Duoethonographic platicás: examining indigeneity and mestizaje realities through an Entre Mundos praxis

Our study is in conversation with Latine education scholars disrupting the invisibilization of Indigenous Latine communities within urban environments (Barrillas-Chon, 2022). In the USA people from Latin America are often referred to as Latine or Hispanic, suggesting a monolithic group unified by the Spanish language. Yet, Latine people are culturally and linguistically diverse, including Afro-Latinx, Asian-Latinx, European-Latinx, Middle Eastern-Latinx and Indigenous-Latinx. The subtle shift from Latinx to Latine, while a translanguaging practice, still obscure the rich diversity within Latin American populations. Within the label Latinx, there have been efforts to incorporate Mestizo onto-axio-epistemologies through changing Latinx to Latine. This subtle change from x to e reflects more appropriately the Spanish e as opposed to the English x, which in many Indigenous languages sounds like/sh/and not the/ks/in English. While subtle, this effort to engage in translanguaging practices highlights Mestizo and Indigenous onto-axio-epistemologies. Defining some key terms will support the importance of the argument we make in this paper on the geopolitical groupings of people that cause damage and erasure of indigeneity. In particular defining axio-onto-epistemological bears importance for further clarity. Indigenous researchers Wilson (2001) and Hart (2010) suggest within Indigenous research paradigms ontology (study of being), epistemology (how we know), axiology (study of values) and methodology (the way in which we do things) must be included. Understanding ontology, axiology and epistemology cannot be separated, hence the term axio-onto-epistemology.

Diversity in this study is understood through the rich Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), that are complex “understandings of the world, tied to familia and comunidad knowledge(s) … encompassing larger social, natural, and spiritual well-being” (Cajete, 1994 as cited in Urrieta, 2013). Within IKS there is an understanding of relationality, living with, not on or over other beings (Marañon Davis, 2025), manifested through embodied knowledge concepts like No es saber, es sentir transcending Western limitations by trusting one’s body (Marañon Davis, 2025) and embracing sentipensante ways of being where you feel, think, know from your whole being (Escobar, 2016). In Western-designed formal educational systems, all beings are reduced to objects in relation to humans, creating tension and struggle in IKS (Escobar, 2016). The growing number of Indigenous students from Latin America arriving in U.S. classrooms face complex erasure within the broader “Hispanic/Latinx/Latine” labels (Urrieta, 2019). This erasure is completed when Indigenous Latine populations are no longer referenced as Mayan, rather by their country of origin: Mexican, Guatemalan, etc. systemically severing their Indigeneity, particularly for children in schools. These labels mask their Indigeneity and perpetuate intra-Latine discrimination that positions Indigenous people as “other” (Machado-Casas, 2009), reflecting the hierarchical colonial castas system that categorized, oppressed and exploited Indigenous and African descended people throughout Latin America (MacLachlan, 2023).

For Indigenous Latine children, this erasure compounds in educational settings where they continuously navigate assimilative content in two colonial languages, Spanish and English (Urrieta and Calderon, 2019). This becomes a “double colonization” for Indigenous Latine children in American schools (Barillas-Chón, 2010). Western educational systems threaten Indigenous ways of knowing and being, through language hierarchies that privilege dominant tongues while marginalizing Indigenous languages (Barillas Chon, 2024), rendering Indigenous Latine students’ understandings invisible within Western educational frameworks.

Framing this research is important to give guidelines and defining terms as we analyze our own lived reality of movement between multiple ways of knowing and being. This study sits within the Critical Latinx Indigeneities (CLI) theoretical framework (Blackwell et al., 2017; Urrieta and Calderón, 2019). CLI is a decolonial framework that recognizes and focuses on the multiplicity that lives within the Latine diaspora. The two tenets from the CLI framework that we will lean into during this study are Mestizaje ideologies and Transnationalism.

Within the Latin American diaspora the concept of being mestizo emerges from colonial legacy and “otherness” ideology. This decolonial study intends to “radicalize otherness” (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 6), highlighting differences as points of unity, rather than separation. Through Mestizaje ideologies, CLI (Blackwell et al., 2017) recognizes overlapping colonialities in Mexico create hierarchical racialization and economic power, developing a new social hierarchy of identities. Quijano (2000) identifies the terms in this hierarchy as Spanish to Indians to Negros to Mestizos to Mulatto establishing castas, a caste system allowing for economic exploitation, oppression and violence specifically on African and Indigenous communities (MacLachlan, 2023). Higher-caste Mestizos often de-emphasized their Indigenous ancestry and language; in many cases it was erased (Chón, 2019) creating “entrenched anti-Indian hatred” that followed Indigenous-Latine communities to the USA (Blackwell et al., 2017).

