Latina Superintendents Navigate Rural and Mid-Size School Districts and Occupy their Liminal Space: An Anzaldúan Nepantla Consciousness and Testimonios Study

School superintendents play a vital role in any school district. Whoever is at the helm as a superintendent provides a vision, enacts policy, and is a role model. It is, therefore, significant that there has been an increasing number of Latina superintendents in Texas over the recent decades. The number of Latina superintendents in rural and mid-size school districts has increased, but the scholarship documenting their life experiences has not. The purpose of this study is to explore the experience of Latina superintendents to illuminate Latina educational leadership scholarship. I used Anzaldúa’s feminist lens as she focuses on how gender, power, and race operate for women in their personal and professional lives. Latina superintendents occupy their liminal space, as such, she navigates the androcentric political Texas school district landscape. Consequently, this narrative inquiry study employed testimonios as a methodology to explore the Latina superintendents’ first-witness accounts of empowerment ascribed to gender and race. This process allowed data to be collected and analyzed simultaneously in four phases using Riessman’s Thematic Analysis Approach (TA), which used field observations, semi-structured testimonio interviews, and a reflection focus group. I used a cyclical data analysis process as a kaleidoscope to explore the Latina superintendent’s experiences.