Katerina Matta - 2025 Mitra Scholar by The Harker School

2024-25

Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient

“Lo pasado me estirá pa’ trás / y lo presente pa’ ‘delante”: Analyzing Strategies of Cultural Subversion in Chicana Feminism

Katerina Matta

‘Lo

pasado me estirá pa' trás / y lo presente pa' 'delante’

The past stretches me back / and the present forwards

Analyzing Strategies of Cultural Subversion in Chicana Feminism

Katerina Matta

2025 Mitra Scholar

Mentors: Dr. Chuck Witschorik and Mrs. Connie Poulsen-Hollin

April 14, 2025

Introduction

“Con imágenes domo mi miedo, cruzo los abismos que tengo por dentro. Con palabras me hago piedra, pájaro, puente de serpientes arrastrando a ras del suelo todo lo que soy, todo lo que algún día seré.”1

With images I tame my fear, I cross the abysses I have inside. With words I make myself stone, a bird, a bridge of serpents dragging myself along the ground of everything I am, everything one day I’ll be.

It feels almost sinful to translate these words from their powerful, native tongue, excerpted from Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal 1987 work, Borderlands/La Frontera. The quote captures the sentiment of her text: her words act as her resistance, both in content and the language itself, allowing her to at last reconcile her lived contradictions and eliminate the cultural, spiritual obstacles impeding her from achieving her potential. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa commits herself to this very goal, blending personal memoir reflecting on her own experiences as a Mexican-American lesbian woman with an extensive investigation of Mexican history and theoretical ruminations on the evolving role of the Mexican-American woman in society. Today, Borderlands remains the foremost example of Chicana feminism’s “life-writing” tradition, the pioneering, semi-autobiographical form frequently employed to “reclaim” and investigate Chicana women’s complex lived experiences. Carrying forward Anzaldúa’s innovative use of multilingualism and memoir, the modern Chicana canon boasts narratives of empowerment, representing the struggles of Chicanismo, of womanhood, of queerness. Of all the messy, tragic severings of self and society that occur when these forces intersect.

1 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 71.

But what of the generation before Anzaldúa? Of the poets, playwrights, activists, students, teachers, daughters, mothers, and more who fought for the “new mestiza” before Anzaldúa even coined the term? Considering that the rise of the Chicano movement as a whole began in the 1960s, with the Chicana feminist movement springing to life shortly afterwards, there remains an entire generation of Chicana feminists who laid the groundwork for Anzaldúa, who, too, employed the same twists on mythology, gender, sexuality and resistance that Anzaldúa historicized so prominently. Anzaldúa asserted her right to live at the intersection of her identities recognizing her indigeneity, her Mexicanness, her womanhood, and how these heritages had been wrested from her. But without the work of the Chicanas before her, who set in motion the rewriting of the culture she proclaimed to embrace, would this interstitial existence be possible? In this study, I seek to explore this early generation’s own strategies of activism, contemplating the origins of Anzaldúa’s thought and how the role of the Chicana woman evolved across these movements.

I begin by contextualizing the concept of Chicanismo alongside the early Chicano movements themselves. Within this historical context, I next delve into the rise of Chicana feminism alongside the broader El Movimiento. I also consider useful theoretical frameworks for our understandings of the Chicana feminists’ particular treatment of cultural narratives, such as Maylei Blackwell’s “retrofitted memory.” Then, I investigate subversions of mythological rhetoric within Chicana feminist history, examining depictions of militancy with figures like Las Adelitas, or motherhood with the welfare rights activists that emerged in this era. Placing these reclamations in the context of various community responses to these initial subversions, I will examine not only the cultural empowerment of women in Chicano society at the time, but the development of their activist consciousness as an independent, Chicana movement. Finally, I

will analyze the efficacy of each of these movements, investigating the nuances of these cultural reconstructions as Chicanas fought for actualization within a male-dominated society and culture. By reclaiming and rewriting cultural narratives, the Chicana feminists crafted a new generation of empowered mujeres: women who, despite continuing to face many of the same systemic challenges as their predecessors, could rely on their new cultural legitimacy to propel the movement forward a monumental cultural paradigm shift well worth the alienation of the powerful Chicano who sought to wrest back the narrative from this new forceful Chicana. As we navigate an increasingly globalized world, the profoundly intersectional Chicana feminists provide a useful framework for approaching questions of hybridization, proving that histories are far more flexible than they seem, and that cultivating the cultural plasticity to interweave them across borders geographic, racial, gender-based, socioeconomic will become necessary to truly achieve inclusion.

Discovering La Chicana

Understanding the truly revolutionary qualities of the Chicana feminists requires comprehending the vast, interconnected historical and social factors fueling their systemic oppression, especially considering the importance of cultural heritage to the movement.

Beginning with the history of the Mexican woman, historians argue that as early as the Aztec era, women remained relegated to the domestic sphere, existing within strictly defined roles based on social class and facing harsh punishment when defying these norms.2 With the onset of Spanish colonization, women became further targets for subjugation, given their reproductive potential to “aid” the colonizer, per the predominant cultural interpretation. The famed figure of La Malinche encapsulates this dynamic: originally known as Malinalli Tenepal,

2 Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez, La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 23.

this Aztec noblewoman-turned-slave was gifted to Hernán Cortés, with whom she subsequently had a mestizo, or mixed Spanish-Indian, child.3 Widely deemed a “traitress” and likened to a “Mexican Eve” for mixing with the colonizer, her story which is often unfairly isolated from the rape she undoubtedly suffered in her forced “marriage” to Cortés represents the long history of women’s sexuality being weaponized against them within Mexican (and by extension, Chicano) culture.4

As history progressed, this subjugation continued, with Mexican women enduring each of the same struggles as their male counterparts alongside their gender-specific barriers. In 1848, the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo brought an end to the Mexican-American War at a cost. Not only did Mexico lose vast swathes of land, a biting national tragedy mourned even today, but also thousands of Mexicans found themselves newly nationless: although the law dictated that Mexicans living on American land would now enjoy the same rights as citizens, abundant racism meant that popularly, few complied with these stipulations and rampant persecution ensued.5 Indeed, with this transition, Mexican-American women emerged, not only without autonomy over their bodies but also their culture and its ties to their land, an echo of the first wave of Spanish colonization from centuries prior.

