Chicana Feminist Research Articles

Establishing Mentoring Relationships as Early-Career Latina Student Support Services Professionals

ABSTRACT Latina student services administrators represent 7% of administrators on college campuses. The lack of Latina representation in administrator roles indicates the need to better recruit and retain this group of administrators. Mentoring is one tool which supports the retaining of administrators. Using a Chicana feminist epistemology and thematic analysis, this study examines the experiences of early-career Latina SSS administrators with mentoring and supportive communities. Our findings indicate that early-career Latina professionals struggle with establishing mentoring relationships; are intentional in seeking mentors; and often must resort to establishing their own peer communities of support. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

"I Was Treated Differently": Reproductive Health Care Experiences Among Women With Recent Experiences of Incarceration, Homelessness, And/Or Substance Use in a Medically Underserved Area in the Southwestern US.

Background: Women with upstream social determinants of health, particularly those with recent experiences of incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use, encounter a series of barriers in accessing health care services and consequently face poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Driven by a community concern for increasing rates of syphilis and congenital syphilis among women who are structurally disadvantaged, this study focuses on their experiences with reproductive healthcare access across healthcare settings.Research Design and Study Sample: This community-basedpláticas(conversational) research project gathered 12 in-depth interviews andtestimonios(testimonies) with women who reported a criminalized upstream barrier (incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use) in a small city in the southwestern U.S.-most of whom identified as Latina/Hispanic.Analysis and Results: Using a grounded analysis and drawing upon Chicana feminist methodologies, this study identifies four major themes: (1) homelessness and economic vulnerabilities, (2) incarceration and health care, (3) drug use, provider stigma, and motherhood, and (4) desired changes to the healthcare experience.Conclusion: Results highlight the need for economic and transportation supports, community-based preventive services as alternatives to incarcerated healthcare, along with more compassionate and structurally competent provider-patient dialogue.

How Doctoral Chicanas Resist White Supremacist Political Erasure Through Muxerista Mentoring

Latinas in graduate education remain underrepresented as doctoral recipients. During 2014-15, only 7.3 percent of Latinas had received doctoral degrees compared to White (66.7%), Asian (12.7%), and Black (10.3%) women (National Center of Education Statistics 2016). Latina students experience the doctoral socialization process of cultural dissonance, which conflicts with their own ethnic or racial identity. As doctoral Chicanas, we resist academia’s values of “individualism, competition, and emotional detachment” (Ibarra 2001, 101). During an isolating COVID-19 pandemic and a white supremacist political climate, we have managed to persevere against the odds. We have informally developed the process of Muxerista mentoring (Revilla 2004) by coming together to plan the annual MAS K-12 training program. We share our multi-generational testimonios to explore the multiple worlds we navigate while in our programs as nontraditional Chicanas learning and teaching in higher education. We argue that Muxerista mentorship is a genuine reciprocal connection and a commitment to building critical conciencia and collective transformation. Creating a Chicana feminist mentoring space that honors and values our unique experiences navigating a eurocentric education system. Through testimonio, we tease out our survival strategies and what nurtures our vision as activist scholars.

Pláticando about Love at the Kitchen Table

In this paper two Women of Color academics employ and blend Chicana Feminist Pláticas and Kitchen Table Talk methodologies to engage in a culturally rooted dialogue about the power of love in education. They explore their journeys towards studying love, love in praxis, and ultimately, argue that love is a practice for cultivating and sustaining our collective well-being.

“Nepantla is a Place Just Like the Ocean”: Bilingual Teachers Explore their Identities through Multimodal and Artifactual Testimonio

AbstractBilingual teachers of Color navigate many in‐between spaces as they forge hybrid teacher identities; Chicana feminist scholars have referred to these crossroads between cultural ideologies, values, and beliefs as spaces of nepantla. In this qualitative case study, we analyzed the work of 31 teachers from two cohorts of multilingual educators who participated in a summer bilingual endorsement course and subsequent bilingual teacher induction meetings. These teachers identified as Latine, Asian/Asian American, Native American, or multiracial, and taught in Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Japanese, and English‐medium settings. As course instructors and induction facilitators, we engaged participants in a series of multimodal and artifactual testimonio sessions and collected data in the form of multimodal and artifactual testimonios, coursework, interviews, and video recordings of testimonio sessions. Framed by bringing Chicana feminist conceptualizations of testimonio and nepantla into conversation with theories of multimodal and artifactual literacies, we analyzed participants' testimonios and found they used images, voice, video, and artifacts to unearth their histories; to forge resilient identidades nepantleras; and to express connection and solidarity with students that informed their present and future pedagogical practices. This study suggests the potential for researchers and teacher educators to leverage hybrid literacy practices, like multimodal and artifactual testimonio, while creating spaces that facilitate identity exploration and development for multilingual teachers of Color. Significantly, this multilingual teacher identity development allows for articulation of connection and solidarity with multilingual students, which teachers perceive as consequential in shaping their pedagogical and advocacy commitments.

