Chicana Feminist Research Articles

Latina/o Political Thought: Exploring the Relationship between Decentered Subjectivity, Coalition Building, and Sustained Political Solidarity

Chicana feminists have contributed to numerous themes in Latina/o political thought. Two of the most significant of these themes are the multiplicity of subjectivity, and the view that political solidarity – i.e. the uniting of diverse peoples in common cause – should build upon the diversity among people rather than on the imposed or supposed sameness of a single identity. Numerous Chicana and Latina feminists have pointed to a strong connection between these two themes by emphasizing the role that inner diversity can play in solidaristic political movements. Within this conversation in Latina/o political thought, however, numerous questions remain as to the exact relationship between identity, the diversity of the self, and the everyday tasks of building political solidarity. In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing consideration of these concerns by addressing the question: via what specific mechanisms, if any, can the multiple identities within subjectivity play a role in creating diverse, yet cohesive, political coalitions or movements? I address this question in two parts. In part one, I survey the concepts of mestiza consciousness and solidarity as Chicana feminists have articulated them in recent decades. In part two, I employ these concepts in a case study analysis of the organizing strategies of the Farmworkers Movement as led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and others between 1962 and November of 1976. I conclude the paper by drawing an analytic inference from the case study suggesting five specific factors that are likely to serve as mediating mechanisms in the role that multiple identities play in diverse coalition building in general.

Scholarship Girls Aren't the Only Chicanas Who Go to College: Former Chicana Continuation High School Students Disrupting the Educational Achievement Binary

Drawing from extensive oral history interviews with five Chicana women, Malagon and Alvarez (re)conceptualize the way educational scholarship defines "high achieving."As attendees of California continuation high schools, all five women defy societal expectations by moving from these alternative educational spaces to community colleges, then transferring into four-year universities and going on to enroll in graduate programs. The article highlights the resistance strategies these young women employ through their critique of social oppression, with the authors using critical race theory, Latina/o critical theory, and Chicana feminist epistemologies to make sense of the women's narratives and their journeys through the educational pipeline.

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature Yolanda Padilla Keywords Yolanda Padilla, Anna Marie Sandoval, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature, Feminism, Latin America, chicano, chicana, Latina/Latino Studies, Mexicana Literature, Chicana Literature Sandoval, Anna Marie. Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 2008. xvi + 129 pp. Anna Marie Sandoval’s Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas appears at a timely moment in Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. To an important extent, these [End Page 289] fields of inquiry have led the current hemispheric/transnational turn that is gaining prominence in American studies. Sandoval contributes to such transnational work through a feminist analysis of Chicana and Mexicana literature, one that highlights the similarities in the discursive strategies and political commitments of each in an effort to “braid Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities” (the subtitle of her first chapter). Few scholars have studied these literatures together, and, to my knowledge, none have devoted an entire book to such a project. There are at least two suggestive antecedents for Sandoval’s work. Debra A. Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) includes chapters on the Chicana writers Helena María Viramontes and Denise Chávez alongside those on Latin Americans such as Luisa Valenzuela and Rosario Castellanos. Castillo does not explicitly make the case for why she includes Chicanas in her study of Latin American women’s writings, but her readings suggest an affinity in these writers’ narrative strategies (such as the use of silence in the work of Viramontes), strategies that foreground issues of gender in their engagements with cultural and political contexts in a Latin America broadly conceived to include Latinas in the United States. In light of her resistance to developing an “overarching theory” to discuss Latin American literary feminisms (1), her decision not to provide a critical framework that accounts for the inclusion of Chicanas was probably a conscious one. Yet even when they deal with similar cultural coordinates, Chicana and Latin American women’s writings are shaped by and respond to very different contexts. Castillo’s readings and juxtapositions are generative while dispensing with an explicit unifying framework, but the inclusion of a rigorous rationale would be necessary in a monograph devoted to transnational analysis such as Sandoval’s. Like Talking Back, Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) does not take as its central focus a transnational study of Chicana and Latin American women’s writings; it attends much more to the links between U.S. Third World and Chicana feminisms. She ends, however, by suggesting confluences between the genre of testimonio and its enabling of the “previously unheard-of self-representation by subaltern women” and similar kinds of narrative expression employed by Chicana border feminists (161). Asserting a connection between Chicana literature and a significant strain of Latin American women’s expressive culture, Saldívar-Hull argues that these women “articulate a feminist consciousness that cannot be separated from its connection to race and class” (164). As a result, gender politics become inseparable from geopolitics. I start with a brief discussion of these two works in order to convey a sense of what has been done on this kind of critical project and to suggest something of what remains to be done. Given that Sandoval’s central focus in Toward a Latina [End Page 290] Feminism of the Americas is precisely the joint study of Mexicana and Chicana writers, it is much more incumbent on her than on Castillo or Saldívar-Hull to provide a rigorous rationale, whether on historical, cultural, political, or aesthetic grounds. To this end, Sandoval identifies and examines a number of common cultural and thematic touchstones, including redefinitions of family, the influence of the Catholic Church, and, most importantly, the writers’ “re-visionings of traditional cultural symbols” such as La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche (9). Along with the “reshaping of cultural symbols...