In the decades that followed, systemic inequalities facing Mexican-Americans only became more deeply entrenched within American society, further complicating the cultural question of with whom Mexican-Americans’ identities truly lay. Could Mexican-Americans consider themselves part of the country that never welcomed them? Could they rightfully claim a home that had been stolen from them generations ago? And what of the thousands, and

3 Mirandé and Enríquez, La Chicana, 25-6.

4 Mirandé and Enríquez, 28.

5 Francisco A. Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 2nd ed. (Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1997), 5.

eventually millions, of Mexican immigrants that would flow into the country in the years to come, following the passage of legislation like the Bracero Act and worsening conditions in Mexico itself?6 Where would these new generations situate themselves, at odds with the Anglo society they entered and distinct from the hybrid Mexican communities they found?

This schism formed a critical part of what early Chicana theorists would refer to as “triple oppression,” or the intersecting influences of race, class, and gender (a concept commonly known today as “intersectionality”).

7 Gender’s influence on the Mexican-American experience is unignorable: prevalent cultural beliefs like machismo (male chauvinism) and marianismo (idealized femininity) subjugated women within the Chicano community, although many Chicana feminists considered supposed female inferiority to be an imported Anglo idea, as opposed to an indigenous cultural ideal.8 Certain social theorists have, even as early as the 1960s and 1970s, indeed conceptualized the idea of machismo as “compensation for colonization,” or as a result of the racist demasculinization Chicano men often experienced, which thus led them to emphasize excessive masculinity and male dominance to legitimize their manhood.9 In her

1972 article “La Chicana,” Elizabeth Martínez succinctly described the wide reach of this misalignment across boundaries of gender and race, writing of how “our oppressor uses ‘machismo’ against us for example, by appealing to a Chicano’s sense of suppressed manhood

6 The Bracero Program created temporary pathways of entry for male Mexican laborers braceros to ameliorate the declining American workforce during World War II. While the initial agreement between the USA and Mexico intended to protect workers from exploitation, they frequently suffered wage theft and other injustices during their time in the States. With the major exodus of eligible male laborers to the USA, the Bracero Program also depleted Mexican industries and communities and created an economic dependency on American labor opportunities we still see in Mexico today. (Rosales, Chicano! The History, 84, 120, 132, 151.)

7 Mirandé and Enríquez, 12.

8 Mirta Vidal, "New Voices of La Raza: Chicanas Speak Out," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 31.

9 Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 97.

in order to get him to kill Vietnamese.”10 However, Chicano social scientists such as Alfredo Mirandé and Armando Rendón have countered these arguments, placing machismo as an essential part of Chicano culture and reframing its persistence as a testament to the enduring resistance of Chicanos through this time period a potential form of “subaltern masculinity.”11 Regardless of how we conceptualize it, the fact remains: machismo required the subjugation of la Chicana, and dominance of el Chicano.

Thus, while both Chicano men and women alike suffered from the Mexican-American cultural clash described above, Chicana women had to contend with the additional internal schism of being repressed by one’s own culture, even if that was a culture they felt they could not claim as entirely their own.12 La Chicana indeed lived a different experience than her Chicano counterpart, despite their commonalities. Capturing these lived contradictions, caught between Mexican and American, between Chicana and Chicano, proves vital to our understanding of Chicana strategies for achieving self-actualization.

Chicano Empowerment

The widespread Chicana feminist movement arose within, or arguably as a product of, the broader Chicano El Movimiento. The Chicano Movement, which took place throughout the 1960s and 1970s, began amid the fervor of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, with the nation’s revolutionary energy aligning with the momentum of early Chicano figures including Reies López Tijerina, a land-back militant, César Chávez, the famed labor rights activist, Dolores Huerta, his fellow pioneer, and more.13 Perhaps most key to our study is the poet

10 Elizabeth Martínez, "La Chicana," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 41, previously published in Ideal, September 1972, 1-2.

11 Blackwell, 96-97.

12 Mirandé and Enríquez, La Chicana, 13.

13 F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1997), 167-169.

Rodolfo Corky González, who popularized the term “Chicano” to refer to those of Mexican descent born in the United States. While for decades “Chicano” was used as a racial slur, in his 1967 poem “I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín,” which would gain popularity via its circulation in the popular La Raza community newspaper, González cemented the process of reclamation, electing the term “Chicano” as the one to truly capture the nuances of his identity. He wrote: La raza! / Méjicano! / Español! / Latino! / Chicano! / Or whatever I call myself, / I look the same / I feel the same / I cry / And / Sing the same. I am the masses of my people and / I refuse to be absorbed.14

He redefined himself, simultaneously Aztec, Spanish, Mexican, American. A Chicano. At last, the broader culture had begun to reconcile the schisms they grappled with, deciding to build a new identity rather than attempting to conform into one side of the border or the other. In these words, González named this struggle, and in doing so, legitimized it. With this new, invigorating empowerment, various groups sprang up joining the fight for actualization, from the Black Panther Party-inspired Brown Berets to student organizations like el Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). While, of course, the blossoming of El Movimiento cannot be solely attributed to a poem, its influence on the course of the movement cannot be ignored in terms of the sociopsychological impact it had on the predominantly youth activist population. The magnitude of this paradigm shift alludes to a greater trend within the Chicano movement: the importance of culture and history in defining the movement’s purpose.

