historias: Five testimonios of schooling and survival. Journal of Latinos and Education, 10(Issue 4). doi:10.1080/15348431.2011.605690
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  This storytelling begins with a positioning of why and how we use testimonio as part of a larger project of social justice and transformative pedagogies. In this collective testimonio, 5 working-class Latina scholars tell the stories of their struggles to overcome the challenges of language and assimilation, of gender discrimination and racism, of the violence of patriarchy, and of the experience of being treated as an "alien" in one's own country. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
• Cruz, C. (2011). LGBTQ street youth talk back: A meditation on resistance and witnessing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 24(Issue 5). doi:10.1080/09518398.2011.600270
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  In this ethnography of LGBTQ street youth, I argue that despite the regulation and containment of their bodies, queer street youth consistently create spaces of resistance that move them away from the tropes of infection, contamination, and deservedness that are inscripted onto the bodies of queer youth. Using the work of feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, this essay articulates a framework for resistance researchers - scholars who enact a "faithful witnessing" in solidarity with the communities they are describing, a movement away from the radical othering that often happens in social science research. It is in this positioning as a faithful witness that researchers can attend to the deconstruction of the discursive climates of deficit tropes that obscure the gestures and maneuvers of resistance. The tropes of contamination and irresponsibility intersect many of the experiences of LGBTQ street youth in ways that implicate not only LGBTQ street youth, but also other marginalized bodies. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.
• Cruz, C. (2008). Notes on immigration, youth, and ethnographic silence. Theory into Practice, 47(Issue 1). doi:10.1080/00405840701764797
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  The experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) migrant youth are often found in between narratives, complicated by the current political climate that makes it difficult for migrant students to disclose information about their lives. In this two-year ethnography of a public school that serves LGBTQ young people, the author suggests that teachers and education practitioners must learn to not only recognize the subtext of student narratives - the recognition of ethnographic silence and to listen for what is not being said - but also to create safe spaces in schools where LGBTQ migrant students feel comfortable to reveal identities without fear of reprisal.
• Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(Issue 5). doi:10.1080/09518390110059874
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  In its current emphasis on all that is analytic and cognitive, the absence and elusiveness of the body in educational research defines and delineates any consideration of how new identities, particularly the emerging identities of Latina/o lesbian and gay youth, are being invented within a contestation of dominant discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In a reevaluation of the writings of Chicana theorists Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, this paper locates the brown body as central in an ongoing practice of negotiation in which multiple, often opposing, ideas and ways of being are addressed, appropriated, and negotiated. The brown body, with its multiple and often oppositional intersections of sociopolitical locations, must be acknowledged in its centrality in creating new knowledges. For the educational researcher, understanding the brown body and the regulation of its movements is fundamental in the reclamation of narrative and the development of radical projects of transformation and liberation. © 2001 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
• Tanaka, G., & Cruz, C. (1998). The locker room : Eroticism and exoticism in a polyphonic text. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(Issue 1). doi:10.1080/095183998236935
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  Critical race theory now encompasses a polyphonic telling of story in which multiple, shifting identities are seen in relation to each other and situated within historical contexts. Locating the fictive voice of an administrator forced to deal with change at a small private university, the article begins with a flashback to confrontations demanding that he reexamine his positions in relation to both work and social life. The second part of the article is an analytic discussion of the voices of narrator and other actors and concludes with a critical reconceptualization of polyphony. Much in the same way that critical race theorists have injected story-telling into legal scholarship in order to deconstruct and then reconstruct knowledge, the authors urge education researchers to move away from methodologies and systems of analysis that derive from white liberal discourse and ironically serve to maintain the status quo by leaving in place conservative structures and reward mechanisms. © 1998 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.