CLI sits within the crossroads of the complex nuances, intergroup oppression and multiple colonialities of power of Indigeneity and mestizaje, advancing hemispheric Indigenous studies and recognizing complexities within Indigenous projects (Blackwell et al., 2017). Indigenismo highlights this tension – a mestizo intellectual and cultural movement that constructs an ideology of recognized grandeur of past Indigenous civilizations, while denying that of the Indigenous present (2017). In the Chicano movement this becomes an “Aztec-centric celebration […] erasing the present and future of the sixty-three other Indigenous pueblos of Mexico” (p. 131). The ideologies of mestizaje are complex that allow this study to explore the nuances within the duo ethnographic methodology.

Equally important is the tenet of transnationalism’s relevance to the reality of Indigenous-Latine communities where negotiating who and how they are is a constant lived experience. According to Urrieta Jr and Calderon (2019), Indigenous communities navigate multiple ways of “knowing, being and doing while at the crossroads of complex intersectional nuances, intergroup oppression, and enduring multiple colonialities of power” (p. 147). Some scholars like Trueba (2004) define transnationals as those who manage different cultures and social systems, defined through a physical border-crossing experience. Other researchers (Vaquera and Aranda, 2011, 2006; Sánchez and Machado-Casas, 2009) argue that many immigrants carry these same qualities, while maintaining linguistic, cultural and relational ties to their homelands, which qualifies them as transnationals whether or not they are in physical approximation to a border. Indigenous people also experience this phenomena when leaving their tribal communities without crossing national borders as they navigate multiple knowledge systems, their own with that of dominant worldviews. As Marañon Davis (2025) explains, “they continuously negotiate their understandings with that of other dominant cultures, different social norms, different roles and responsibilities and different social, political, and economic realities” (p. 58). This creates border-crossing, not across geographic boundaries, rather through distinct ontological, axiological and epistemological spaces that coexist within the same national territory (Marañon Davis, 2025), suggesting transnationalism can be defined through onto-axio-epistemological understandings.

Our decision to collaborate through our positionalities as Indigenous and mestiza women became a generative space for inquiry, prompting us to engage in a collaborative process that honors our positionalities and the multiplicity of our voices. Our methodological choices of duoethnography (Velez Tello and Paredes, 2024) and pláticas (Fierros and Bernal, 2016) reflect our intention of centering relationality, dialogue and lived experiences as valid and vital sources of knowledge.

Duoethnography, a collaborative research methodology where two or more researchers juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings of the world (Lund et al., 2016), allowed us to center our lived experiences, explore and articulate personal and collective narratives of resistance in relation to dominant discourses. Duoethnography is particularly valuable in allowing us to illustrate the intracultural diversity within the Latine community, examining our lived experiences, the complexity and multifaceted nature of our individual and collective identities, fostering a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives within the community.

This definition of duoethnography also has limitations, particularly its Western emphasis on individual narratives and personal histories. In contrast, communal ways of understanding emphasize interconnectedness and collective identity, integral to many non-Western cultures, highlighting community narratives and shared experiences, and understanding oneself within the context of community. By expanding the definition of duoethnography, to center communal ways of knowing and being we are able to lean into the inbetween, strengthening our onto-epistemological stance and tell our stories, within the sociopolitical context of our time and in conversation with the generational histories of our ancestors.

Our methodology sits within the Entre Mundos (Marañon Davis, 2025) methodology, drawing from its three conceptual spirals: Sitting in Chi’xi, Holding and Honoring and Acompañamiento.

Sitting in Chi’xi navigates between languages, Indigenous Latine communities and cultures moving in continuous motion across ancestral understandings, present day realities and future becomings (2025). Language communicates our entire being, the tension between colonizer and colonized, while amplifying Indigenous resurgent practices of communion with spirit through creative self-expressive practices (2025). This methodology harnesses the creative forces of in-betweenness – of time, reality, ancestry and language (2025). This study sits in Chi’xi as Ymasumac stands in her indigeneity as a Quechua Indigenous Latine woman and Erika within her own understandings of Mestizaje, exploring together the in-between of their reality as educators.