Academic Supervivencia and Sesi Irekani: Refusing, Reimagining, and Rearticulating Decolonization in the Social Foundations of Education

The American Educational Studies Association (AESA) was established in 1968 in a context of both local and global social justice movements. The AESA’s mission and ongoing commitment to the analysis of education and society with underlying liberal activist aims has been ongoing since. Although AESA and its membership have been critiqued and questioned for their larger impact in the field, especially in its disconnect between university academics and pk-12 teachers, the original charge and purpose has largely remained. This address seeks to put a spotlight on the foundations of the social foundations of education and by extension AESA by using settler colonial and structural racism frames to examine the enduring problematics of how academia and academic enterprises are, as Quechua scholar Sandy Grande would say, “an arm of the settler state” (p. 47). Namely, I ask, how does AESA and the field of social foundations of education advance settler futurity? However, most importantly, I will also engage, how can AESA, the field and its membership engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist self-reflection and work toward decolonizing the organization and the work that we do as faculty members in this field? To engage in this process of reflexive praxis, I will use Grande’s concept of academic survivance, which includes operating beyond the boundaries set up for us by the institution and toward “an active presence in society and the academy” (p. 12). I slightly modify survivance with Chicana feminist scholar, Ruth Trinidad-Galvan’s concept of supervivencia, which also emphasizes beyond mere survival but from the perspective of Mexican campesinas “left behind” in a context of neoliberal extractivist dislocation. Finally, I draw from my P’urhépecha community ancestry a concept also common throughout many Indigenous communities, Sesi Irekani, el buen vivir, or “the good life.” I will argue that by centering a reflexive praxis based on these saberes-haceres we can refuse, reimagine, and rearticulate a relational comunalidad that unsettles the settler within and recon/figures an alter/Native charge and decolonial practice.

FilmCrit: using cinematic critical race counterstorytelling as critical race feminista methodology

This paper provides an overview of a Critical Race Feminista praxis-oriented methodological framework in development called FilmCrit, and a critical race method expanded into filmic form called Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling. Critical Race Feminisita Praxis informs this work by drawing on a Critical Race Theory in Education framework and Chicana Feminist theories and epistemologies. In discussing two FilmCrit studies, a qualitative documentary study, No Somos Famosos (We Are Not Famous), and my dissertation study, From the Classroom to the Screen: Experiences of Women of Color MFA Film Students, I detail the theoretical, methodological, and analytical development, as well as the scholarly significance, of FilmCrit and (auto)biographical and composite Cinematic Critical Race Counterstorytelling.

E-learning in Times of Radical Uncertainty

As teachers and teacher educators in the United States, we offer this editorial based on our lived experiences with the political, social, and environmental precarities where we live. Among these precarities are our looming U.S. presidential election after the last one included a plot by bad actors to abscond with our State’s electoral votes, our constant struggle for water in a desert state, and our weak overall internet connectivity. We call our wonderings about how we are living in and somehow surviving these times, <i>radical uncertainties</i>. In this editorial, we canvas radical uncertainties related to e-learning about digital literacies, generative text, datafication, and the camera gaze. Alongside these uncertainties, we offer alternative avenues for collective thinking based on Chicana Feminist epistemologies. We intend for readers to consider how local knowing can and should inform e-learning planning and practice.

Chicana/Latina feminism: What is it and how does it define us?

AbstractLatinas holding doctoral degrees are few and far between in the academic world as compared to their White female counterparts (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2020). We explore a crucial topic of Chicana/Latina feminism, which resists traditional theoretical concepts and methodologies in the field of adult education. Chicana/Latina feminism is a feminist theory that has transcended academic disciplines since its conception in ethnic women's studies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to offer an in‐depth look at Chicana/Latina feminism by defining the origins of a Chicana feminist theory, exploring the need to decolonize adult educational research to allow a more inclusive space for women of color in academia, attesting to the application of a Chicana feminist epistemology with the use of testimonios, and discussing the implications of embedding Chicana feminist perspectives in adult educational research.

