Tantear Practices in Popular Education: Reaching for Each Other in the Dark

Abstract:This article draws on María Lugones's matrix of resistance and tantear practices outlined in Pilgrimages to bring attention to the importance of relational practices in popular education and coalition building. Drawing on ethnographic detail from a popular education project (called "Adelante") that emerged through inspiration from Freirean, Highlander, and feminist frameworks in a predominantly Latinx farm-worker community in California, the author explores how Adelante discussed their praxis in the first six months of their formation. The article focuses on three tantear practices of making time to tantear, making space to tantear, and reflecting on their praxis as moments that both supported and described tantear practices. Tantear is a Spanish verb that Lugones explains as a tactile searching together in the dark; a productive unknowing that allows individuals to make sense of themselves, each other, and their praxis beyond predetermined understandings or fixed visions of the future. A clear vision forward can compress the space and time otherwise needed for complex communication and relies on ontological presuppositions about the self and other that may foreclose transformative possibilities. In turning toward each other and reaching in the darkness of unknowing, agentive possibilities form with and in the making of a coalition.