Listening to stories is the least invasive way to hear a community’s soul – their beliefs, dreams, journeys, truths – Holding and Honoring do just this (2025). Through this conceptual spiral the Entre Mundos methodology honors participants’ lived experiences, requiring coherent research practices (2025). In this study, platicás (Fierros and Bernal, 2016), a casual conversation between two friends, allows them to counter narratives told about them through their own stories.

The Entre Mundos methodology is a decolonial praxis requiring alignment within multiple intersecting onto-axio-epistemologies (Marañon Davis, 2025). Acompañamiento critically examines dominant epistemological impositions through the CLI framework (Blackwell et al., 2017; Urrieta and Calderón, 2019) and Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Bernal, 1998) recognizing non-Eurocentric knowledge systems that challenge what is considered “official knowledge” (Bernal, 2002). Positioning itself in the peripheries where impulses to create new centers exist (Cusicanqui in Gago, 2016), acompañamiento fosters deep relational and emotional understanding to nurture meaningful connections (Valenzuela, 2018). Leaning into relationality is important as this methodology utilized a duoethnographic method.

Inspired by Tello and Paredes’ (2024) work we merged duoethnography with pláticas, informal conversations crucial in understanding intracultural dynamics within Latine communities. Despite Ymasumac having Quechua roots positioned within Bolivian borders, both have deep connections to Mexico. For Ymasumac, the Quechua change regionally, something she is mindful of. For both Erika and Ymasumac, Mexico speaks to a way of being that sits between a uniform understanding of being mestiza, with a strong underpinning of what it means to be Indigena that also intersects with the tensions of hierarchy. Through weekly zoom meetings we shared stories and reflections in a relaxed and open environment exploring our cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We explored ideas on identity and ways of being, reflected on how family histories and community shaped our understanding of who we are, delving into what it means to be mestiza and Indigenous-Latine, how our families positioned us within local and global communities and how context influenced our sense of self. Pláticas helped us challenge dominant narratives and our own ideas on Indigeneity and intracultural solidarity, where stories became powerful ways to better understand diversity within our Latine community. Our duoethnographic writing highlighted the nuances of our collaboration, speaking to the diversity of where we stand as Indigenous-Latine and Mestiza women.

Through casual conversation between two friends, we were able to incorporate cultural intuition and knowing into our research through Bernal’s (1998) Chicana feminist epistemologies, strengthening our familial and community narratives, allowing them to counter narratives told about our ways of knowing and being.

To frame the discussion on mestizaje and Indigeneity, we drew from Urrieta’s tenet on mestizaje ideologies and transnationalism. Yma and Erika met in the Fall of 2024 and began pláticando about life post-doctoral work. They discussed their shared interest in collaborating within Indigenous Latine communities and their past and present research. They systematized their pláticas through late Spring and early Summer 2025. Through pláticas and reflexive journaling, we engaged in defining and discussing what it means to be mestiza and Indigenous for each of us. Our experiences, and the ways that we were positioned by our families, offer a lens through which to examine the dominance of the onto-axio-epistemological Western frameworks, in the USA. This dominance, as Barbara Fields (1982) and others have argued, is not merely about race as phenotype but about race as a way of being, a system of knowledge, behavior and values that positions itself as the singular, legitimate norm. In this study, we challenge this norm through our platicás, something deceptively simple, profoundly complex. Within our platicás we embed both our positionality and our methodology. Positionality statements, stand alone statements of who a person is, did not feel coherent with who we are and how we are, as they are not relational. Instead, we chose to lean further into our platicás to further respond to our subquestions: What does it mean to be Indigenous? What does it mean to be Mestiza? It is in the tension of these questions that this study sits when exploring our own positionalities. Our positionality is our process. Opening up for you, the reader, further insight and exploration into our positionality, our methodology and analysis in a more natural and coherent way.

The story of our analysis is one where we are able to hold to our methods as pillars, keeping us focused while leaning into and being with our Entre Mundos methodology. The pillars for this study were reflective journaling, recordings and transcriptions, cyclical coding and pláticas. While our driving question guided our research, themes emerged from and were rooted in the data. We will briefly discuss the use of these methods here, after which the story of the analysis will weave between our positionality and the data to give a more thorough description of what was said and explored during our pláticas.