The Chicano Movement is fairly well-historicized, largely due to efforts by its own participants including Sal Castro and Anna Nieto Gómez, as many of its prominent leaders turned their efforts to the academic spheres later in life. However, where the literature fails is

14 Rodolfo Corky Gonzales, "Yo Soy Joaquin," Latin American Studies, accessed February 5, 2024, https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/latinos/joaquin.htm.

when it begins to address the Chicana movement that arose within El Movimiento. Although predominant academic narratives qualify the Chicana feminism of the 1970s as a short-lived response to sexism that was quickly overshadowed by a larger cultural and racial Chicano battle, historical documents prove otherwise.15 Abundant writings and theories by budding Chicana academics and writers like those anthologized in Alma M. García’s Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings emerged in tandem with the growing awareness of the legitimacy of their struggle as well as increased Mexican-American female representation in universities.16 Women-only events like La Conferencia de Mujeres Por La Raza (The Women’s Conference for the People) revealed the sheer volume of Chicana women coming into their own, with 600 women attending the conference alone and many of them representing broader constituencies.

17 Activists created journals like Encuentro Femenil, creating a niche space to truly historicize and analyze the problems of la mujer in the society, not just those facing Chicano men as dominated other community-oriented publications like La Raza. 18 Notably, even in broader male and female Chicano organizations like the Brown Berets, women were agents of some of the largest change, spurring the advent of profoundly impactful, community-level changes like social welfare programs such as the Free Clinic in the face of rampant sexism, dismissal, and disrespect from their male peers.19 Rather than existing solely as an offshoot of the declining Chicano Movement, we can place the Chicana feminists at the forefront of the movement alongside their male peers, experiencing its moments of success and failure alike.20

15 Vicki Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, 10th ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100.

16 Alma M. Garcia, Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014).

17 Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 108.

18 Ruíz, 109.

19 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 36.

20 Blackwell, 29.

Evidently, despite attempts to craft narratives proving otherwise, the Chicana feminist movement cannot be undermined as a sweeping force for change within the Chicana community, and, especially, as one meriting study. However, to truly understand the movement’s origins and impact, one must delve into the importance of culture as both a sense of solidarity and division within the Chicano Movement as a whole.

Culture, the Movement, and the Ideal Chicana

The importance of cultural heritage to the Chicano Movement cannot be understated. This derives from the presence of the internal Chicano struggle across borders, not only grappling externally with the perpetual, ever-evolving impacts of colonization, but also the struggle of the “internally colonized” and fractured self. As early as César Chávez’ farm worker movement, consequently, Chicano activists propelled culture to the forefront of their activism, from claiming the label “Chicano” to crying out, as Chávez did, “¡Justicia para los campesios y viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!” (Justice for the farmworkers and long live the Virgin of Guadalupe), emphasizing cultural icons like La Virgen as figures of pride and motivation.21 As the movement progressed into the 1960s, it crossed generational lines, diffusing across the fields of California into the university campuses which unprecedented numbers of Chicano youth had begun to attend, the culmination of a lengthy fight for educational reform.22 Access to higher education proved monumental not only in empowering Chicano youth, but also in inadvertently creating forums for young Chicanos to collaborate, commiserate, and organize to at last address their shared struggles, as revealed in the rapid growth of student organizations like MEChA, the Texas Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), Denver’s Crusade for Justice, and the

21 Rosales, Chicano! The History, 139.

22 Rosales, 175.

Mexican American Student Confederation (MASC).23 This mobilization culminated in the National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference for March 1969, which simultaneously jumpstarted the independent Chicana struggle.

The conference, which featured over a thousand attendees from across the country, resulted in the creation of the enduring El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán), which cemented in official terms the influence of culture on the movement not only in the cultural references in its name but also its described goal of reclaiming cultural roots. The Plan reads:

We the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán, from whence came our forefathers, reclaim the land of their birth and concentrating the determination of our people declare that Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans We declare the Independence of our Mestizo Nation. We are a Bronze People with a Bronze Culture. …

We are a Nation, We are a union of free pueblos, We are Aztlán.24

As revealed in González’ words, which were once again widely disseminated in the pages of a community newspaper, El Grito del Norte, the Chicano Movement was fueled by a sense of inherited resistance, of reclaiming cultural heritage and its indigeneity, and of using this birthright to then push for social change.

It is here that we begin to witness the fracturing of El Movimiento across gender lines. At the same conference that produced this seminal El Plan, a workshop designated for Chicana women specifically arrived at a revealing conclusion: “It was the consensus of the group that the

23 Rosales, 178.

24 Rodolfo Gonzalez, "El plan espiritual de Aztlan," 1969, 803398, ICAA Documents Project, Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Chicana woman does not want to be liberated,” as one workshop facilitator wrote.25 The alleged decision arrived at a tense moment in Chicano history, one where la raza found itself at the edge of a thrumming, vibrant cultural precipice, and where la Chicana found herself pushed aside in favor of collective racial empowerment. Indeed, in this early era, Chicana women were often ridiculed for criticizing the rampant gender inequalities within the Chicano community, accused of betraying the Chicano cause in favor of the “Anglo” idea of feminism, whose second wave was also sweeping the nation at the time.26 Considering the emphasis Chicanos (referring to both men and women) placed on emboldening their cultural pride in the present moment, any attempts at straying from these values, even those as potentially problematic as machismo and marianismo, for example, were easily reduced to a betrayal of the movement, perpetrated by socalled “Women’s Libbers” or agringadas (white-washed ones).27 Per the resolution of the conference, many Chicano men assumed women would accept this dismissal, shoving the burgeoning Chicana movement back into dormancy.28

However, recent efforts by Chicana academics to reinvestigate the narratives of these early female activists and community members themselves reveals a different response, one which brought both the rewriting and revival of culture to the forefront of the movement not as an offshoot, side door craze as is often purported. Understanding the groundbreaking efforts of the Chicana feminists requires untangling the newly established cultural narratives enmeshed within their strains of activism.

