Summary
In this chapter, we defined what Chicanx/Latinx history is and covered the ways the field disrupts dominant conventions in the discipline of history through the usage of anti-imperial, anti-racist, decolonial, and medicinal approaches and methods. The contributions of feminist and queer studies scholars were highlighted, along with other activist scholars, who are working to expand and deepen the field of Chicanx/Latinx history.
Many scholars express the need for Chicanx/Latinx history to be made available beyond the college classroom and shared with the wider public through K-12 curricula, public educational programs, mass media, and other venues of public history. One way this is taking place is through Chicanx/Latinx expressive oral culture, which has been a vital method of meaning-making and knowledge-sharing for centuries. Oral traditions such as storytelling, music (especially corridos), and testimonio are used to pass on familial and cultural histories across generations and geographies. Visual culture, murals in particular, have also been used as an accessible means to publicly document and exhibit Chicanx/Latinx history (visit Section 10.5: Cultural Productions in Practice for a discussion of this topic). As this chapter has demonstrated, there are still many stories to document and historical studies to conduct and we hope that you are inspired to engage in this important work.
Ancillary materials for this chapter are located in Section 11.3: Chapter 3 Resource Guide, which includes slides, media, writing and discussion prompts, and suggested assignments and activities.
Key Terms
Historiography: The study of the ways a group, culture, or discipline constructs its history.
Hemispheric Approach: An approach used by scholars in the field of Chicanx/Latinx history to examine transnational histories of the Americas, beyond national, regional, or even continental borders, accounting for the ways that power structures race, culture, gender, sexuality, and resources across time and space. It emphasizes thinking beyond borders that contain the nation-state and expanding the scope and frameworks many U.S. historians rely on. A hemispheric lens also allows for an expansive examination of mobile commodities, ideas, and peoples in diaspora that flow across imperial geographies.
Borderlands Theory: This theory, developed by Gloria Anzaldúa, challenges imposed nation-state borders and provides new frames for understanding identity, hybridity, and the material realities of people who reside in the b/Borderlands, extending the notion of a geopolitical border in order to explore the boundaries of gender, sexuality, spirituality, language, and other social locations, dislocations, and encounters. This theory would become foundational for Chicanx/Latinx historians who utilize a hemispheric approach to history.
Thematic Approach: An approach to history that focuses on key concepts and themes such as empire, conquest, wars of expansion, and revolution; migration and nation-building; industrialization and labor; and civil rights and resistance movements, among others, from the perspective of Latinx populations.
Relational Approach: The study of how one racial group is affected by the ways another group is racialized through co-constitutive historical, social, and political processes. Rather than studying a racially marginalized group in contrast to white supremacist and colonial power structures exclusively, a relational approach moves beyond a white/nonwhite binary to examine racially subordinated groups in relation to one another. A relational view does not advocate for simply comparing and contrasting groups’ experiences, viewing them independently. Rather, groups are understood to be interdependent.
Imperial Histories: Narratives manufactured official histories wielded by a colonizing power or repressive regime “to attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate and attempt to take over and control people’s relationship to their own past.” Imperial histories are created to justify and explain oppressive power imbalances by naturalizing them, making them seem inherent and permanent.
Curandera Historian: A person who works to heal the damage caused by imperial histories. They work to restore the dehistoricized sense of identity and possibility of colonized and oppressed peoples.
Medicinal Histories: What curandera historians produce. Medicinal histories re-establish the connections between peoples and their histories, revealing the mechanisms of power by which their current condition of oppression was achieved as well as the multiplicity, creativity, and persistence of resistance among the oppressed.
Colonial Imaginary: The epistemology, or way of knowing, that the dominant discipline of history relies on. Time and space are arranged linearly and origins, categories, chronologies, and periodization is emphasized. These prevalent approaches reinforce a colonialist historiography, which have omitted or obscured women, queer, and Indigenous peoples’ stories.
Decolonial Imaginary: A new category, a political project, and a theoretical tool developed by Emma Pérez to counter the colonial imaginary by writing Chicanas into the historical record.
Retrofitted Memory: A concept developed by Maylei Blackwell to interrogate why certain stories remain untold, uncovering the ways power functions in the creation of truth regimes, in order to make space for women’s (his)stories and their visions of liberation and transformation.
Chicana Movidas: A lens to understand the everyday strategies, tactics, and relationships, often occurring within and between highly visible movements, as intentional and significant individual and collective liberatory maneuvers.
Mapping Movidas: The technique used to organize Chicana movidas. It is a mode of historical analysis that charts the small-scale, intimate political moves, gestures, and collaborations that reflect the tactics women used to negotiate multiple scales of power within their homes, communities, organizations, social movements, and dominant society.
Archival Movidas: Expand what is typically considered valid source material and documentary evidence by also including oral histories and extrainstitutional archives as a source of embodied knowledge.
Praxis of Memory: A term that describes the ways in which Chicana feminists compile a personal archive of personal objects and materials, creating a space where Chicana memory practices are both preserved and performed.
Conocimiento: An aspect of consciousness, a living theory, and a praxis laid out by Gloria E. Anzaldúa. It describes the journey one takes in the development of an embodied self-awareness, questioning reality and dominant paradigms, and experiencing shifts in perception.