Throughout the study both Erika and Yma kept individual, personal journals. These reflexive journals became places of processing their pláticas along with analyzing the themes that were beginning to emerge. The journals allowed them to expose their inner thoughts, bringing feelings and often, hidden ideas and feelings to the conscious mind. During their pláticas they would sometimes reference parts of their journals, allowing them to further synthesize what they were experiencing and what was becoming clearer.

Every plática was recorded and transcribed using zoom’s internal transcription option. This proved helpful as sometimes they would listen to the recording while reading parts of the transcript to see what tone they might have been using. They would also upload the transcript for each plática into a Google document so they could comment and highlight on a shared transcript. In this way they were able to “see” each other’s thinking in this shared document and comment on it. This allowed them to further analyze their pláticas in-between meetings.

Leaning into the critical Latine indigeneities theoretical framework (Blackwell et al., 2017; Urrieta and Calderón, 2019), they chose to read whole sections of their transcript allowing Indigenous Iterative and emergent coding (Kovach, 2015; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021; Wilson, 2010) and Relational and Holistic coding (Archibald, 2008; Cajete, 2017) to be used. By not lifting codes from the transcript, they were able to preserve their decolonial methodology and identify themes from the data. Each time we met on zoom we discussed what was emerging in our transcripts and our journals, that would in turn raise further questions and layered thinking around the themes emerging. Through this process, coding cycles organically emerged between coding through our shared Google document of our transcripts, and the parts of our reflexive journaling we shared with each other in each zoom session. The coding cycles allowed us to maintain integrity in our analysis, rather than triangulation; we revisited emerging themes again and again, comparing findings in earlier transcriptions with later ones, and comparing ideas in our personal reflexive journals. At the heart of our process and analysis were our pláticas.

I stand in-between two great oceans with ancestors from the Quechua people of the Andean mountains of Bolivia and from the Emerald green valleys of Vermont where my English and Irish ancestors arrived two years after the first pilgrims. Straddling this in-betweeness became a continuous tension between multiple ways of knowing and being, negotiating between being Indigenous, Latina and American sitting within transnationalism, challenging mestizaje ideologies.

The relationship between being Indigenous and being mestiza is in constant tension of being and not enough. Growing up was a very confusing landscape. To be Indigenous was to be closer to our ancestors. To be mestiza was to align with the colonizer, being closer to Spanish, simultaneously a goal to be desired and one to abhor. In my reflexive journal I wrote, “I couldn’t answer these questions (What does it mean to be Indigena? What does it mean to be mestiza?) separately, because the relationship between them is always present and at the same time invisible”; speaking to the tension that exists between the two. My father’s words anchored me: “somos Quechua primero, luego todo lo demás” (J. Marañón, personal communication, 1985). This rooted me in my Indigenous roots. However, my mother’s English-Irish-American ancestry remained a quiet, strong presence, representing the dominant culture of my birth country. Choosing not to choose between my ancestors was in itself a choice, standing between the crash of two oceans.

Colonialism creates contradictions that manifest in the patterns of our behaviors and beliefs. Elders would say marrying an American white woman would raise one’s “status” in Bolivia, while simultaneously telling me not to believe “the world,” when they labeled Indigenous people as ignorant, lazy, dirty and dumb. This created a tension of contradiction within me: which one was “the right one?” Continuously asked, “what are you?”, leaving me to negotiate this space of in-between two distinct ethnicities and ways of being. Again, in my reflexive journal I wrote, “to be mestiza was to betray being Indigenous, and there was already enough tension between being American and being Indigena.” When forced to choose, I pulled back from being mestiza and chose “Latine” a “safer” term making more room for my Indigeneity.

Stories became my anchor and from them I grew my roots. Through stories I learned my paternal grandmother went to school as a mestiza because Indigenous people in Bolivia were not allowed to attend schools until 1954. However, she only went to 6th grade, because she was a woman. With this limited education, she learned to translate Spanish laws into Quechua, helping her community defend their rights. My maternal great grandmother fought to attend college in New England successfully becoming a teacher, learning to work the stock market, becoming a millionaire. Through these narratives I learned maybe I didn’t have to choose, I was enough standing in-between.