Retrofitted

Memory

25 Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows, 108.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Rosales, Chicano! The History, 183.

Before we examine the specifics of the Chicana feminists’ social, cultural, and activist movements, I would like to introduce a useful framework in examining their efforts: retrofitted memory. Coined by prominent Chicana historian and activist Maylei Blackwell in her 2011 book, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, the term seeks to capture the complexities of weaving together marginalized historical narratives from the knowledge commonly promoted by the hegemonic groups in question: in this case, both Anglo and Chicano men.29 Essentially, Blackwell advocates for the development of “countermemory,” or “retrofitted memory,” actively resisting the acceptance of oppressive or exclusive narratives in order to offer historical legitimization of our identities.30 Retrofitted memory recalls the words of iconic cultural theorist Stuart Hall:

Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.31

As Blackwell elaborates, embracing these new consciousnesses requires essentially operating within the margins, returning to historical narratives and examining them through the lenses we know existed but were not possessed by those holding the pen; in this way, disenfranchised populations can be historicized, and, consequently, humanized, honored and propelled forwards with the legitimacy of historical record. This practice permeated the ideology of the Chicana feminists themselves, whose subversions of mythological rhetoric evolved into their own newly defined language of cultural understanding, a metalanguage without which one could not

29 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 2-3.

30 Ibid.

31 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity and Its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 274–316, quoted in Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 100.

possibly expect to rally the community against the settler, Anglo, male, Chicano forces that bound them.

The Chicana process of reclaiming their mythologies, which existed both uniquely outside of and alongside the cultural nationalist context of El Movimiento, required innovation of the new strategies for resistance already employed by the broader Chicano. Language itself featured prominently in this re-historicization, with the Chicanas expanding upon the characteristic Spanish-English bilingualism of the Chicano Movement to adopt culturalisms that were typically engaged with exclusively by men, such as the vernacular caló slang.32 Given that ethnic identity has long been documented by theorists to be informed, in part, by linguistic identity, as Gloria Anzaldúa expounded upon in her seminal bilingual work Borderlands, this new introduction of dialect signifies the Chicana goal of embracing the avenues that were long denied to them, of rebuilding and “retrofitting” the interstices into their stories.33

Perhaps the most notable and overarching aspect of this countermemory became the idea of the Chicana body as a sitio, or as a site, of historical memory and examination.34 Many scholars cite this approach to knowledge as one of the major differentiating features of Chicana feminism: by centering their lived experiences in their activism, Chicana feminists could much more naturally confront the intersectionality of their existence.35 By highlighting and validating personal narratives, it was just as impossible to ignore the internally colonized influence of Mexican chauvinism as the racism and sexism encountered in the Anglo environment, and even more visible were the systemic socioeconomic injustices plaguing the community at

32 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 66.

33 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 59.

34 Aída Hurtado, Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 268.

35 Hurtado, Voicing Chicana, 268.

disproportionate levels.36 In time, this internal examination would develop into a pronounced effort to celebrate these community truths, marking a shift towards reclaiming histories like Chicana indigeneity. As will be explored in the subsequent section of this paper, this simultaneous confrontation with and embrace of their realities propelled Chicana feminists towards a fundamental acceptance of their uniquely hybridized identities, facilitating their entrance into activism.

Still, we may not simply comment on how the Chicana feminists employed retrofitted memory subconsciously in their rhetoric and ideologies; we also must examine our histories of the Chicana feminists themselves within the context of their erasure from the broader Chicano Movement, as has been established above as victims of the very marginalization and erasure that they sought to correct.

37 Indeed, even in this study, our early historical context bears the danger of entrapping the reader in the same slights as the majority of the historical canon: why do we celebrate Reies López Tijerina’s land-back movement as a monumental claim to heritage land, but rarely, if ever, discuss his alleged rampant abuse of his wife and children and documented sermons preaching cult-like religious sexism?

38 Why do we have a César Chávez Day, when Dolores Huerta co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with him sideby-side?

36 Ibid.

39 And would Corky Gonzales’ seminal poem ever have reached the popularity it did,

37 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 28.

38 Aadieter, "Dr. Lorena Oropeza Reveals New Facets of Chicano Leader, Reies López Tijerina," UC Davis Humanities Institute, last modified June 1, 2022, https://dhi.ucdavis.edu/featured-stories/dr-lorena-oropeza-revealsnew-facets-chicano-leader-reies-lopez-tijerina.

39 Rosie Bermudez, "The Chicana and Chicano Movement," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, last modified December 21, 2022, https://oxfordrecom.harker.idm.oclc.org/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore9780199329175-e-219.

had it not been for the efforts of the women instantiating the Chicano print newspaper culture that disseminated his works?40

Evidently, we must apply the same strategies the Chicana feminists did to their pasts to our present understanding of their lives these decades on, striving to examine their cultural impact, and whether these new attempts at cultural foregrounding were able to successfully propel their mission across generations. As we examine the various societal sectors within which the Chicana feminists were able to both successfully and unsuccessfully enact positive change for their communities, we will first consider the reformulation of culture necessary to enable them to take on that new role within the social consciousness and next the endurance of this reconceptualization within future generations.

