Interview With Maestra Silvia Rodríguez Vega
Photo from UCSB’s Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies website.
In the fall of 2022, the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara welcomed Dr. Silvia Rodríguez Vega as one of their newest faculty members. We had the pleasure of being able to conduct an interview with her. Given our community engaged and praxis based work at Las Maestras Center, we were excited to get to learn about Dr. Rodríguez Vega’s community engagement as both an artist and a scholar. We asked her a few questions about her research, what she is working on, and what inspires her.
Reflecting upon her arrival to UC Santa Barbara, she expressed:
I am so honored to be in community with everyone at UC Santa Barbara, and I’m especially honored to be part of the Chicana/o Studies Department. I am humbled by the important history of this department and campus. I remember studying El Plan de Santa Barbara as an undergrad in Arizona and being inspired by the vision of El Plan because of how radically different it was to my experience in my home state, which enacted a ban of ethnic studies in K-12 schools.
Now, as the first faculty member trained specifically in Chicana/x/o Studies to join the department, I think a lot about the great sacrifices so many people had to make for me to be here. It is an especially exciting time in this department given the awesome work happening with Las Maestras Center and other groups across campus and in the community. I hope to contribute my own experiences and expertise, but most of all, I hope to convey my belief that this discipline has the power to transform students’ lives.
Dr. Rodríguez Vega has been immersed in her research for many years and we wanted to know what she is currently up to. When she first arrived on our campus, prior to becoming an Assistant Professor, she was a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, following the completion of her Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since then, she shared with us that:
Right now, all my energy is focused on bringing my book into life! I have been working on my book, Drawing Deportation, for what feels like half of my life and I am excited to have it in my hands soon. The book argues that young immigrant children are not passive in the face of challenges presented by U.S. anti-immigrant policies. Through drawings, theater performances, and family interviews, the book sheds light into both the impact of the deportation machinery on immigrant children’s lives, and how they develop personal agency to creatively respond, manage their emotions, and reimagine the dilemmas presented by legal violence.
I am most excited to share the book with the many communities that helped create it, like the children and families I worked with in Phoenix, AZ and in Los Angeles, CA. Aside from that, I am so excited to get to know the students and faculty on campus and folks in the community.
Her work displays a deep commitment to activism, specifically immigrant rights. Reflecting upon what drives this commitment to working with immigrant communities, she adds:
Mostly, I believe it was seeing the suffering of immigrant families in Arizona (including my own) that burned a fire inside me to change the ways laws were/are imagined, accepted, implemented, normalized, and weaponized. I have been involved in the immigrant rights movement since middle school, when I joined a theater for social change program at 13 years old. The person who was running the program (who later on became my mentor) was doing her PhD. That is how I learned about El Teatro Campesino, Theater of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the other aspects of my work that I fell in love with and saw as tools to combat structural and legal violence. What was most powerful for me as an undocumented young person during that time was to actually DO theater. Not only learning theories, but practicing them (what I later learned was called praxis), became one of the guiding principles of my work as a scholar, educator, and human being in general.
Prior to her journey at UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Rodríguez Vega had been involved in countless community engaged projects. She has worked as a theater teacher to elementary school children, has organized theater of the oppressed demonstrations to protest anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona through Teatro Nopalero and so much more. Dr. Rodríguez Vega is very much a Maestra in her own right, deeply immersed in her practice, and we wanted to get to know what inspires her work as a teatrista and ARTivist:
As a young child I first wanted to be a legislator with the goal of changing laws (in addition to being a singer on the weekends, an astronaut at night, and a teacher during the day) haha! I obviously had no plans for sleep! However, I completely fell in love with the transformative power of expression through art. I saw that power first change my own life and the lives of my friends who were also involved in the theatre group I was a part of. There we did theater with elders, children, parents, teachers, and others folks in our community. With them, I got to see how dialogue and embodiment were so generative.
While using theater in and for community I continued other art practices like poetry, painting, clothes and jewelry making, and even my own performance art practice. It was during this time that I came to accept my identity as an ARTivist. The rascuachismo of community organizing taught me to harness all tools available to me, and that included any expressive form to bring about liberation and social justice. Although I am mostly now teaching and writing about Teatro, I love seeing the creative process take off with children and others and how it can turn a dire circumstance or situation into a moment of hope and possibility.
Dr. Rodríguez Vega has demonstrated how one can weave in their art making and activism into their scholarship. Her work is a powerful example of how to put theory into practice. In closing, she gives her advice to students who may be trying to figure out how to integrate what they learn in the classroom into their daily lives and their communities. She says:
I think that we are all doing that already on a daily basis, from the shows we watch to the music we listen to. All of our experiences shape us and eventually change us. Going to college was something I never thought would become a reality for me and when I finally arrived as an undergrad, I was having existential crisis every week because of how much I was learning and how quickly my world was becoming so big! College is already an overwhelming thing, especially for those of us who are the firsts in our families, so I’ll just say, be gentle with yourself. The things that speak to your spirit and change your perspective will inevitably become part of you and how you live your life, no need to add more pressure.
These words of wisdom provide us all, estudiantes de la vida, navigating the university, with the needed guidance to follow our creative path. Her work illuminates us with the possibility of how the arts can become transformative tools for inciting revolutionary change. Because of Las Maestras Center’s committment to the idea of “art as research,” we are so excited to have Dr. Silvia Rodríguez Vega share her praxis with us. We know that she can teach us all so much about the value of creative scholarship.
Welcome Maestra! We look forward to getting to work together in the future!