As a mestiza, Mexican-American, born in the USA, I have grappled with the tension between my Indigenous Mexican and European identities. My mother is a fair-skinned, green-eyed Mexican woman with Western European ancestry and my father is an Indigenous man who grew up in a small pueblo in Guerrero, Mexico, a coastal state bordering Oaxaca, a state with a large Indigenous community. My family often spoke about indigeneity as something belonging to the past-mis ancestros. My name was given to me as a manifestation of my mom’s desire for a white baby, inspired by Erika Buenfil, a white, green-eyed Mexican actress. This background has deeply influenced my understanding of identity and highlights the colorism and racism that exists within Latin America and our Latine communities here in the USA.

Although born in the USA, my family positioned me as Mexicana; my mother was determined that I would not forget my Mexican roots and maintain my native language, Spanish. She chose a Spanish dual immersion program, in which I was taught in both English and Spanish. Upon entry into the U.S. education system, I was labeled an “English Learner” and positioned as lacking the “right” literacy skills despite my bilingualism. Although most of my education was bilingual, my Spanish was often perceived as “too Mexican” for the classroom. I was often corrected by my teachers, some of whom were Latinas, sharing similar cultural backgrounds. For many years, I was taught to speak “academic Spanish” and “English,” adjusting my language to meet the expectations of what was considered appropriate in school. I worked hard to be accepted by my teachers, carefully shaping my language and ways of being to fit those norms. Yet, no matter how well I spoke either language, it never seemed to be enough. I often found myself caught in between, feeling not Mexican enough, and not American enough. Gloria Anzaldúa captures this tension when she writes, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity-I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Anzaldúa, 1987a, 1987b, p. 81). Her words resonate deeply with my experience, language is not just a tool for communication, but a core part of who I am. In this context, bilingual education becomes a site of both possibility and contradiction. While it can affirm linguistic and cultural identity, it can reproduce colonial logics – especially when it privileges standardized, “academic” forms of Spanish and English while marginalizing the everyday, family and community-rooted language practices of students. Within dual immersion programs, whiteness operates not just as a racial identity but as an onto-axio-epistemology framework, a way of defining what is “normal,” what language practices are appropriate, what counts as knowledge, and who gets to be seen as intelligent or capable. Even when one cannot be White, there is still pressure to uphold Whiteness: to speak English without an accent, to value individualism over community, to pursue academic and professional success as defined by dominant norms. Although my family positioned me as Mexican, I was also expected to assimilate and adopt American norms. Their vision of success included attending college and becoming a professional. My family’s aspiration for us to “become white” was not a betrayal of our roots, but a survival strategy in a society where whiteness is equated with safety, legitimacy, and opportunity.

Diversity of Knowledge Systems. The first finding that emerged from our platicá’s was the recognition that onto-axio-epistemological diversity exists and is real. This understanding may not necessarily be a “new” contribution, however, recognizing it and highlighting it as an emergence between two colleagues is significant. Despite this understanding sitting between Yma and Erika, we recognize it sits in tension. The world continues to create its pressure through its tired colonial patterns of insistence that humanity and all beings be placed on a hierarchical scheme, felt throughout formal education and professions. Through our platicás we realized we had to develop processes reinforcing our anchor in our own ways of being as in-between. This in-between space is a beautiful concept, bringing together many scholars including W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) with Double Consciousness, Gloria Anzaldúa (1987b) with Nepantla, Emma Pérez (1999) recognizing liminal spaces, Marisol de la Cadena (2010) mas que uno, menos que dos, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) with the powerful Aymara concept of Chi’xi. All recognize the tension and the creative energy of this in-between space that diversity within knowledge systems create.