Reclaiming Mythologies in Narrative and Practice

Establishing a Chicana(o) Print Culture

The establishment of a successful Chicano print culture was fundamental to the rapid progress of the Chicano Movement in this era, becoming a tool to both unify platforms across the widely cast, semi-diasporic Chicano population in the United States, and to reinforce the legitimacy of the new cultural narratives Chicanos sought to promote. Examining not only the contents of these publications but also the precise efforts of young Chicanas to build this counterpublic reveals the centrality of culture within the movement, as Chicanas sought to legitimize their empowered, retrofitted histories in print, while simultaneously subverting and expanding traditions of knowledge production in their own way through female-dominated presses.

40Dennis López, "'El Grito Del Norte', Chicana/o Print Culture, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism," Science and Society 79, no. 4 (2015): 538, accessed January 17, 2025, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24585272.

The most prominent publications found their roots in universities, a manifestation of the widespread increase in Chicano students enrolled in university during this era and a testament to the influence of the youth on the feminist movement. Although numbers of Chicano students exponentially increased during this era as a result of early efforts at educational reform, they still found themselves to be a distinct cultural minority on campus, often turning to programs like the Educational Opportunity Program or other identity-focused spaces to find solidarity in their communities.41 Within these groups, many Chicana women reported feeling a sense of isolation and dismissal, with the sexism they experienced both from the Anglo world and within their communities at home following them into college.42 As a result, Chicana members of student organizations like United Mexican American Students (UMAS) or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) typically took on secretarial roles, from creating typed records to physically cleaning the spaces these activists occupied.43 While this tedious manual labor was vital to the functioning of each of these groups, prominent activists like Leticia Hernández recalled the “devaluation” of women’s participation in the movement.44

The Chicana youth’s collective frustration in these groups organizations that promised them a reprieve from the repressive Anglo environment around them in the first place fueled their first steps towards fighting for their autonomy. Brought together by these programs, regardless of how difficult the environments may have been, Chicanas started unique initiatives to voice their grievances, with organizations like las Chicanas de Aztlán, an all-female rap group, emerging at schools like California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), in the late 1960s.45

41 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 62.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 44.

As the group gained momentum, it expanded into more formalized discussions of the issues they faced each day, frequently participating in protests, eventually penning a philosophy statement of la Hermandad (the sisterhood), and, most critically, creating the campus newspaper Hijas de Cuauhtémoc in 1971.46

Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was not only one of the first truly Chicana publications, but also one of the most successful of these early decades, fueling the growth of a broader Chicana print culture and introducing swathes of young Chicanas to new, empowering cultural narratives. As the name suggests, one of the primary goals of the newspaper was to affirm Chicana students’ cultural identities amongst the sexist spaces suffocating them even the shift from “Chicanas” to “Hijas” (daughters) reveals this frustration with both the Chicano and Anglo men in the students’ lives. Further, their name centers their indigeneity in their anticolonial, feminist mission; Cuauhtémoc was the last tlatoani (ruler) to control the Aztec Empire before colonization. The title itself was also borrowed from an underrecognized cultural contributor: the original Hijas de Cuauhtémoc of the Mexican Revolution, who organized female-led movements for suffrage and overall political reform.47

Throughout its lifespan, which lasted for a period of only three issues, Hijas de Cuauhtémoc evolved into one of the most prominent and potent archives of Chicana feminist thought, encapsulating the cultural subversion the movement sought to ingrain in its generation and the next. Blackwell referred to this phenomenon using Nancy Fraser’s terminology, citing the newspaper’s rhetoric as the starting point for the creation of a Chicana counterpublic, a space operating in parallel to the world of the broader Chicano Movement in order to entertain ideas

46 Ibid.

47 Blackwell, 107-108.

and theories of what liberation could look like, and what it would take to get there.48 This resulted in a sort of doubling: both Chicanas and Chicanos desired to reinvent their cultural narratives, to wrest them from the control of the Anglo and resituate them in stories of empowerment. But by using tactics like the development of their own distinct print culture, as seen here, Chicanas could escape the “gendered nationalism” we witnessed in these efforts at a new nationalism, like the masculinized foci platformed in El Plan de Aztlán.49

Practically any selection from the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc’s three issues reveals this strategy. The cover art of their inaugural issue (see figure 1), encapsulates the Hiijas’ goal of recontextualizing and ultimately reclaiming female cultural narratives within Chicanismo. The image recalls the icon of La Soldadera, a figure who emerged during the Mexican Revolution, who will be elaborated upon in the following section. Our soldadera kneels beneath the figure of an eagle representing the domineering, oppressive influence of Chicanismo’s cultural emphasis at the time unable to separate herself from toxic ideals of machismo and sexism. However, the soldadera is not cowering, as her arms shielding her face and eyes may suggest; instead, she swings a machete another culturally potent symbol cutting herself free of the eagle’s net and signifying a release from the cultural archetypes binding her. The image implies the impending liberation of all things Chicana: freedom from cultural expectations, as evidenced by the eagle, from the repression of female sexuality, as witnessed in the soldadera’s naked, uncovered torso, and from an oppressive accountability to these cultural ideals. Much as the woman’s eyes are

48 Blackwell, 134.

49 Blackwell, 8.

covered by her machete-swinging arm, the Hijas envisioned a Chicana who need not surrender herself to the opinions and expectations of the dominant Chicano. She will not even deign to lend them her gaze.

Figure 1. Hijas de Cuauhtémoc 1, front cover art. H. Villa, artist. Reprinted in Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 121.

One of the organization’s founders, Anna Nieto-Gomez, recalled the profound impact this new cultural approach had on her and her peers, narrating the moment she learned of the Hijas of the Mexican Revolutionary era.

