<p> Community college trustees are critical to the success of the organization and the students they serve because they provide the voice of local needs in alignment with the college mission. Community college trusteeship in California is vital given the changing student demographic, the growing number of Latinos enrolled, and their need for responsive institutions. The diversity of the board is therefore critical to ensuring that the diverse needs are being met. However, little is known about the lives of California's community college trustees and how they transform educational settings. </p><p> The purpose of this qualitative study is to shed light on the personal, educational, professional, and trusteeship journey of five Chicana/Latina trailblazers, the first Chicana/Latinas to be elected to their district. Using testimonio methodology to give voice to this group of women, this study is set in the Chicana Feminist Epistemological stance, which put these participants in the center of this study, providing the participants an opportunity to co-create knowledge, and allowed the researcher to apply the use of Chicana intuition, to guide the study design. The theoretical framework, Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit) was used as the analytical lens exposing raced, classed, and gendered experiences in the school setting. Through the use of a LatCrit lens, this study exposed the participant's experiential knowledge, critical to their successful navigation oftheir trusteeship, creating more responsive institutions. </p><p> The findings reveal that these participants, as a collective, felt the trauma of the race, class and gendered experiences in the educational setting. These experiences shaped their worldview. Nonetheless the women developed aspirations to become educators and these aspirations led them to college where they were able to move beyond internal oppression by developing a social consciousness and develop a Chicana identity. These experiences led them to social activism, which served as the path to community college trusteeship. They became the first Chicana/Latina community college trustees in their district, taking a seat at the dais and it is there that these trailblazers created a legacy of inclusion and transformed the educational setting.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3647113 |
| Date | 05 December 2014 |
| Creators | Acosta-Salazar, Angela |
| Publisher | California State University, Long Beach |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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