During one of our platicás, this onto-axio-epistemological in-betweenness emerged through Yma’s story of when she was working with the American Indian Movement, serving as a navigator between worlds with a team that included an Indigenous woman and a Jewish man from North America as we met with the U’wa people in Colombia. Yma shared, “I’m the in-betweener, right? I’m the one that’s kind of translating understandings, not only in Spanish, but culturally, for, like those friends that came from the USA” and the U’wa people. It was in this data point that Yma realized she was traversing the in-between of multiple onto-axio-epistemological worlds and the amount of negotiation that demanded from her. She didn’t know it then, but her body did. Her body held this understanding. She was embodying this negotiation between worlds. Yma remembers being very overwhelmed by this negotiation and wanted to just be Indigenous already and that be enough. On this same trip a powerful experience emerged that Yma shared with Erika. In Colombia they met with one of the chiefs and when he saw Yma he smiled and said, “Eres mestiza!” Yma shared, “immediately my face dropped - here we go again, I thought, not Indigenous enough.” The chief noted my face, he looked confused and calmly said, “no entiendo, eso solamente significa que tienes mas ancestros para llamar.” This was such a powerful healing moment for Yma. Being of two oceans means she has more ancestors to call on, it’s not a deficit, it’s an asset. The chief was speaking of Pluriversality, a concept emerging from Andean scholarship and the Zapatista movement’s vision of “a world where many worlds fit” (Subcomandante Marcos, 1996), embracing multiple ways of knowing and being. For Indigenous Latine communities pluriversality offers a conceptual pathway to maintain their knowledge systems and worldviews while engaging change, where negotiating between realities is carried out within relationality. For Erika this was an equally powerful reflection as she saw this concept of mestizaje in a new light. While Erika had been positioned to sit in between being Mexican and American, she was often told that her ancestros were Indigenous and that now that they were in the USA she needed to sustain her language and culture while also assimilating into “American ways of being.” Listening to Yma’s story prompted Erika to reflect on this positionality, navigating feelings of not being “American enough” or “Mexican enough.” Through this reflection, she began to embrace the in between. This speaks to the importance of intra-cultural diversity. While an understanding of culturally responsive pedagogies is important, we must also recognize onto-axio-epistemological diversity as key to pedagogical practice. Until we recognize this lack of understanding as a root cause of hegemonic school practices, we’re just patchworking solutions. It is important to note, not only is addressing diversity within knowledge systems important, but how we address it equally matters. Multiple ways of knowing and being is an asset and within educational contexts, this has important implications for learning.

Engaging in Root Work. Another finding that emerged was in our process, where we spent a great deal of time unpacking our own understandings and interrogating how we were walking into this conversation of indigeneity and mestizaje. This leaned toward Yma’s own work on engaging in root work in her collaborations with a Quechua community in Bolivia. Engaging in root work is redefining reality by having the willingness to walk with others and make space for their onto-epistemology as you question and explore deeper understandings of reality collectively (Marañon Davis, 2025). Root work, a precursor to pluriversality, is complex, iterative and requires a deep trust in one’s own cultural intuition (Anzaldúa 1987b; Bernal, 1998) and in the capacity of others to highlight understandings with you. Through our duoethnographic platicás we began interrogating our own understandings and the ways in which we were defining our reality, including our own ways of knowing and being. For example, in discussing the categorization of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), Erika noted, “Latinos [are seen by institutions of higher education] as one monolithic right? In our teacher preparation programs, we talk about culturally sustaining pedagogies. But before you can talk about culturally sustaining pedagogies, whose culture are we sustaining? Who are the people that we’re talking about?” Yma followed up with, “How do we define indigeneity for example? Never in my teacher preparation program did they bring Indigenous communities and if they did it was Native Americans on a reservation somewhere being served by someone else, so we didn’t have to worry about it.” These questions asked us to dig deeper into interrogating not only how we defined our reality, but also how we were trained as educators, in some instances going against our own framework of understanding. It was through our platicás that we were able to air out the roots of our understanding, making room for new ways of defining our reality centered more closely to the principles we hold dear of justice and love. For Yma, it was her father who reset her teacher preparation back into her own framework of understanding when he told her that when she sees her students she remember that behind each one is their whole family and community that have sacrificed for them to be there – you are not just teaching an individual, you are impacting a whole community.

These findings have important implications for K-12 education and teacher preparation programs. We recommend beginning with considering how to integrate strong reflexive exercises engaging in root work and a deeper understanding of onto-axio-epistemological diversity within teacher preparation programs. During our duoethnographic platicás, Erika shared an experience from her work with transnational migrant students from Guatemala where this root work was not done and the damage it caused. One particular moment involved Wendy, a 9-year-old Indigenous girl who had grown up in a rural Guatemalan community, who migrated to the USA with her mother, leaving behind her father and younger siblings. Although she had limited formal schooling, Wendy carried rich funds of knowledge, lived experiences and stories. As Erika reflected on her work Meeting Us Along the Journey (Garcia, 2023), Wendy’s story exemplifies the rich funds of knowledge transnational Indigenous students bring with them, knowledge often overlooked in U.S. educational settings. Drawing on CLI’s tenet on transnationalism, Wendy’s experience reveals how Indigenous Latine students navigate settler colonial educational systems that frequently fail to recognize their unique epistemological perspectives.