I realized how important it was to read about your own kind, your own women of your own culture, of your own historical heritage doing the things that you were doing to kind of reaffirm and validate that you’re not a strange, alien person, that what you’re doing is normal and … not only normal, but a part of your history. So I Xeroxed and just passed it on and passed it on. … We read it word for word like it was gold. We talked about how it

felt to read about Mexican women who had organized as a group and who were advocating for women’s rights. I don’t know how much … more difficult it would have been for our self-validation if we hadn’t read that we had sisters before us who had done that. So then they became our models; our heroes to carry on the tradition so that’s why we used their name in the newspaper.50

The Hijas’ formal knowledge production indeed honored their ancestors in many ways. Not only did they directly carry forward the legacy of these revolutionaries, as Gomez elaborates, but arguably, they amplified the traditions of oral knowledge within Chicana families. Just as easily as stereotypes, strategies of survival are passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation, creating for many of these Chicanas the mental schema of their resistant, enduring mothers, tías, abuelas. But they soon realized how vastly this image was at odds with the submissive figure of la mujer championed by cultural nationalists. Oral interviews conducted by Maylei Blackwell with many prominent members of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc reveal that the women sought to reconcile the broader movement’s nationalistic emphasis on the “Ideal Chicana” with their lived experiences of their own resistant tías and abuelas, of the survivors they knew intimately and may have been themselves.51 Prominent Chicana welfare activist Alicia Escalante directly addressed this tradition within the Chicana feminist movement, asking in an interview that as we examine her activism, we, “Remember I speak from oral knowledge” the knowledge passed down in her childhood by her mother, Guadalupe, and tía, Aurora.52 Notably, the academic conducting this research, Rosie C. Bermudez, underscored the 50 Blackwell, 104.

51 Blackwell, 47.

52 Rosie C. Bermudez, "La Causa de los Pobres: Alicia Escalante's Lived Experiences of Poverty and the Struggle for Economic Justice," in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, ed. Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 128.

persistence of this knowledge-making across generations, writing in her article discussing Escalante of the many parallels between their families’ experiences despite their different generations a tribute to the strength of this praxis within the Chicana community.53 In creating new spaces for a specifically feminine knowledge especially knowledge that came in unorthodox forms like poetry, art, or Spanish-English bilingualism the Hijas effectively continued this tradition, telling their stories to their fellow mujeres, and eventually, organizing and acting both in narrative and practice to fight for their collective uplift.

Although the subversive approach of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc to cultural histories would become widely adopted within Chicana feminist movements, at the time, it was profoundly innovative at least in the extent to which it was practiced and shared formally. While Chicano newspapers gained prominence alongside the early student movement in the 1968, with notable publications like La Raza, Inside Eastside, and The Chicano Student gaining their footing, these newspapers primarily served a male audience, often targeted specifically at discussing issues of police brutality and promoting the “cholo” attitude as a form of resistance.54 With the rise of the student movement around the late 1960s, these newspapers evolved to spotlight the youth’s cause still a diversification, but far from an inclusive space for Chicanas looking to question their cultural norms.55 The only other publication from this early period that appeared to at least platform Chicana feminist ideas, if not prioritize them, was El Grito del Norte, a New Mexicobased newspaper founded essentially to disseminate Reies López Tijerina’s land-back movement.56 Notably, El Grito was led by a team of Chicana editors, who naturally directed the publication towards an embrace of Chicana feminist ideals, with columns and essays often

53 Ibid.

54 Rosales, Chicano! The History, 188.

55 Rosales, 189.

56 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 135.

published discussing the problems facing la mujer as well as early Chicana efforts to combat them in sectors like welfare.57 Still, their location within the Southwest, as opposed to the El Movimiento epicenter of Los Angeles, as well as their tendency towards promoting a broader internationalist and anti-imperalist ideology, as opposed to a strictly female liberation lens, such as the one the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc embodied, shifted their recognition away from that of one of the most seminal contributors to the movement.58 For these reasons among others, Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was voted to be published nationally by a committee of its peers at the Conferencia de las Mujeres por la Raza in Houston, Texas, in 1971, a testament to its resounding impact within the Chicana community.59 Ultimately, Hijas de Cuauhtémoc suffered in part from its student-led status; with the graduation of prominent members like Anna Nieto-Gomez, its final issue was left unpublished and members continued on to contribute to a variety of different community projects but the publication’s impact was tangible.60

Following Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, exponentially more truly Chicana-oriented publications came into being and earned legitimacy in not only cultural spaces but also the academic sphere.

While previously, Chicanas often submitted letters, essays, or other works to broadly Chicanofocused publications to bring their ideas and grievances into the spotlight, in the afterglow of las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, Chicana presses themselves began to emerge.61 Founded by Francisca Flores in 1970, the journal Regeneración soon came into a broader spotlight, an echo of the Mexican Revolution-era publishing work of the Flores Magón brothers for whom the paper was named.62 It would become one of the first publications to embrace not only poetry but also visual

57 López, "'El Grito," 538.

58 López, 538-539.

59 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 8.

