Beyond El Arrebato: the seven stages of Conocimiento as instruments for radical reflection and the unlearning of white supremacy culture
ISSN: 0090-7324
Article publication date: 7 December 2021
Issue publication date: 2 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
To be actively antiracist requires an internal reckoning, what Chicana activist and scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa referred to as “el arrebato.” Used to describe the first of seven cycles through which conocimiento, or knowledge, is formed, el arrebato presents a shift in the understanding of the world as it has been prescribed by both patriarchy and white supremacy. This paper will use Anzaldúa's Seven Stages of Conocimiento to trace a Latinx librarian's journey in unlearning white supremacy toward a shift to antiracist practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This ethnography follows the author from her time as a Diversity Alliance resident librarian in an R1 library to her current position as a tenure-track librarian in a primarily white institution, outlining how the seven stages have led toward active interrogation of not only library structures but with the legacy of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse within her own Latinx identity.
Findings
As an ongoing reflective practice, this paper presents a journey of learning and unlearning toward critically deconstructing the culture of “niceness” within librarianship, where the principles of neutrality and vocational awe lend to library structures that place responsibility on the individual for institutional trauma rather than rightly examining and reconstructing the environments and structures themselves.
Originality/value
This autoethnography presents the viewpoint of a first-generation Latinx librarian growing up in a tricultural context in the Midwest.
Keywords
Citation
García Mazari, S. (2022), "Beyond El Arrebato: the seven stages of Conocimiento as instruments for radical reflection and the unlearning of white supremacy culture", Reference Services Review, Vol. 50 No. 1, pp. 40-50. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-07-2021-0030
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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