To illustrate the tensions between Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Western epistemologies, Erika shared receiving an email from Wendy’s teacher, accusing Wendy of stealing from her classmates. Erika’s entire body went tense, intuitively sensing the accusation did not align with what she knew about Wendy: her actions were not rooted in malice or theft, rather curiosity. In her Indigenous community, resources are often shared, thus she was drawn to her peers’ personal belongings, particularly school supplies she had never seen before. From her perspective, these items were communal. She was simply engaging with her environment in the way she had been taught, a lens of collective belonging and shared use. This worldview aligns with relational ontology, which holds that everything is interconnected and nothing belongs to one person. However, the teacher’s refusal to consider an alternative explanation for Wendy’s behavior revealed a deeper epistemological conflict, between Wendy’s grounding within her ways of knowing and being and the individualistic, Eurocentric norms that dominate U.S. schooling. This experience raised a critical question: As educators, are we able to recognize and honor multiple ways of knowing and being? Educators must be encouraged to examine their own positionalities and the ways in which their beliefs, assumptions, and practices either reinforce or resist systemic inequities. While teacher education programs increasingly emphasize the importance of examining positionality, there remains a noticeable gap in addressing the underlying onto-axio-epistemological and ontological foundations that shape educators’ beliefs, practices and understandings of knowledge and being. While positionality is a crucial entry point, without interrogation of how we know such reflections risk becoming superficial or disconnected from broader systems of knowledge and power.

Understanding diversity within knowledge systems in teacher education invites teacher educators to critically examine the sources, legitimacy and hierarchies of knowledge that are privileged in schools. Whose knowledge is considered valid? Whose ways of knowing are marginalized or erased? For example, Indigenous, Black, and other non-Western epistemologies are often excluded from curricula, despite offering rich, relational and community-centered approaches to learning. All of these questions must also be addressed by interrogating the framework imposed by Western educational systems, under which many teachers have been schooled through.

In her work with teacher candidates, Erika engages them in reflective storytelling practices that serve dual purposes. First, using her own testimonio (Garcia, 2023) on working with Indigenous migrant children, which includes stories like Wendy’s, she models how testimonio, personal narrative and story-telling can be a powerful pedagogical tool. She teaches candidates to value and integrate students’ stories, languages and cultural knowledge into their planning and teaching. By centering students’ lived experiences, candidates learn to create inclusive classrooms where students’ language and culture is seen as an asset. This approach helps dismantle deficit-based narratives and promotes culturally sustaining pedagogies that affirm students’ identities.

Second, as teacher candidates transition into their master’s programs, Erika guides them in writing autoethnographic and duoethnographic narratives in which they explore their own lived experiences, fostering deeper self-awareness and critical reflection. These narratives help candidates examine how their identities, histories and cultural knowledge shape their ways of knowing and inform their pedagogical views. Together, these practices prepare teachers to recognize multiple ways of knowing and being and advocate for culturally sustaining curricula.

With a growing emphasis on multicultural responsiveness in teacher education, one gap that this study addresses is recognizing the importance of engaging in root work that prepares the path toward pluriversality and diversity within knowledge systems. Yma’s work in facilitating professional development that focuses on developing awareness of one’s personal framework that holds their own onto-axio-epistemologies helps teachers gently interrogate their worldview. The teacher’s professional development is conducted through the Native American Medicine Wheel (Orona, R., 2024; Fidel, 2024; Valencia, 2022), which holds specific understandings and principles from Indigenous Knowledge Systems. For example, within the medicine wheel is the recognition that learning is a balance between the development of mental, spiritual, emotional and physical capacities. For this reason, teachers sit in a circle during the professional development, learn to lean into relationality as they share about the difficulties they are encountering and explore collectively ways to learn how to care for their own well-being, while also thinking of their students. Teachers often leave the workshops feeling renewed, with personal practices of self-care that they are able to translate into their pedagogy knowing their well-being is intimately connected to their students’ well-being. Preparing educators for the realities of today’s classrooms, teacher preparation programs must embrace this onto-axio-epistemological shift. This means moving beyond frameworks that merely celebrate cultural difference, toward pedagogies that center relationality and interdependence. Equipping future teachers to recognize and disrupt the hierarchies, both societal and intra-community, that marginalize certain students while privileging others. Pluriversality invites us to imagine a world where many worlds coexist – where multiple ways of knowing and being are not only acknowledged but valued and contribute equally.