Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain

The Distance Between Tenderness and Threat: A Letter on Care, Constraint, and the Lonely Only in Higher Education

Jennifer Yanez-Alaniz

University of Texas at San Antonio

Keywords: Relational Labor Senate Bill 17 Lipan Apache Teacher Education

Abstract

Abstract

This letter addresses higher education from the embodied standpoint of a Chicana Lipan Apache scholar navigating multigenerational caregiving, chronic illness, and intensifying policy constraints within the academy. Drawing on my original framework, Conocimiento Transcendente Autohistoria Teoría (CTAT), I integrate personal narrative, translingual poetry, and institutional analysis to examine how women of color faculty and teacher educators sustain relational labor amid conditions that increasingly narrow curricular and programmatic possibilities. The letter situates recent developments at the University of Texas at San Antonio within the broader policy climate shaped by Texas Senate Bill 17 and evolving UT System guidance, tracing how these shifts reverberate in classrooms serving vulnerable students.

Through scenes of caregiving, early teaching experience, and Lipan ancestral invocation, I argue that the “Lonely Only” condition is not merely affective but structurally produced by administrative recalibration, policy pressures, and the ongoing marginalization of relational, culturally grounded pedagogies. At stake is the fragile ecosystem of care, truth-telling, and linguistic and cultural sustainability that many women of color educators have labored to build. The letter ultimately advances a vision of enduring hope, insisting that survival within the academy has long served as preparation for continued intellectual and community-building work. I call on higher education to reckon with the lived costs of current policy directions while recognizing the sustaining knowledge practices already carried forward in our classrooms.