Thinking together, finding one another

Thinking together, finding one another

María Carolina Sintura

If you go into Las Maestras Center, on the first floor of the South Hall building on the UCSB campus, you’ll walk into a narrow and dark entrance hallway. When this space received us, on several late afternoons this past November and December, my friends and colleagues followed me in lowering their voices, hunching their backs, and tilting their heads forward as if entering a cave or a secret meeting space… a refuge, in any case. Towards the end of the hallway are the light switches and, after flicking them on, we walked onto an open, warm, and well-lit room.

As Graduate Student - Teaching Assistants on strike, we came to LMC after completing our shifts on the picket line. Our bodies were frequently cold, our skins sometimes burned by the sun, our backs hurt by the discomfort of sitting on the ground, and our feet sore after marching around the campus. Our spirits were angry and frustrated as every day of the strike the university confirmed how much it misunderstands and undervalues our labor. But here, in this room, we realized we had found each other as workers, peers, and people. This room had space for anger and for joy, for frustration and for hope, for debate and for friendship.

Siloed into departments, disciplines, classrooms and offices, induced into the credentializing logics of the pursuit of degrees, and ground to exhaustion by our myriad obligations, it seemed that we had forgotten everything we shared: as workers, as intellectuals, as creators, as part of a community of teaching and learning.

On a corner of Las Maestras Center rests an altar with a small clay figure in the middle. One of my colleagues noticed her on our second day at LMC and pointed her out to me, asking why it was there. “She is a maestra - a teacher - and those around her are her students”, I explained. This maestra isn’t lecturing, grading, or administering examinations. As she sits with her students, it is their reciprocal attentiveness and presence of mind that makes them teacher and students, and the other way around.

As striking graduate students we met at Las Maestras Center to study and write. And, in doing so, to learn from each other’s studying and writing practices. Yes, we were on a work stoppage, but as researchers, writers, and creators, our labors of thinking, writing, and creating can never quite stop. Indeed, the very labor that the institution most undermines when it calls us “part-time workers” – the production of academic papers, the composition of creative pieces, the application to grants and fellowship, the contemplation, the thinking, the reading, and the writing that makes us the capable and well-rounded intellectuals that conduct the research and the teaching that give the institution its name and prestige– was silently and almost secretly ongoing in that room.

We thought and wrote and created in the presence of one another. 50 minutes of writing followed by 10 minutes of conversation, so we could make sure that the excitement of this newfound togetherness wouldn’t get in the way of our writing progress. We conversed about our experiences and struggles with research, teaching, and academic writing. We shared insights, resources, and strategies. More importantly, we opened up about our frustrations, failures, and shortcomings. We encouraged and consoled each other. We dissertated on our research topics, not for a grade or to accomplish another degree requirement, but because we knew we were in the presence of others who would listen actively and engage with our ideas just for the sake of thinking together. We remembered the love of knowledge, the thirst for depth, and the sense of wonder that brought us here. That’s what keeps us here at the University, in spite of the institution’s logic that encourages us to neglect our full intellectual, spiritual and creative selves.

The strike has ended with a contract that left too many of us dissatisfied, still rent burdened and unequally compensated. But, through striking, we remembered each other’s presence and we found the space to give each other attention and care.

In this spirit of cultivating our friendship and solidarity, and with the desire of continuing to resist the siloes and credentializing logics that keep us apart, I am happy to host Community Writing hours for graduate students at Las Maestras Center this quarter. Like a few of us did this past Fall, we will gather on Wednesday afternoons from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. to think, write, and create in each other’s attentive presence. Just like then, we will work individually for 50 minutes on the writing that requires our attention, followed by 10-minute conversations on whatever moves our spirits. Join me and other fellow graduate students any or all Wednesdays this quarter beginning on February 1st. Les espero.