Abstract
This perspective introduces Madrinidad, a culturally grounded framework of collective mentorship designed to strengthen the navigational capital of aspiring first-generation Latine teacher educators. Drawing from narratives among faculty, an institutional leader, and a graduate student who aspires to teach, we show how critical ecological literacy maps power, culture, and inequity in education, using accompaniment and scaffolded relational practices to cultivate student agency and drive systemic transformation. In a time when culturally sustaining practices face political opposition, Madrinidad offers both a strategy for navigating exclusionary systems and a vision for dismantling them through collective resistance. Rather than reinforcing individualistic, hierarchical models of mentorship that position a single mentor as savior or gatekeeper, Madrinidad reimagines mentorship as a distributed, relational process rooted in community accompaniment and collective growth. We advocate for ecosystems of relational support that center cultural knowledge, affirm community wisdom, and build pathways for systemic change in educational spaces historically marked by marginalization.