Moving Beyond High School Expectations: Examining Stakeholders' Responsibility for Increasing Latina/o Students' College Readiness

In an effort to improve college readiness for Latina/o students, this article examines the meaning and significance of college readiness among multiple stakeholders (teachers, counselors, parents, students, and superintendents) in the South Texas border region. Using focus group data, this article explores the assets embedded within college readiness by using integrated Chicana feminist theory (Anzaldúa, 1987; Fránquiz & Salazar, 2004) and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005, 2006) lenses. In particular, the authors conceptualize a hybrid framework-borderland cultural wealth (BCW)-which we define as the cultural assets present in this region that when cultivated and tapped into effectively can improve college preparation and access. Findings reveal that stakeholders felt both individual and collective responsibility for college readiness. Furthermore, stakeholders voiced the need for improved college readiness efforts so that students can be successful in diverse universities and to break the cycle of low-college-going rates of this region. Implications for research and practice for P-20 educators, practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.

Feminismo, traducción cultural y traición en Malinche de Laura Esquivel

This essay explores the complexity of Laura Esquivel's conciliatory approach to the figure of Malinche in her novel Malinche (2006). I read the text in relation to textual and visual representations by Mexican and Chicana feminists. I also analyze the first three editions of the novel in the U.S. and in Mexico. As a result, I analyze symbolic betrayals that have to do with processes of cultural translation. In this context, I discuss the function of Esquivel as a writer in-between cultures who has the authority to design the plot and to be a traitor, but may also be betrayed in the process.

Catherine S. Ramírez . The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xxvi, 229. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

A short skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, a tight v-neck sweater, a fingertip-length boxy jacket, heavy eye makeup and dark lipstick, hair teased and piled into a high bouffant: these were the signature fashion elements of the young Mexican American women who participated in the zoot suit subculture in Los Angeles in the World War II era. These women were just as daring and dissident as their brothers, with whom they shared both a style politics and the disapproval of white society. However, the women, sometimes called pachucas, remained largely invisible and unintelligible in comparison to their male, pachuco counterparts. Police, white servicemen, newspapers, and the courts cast male zoot suiters as unpatriotic, criminal delinquents during the Sleepy Lagoon incident of 1942 and the zoot suit riots of 1943; Chicano nationalists reinterpreted them as icons of resistance during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an innovative twist on an old question, Catherine S. Ramírez asks, “Where were the pachucas?” By this, she means to investigate both the subculture of the historical subjects and the role of the iconic representation—la Pachuca—as it figured into World War II nationalism as well as later, insurgent Chicano nationalist and Chicana feminist reinterpretations. The result is a fresh interdisciplinary history that tells us as much about nationalisms, gender, race, and culture from 1942 to the present as it does about young women who embraced a defiant public style.

