Telling Tales for Justice and Equity: Storytelling as Public Nepantla Pedagogy

In 2020, as a global pandemic health crisis united us in a similar plight worldwide, I asked myself: How can spaces for social closeness traverse borders—creatively, publicly—and counter the discourse of social distancing, which in reality means physical distancing? My mind was “still racing back and forth, longing for a return to normality,” but I knew that “nothing could be worse than a return to normality” (Roy, 2020b).

With Arundhati Roy’s words as a North Star, amidst physical separation and stay-at-home orders, I considered: How might virtual spaces become an in-between space of hybridity—what Anzaldúa (1987) called Nepantla. As I began to recognize that the rupture the pandemic had brought about could serve as a site for transformation (Delgado Bernal, 2018), I wondered how my own feelings of in-betweenness—as a transnational, woman, teacher, and teacher educator of Color in North America—might serve as a site for reimagination.

I inhabit a space in-between; my identity changes depending upon my location, as is the case for many people. My identity and experiences made me think about what I could do in a pandemic to support children and families, to enact a public pedagogy from a site of Nepantla; here is a little more about me and my history.