Chicana Feminism

By Manini Manushi Gangal

Feminisms, and Chicana as an intersectional movement

Benita Roth’s book Separate Roads to Feminism demonstrates that at the core of feminist mobilisations during the 1960s and 1970s was the sense of plurality between movements, resulting in ‘feminisms’.That which supported and liberated white women was not effective for women of colour, whose experience of womanhood and gender-based discrimination and violence was intertwined with their experience as people of colour as well. Dorothy King, a black feminist activist,and Irene Blea, a Chicana feminist activist, both described their frustration at being asked to set aside at least one of their experiences in order to be effective voices for change. Often that pressure came from fellow women themselves, perhaps confused as to how discussions on race were relevant in meetings about gender discrimination.

 “I was in a NOW meeting and being told by women in Denver, you have to choose between being a Chicana and being female… and what I’m saying is ‘I cannot separate the fact that I’m brown and I’m female, I cannot do it physically to this body…’”- Irene Blea

The importance that Chicana feminism held for Latin American women should not be sidelined, because the distinctions between ethnic approaches to feminisms and their understandings of their community’s options and suffering moulded their decisions about organising, and the demands they made.

Second-wave feminist movements were largely distinct from one another, mobilisations which were rooted in racial or ethnic experiences of gender, therefore feminisms were articulated using diverse political communities. Chicana feminists created spaces for themselves when they found that they were largely excluded from white feminist ideologies. While there were other types of intersectional marginalisation, such as working-class women’s distance from middle-class organisations, Chicana feminism addressed the specific issues raised by the Latin American women of that time. Education, for example, was a focus of discourse: before the late 1940s, when Mexican American children were segregated into colonias (low-income slum areas located along the Mexico-United States border). Mexican-American children were only allowed to attend segregated Mexican schools, where girls learnt only skills such as sewing and homemaking, whereas their white counterparts were taught academic preparation. This proliferated existing class and income divisions and was one of many inequalities suffered by the Mexican-American community which formed the basis for Chicana feminists’ commitment to addressing race and class-specific subjugation. Authors such as Alma Garcia acknowledge the similar struggles that Black and Asian feminist movements were tackling during the second wave of feminism, fighting for the recognition that the identity of a woman was culturally and racially-informed at its very core.

Chicana feminist theorist Cherríe Moraga championed the practice of ‘theory in the flesh’,a phrase which she attributed to political movements borne out of the necessity of the physical realities of life. This meant contextualising subjugation such as a person's skin colour, the land or concrete they grew up on, their sexuality, or their educational background. Chicana feminists were strengthened and empowered by collective activism, for example in collaboration with trade or food unions.

Chicana feminists’ struggle with Chicano ideology and being ‘vendida’:

Within the context of conscription to the Vietnam war, tensions between men and women peaked, and Chicana were no exception. Chicana feminists were often mislabeled, accused of being anti-men or anti-family by fellow men and women. A divide was evident when the topic of women’s experiences was raised in Chicano activist spaces. Nieto Gomez explains that she felt a strong sense of solidarity with the women she had organised alongside for years, however the issue of feminism was severe enough to separate lifelong friends, becoming a taboo conversation. Some argued that advocating for civil rights meant ensuring that no one was denied their civil rights; some believed that it was not quite the ‘right time’ for feminism and while it was an admirable fight, it should be addressed at a later date. Those who fought for the visibility of Chicana women’s rights were considered traitors to the race (malinches), whitewashed (agringadas), or even sexually deviant. Maylei Blackwell laments the profound effects that this ‘vendida (sell-out) logic’ had, as it caught Chicana feminists between the Chicano movement, who considered women’s rights a privileged and anglicised approach to civil rights, and the women’s liberation movement, who did not acknowledge race and class as relevant to the feminist cause.

Betita Martinez, who began organising in 1959 with the civil rights and the Cuban solidarity movement, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) women’s group in 1961. She described a feeling of otherness when in spaces dominated by white women, and like other Chicanas, Martinez felt the pressing need for a space to be carved out especially for Latin-American women: a third-space feminism which understood how gender was lived through class and race oppression.

Chicana feminism reinvigorated

Ana Castillo proposed ‘Xicanisma’ in her 1994 book  to invoke the image of crossroads and hybridity of the movement in the added ‘X’. Furthermore, this sound was difficult to pronounce for Spanish colonists speaking Mesoamerican languages in the 16th century; Xicanisma aims to reclaim the colonial encounter for the Indigenous people who suffered subjugation at the hands of the Spanish. Castillo uses the crossroads to challenge the coloniality of gender imposed onto women. Xicanisma, a continuation of Chicana feminists from the 1960s, hopes to challenge the masculine-focussed elements of civil rights organisation, and to continue subverting gender-racial hierarchies using a postcolonial lens.

Chicana feminism has provided Latin-American women representation and a voice to navigate the intersections of systematic subjugation. 

Want to find out more? Check out these sources?

Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma 

Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History 

F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement

Irene Blea, La Chicana and the Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender 

Louis Alvarez et al, A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History 

Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! 

Nancy Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty