When you talk to Dolores Delgado Bernal you immediately feel a sense of community and lineage. In fact, though she’s an accomplished researcher, she says her super power is less about her research and more about the communities she works with and serves. “My super power,” she says, “is being able to connect, tag along, and learn from brilliant anti-racist scholars who draw from their families, their experiential knowledge, their Latinx communities, and their socio-political convictions.”
Delgado Bernal is a professor of educational leadership for social justice at Loyola Marymount University, and was this year’s Wallace Foundation distinguished lecturer at the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) annual conference—the largest gathering of scholars in education research. Her work bridges the disciplines of education and ethnic studies, using Chicana feminist and anti-racist scholarship to investigate educational inequities, among other things.
She is also a passionate femtor for Latinx students and early career scholars, which was evident by the line of people waiting to speak with her after her lecture at AERA. I was fortunate to be one of them and to catch up with her a couple of weeks later to learn more about her work. What follows are highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Angel Miles Nash: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and why you became interested in education research in particular?
Dolores Delgado Bernal: I’m from the Midwest, and so I would say both that and my family influenced where I landed on my trajectory, the research I do, and who I do research with. Listening to family stories, seeing my mom as an example of a strong, Brown woman when I was growing up in the 1970s have shaped who I am as a scholar. I mentioned in my lecture that she went back to school to finish her high school diploma when I was in elementary school, and how the school-to-prison pipeline impacted my family very directly. So those kinds of things influenced my research trajectory.
I started working in a community-based organization in Kansas City, not in academia, and ended up at the National Council of LaRaza [now Unidos]. My supervisor there said,
“You should think about going back to school and getting your doctorate.” I applied to UCLA, and I wasn't thinking, “I want to be a researcher. I want to impact educational policy or practice at that level.” I taught elementary school for a while and thought I would go back into the classroom, and I would have more influence having the Ph.D. behind my name.
Well, I didn’t go back to the classroom and ended up on a trajectory that was doing research, much of it community-engaged. For me, that just meant being able to be in relations with families, parents, Latinx communities, graduate students who came from and wanted to work in these communities. I did a lot of that work when I was at the University of Utah. I was there for 17 years.
These were the experiences, the experiential knowledge, that shaped my research, particularly how I was centering Brown women's voices, which really went back to my own family and seeing the strength of women in my own family.
AMN: Your work in those years led you to writing a seminal article, Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research (1998) and developing feminista methodologies. Can you explain how that work came about?
DDB: Sure. The work came about through deep reflection. As I was engaged in the process in my dissertation, I didn't recognize what I was doing as a feminista methodology. Then I filed my dissertation, and when I was revisiting that research, I realized there was something there epistemologically and methodologically that hadn't been written about in education.
It was about the influence from family and ancestral knowledge. I thought about how I brought myself to the research–from my experiences as a first-gen student, as a former elementary school teacher, as someone who had worked in and with community-based organizations. This all shaped how I interpreted findings. These were the experiences, the experiential knowledge, that shaped my research, particularly how I was centering Brown women's voices, which really went back to my own family and seeing the strength of women in my own family.
The framework came about in that retrospection. When we think of training graduate students, we’re very often thinking about how we train them in the methodology that they lay out ahead of time. Put it in the proposal before you do the dissertation research. But outlining a Chicana feminist epistemology and methodologies came about more in reflecting on what I had done, if that makes sense.
AMN: That absolutely makes sense. That’s wonderful. What gave you the courage to do such creative work at that time?
DDB: Oh, wow, that’s a great question. I think at least a couple of things come to mind. One is my dissertation chair, Daniel Solorzano, who gave me permission and encouragement to delve into Black and Chicana feminist scholarship and bring that into my dissertation at a time when it wasn't done. Now it’s very common to see this within education, pulling from feminists of color, different disciplines, and other areas but, really, that wasn’t done then. Then I got a dissertation-year fellowship at UC Davis in Chicana/o Studies, which I took because of the feminista scholars who were there. To be in community and surrounded by a group of Chicana feminists who were groundbreaking in their specific fields of psychology, political science, sociology, was a way to not just give permission, but allow me to acknowledge that my work, my ideas were important.
AMN: That’s refreshing to hear, because my dissertation advisor also encouraged me to define intersectional leadership in educational spaces. You mentioned in your speech that the impetus for the initial study was the work of Chicana women who were school leaders. How do you envision people using feminista methodologies to advance the work of leaders in schools and how does this affect students?
