Cindy Cruz

Cindy Cruz, Ph.D., is an urban ethnographer and educational researcher. She is an associate professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a member of the National Association of Chicana/o Studies, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Anthropological Association. Her research looks at the embodied practices of resistance in homeless LGBT youth communities, violence and youth, problems in testimonio methods, and the school-to-prison pipeline. She is also interested in decolonial feminist theory, community-based learning, race and schooling, and U.S. Third World feminism.

Education

Cindy Cruz received her bachelor’s degree in literature at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She attained her master's degree and Ph.D. in education in 2006 at the University of California, Los Angeles.^[1]

Contributions to the field

Cruz’s work focuses on the embodied practices of resistance that queer youth of color utilize. She outlines the forms of new identities that are emerging among lesbian and gay youth of color through practices/praxical thinking that is grounded in the writing and theorizing of women of color.

From these ideas Cruz developed the concept of an “epistemology of a brown body” which acknowledges the multiple and often oppositional intersections of sociopolitical locations that the brown body appropriates and negotiates. “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.”^[2] In her article “Toward an Epistemology of a Brown Body”^[2] she focuses her writing on her experiences as a Chicana lesbian.

“I had always thought that among my endless number of relatives I had the only queer story to tell. No matter about the one in ten statistic for lesbians and gay men (homosexuals make up at least 10 percent of the population), I could not even imagine there was another lesbiana in our family until the day of my grandmother’s funeral.”^[2]

Other Chicana/Latina and African American feminists that frame their work in the form of lived experiences are Audre Lorde, Chela Sandoval, M. Jacqui Alexander, Maria Lugones, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and the Combahee River Collective, who have strongly influenced Cruz’s work.

LGBTQ youth and forms of resistance

Another area of study that Cruz focuses on is in the forms of resistance enacted by homeless LGBTQ youth. In her journey of understanding the brown body she centralizes her research in testimonio methodologies and critical ethnographic practice. “In my ethnography of LGBTQ street youth, I learned to read the subtle signs of their identities – the small rainbow bracelets, the body language between students, a movement of the hands, the coded languages – wherein the body became a sign.”

Publications

In “LGBTQ Street Youth Talk Back: A Meditation on Resistance and Witnessing”,^[3] Cindy Cruz argues 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".^[3] Following the parallels of the work by feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, this essay integrates a framework for resistance researchers with the traditional sense of social research. In other words, it may be seen as an alternative perspective from the researcher, where the researcher becomes inundated in the environment as a witness, rather than an "other". Cruz elaborates that "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".^[3] In that, Cruz suggests that intersections of poverty and race give way to new dimensions of marginalization, which are exclusive not only to LGBTQ street youth.

Cindy Cruz’ “Notes on Immigration, Youth, and Ethnographic Silence”,^[3] published in the journal “Theory into Practice”, "is a two-year ethnography of a public school that serves LGBTQ young people".^[3] Cruz advocates that teachers create safe spaces in schools where they may recognize ethnographic silence and omitted dialogue. By doing so, Cruz argues that such safe space will allow for LGBTQ migrants students, as well as other marginalized students, to feel comfortable about expressing and confronting their identities without negative social consequences. Such publication serves to challenge the traditional sense of the classroom into a space that may foster students in relation to their construction of self.

In “The Locker Room : Eroticism and Exoticism in a Polyphonic Text”,^[4] Cindy Cruz "collaborates with Greg Tanaka to inject story-telling into legal scholarship in order to deconstruct and then reconstruct knowledge".^[4] The authors encourage education researchers to steer away from methodologies and systems of analysis that are rooted on white liberal discourse, which serve to uphold the status-quo. This publication utilizes polyphonic dialogue in the first half, then transitions into an analytic discussion of the polyphonic dialogue to decipher and reconstruct the matter of knowledge. This process exercised by the authors allows one to identify multiple identities through the dialogue as relative to one another.

In “Toward an epistemology of a brown body”^[2] from the “International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education”, Cindy Cruz examines how "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".^[2] By reevaluating the writings of Chicana theorists Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Cruz determines the brown body as the required central role in the negotiation of multiple, and often conflicting, ideas and identities. To create new knowledge, Cruz deems it imperative to maintain the brown body in centrality when compromising for identity at an intersection of sociopolitical and ethnic roles. This publication is unique in that it implicitly prioritizes the appearance of ethnicity as a starting point in the search for one's construction of identity.

Awards

Cindy Cruz’s contributions to the field have been of great benefit to the research in many different fields for example, Chicano/a Studies, Queer Studies, Education, Feminism, and other interdisciplinary fields. Her work has been recognized through several prestigious awards. More specifically her article “LGBTQ Street Youth Talk Back: A Meditation on Resistance and Witnessing” has earned her two important awards in 2012. One of the awards was for Article of the Year from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) through the Queer Studies Special Interest Group. She also received the Antonia I. Casteneda Prize from the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). ^[5]

Activism

Along with other UCSC professors, Cindy Cruz has demonstrated substantial support for student-led, non-violent protests on the UCSC campus. The UCSC General Assembly, a general strike led by students to restore state funding to the UC system, took place on March 1, 2012 and effectively shut down both main entrances to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Following initial reports of protesters carrying clubs and knives, smashing a car windshield with a metal pipe, denying a resident of faculty/student housing the right to exit the campus, and keeping a campus health care worker from getting to work, several UCSC professors, including Cindy Cruz, responded to the initial reports by asserting that clubs, metal pipes and knives were nowhere to be seen at either entrance to the campus. Also, they contested that residents of faculty/student housing were indeed allowed access through the demonstration which shut-down the entrances. In addition, they applauded the efforts made by the students involved to organize and educate themselves and others about the state of the California budget and the increasing privatization of the UC system and public education in California.^[6]

Additionally, many UCSC professors, including Cindy Cruz, wrote a "UCSC Faculty Letter of Solidarity" to exemplify their support for the UCSC General Assembly. In their letter, they cite the UCSC General Assembly as a protest which correlates with national and global movements against inequality and privatization of public resources. The faculty also called on the UC to re-affirm its commitment to serve the public good, to reset its priorities to put students first, to reverse the growth in administration and foster instruction and research, and, by taking all of these actions, to restore its role as the university of the people of California. ^[7]

References