Chapter 2: En La Brega: Puerto Rican Female Scholars Navigating U.S. Educational Pathways

Few studies document the experiences and subjectivities of Puerto Rican female scholars on the road to doctoral attainment. Guided by La Brega as a Puerto Rican epistemology (Díaz Quiñones, 2000) and drawing from place consciousness (Greenwood, 2019; Gruenewald, 2003), and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005) frameworks, we employ testimonio as a first-person methodology to describe and reflect on the contradictions and complexities of our life and educational trajectories as two Puerto Rican female scholars living and working in the U.S. diaspora within majority White spaces. We posit that Puerto Rico’s territorial ambiguity has traumatically shaped our collective bilingual and bicultural identities and our personal, educational, and professional trajectories as we have learned to “do things,” or what we Puerto Ricans refer to as la brega, a central strategy to navigate life as a means of surviving with dignity in the face of adversity (Díaz Quiñones, 2000). Our testimonios serve as a collective voice of resistance, empowerment, and affirmation for Puerto Rican female scholars in the United States. Without essentializing our experiences, findings extend Yosso’s (2005) CCW framework revealing a distinct Riqueza Cultural Puertorriqueña (RCP), the accumulated assets, knowledges, subjectivities, and resources unique to Puerto Rican female scholars who must constantly navigate through U.S. educational pathways to succeed in the PhD journey.