Summary
In this chapter we explored a variety of Chicana/Latina feminist political, social, artistic, and scholarly issues, movements, and practices that have taken shape in a variety of contexts. Chicana/Latina feminists draw inspiration from a long lineage of radical feminist praxis across the hemisphere and around the world, often building coalitions with other marginalized communities. Some key issues that were introduced include economic justice, reproductive justice, cultural activism, family dynamics, and scholarship. However, these are only a few of the many ongoing movements and causes that Chicana/Latina feminists participate in. Hopefully you complete this chapter informed and inspired taking with you new perspectives, tools, and strategies to utilize in your own advocacy work, whether that be in your home, community, school, or beyond.
Ancillary materials for this chapter are located in Section 11.5: Chapter 5 Resource Guide, which includes slides, media, writing and discussion prompts, and suggested assignments and activities.
Key Terms
Patriarchy: A system of gender-based control and domination where women and gender non-conforming people are subordinated to men through legal and extralegal measures. Patriarchy “includes cultural ideas about men and women, the web of relationships that structure social life, and the unequal distribution of power, rewards, and resources that underlies privilege and oppression.”
Sexism: Discrimination or devaluation of women, based on their sex or gender.
Triple Oppression: A phenomenon named by feminist writers in the early 1970s who argued that Chicanas were subjugated based on their race, as workers, and as women. U.S. Third-World, Puerto Rican, and Black feminists were simultaneously theorizing and organizing around the convergence of multiple systems of oppression, drawing on an intergenerational feminist lineage dating back hundreds of years.
Loyalists: A designation for Chicanas who were guided by the ideology of Chicanismo and believed that race and class oppression should be the primary agenda of El Movimiento and that feminism was divisive to the movement.
Dichotomy: A division between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.
Virgin/Whore Complex: An example of a dichotomy that was first imposed by the colonial Catholic Church during the Spanish conquest that constructed women as a ‘mujer buena’ or a ‘mujer mala.’ In modern times, this gendered cultural expectation about Chicana womanhood reinforces patriarchy, obliging Chicanas to take on the contradictory roles of obedient wife and mother and to also be sexually available.
Marianismo: The narrative found on one side of the virgin/whore complex, which typifies the deep reverence for La Virgen de Guadalupe who is valued as the subservient all-suffering virgin mother.
La Malinche: The Indigenous woman on one side of the virgin/whore complex known for being Hernan Cortes’s concubine, translator, mediator, and fabled mother of the first mestizo. As a Native woman, she is characterized as sexually available, disposable, and condemned as a traitor for contributing to the downfall of the Aztec civilization.
U.S. Third World Feminism: A transnational feminist standpoint developed in the late 1960s and informed by global decolonial and anticolonial movements. As they critiqued and attempted to dismantle interlocking systems of oppression through racially specific feminist projects, feminists of color in the U.S., including Chicanas and Latinas, co-created a new cross-racial political subjectivity and oppositional praxis that linked various struggles for social justice.
Praxis: The act of putting theory into action.
Farah Manufacturing Strike: An event that began in May 1972 when 4,000 garment factory workers, predominantly Mexican American women, walked out of their jobs at Farah Manufacturing Company plants in Texas and Júarez, Mexico. The strikers demanded the right to unionize for higher wages, maternity leave, workplace safety, and an end to sexual harassment, which they won after twenty-two months of striking and a successful national boycott.
Alicia Escalante: A prominent Chicana welfare rights activist in the 1960s and leader in the larger welfare rights movement. Escalante was also involved in other facets of the Chicano Movement, supporting and participating in the East Los Angeles high school blowouts, the anti-war movement, and the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington D.C.
Chicana Welfare Rights Organization: Originally the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization (ELAWRO), this organization was founded in 1967 by Alicia Escalante. The organization ran workshops on welfare policies, advocated for welfare forms in Spanish and additional local offices staffed with bilingual Mexican American caseworkers, and worked for humane public policy at the county, state, and federal levels.
La Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza: The first nationwide Chicana feminist conference held in 1971 in Houston, Texas.
Reproductive Justice: An expansive feminist of color standpoint at the intersections of reproductive health and social justice that goes beyond the pro-choice movement’s singular commitment to legal abortion access. RJ advocates for the right to not have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. It also demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom for all.
Artivist: A combination of the words artist and activist. Artivists create art not for its own sake, but to convey a political message in the service of social justice movements.
Political Familialism: A term coined by Chicana feminist sociologist Maxine Baca Zinn to describe the fusion of cultural and political resistance during the Chicano Movement demonstrated by the call for total family participation in the struggle for racial justice.
Activist-Scholar: A term used to describe academics who take an explicitly political standpoint in their work.
