Epilogue: “Tell them About the Dream, Martin”: When Homophily Happens and Music and Educational Leadership Meet Destiny

In Boiderlauds: La Frontera,Anzaldua (2007) posits the concept of the “new mestiza consciousness,” which provides geopolitical critiques that situate the complexity of U.S.-Mexico border relations; analyzes the implications of occupying a hybrid racial identity; and extends dualistic explanations to encompass the breadth of gendered, sexualized, and class-based difference. Similarly, Giroux (2005) utilizes the concept of border pedagogy to describe the power relations in educative settings that must be dismantled by leaders, educators, and students—border crossers—who are willing to challenge the “physical . . . [and] cultural borders historically constructed and socially organized within rules and regulations that limit and enable particular identities, individual capacities, and social forms” (p. 22). What we learn from scholars like Anzaldua (2007), Giroux (2005), and Hicks (1991) is that voices and identities live and are silenced within, across, and on geopolitical and sociocultural boundaries and borders. Those who will be effective border crossers must account for otherization: “the process of marginalizing difference, most times through negative stigmas and stereotypes” (Villaverde, 2008, p. 42), which has been a method by which those who hold dominant positionalities have sought to silence difference and stultify subordinate groups (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Gause, 2008; Johnson, 2006).