DDB: I think it’s limitless. In at least two generations of scholars, I have seen things that I never imagined. During my talk, I mentioned queer scholars such as Ángel Gonzalez, Roberto Orozco, and Sergio Gonzalez (2023) who've taken up how to think of this methodology differently in terms of when they're doing work with trans or queer Latinx students.
When early career scholars, graduate students, whoever it is, can bring their whole selves to the research and when they're coming from the communities they work with, it very often allows us to interpret and see differently.
Then there have been scholars who have paired something like pláticas–the culturally grounded conversation type of data collection–with letter writing (see Valencia and Campos 2023). Again, the idea being when scholars use feminista methodologies, plural, because there are many now, it allows us to see things, hear things, learn things that we wouldn't be exposed to otherwise. Part of that is through relationships with who we usually call participants, but very often in feminista methodologies we call collaborators.
When early career scholars, graduate students, whoever it is, can bring their whole selves to the research and when they're coming from the communities they work with, it very often allows us to interpret and see differently.
AMN: It's exciting to hear you say you’ve been able to see at least two generations of scholars enact this work. I think every scholar's dream is to see that level of impact. What do you imagine the impact could be in continuing to broaden the approach of using feminista and pláticas?
DDB: I am really looking forward to how we can be more accountable to different subgroups within the broader Latinx community, such as queer, trans communities, and Afro-Latinos. How can this research be used to see things in those communities that haven't yet been examined in educational scholarship?
I think the same can be said for spirituality being something that gets taken up in this research more. It's something that I didn't address in my 1998 piece. I mentioned spirituality, but didn’t talk about it in detail. I think now scholars are taking on this idea of spirituality in relationship to education. Separately, a focus on the education of Indigenous immigrant students is a way to broaden the research. What does that mean in particular communities such as Los Angeles, where we have such a large Central American and Mexican Indigenous population, speaking languages other than Spanish? What does this mean in terms of how we think about schools, about multilingual education, and about how we prepare educational leaders and teachers?
AMN: Can you tell us some ways that you’ve seen this theory and practice intersect in the education sector more recently?
DDB: This latest generation of scholars is merging feminista theories with quantitative research. For so long, we’ve seen feminista methodologies really embedded in different kinds of qualitative methods. Now you see scholars bringing in quantitative methods with this feminista understanding. Specifically, there are a number of folks who are doing spatial analysis using GIS mapping. I mentioned in my lecture one study where Mayra Puente and Veronica Velez mapped quantitative census data and then used feminista methodologies, pláticas specifically to collaborate with high school students to give social-political context to the census data. This crossing over into the quantitative world while still holding onto the contours of feminista praxis is a new direction.
If we can think about research as being helpful tools, whatever the findings are, it could give us some insights on a day-to-day basis as we’re teaching or running a school that helps everyone do what they’re doing even better.
AMN: You’ve seen so much in these recent generations. What would you like to see in feminista methodologies in another 20 years from now?
DDB: Angel, you’re giving me a tough one here. I guess my hope would be at least twofold. One would be that it's anything but static. I know in academia, sometimes people want to hold on to their ideas, or they don’t want the critiques. But when we get static, we have a tendency to forget those issues or those people who are more marginalized–Afro-Latinos who get forgotten sometimes in the discussion or Indigenous peoples who migrate from Mexico or Central America. My hope would be that the framework continues to be extended in various communities and generates new ideas.
Second would be that it truly does allow us to do something different in practice. I never want research for research's sake, or to just say someone has another publication. The hope is that it actually has some impact in a community, in a school, with students, with educational leaders. Does it allow us to not just see and hear different things, but then to be able to address them and do something with the information we get?
AMN: Just picking up on the last thing that you said to bring it all back to schools. What advice might you give to a principal, a superintendent, or anyone who might be shy about using research to help make it more approachable?
DDB: That’s really important because there’s a tendency to sometimes shy away from research because of what it might expose, right? I do think at times, quantitative and qualitative research, outside of the feminista realm, can become something that might be used to “get you,” as opposed to asking, how can we use this information to better know our communities, the kids, the families that we're serving? If we can think about research as being helpful tools, whatever the findings are, it could give us some insights on a day-to-day basis as we’re teaching or running a school that helps everyone do what they’re doing even better.