60 Blackwell, 190.

61 Melina V. Vizcaíno-Alemán, "Chicana Letters: Writing Back, Con Safos," Pasados 1, no. 1 (2024): 31, JSTOR.

62 Hadley Meares, "Activist and Journalist Francisca Flores Is a Chicana Hero Every Angeleno Should Know," Los Angeles Magazine, last modified November 26, 2018, https://lamag.com/lahistory/francisca-flores.

art in the print space, contributing to the growth of expression-focused space that would become a hallmark of the next generation of empowered Chicanas.63 Indeed, fourteen of the sixteen authors featured in the third issue of Regeneración published just two years after the final issue of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc were Chicanas.64 The topics discussed ranged from analyses of contemporary social welfare policy, which was considered within the domestic sphere, to a report on the female-led Farah garment worker strike in New Mexico and El Paso to a poem titled “‘LOVE’ from a Mother!”––a distinct representation of the new, forceful presence of la Chicana in print and the accompanying awareness they raised in their new position.65 Formal Chicana literary spaces of all kinds emerged, with publications like the seminal Encuentro Femenil placing a dedicated focus on formalized and theoretical explorations of the issues facing la Chicana. Indeed, Encuentro Femenil essentially constituted a revamped and redirected las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, as they acknowledged in their own inaugural introduction, founded by the next years of Chicana students at CSULB.66 That’s not to say that this successful cultivation of a print culture can be localized to Southern California alone; while exclusively Chicana publications were rarer, publications ranging from De Colores in Albuquerque to Caracol in Austin to La Cucaracha in Pueblo, Colorado, began to feature far more pieces directed at La Chicana, affirming this shift in cultural momentum, even if its speed varied across different regions.67

63 Meares, "Activist and Journalist," Los Angeles Magazine.

64 Francisca (Editor) Flores, Harry Gamboa, Jr. (Editor), and John Ortiz (Editor), "Regeneración, Volume II, Number 3," 1973, http://localhost/files/02870z231, General Entries for CI Chicana/o Studies, Cal State.

65 Flores, Gamboa, and Ortiz (Editor), "Regeneración, Volume II, Number 3."

66 The Editors, "Introduction to Encuentro Femenil," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. García (Routledge, 1997), 110, previously published in Encuentro Femenil 1, no. 2 (1973): 3-7.

67 For instance: Caracol may be accessed via the Texas State Historical Association (https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/caracol), or La Cucaracha via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/).

This growth in literary spaces fostered an expansion of the cultural ideas that many authors of Hijas had introduced, or at least documented. The discourse around the figure of La Malinche, the derisive name for Malintzin Tenepal, who was viewed by many as the ultimate woman-traitor to the Mexican people for her relationship with conquistador Hernán Cortés, reveals this evolution.68 With this “Malinche logic” often in turn applied to Chicanas who wanted to pursue female liberation in tandem with the liberation of la raza, the emergence of the defense of La Malinche encapsulates how these cultural subversions worked simultaneously against the racial oppression Chicanas faced defying the idea that their cultures were inherently primitive or oppressive towards women and the sexual and gender oppression they faced from Anglo and Chicano men alike.69 Still, early presses like Hijas de Cuauhtemoc had to battle this “vendida” logic, accused of selling out their men as these new counterpublics battled to earn legitimacy. As a result, discussions of controversial figures like the Doña Marina were much more reserved in proclaiming her innocence from the line in Leticia Hernandez’s “Hijas de Cuauhtémoc” poem obtusely referencing las mujeres who “fueron violadas por los españoles” (who were violated by the Spanish) to the anticolonial and thus anti-”Malinche mindset” the indigenous-forward Hijas’ name promoted, direct pleas for La Malinche’s vindication were rare.

70 El Grito del Norte’s 1969 “Despierten Hermanas” went as far as to evoke the cultural legacy of la Malinche’s rape, writing, “Male domination over the woman is a thing of Spain and Europe” and condemning the “Anglo” sexism but not the chauvinistic Chicano male attitudes

68 Martínez, "La Chicana," in Chicana Feminist, 24.

69 Ibid.

70 Leticia Hernandez, "Hijas de Cuauhtémoc," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 133, previously published in Regeneración 1, no. 10 (1971): 9.

that perpetuated la Malinche’s condemnation over the centuries.71 But only a year and a half after the dissolution of Hijas, as new Chicana presses blossomed over the nation, discourse around La Malinche diversified in turn. In 1974, one of the first formal essays truly investigating and vindicating Malintzin Tenépal, “Malintzin Tenépal: A Pre-liminary Look into a New Perspective,” was published in the second issue of Encuentro Femenil notably the legacy publication of Hijas.72 The journal’s editor, Anna Nieto-Gomez, would publish her own arguments around the rape of her Indian ancestors in Caracol in 1976, intertwining their struggles with colonialism with historical references ranging from figures like Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz to the contemporary garment worker strikes in Texas, emphasizing the wide breadth of the movement.73 The evolution of a figure as widely villainized as La Malinche into a symbol of female survivorship showcases the efficacy of the cultural reclamation of this era, taking one of the most extreme cases of female cultural repression within Chicanismo and rewriting the narrative.

With the advent of this vast web of Chicana-oriented spaces, La Chicana had built a counterpublic where new voices could be heard and historicized, literally rewriting the oppressive cultural narratives they sought to resist in the first place. Discourse could now blossom and impact could double, such as when social welfare organizations which Chicano men typically dismissed collaborated with and capitalized on the influence of these publications.74 Through creating these formalized spaces, the Chicana feminists expanded the

71 Enriqueta Longeaux Vasquez, "Despierten Hermanas," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 107-08, previously published in El Grito del Norte, July 26, 1969.

72 Maylei Blackwell, "Contested Histories: Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, Chicana Feminisms, and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement, 1968-1973," in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Gabriela F. Arredondo, et al., 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2006), 77.

73 Anna Nieto-Gomez, "Chicana Feminism," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 59-62, previously published in Caracol 2, no. 5 (1976): 3-5.

74 Blackwell, 151.

tradition of inherited oral knowledge into a powerful community resource, one dedicated to bringing the narratives of their lived experiences into an urgently important spotlight. Regardless of how far thematically, geographically, or temporally removed the publications may have seemed from each other, it cannot be denied that the legacy of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc lived long beyond its three issues, having proved that female-oriented publications could not only survive, but also were vital to the survival and success of this new cultural vision of la mujer.

