Marissa Muñoz is a Xicana Tejana, tracing her roots to Tlaxcalteca-speaking and Wixarika communities of the present-day Texas/Mexico borderlands. She is a third year PhD student in the Faculty of Educational Studies at UBC. Marissa draws from her experience as a middle-school teacher, museum educator, and curriculum developer to inform her ongoing research in the area of culturally-centric environmental education. Her current research focuses on the relationships between border communities and water, recognizing traditional ecological knowledge as an intergenerational pedagogy along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo border. Building upon Indigenous scholarship and methodologies, Marissa’s research moves toward mobilizing understandings of water as a means of community empowerment toward justice, in response to the ongoing military occupation, environmental racism, and cultural ethnocide that continues to occur along the U.S.-Mexico border.