Disabling La Frontera: Disability, Border Subjectivity, and Masculinity in "Big Jesse, Little Jesse" by Oscar Casares

More than a century after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Chicano public intellectual Americo Paredes described the violent 1848 redrawing of the US-Mexico borderline in the following terms: The river, which had been a focal point, became a dividing line. Men were expected to consider their relatives and closest neighbors, the just across the river, as foreigners in a foreign land (15). Paredes's description emphasizes how the imposition of a new border not only reassigned the national identities of living on the border but also forced them to redelineate the boundaries of their own families. This transformation of the river into a dividing line, turning family into foreigners, has ongoing repercussions in the lives of living on the border today, as Oscar Casares's debut short story collection Brownsville (2003) powerfully reveals. Brownsville deals with the connection between the geopolitical borders drawn around the nation-state and emotional borders drawn within families. It presents the US-Mexico border as a site of intense psychological violence, elucidating how social conflicts produced by a political boundary affect the most intimate of personal relationships. These issues coalesce around the representation of disability in Big Little Jesse, a pivotal narrative in the book. Disability is central to the story's critical representation of the border and to its depiction of how the existence of the border informs the construction of family life and racialized masculinity. Furthermore, the story suggests that attention to disability identity can provide a critical perspective from which to contest the exclusionary conceptualization of national belonging that the border produces and supports. Big Little tells the story of a young Chicano father who has recently separated from his wife and struggles to maintain a relationship with his physically disabled son. Disability informs the division between Jesse and his family, suggesting that his ability to navigate the physical and emotional barriers that separate him from his former partner and his child depends on his willingness to understand the social meaning of disability. This understanding, as disability theorist Tobin Siebers observes, requires both the ability to abstract general rules on the basis of one's experience and to recognize that one's experience differs from that of others (104). In other words, Jesse needs to comprehend how his experiences of race and class oppression can help him interpret his son's experiences. He must also recognize how his able-bodied (and racialized) masculinity differs from his son's disabled (and racialized) masculinity. Arriving at this awareness benefits not only his son but also Jesse himself because, as Siebers notes, disability identities serve as critical frameworks for identifying and questioning the complicated ideologies on which social injustice and oppression depend (105). Jesse needs access to these critical frameworks not only to have a closer relationship with his son, but also to gain awareness of how exclusionary constructions of national identity in both the US and Mexico have limited his own chances in life. As a result, Big Little illustrates a key insight from the work of Paula M. L. Moya, who argues that people who have been oppressed in a particular way ... have experiences--experiences that who are not oppressed in that same way usually lack--that can provide them with information we all need to understand how hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality operate to uphold existing regimes of power in our society (38). By paying closer attention to his son's experience, Jesse has the potential to gain knowledge that can help him navigate the ideologies of race, class, and gender that structure his own life on the US-Mexico border. By engaging the representation of anti-normative bodies in order to critique the psychic violence life on the border entails for Casares's writing resonates in surprising ways with that of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua, whose work is predicated on the rejection of nationalist claims and ideologies of body normativity. …

The Oppositional Consciousness of Yolanda M. López

Based on an oral history interview, this essay examines the work of Yolanda M. López, one of the most significant Chicana artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It posits that her work portrays feminist intersectionality and oppositional consciousness, predating the Chicana feminist literature on these paradigms. Documenting her political activism and the aesthetic strategies that emerged from her involvement in the Chicano movement, the essay illuminates the conceptual, deconstructivist, and semiotic style of the artist, which is frequently overlooked by critics. It concludes with the observation that López’s work recuperates Chicana empowerment.

Chicana feminist strategies in a participatory action research project with transnational Latina youth

This article discusses a participatory action research (PAR) project carried out with three transnational Latina youth in northern California and how the university researcher incorporated Chicana feminist strategies in the study. PAR and Chicana feminism place at the heart of research the knowledge that ordinary people produce, referring to this knowledge as conocimientos, or "homemade theory." The author discusses the project, the collaborative writing of a children's book based on two years of data collection, the challenges in being both an insider and an outsider to the community, how the youth created a counterstory based on their transnational immigrant lifestyle, and how an out-of-school setting promoted engaged research with urban teens.