Small axe: chipping away at special collections barriers to inclusivity

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to share this study’s efforts to foster belonging in special collections public service spaces, as Black and Latina practitioners of color, while navigating known systemic professional barriers to inclusivity in the library information profession.Design/methodology/approachIn this conceptual essay, frameworks from Black and Chicana feminist theories are applied which resonate deeply with this study’s practices but are not often encountered in library spaces, namely intersectional nepantla, which is used to situate the positionality within special collections.FindingsFostering belonging in special collections environments is an ongoing effort, but this study offers reflections in solidarity with all who seek to increase inclusivity and equity in their spaces. It is believed that the cumulative impact of many small actions implemented from the ground up can potentially be as significant as top-down, administrative charges.Originality/valueThis article's originality stems from both its authors and the methodology. As BIPOC practitioners, to the authors emphasize the authentic, day-to-day interactions that are essential to developing inclusivity and equity in special collections and archival spaces. Special collections reference workers have limited time off desk to collaborate and conduct research.

Can Chicana Feminists Create a Queer Mesoamerican Memory?

Can Chicana Feminists Create a Queer Mesoamerican Memory?

Resistance Testimonios for Reclaiming Teaching Instruction and Assessment Practices: Holistic Narratives of Bilingual Latinx Youths’ Knowledge Through Long-Term Relationships

ABSTRACT This study, informed by Chicana Feminist frameworks, explores bilingual Latinx students’ resistance testimonios pertaining to instruction and assessment. These testimonios transpired through pláticas [familiar gatherings] between adolescent youth and the author, also their former elementary school teacher. This study is contextualized within historical and current ways white supremacy impacts education for bilingual Latinx students. Reviews of the literature show how standardized testing does not always capture a full narrative of bilingual Latinx students’ knowledge. While educators cannot dismantle all the limited ways of assessing students at once, this article adds to the scholarship on how teachers can build long-term relationships to mend these sources of harms. The past relationship, between the students and the author, helped establish plática spaces, where they collectively reflected on the ways instructional and assessment practices hurt or dismissed their communities. In the pláticas, students enriched their sociopolitical consciousness by pushing and pulling each other to share their lives. Assembling their collective testimonios reveals alternatives to understanding what bilingual Latinx students know. Remembering with, listening to, and assembling students’ testimonios collectively over time offers how educators might build longer lasting and broader relationships, for a broader, more expansive holistic understanding of Latinx students’ experiences in school. Educators must collaborate together, as there is a critical opportunity for reclaiming instructiom and assessment practices.

Politics of Being Loving, Vulnerable, and Present

As feminist faculty we assess our use of testimonios by employing testimonio to share our experiences and Chicana feminist pedagogy praxis, which challenge the structure of the traditional canon and offer alternative classroom practices. As Chicana feminist faculty we appraise the use of testimonios as feminist pedagogy to contest the structure of the conventional canon and fashion and provide alternative classroom practices. We explore how we view our courses as a medium through which students’ lives can be transformed, inspiring them to become active thinkers and active citizens, to participate in the life of the university, and most important, to become agents for social change. As faculty from different disciplines and generations, we examine the use of testimonio in our Chicana/o studies classes by centering the voices and stories of girls, women, and immigrants in a variety of fields, in particular psychology and public health. The stories shared challenge their invisibility, invalidation, and marginalization in academia and in an array of fields. Their testimonios expose brutality, disrupt silencing, and build solidarity among mujeres.

Entre Madres y Comadres: Trans Latina Immigrants Empowering Women Beyond Marianismo

When social workers discuss the lives of Latinx individuals, it is often in the context of cultural values such as marianismo. Marianismo is linked to Catholicism and patriarchal values that reinforce traditional gender scripts for women. Although Latina feminists have challenged these values for decades, it continues to be paramount that social workers deepen their understanding of the lives of Chicanas and Latinas through critical theories. From this perspective, mujeristas and Chicana feminists who emphasize liberative work often use the term comadres, or comothers, to explore Latinas’ roles and relationships. The distinction between the traditional motherly role of marianismo and the collaborative and empowering role of comadres was evident in our feminist-informed study about the lived experiences of trans Latina immigrants who are activists and agents of change in their Southern U.S. communities. Our goal as Latina feminists is to include these women in the theoretical conversation as their experiences allowed us to expand our knowledge of these concepts. By reconceptualizing the mutually supportive role of Latinas in their communities, trans Latina immigrants and Latina feminists encourage us to see Latinas beyond the traditional and stereotypical gender script of marianismo.

