 Hello. How have you come to know what you know? This is not a trivial question. Most of you watching this at home are in some way, shape or form connected to the intellectual enterprise of higher education. You are responsible for creating and validating knowledge through rigorous scientific research methods. And this is not inconsequential. At best scholars, researchers and innovators like yourselves are looked to by policy and decision makers to fix societal, economic and political problems, problems such as global warming, racial injustice and poverty. At worst and too often, knowledge is altogether ignored, distorted and used for capitalistic gain to willfully hurt people, often those who are minoritized. Regardless of how the knowledge you produced is used, have you interrogated how you know what you know? What systems of knowledge are true for you and why? I've thought a lot about this. So how do I know what I know? Some of it is, of course, from books and theories and my formal education. But most of it, the most valuable, I learned from necessity living as and among brown women. The foundations of my knowledge were given to me by the matriarchs of my family, especially my mother. And while I did not always understand her methods, I later came to see them as valuable. My mother owns a grocery store in Boyle Heights. Boyle Heights is part of East LA and a birthing place for Mexican culture in the U.S. And growing up, my six siblings and I had to sacrifice so much to help out the family business. We sacrificed time with extended family, we sacrificed time with friends. And regardless of what else we'd rather been doing, we worked. We worked weekends, we worked holidays, and we worked after school. I did not understand why we worked so much. Why my mom would not shorten store hours or close one day a week. After all, she was the owner. She could do what she wanted. As a kid, I even created what I thought were innovative ways to close and not lose business. But I know that my mom would never listen to such suggestions. In part, because she has an unwavering commitment to her identity as a worker. But also for other reasons I could not yet understand. I grew resentful of my mother's obligation for us to work. And while my siblings and I found ways to entertain ourselves, this was not ideal. What I didn't understand then, that I certainly understand now, is that it wasn't just about keeping the store open or working what I thought was excessively. It was a stability. A stability she and my family needed and that the community did too. See, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, oil heights is a food desert. And my mom's store is a stable source of access to fresh produce. But the grocery store has been much more than just access to food. It's been a place of community. One where she looks out for them and they look out for her. But my mom has never described oil heights as a food desert or analyzed the lack of grocery stores in the area. I tell her she's extraordinary because she's a source of access and because of the rich community she has built. She gets frustrated with me. Not because it's untrue, but because I perched her to talk to me about her perceptions of the inequities that led oil heights to be a food desert. And we end up fighting because I want her to look at what I'm looking at. The social, cultural, the political, the inequities. And I want her to look at them the way I look at them. And while they do exist, my mother knows that they do. She does not talk about them like I do. With the words I use, she does not speak it. She lives it. Her knowledge is embodied in her everyday life and in interactions with others. A kind of knowledge that does not necessitate words. Why does my knowledge need to speak so many words and impose them on her? And why did I not appreciate how she conveys it? I'm glad to say I no longer impose my knowledge on her. Not just because she's going to win every fight, but because I interrogated myself and my systems of knowing. My socialization about what was true knowledge was learned in college in books and theories and methods courses and usually by people who didn't look like me. And somehow through these processes, I unconsciously thought my thinking superior to hers. And I guess I didn't question it too much because everyone around me was theorizing injustice. Speaking words, claiming expertise of something they usually did not live. And I guess it was cute for a bit to theoretically analyze social problems of those near me with my newfound limited knowledge. But just like a baby learning to walk, I stumbled a lot. And I came to realize that the theory I read in books or academic articles rarely applied to me. And that they would categorize my mother's thinking in some deficit way. And perhaps attributed it to her second grade education or perhaps it's that she doesn't know English or perhaps that she learned to read and write as an adult. And that my mother's embodied knowledge from her everyday life would be baseless or lack rigor. Because it was not built on some theory created forever ago from some person who only researches white affluent populations. But why did something that did not apply to me mean so much to me? I guess I got to see the rational thoughts of others mostly white men that helped me understand all the irrational experience in my life. And I guess there was a sort of liberation that the irrational experiences I lived were not my own doing. And in that way it was helpful. But this is unfulfilling knowledge now. Like any good teacher, my mother is patient of my learning and reminds me I have much to learn. And when she does speak, she does in forms of details a proverb to explain a million things that are happening around us using no academic terms. And I'm always humbled. And this is just one of many examples of how the matrix in my family have helped me know what I know. This way of knowing and being of my mother has forced me to have beautiful tensions between my formalized socialization and education with my lived experiences. I call this a beautiful tension because it has forced me to be more critical of what I know. And specifically what I know because of my formal education. A formal education that holds true theory and knowledge built on the experiences of white people while systemically ignoring the knowledge of people of color like my mother's. And while my formal knowledge and my knowledge of my lived experiences can contradict one another, in a lot of ways my formal education has helped me understand my matriarchal knowledge. Sometimes it's because it was valued such as in my critical race theory course. But oftentimes it was because it was not. And this led me to ask myself if I can live in fragmented ways. Only bringing pieces of me into academia. But I know through my matriarchal knowledge systems that there is liberation to self-determination. And I get to define who I am and what I bring into academia. So the academic and the cultural knowledge I have is merged to create the scholar that I am. By learning about myself and interrogating my knowledge systems I have been able to better learn about others. I have more integrity in my research and I see the value of my cultural knowledge systems. But this reflection process about how you know what you know outside of formal curriculum is not valued. And it is in fact diminished in academia. And for me this has been incredibly important as I get socialized to think a certain way in my graduate studies. I get socialized to think by how my professors think, by how my faculty advisors think, by how my discipline thinks, and how my peers think. And for me what I have gathered through indirect or direct messaging is that if I think similarly I will be rewarded. I am not suggesting that they replicate each other. But merely that there are parameters to knowledge that can be created in academia with a reward system for only certain types of knowledge. And that should be interrogated. And I often ask myself if the forms of thinking taught to me in graduate school are true for me. Certainly they hold some merit. I am not disregarding that socialization as important learning for a scholar. Yet I ask yourself to ask some basic questions. Where did I learn this? What is valued in this form of thinking? What are the roots of this form of thinking? See, knowledge production in academia is not a historical or objective or some kind of supreme truth. Some like to argue it is. But knowledge is ultimately a cultural product. It is situated in the reality of its creators. And the people who often get to be creators of dominant knowledge taught in graduate programs and widely accepted in academia are those aligned with white formulated ways of thinking. So I ask you again, how have you come to know what you know? Thank you.