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art (review)

Reviewed by: Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art Nadia Avendaño Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art. Duke University Press, 2008. By Debra J. Blake. What do La Malinche, La Llorona, and la Virgen de Guadalupe and Mexica goddesses all have in common? They are all cultural symbols that have exerted a profound impact on the way women of Mexican descent have understood their sexuality and have imagined their roles within society and the family. This study, a welcome volume addition to the critical series Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations, examines the way different groups of Chicana and U.S. Mexicana women have made use of these cultural symbols to negotiate, contest, and transform the forces that have restricted or oppressed them. Since the 1980's Chicana writers and artists have refigured these iconic figures and assigned them new meanings. Debra J. Blake compares these refigurings by professional intellectual Chicanas with that of working-class and semiprofessional women's oral narratives. The book examines how representations of the four Mexican female cultural figures have been used by dominant forces from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century to oppress women, and how Chicana writers have been influenced by their "transformative foremother," La Malinche. In contrast to patriarchal representations, Blake analyzes how Chicana artists have [End Page 224] refashioned the four figures in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first centuries. Blake then examines the significance of indigenous Mexican mother earth goddesses used in fictional and autobiographical writings by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Alma Luz Villanueva, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros and compares them with several interrelated feminist discourses including anthropology, spirituality, and radical/cultural feminist debates about sexuality, women's culture, and universalized gender oppression. The book subsequently discusses the importance of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the lives of the working-class and semi-professional women from a semiotic perspective and shows how their refigurings of women's roles and sexuality are based in practical or action-oriented strategies. It also analyzes both groups' shared experiences with the legend of La Llorona, and its continuing relevance in Chicana cultural thought, for example, the legend's disciplinary function for children and its regulatory message regarding female sexuality. Blake analyzes fictional writings by Chicanas that refigure the misogynist view of La Llorona. Finally, the author considers the historical reception of written and oral narratives from a literary studies perspective and suggests that oral histories be "read" as literary representations and incorporated into the "canon." Blake concludes that regardless of Chicanas' and U.S. Mexicanas' social and economic locations, the female symbol they affiliate with, or how they identify, their narratives indicate that they are engaged in claiming and redefining power for themselves and others. Finally, this study shows that Chicana feminist writings continue to address significant concerns affecting real women's lives, including those of working-class and semiprofessional women, and to redefine what it means to be a Chicana or U.S. Mexicana into the twenty-first century. Chicana Sexuality and Gender is the first full-length study of Chicana literature to analyze oral histories as narrative representations along with fictional writings and visual artists' representations. This study offers one of the most thorough discussions of the archetypes of La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe as well as the lesser known Mexica goddesses. Though Blake provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of Chicanas and U.S. Mexicanas, she recognizes that further studies of the experiences and ideas of middle-class, professional Mexican American women would contribute an even more complex picture regarding identity politics, Mexican female cultural symbols, gender roles and sexualities. Despite this omission, Debra J. Blake makes a great contribution to Chicano/a studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and literary studies. Nadia Avendaño College of Charleston Copyright © 2009 The Board of Regents of the University of Arizona

Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement Marcia Hernandez (bio) Reger, Jo , ed. Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement. New York: Routledge, 2005. 320 pp. In academic circles the debate over whether or not a new wave of feminism exists has largely been replaced with how women, and increasingly men, are actively engaged in the third wave. Feminism is now also part of the mainstream dialogue regarding women's rights, although the range and diversity of ideologies represented under this umbrella term are often reduced to simple stereotypes in popular culture. Outside of gender studies and women's studies departments there is limited understanding that feminism as a social movement, an academic field of study, or a political identity, represents a multilayered and complex way to understand and respond to social inequality. Since it is through popular culture that most contemporary students learn about feminism, it is not a surprise that many resist identifying with the label as a personal political ideology and lack a clear understanding of how the changes brought by the second wave affect them. Jo Reger's Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement provides an engaging read for students who have come of age enjoying the benefits of feminism yet are unsure how to interpret what feminism means for their own lives. Different Wavelengths offers a refreshing blend of chapters featuring personal observation, textual analysis, and theoretical arguments. As Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor state in the introduction, "we need to understand where we've been and where we're going." Taken as a whole, the chapters in Reger's text provide a response to this challenge. The book is easily organized for readers into separate sections as replies to often-cited criticisms of the second wave, ranging from exclusivity to out-of-date activist techniques to its distance from contemporary culture. In the first section, "Who Is Third Wave? Issues of Diversity," the authors explore various forms of diversity within the contemporary feminist movement, challenging the notion that only white, middle class, middle-aged women are engaged. Florence Maatita's chapter on Chicana feminism explores the ways in which young Latinas negotiate their race and ethnic [End Page 241] identity as well as their gender identity while finding a racial and feminist voice in college. Her respondents remind readers that personal and political identities are complicated, fluid, and often based within a specific context of family, culture and peer groups. Karen Schilt's "The Punk White Privilege Scene" argues that despite the rhetoric of inclusion within the third wave, white, middle-class women remain fully ensconced within a privileged position due to resources at their command and racial privilege. Together Schilt's and Maatita's chapters offer a wonderful contrast for students to analyze the accomplishments of second-wave feminism and the challenges that remain for feminists in the third wave. The second section, "Mothers and Daughters? Relations between the Second and Third Waves," deals with the ways in which feminists connect with each other in efforts at social justice yet also disconnect due to differences in social location, practice, and ideology. Stephanie Beechley's article, "When Feminism is Your Job: Age and Power in Women's Policy Organizations," offers an empirical analysis of what for some young feminists may be an all-too-familiar description of life in an established women's organization. Astrid Henry's chapter titled "Solitary Sisterhood" may also touch a personal chord with students who struggle to engage with feminism, unsure of where or how they fit into it. The stance of many third-wave pioneers to declare feminism an individualistic, "on-your-own-terms" personal identity created a multitude of opportunities for young women to engage in activism. Students may enjoy debating Henry's various points regarding how diversity and individuality are framed according to third wavers. Section three, "What Brings Change: Tactics of the Third Wave," offers an interesting selection for students to understand contemporary strategies for social change. Most students will be familiar, at least in passing, with the themes in Reger and Story's chapter on campus productions of the Vagina Monologues. Although the Monologues offer...

Gender, epistemology and cooking: Rethinking Encarnación Pinedo's El cocinero español

Gender, Epistemology and Cooking: Rethinking Encarnacion Pinedo's El cocinero espanol Encarnacion Pinedo's 1898 publication of El cocinero Espanol marks an important moment in Chicana/Mexicana history. Re-released in 2003 as Encarnacion's kitchen in an edited edition by Dan Strehl with an introductory essay by Victor Valle, El cocinero Espanol takes on a form that the author did not intend. Strehl edits the 880 recipes down to approximately 200 recipes because many recipes were “redundant.” This essay examines how the 2003 edition is embedded in Chicano nationalist thinking, which has enabled the editors to portray the text as authentically Mexican/Chicano and therefore located outside of feminist, multi-ethnic, and transnational considerations. The 2003 edition thus falls away from the original text and raises a number of the concerns and problems that Chicana feminist methodology is well suited to address. By tracking three thematic/intellectual issues: discourses on cookbooks as displays of skill rather than redundancy; theories of epistemology, conversation, and social knowledge; and nationalist versus postcolonial contexts, the article shows that we must read El cocinero Espanol with a Chicana feminist methodology rather than with the same narrow gender/race essentialist mode that Strehl and Valle use to frame the text.

