We are Self-Directed Learners and Identify Ourselves as "Schoolers"...Why?

Salsas Tapatío and Valentina. Same roots, different branches. One Chicanx, the other Mexican. Nuance and duality at work.

In a complex nuanced world, which includes many colored shades within the spectrum of the black and white present in any given personality we bond with, any new subject we encounter or new situation we face...Our family has found, ignoring the nuances becomes a huge disadvantage in our journey towards self-directed life long learning or just our plain survival within the dominant culture.
Culturally, we find limiting ourselves to black and white thinking fails to account for the natural shifting or evolution of knowledge and situations, as we are traditionally accustomed to perceiving them. Thru our cultural lenses, almost nothing is monolithic and viewing the world in monolithic ways is confusing for us, because we find it stalls or stunts our learning and therefore our freedom to innovate or evolve in any realm. In our case, it can fatally impair our ability to survive some of the tough situations we face as a family of color. 

As self-directed Ancestral Schoolers, the seemingly contradictory use of the word "schoolers", to identify the way we learn, is a token of our cultural duality and a reflection of the marginalized reality we sometimes face as Chicanx. Even as our unearned privileges and hard earned advantages are evident, as freely as our individual family has chosen and managed to make our lives be, we are not blinded to the social and political realities that cause us to have to culturally code switch. We have to code switch not only when we learn in certain settings, but also adjust the way in which we translate our existence for the dominant culture to understand it. Since we live within it, we adjust as we figure out ways to try our best to have our cake and eat it too without "escapism, denial, or succumbing to fantasy." In fact, I'm doing it right now. I'm writing in my second language so you all can read me and we can interact.

As a Chicanx family, we are the human embodiment of the realities of our non-monolithic world. 
Families like ours, are the product of the crash between the totalitarianism of the European colonizers and the cultural nuances of our Indigenous origin. Our origin story and current reality contain the remains of many cultures in which gender, race, and hierarchies, were multifaceted. Most of us Chicanx, come from a group of people which acknowledges the existence of more than two genders and at some point during colonization had to learn to live under the oppressive classifications of a system which divided us into hierarchical groups of more than sixteen "castas," all of which underhandedly continue to have an effect in the ways in which we as Mexicans relate with each other and others. These internal and external contradictions have transformed us into nuance itself. We still live our daily lives surviving the ancestral and current attrition of our culture, language, and beliefs. 

We the people, which most now know as a single group called Mexicans, are people accustomed to navigating the nuances of the many customs, multiple cultures, social classes and peoples which inhabit México. We are the part of the people forming all these diverse populations, which sometimes fight and sometimes equitably share knowledge and resources thru "tequio," an ancestral custom of communal work and resource sharing, spread out around the many groups populating our territory.  
Despite this being a forgotten tradition only formally shared by a minority of the Mexican population, many Mexicans still continue to practice forms of tequio informally,  in diverse ways and different settings. Tequio is part of the way in which we ourselves form community and learn among friendly allies.
It is because of this history, we can innately adapt into any and many learning situations and the reason we are survivors. It is also the reason many of us can laugh, cry and sing all at once at funerals, the reason we can speak Spanglish, and the reason some of us can venerate the Virgen of Guadalupe and La Santa Muerte with the same fervor, whether we are religious or not. These are just some examples of what appear to be our contradictions. These are the same reasons we have learned effective ways to appease those who feel threatened by our otherness, the reasons many of us can make our voices and our vocabularies sound white over the phone while at work and so "barrio" when among our friends and family at home. 

As a family, our use of the word "schooling" to define ourselves, while at the same time denouncing school and everything it stands for, announces our freedom to be our multifaceted selves. We recognize that at any time, the dominant culture might need a diploma as proof of our worth as people of color. We are recognizing there might be times when our marginalized circumstances might cause our reliance in school. We are also recognizing our determination not to let that stop us from fighting to regain our learning independence and achieve decolonization.

There was a time at the beginning of our self-directed journey, when we initially organized our new knowledge about self-directed education, by compartmentalizing it. As figurative black and white pieces and notions, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge and skills to be absorbed on the way to mastery. Later, as confidence and signs of proficiency begun to appear, experimentation and creativity began to happen, giving way to breakthroughs. Which is how we have surpassed plateaus and our nuanced learning independence was born. 
While under the spell of the wrongfully conceived idea that we originated from a culture of inexperienced self-directed learners... Our family experienced stressful situations such as fear of the unknown when attempting something we thought was "new" or "alternative."
After we realized our reality, such stress ceased to have an effect on us, giving birth to our newly found adaptability and flexibility, as we face our complex reality as a Chicanx family. We do not fit into the paradigm and in that nuanced context, we paradoxically feel at home.

P.S. Just for fun! A little bit of pop culture humor in honor of our Chicanx struggles.