Reclaiming Malintzin: Epideictic Practices of a Chicana Rhetoric

This article analyzes the epideictic practices Chicana rhetors use to reclaim the figure of Malintzin, a woman cast as a promiscuous traitor for her role in the Spanish conquest. Since the figure of la Malinche was used to shame Chicana feminists as the traitors of the Chicano movement, Chicanas responded by first rejecting the narrative of la Malinche through rhetorical delinking, reframing her story with the use of amplification and depreciation, and finally reclaiming Malintzin as an aspirational symbol for Chicana feminists. Chicana epideictic makes a political argument about the value and worth of Chicana feminists by praising the Malintzin figure. Chicana epideictic challenges and celebrates community values and blurs the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric.

A Kitchen-Table Talk on Disrupting and Dreaming Beyond the Prescribed Curriculum

This kitchen-table talk is grounded in Black and Chicana feminist traditions, with the facilitator, Yvette M. Regalado, senior scholar Drs. Farima Pour-Khorshid, Timothy San Pedro, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Mariana Souto-Manning, and community member Jessica Martell sit down to have a critical and authentic conversation around the real work that is being done to disrupt and move beyond the harmful prescribed curriculum. These conversationalists begin with an ofrenda, an offering, that connects and inspires their work. Then the discussion moves into types of coalition work done in our communities, and finally, we discuss our hopes and dreams for the future of education. So, sit down and dream with us as we discuss the consciousness of (re)defining equity and excellence in education.

Movidas after Nationalism: Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez and Chicana Aesthetics

ABSTRACT This essay traces the Chicana feminist rhetoric of prominent activist Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez in the late 1960s. I argue that Longeaux y Vasquez’s Chicana movida(s), the enactment of feminist sensibilities amid gendered repression, erupted the exclusive boundaries of Chican@ nationalism birthed during the 1969 Denver Youth Liberation Conference. Her rhetoric generated an expansive inclusivity that resonated, although it did not necessarily align, with Chicana movidas emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. An analysis of the aesthetics of her feminist rhetoric in the Chican@ movement newspaper El Grito del Norte highlights at once the rhetorical inventiveness of a Chicana activist grappling with the inclusion of Mexican American women in Chican@ movement(s) and variations in Chicana movidas constituting Chicana rhetorical history. In Longeaux y Vasquez’s feminist rhetoric, we witness a Chicana movida that invented inclusion from the premises of exclusion marking Chican@ nationalism.

World of Our Mothers: Mexican Revolution-Era Immigrants and Their Stories. By Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel

Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel’s World of Our Mothers: Mexican Revolution-Era Immigrants and Their Stories sets out to ethically document the voices and stories of forty-five women who migrated to the United States during the 1910 Mexican Revolution era, and the heterogenous ways they navigated and negotiated their lives and labor amidst U.S. segregation and anti-Mexican and immigrant violence. The text complicates traditional representations of Mexican women in the U.S. during the early twentieth century as passive and submissive by providing various, and at times contradictory, perspectives through the women’s own voices. Additionally, they place the women’s accounts in conversation with multiple discourses and histories, including Mexican, Indigenous, and Chicana feminisms, Indigenous and campesino displacement, and U.S. imperialist and extractive labor practices. The authors’ methodology stands out as one of care and respect for the women whose stories they make visible. All seven chapters begin with an introduction orienting the reader through the historical and socio-political circumstances the women’s narratives undertake, beginning with the Mexican Revolution and their displacement, often leading to the women’s migration to the United States. Each chapter furthers the particularities of the women’s lives, including but not limited to exploring their experiences as contract (reenganche) laborers, their struggles with mobility, and complex relationships to U.S. citizenship including both a desire and refusal of it, their roles as wives and mothers, and the role of education and religion in their lives. Rather than weave their interpretations alongside the women’s narratives, what Montiel and de la Torre Montiel offer is the women’s narratives thematically grouped beside each other.

Pláticas as a methodological praxis of love

In this paper, I explore how pláticas allowed for my former high school students and I to conceptualize love. This work is a response to overwhelming statistics regarding child trauma and literature that named loving relationships as a pivotal but under-conceptualized intervention. Specifically, we participated in three different iterations of pláticas: communal, peer, and individual. Through our plática structures and commitments to safety, accountability, and joy, we were able to conceptualize love and ultimately argue that based on the similarities between the five tenets of Chicana Feminist pláticas and our definition of love, that pláticas can not only serve as a methodological praxis that challenges centuries of epistemological and methodological harm but also serve to foster the type of love that is integral to the well-being of our communities.

Review: Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley, by Monica De La Torre

Review: <i>Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley</i>, by Monica De La Torre