I sensed something different in the air as soon as I opened the door to room 1808, a portable classroom building in the El Paso Community College Transmountain Campus Mountain Village.  If you’ve never had a class in a portable classroom, it’s been my experience that they lend themselves to magic—discussions are livelier, students linger long after class is over, and on Fridays, snacks seem to appear out of thin air. 

Part of my routine for the past few weeks, undertaken in order to keep myself as sane as possible during the new COVID-19 pandemic reality, has been to balance my professional life as a doctoral student and assistant instructor and still allow for those small things that bring joy to my life—like watching YouTube videos. 

“Our problem then is to define what a Chicano is before we can define what Chicano art is.”

-Jacinto Quirarte, 1973

As a precursor, I ask my students to answer the question posed to me countless times, “What is a Chicana/o/x?” Anyone familiar with the field, the Mexican culture, the people, and politics will undoubtedly have their steadfast and loaded answer, but these types of inquiries often fall short of the more relevant issue of, “how do we express identity?” An impetus for this project is to expose more learners to the world of the humanities—the foundation for how we interpret the human condition and consciousness. 

As students, we grow in the understanding of our chosen disciplines through the years.  We learn the subject matter, learn the nuances of which we hadn’t been previously aware, and discover things that had been previously hidden to us.  The subject matter sometimes becomes clearer, but it often becomes deeper and complex.  What we discover as well is that that depth and complexity apply not only to the subject matter, but to the ways in which we conduct our research into that subject matter.

As I write this, the world is in pandemic, with all societies looking frantically for a cure in the form of a vaccine. Perhaps some form of a vaccine will be found in the next year, and then we will again be able to move out of our homes. But this moment of pandemic offers us a suitable window to stop and reflect on the very practice upon which we are all relying today for the solution of our problems, i.e., the practice that we call science.