Learning across Differences: Native and Ethnic Studies Feminisms

Learning across Differences:Native and Ethnic Studies Feminisms Renya K. Ramirez (bio) Some colleagues—who are members of Native studies departments—tell me I occupy a precarious and vexed position as part of the project and field of American studies. They argue that my living and breathing within an interdisciplinary space weakens my ability to theorize Native studies from uniquely indigenous perspectives. They tell me the goal of American studies is inconsistent with the objectives of Native American studies, because indigenous peoples occupy such an exceptional position vis-à-vis the U.S. nation-state. While I definitely agree that I must highlight our specificity by remaining in conversation with other indigenous feminists, at the same time my involvement in American studies has encouraged me to read other feminist scholars of color, contributing to my elaboration of Native feminisms. Even more important, I have grown as a Native feminist by interacting with other ethnic studies feminists at UC Santa Cruz and as part of my participation in the Gender and Cultural Citizenship Working Group. Because American studies is an interdisciplinary project that stimulates discussion across various disciplines and different ethnic studies concentrations, I am open to reading the writings of women of color feminists in order to help me theorize Native feminist theory and praxis. Understanding why some African American women choose not to identify as feminists has helped me appreciate the similar choices of many indigenous women.1 Like some African American women, some Native women have considered sexism to be racially disruptive and divisive. Indeed, they sometimes assume that a feminist consciousness will automatically create tension between themselves and indigenous men. The sexism common in the American Indian Movement (AIM)—which is similar to the sexism in other people of color movements—could also influence how indigenous women relate to feminism. Native women frequently occupied subordinate positions within the movement, and were expected to satisfy and fulfill the sexual desires of AIM's male leaders. Native women were, therefore, encouraged to believe that indigenous men should be in power.2 Native American women were taught in this sexist environment to support an indigenous nationalism that disregarded their own antisexist priorities. [End Page 303] Reading Patricia Zavella's work about the importance of recognizing the diversity of the Chicana community in order to theorize Chicana feminisms encouraged me to think about the diversity of the indigenous community.3 Indigenous women come from divergent tribal nations and maintain different relations to their particular settler nation-states. Many reside on reserves in Canada, reservations in the United States, or villages in Mexico, and many others dwell away from their indigenous lands in rural or urban areas. In the United States, some are struggling to become federally acknowledged while others are already members of acknowledged tribes. These diverse circumstances shape how we as indigenous women relate to the world and make decisions about our needs. In fact, how we name ourselves differs in relationship to country of origin, geography, and tribal nation. In the United States, we often identify as "Native American" or "American Indian." In Canada, indigenous women claim the terms "First Nations" or "aboriginal," while in Mexico they identify as "indigenous." Many other Native women name themselves only by tribal nation and reject using any of the above terms. I utilize the word Native in the term Native feminisms in order to concentrate on our similar experiences as indigenous women all over the Americas.4 But whether one utilizes "a tribal name," "indigenous," "Native," "First Nations," or another term, highlighting our heterogeneity is essential for appreciating our varied experiences as indigenous women.5 Indeed, similar to other women of color feminists, this diversity encourages me to argue for the development of multiple feminisms rather than a singular feminism. In contrast, other indigenous women scholars do not engage with women of color feminists and, unfortunately, conflate feminism with white feminism. For example, in 1996 Haunani-Kay Trask argued that since feminism relates only to gender issues, it is not relevant to a Hawaiian nationalist struggle and is ultimately a white notion.6 She assumes feminism and white feminism are interchangeable terms, not discussing or recognizing feminist theory created by women of color...

Introduction to Focus: "This Instant and This Triumph": Women of Color Publishing

Page 4 American Book Review “This Instant and This Triumph”: Women of Color Publishing Introduction to Focus: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Focus Editor Women of color in the US have been using the printed word as a medium for imagination and protest for more than a century. In the 1800s, novelist Pauline Hopkins was a co-founder of the collective Colored American Magazine, where she published short stories and serial novels that imagined the equality of the races as a rational and achievable future.Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells co-founded her own newspaper, and when her offices were burned to the ground, she rallied black women and raised the funds to publish pamphlets on lynching and racist mob rule in theAmerican South. In the mid-twentieth century, Chicana feminists in the US invoked the memory of Las Hijas de Cuahtemoc, women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, as they created a network of campus-based newspapers and anthologies through which to theorize the relevance and contours of Chicana feminism. In the early 1980s, a group of women including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde (from whose “Litany for Survival” the title of this piece comes), and Cherríe Moraga came together to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) and kept This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1983) in print for more than a decade. Though women of color sustained publishing initiatives before and throughout the twentieth century , the very act of what this section calls “Women of Color Publishing” is embattled and almost counter-intuitive. The dominant narratives of state policy and the cherished “great work” of American literature have not characterized women of color as intellectuals or important cultural producers. Instead, women of color have been caricaturized as reproducers of domestic stability in the homes of the literarily relevant, and deviant reproducers of pathological cultures of poverty at worst. And further, as the selfproclaimed “third world feminists” in the US asserted in the 1980s, neither the seeming refuges of feminist publishing or third-world publishing supported the critical voices of women of color. Women of color producing literary texts (or anything else) on their own terms smacks of danger. In the 1970s when eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison used her tokenized role within a mainstream publishing house to encourage the work of black women writers such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, their work was met with an intense critical backlash from black male critics who attacked , not the literary merit of Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) or Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975), but rather the supposedly “divisive” audacity of the authors in representing and responding to rape and domestic violence against women in their texts. Morrison and other black women writers working in that time period, including Walker, Shange, June Jordan, VèVè Clark, and others, realized that autonomous publishing was the only way to create space for their voices. In a collective called “The Sisterhood,” these women envisioned a publishing company called Kizzy Enterprises that would have operated out of Shange’s house, funded on a profitless basis and through which they intended to keep texts that they deemed crucial in print and available. When Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa brought together writings by radical women of color to protest the abusive tokenization of women of color in the mainstream feminist movement and to create a viable network for women of color, the feminist publisher Persephone Press was not willing or able color presses in this moment reaches beyond the publication of women of color by women of color for women of color; this section features work that ranges from essays, critical analysis, poetry, fiction, interactive art and work authored by multi-racial groups of women, women of color collectives, men of color, and like-minded people of many genders and backgrounds. However, these works are far from generalist, and each creates an intimate relationship that assumes the participation of readers in a shared project of transformation. RedBone Press Lisa Moore founded RedBone Press after successfully publishing the groundbreaking anthology Does...

Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

A Dialogical View of the Emergence of Chicana Feminist Discourse1

I argue that a convergent dialogical approach to the understanding of social movement discourse drawn from sociology and feminist studies is best suited for understanding challenges made by dissenters within social movements. I analyze “second wave” Chicana feminism which arose in the 1960s and 1970s. I first discuss two dialogical approaches in social movement and feminist theory to understand the strategies that challengers within already oppositional movements use to confront locally hegemonic discourse. Chicana feminists built their arguments on established Chicano movement practice and values, but transformed/inverted the meanings of movement concepts and appropriated movement practices to their own newly forming feminist ends. In conclusion, I explore what the case of discursive strategies in Chicana feminism tells us about the creation of blind spots in movement discourse and what dialogical approaches can offer vis-à-vis an understanding of discourse's role in movement fragmentation.

Food-centered discourses: Intellectual communities across fields of knowledge

In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader , many contributors point out the ways in which Chicana/Latina writers used a multi-genre interconnection in their creative and non-creative work. This tradition is not new. Rosaura Sanches, Guillermo Padilla and others, working on the Recovery Hispanic Literary Project, indicate that the literary production of the late 1800s and early 1900s also reveals a combination of genres: folklore, ethnography, autobiography, prose and lyrical fiction. The argument set forth by the interconnection of genres is that writers speak for, about, to, and within a diverse community. Voices in the Kitchen , my forthcoming book, follows this history. I refer to the diverse communities I address within it as forming part of a non-academic and academic world. The different styles and multiple voices in the book aim at revealing the different discourses used mainly by feminist academics and working class-women on diverse issues dealing with acts of agency within the realm of food. The non-academic community's discourses are reflected by the ethnographic aspects of the book where Mexican working-class women and I charlamos (chat) about food. The academic communities’ discourses of theorizing and analyzing manifest themselves in the language of philosophy, architecture, anthropology, geography, literary and cultural criticism. The shift of food voices in my writing is rather prevalent. The theoretical implications of this methodology and the paradigm it offers involve a three-part exploration. First, how does the language of food speak differently according to its localized place? Second, what are the conceptual ways in which food-centered discourses overlap in such places? This overlap creates what I call a borderless boundary zone . The final exploration is to ask: what are the strengths, as well as the limitations, in bridging the food voices from different places and spaces?

Book Review: Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Book Review: Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Book Review: Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Book Review: Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Pain

Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness has been celebrated by critics of diverse methodologies and applied to discussions of hybridity, borders, and difference around the world. Lost in these wide and varied applications are the conquest and rape, and the regulation of national and individual boundaries, that are the historical origins of mestizaje. I focus on an aspect of Anzaldúa’s work that is often overlooked and that has become even more significant since her recent death: her writings on physical pain. I examine the relationship between these representations and her theories of mestiza consciousness, tracing her references back to Aztec sacrifice rituals and Spanish Catholicism and concluding with a forward-looking analysis of the Chicana feminist political potential of Anzaldúa’s body in pain.