Understanding the overarching impact of this revolutionary print culture in turn allows us to investigate the cultural overhaul experienced in various other sectors of Chicana society, having grasped the mechanism by which they were disseminated, revised, and legitimized.

La Adelita and the Revolutionary Sister

Beyond the literal reconstruction of narrative undertaken in the print scene, Chicanas also called upon cultural icons as part of their participation in militant organizations like the Brown Berets, reconstructing the tradition of la adelita in a sharp departure from the demure, pliant figure of la mujer often championed by male members of the movement. The paramilitary youth organization the Brown Berets was the primary group through which we can investigate this transformation, although student organizations like UMAS or MEChA also prefigured Chicana revolutionary involvement.

Often likened to the Black Panther Party in their approach to activism, the Brown Berets promoted both cultural nationalism and “revolutionary nationalism,” focusing on the empowerment of their community to live out its cultural values, and, in more extreme instances, the “recapturing of the state.”

75 Similarly to the Chicana women’s initial participation in print culture, female Brown Berets often took on domestic roles within the organization’s activities,

75 Dionne Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters': Women's Solidarity and Collective Identification among Chicana Brown Berets in East Los Angeles, 1967–1970,'" Aztlán 26, no. 1 (2001): 19.

typically historicized as performing clerical or housekeeping work.76 And, just as with the first Chicano newspapers, male members continued to dismiss Chicana contributions to the organization, even excluding women like Gloria Arellanes who held the position of minister of finance from promotional photos with her male peers, constituting an effective erasure of the Chicana Berets from the success narrative of the group at the time.77 Arellanes later stated that her position itself felt diminutive, saying, “My title was minister of finance and correspondence glorified secretary, that’s all it was. That’s all it was.”78

Those within the movement even recognized this inequity, with one author for La Raza writing just three years after Arellanes’ appointment in 1971 that, “When women were given leadership roles, it was mainly out of tokenism to a silent, yet potentially powerful group.”79 To be a woman in the organization at all forced daily confrontation with sexism, but to serve as a figurehead, as the sole woman in a leadership position, was another battle entirely. Arellanes spoke to the dissonance she experienced in her role as minister of finance, fighting to make herself heard, grappling with the double-edged validation her by many perceptions, tokenist title gave her, and witnessing her fellow Berets’ persistent sexism despite her efforts at asserting her presence.

I was the only female minister with all the males. I knew I had a voice. And I used body language, so I would make myself heard So, they did listen to me and but they just, I don’t know. I started to feel the difference. … I have some pictures that I always point out to people. … Here is a Brown Beret Conference … look who’s sitting at the table and

76 Ibid.

77 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 30.

78 Gloria Arellanes, interview by David P. Cline, Gloria Arellanes Oral History Interview Conducted by David P. Cline in El Monte, California, 2016, PDF, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016655427/, 17.

79 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 29.

standing against the walls, okay? It was all men. The only person was a woman [scribing]. Then I took pictures in the kitchen. All the women with their Brown Berets on were back there cooking. … They would always say, “We walk side by side. We don’t walk in front or in back of our men, and we’re equals.” But in reality, we were not.80

Despite these challenges, examining the oral histories of not only leading women like Arellanes but also the fellow Berets who witnessed their leadership reveals a much more hopeful narrative, where in the face of this suppression, Chicana Berets still emerged as prominent actors in this landmark movement, resisting their male peers’ attempts at tokenization and silencing them. After all, as a student organization, the Brown Berets primarily recruited from a new generation of Chicana students who were already experiencing an amplified sense of liberation compared to their Chicano peers, having not only defied the expectations of the Anglo in reaching university but also their own repressive cultural tradition.81 With this momentum in mind, various Chicana participants framed their efforts within the Brown Berets as a tribute to and continuation of their own mothers’ and abuelas’ quiet strengths within the domestic sphere, no longer fighting solely for the survival of the family but expanding to join the fight for la raza.82 As year after year of Chicanas gained exposure to this collective community of women within the Berets, they were empowered by a sort of generational domino-effect, witnessing a living testament in their peers to the potential of la Chicana to resist machismo and fight for change. Member Yolanda Solis Sanchez pointed to her experiences with young Chicana Berets at the outset of the movement indeed, in the first recruitment meeting she attended as a turning point in her own activist journey, feeling that the organization would be a space where

80 Arellanes, Oral History Interview, 2016, 18.

81 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 55.

82 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 24.

Chicanas were at last validated and included as legitimate actors, at least in comparison to the much more staunchly machista (of machismo) forums that had long been the sole Chicano activist spaces. She said:

I remember at our first meeting Andrea Sanchez got up and talked and then I really liked her immediately because of the fact, number one, she was a large woman, like me, and she kind of stuttered but that didn't affect her. She wasn’t embarrassed or anything. Being a Chicana you kind of grow up thinking, “Oh how embarrassing.” ... You kind of let the men lead you. And here were all these women, all these strong women, talking, saying their opinions, their feelings.

Further, the typically masculinized militaristic approach of the group ironically served to further the Chicana’s sense of empowerment within the organization; as uniform subordinates to their superior commanders, each forced to defer to the orders of those in the upper ranks, young Chicanos and Chicanas were equalized as faceless soldiers in the broader fight for liberation.84 Indeed, this militarism marked both a continuation of and divergence from the icon of the female soldadera or adelita, a popular figure from the era of the Mexican Revolution that similarly alluded to female participation in revolutionary cultural movements. The mere involvement of women in this militaristic movement continued this tradition, but their new insertion in the same activist spheres and metaphorical battlegrounds as their male counterparts simultaneously subverted this ideal, departing from the domestic role they were said to have played in the corridos (ballads) of old as providers for the male soldiers on the frontlines.

While previously, during points of contention like the ground-breaking student-led protests of the East L.A. Blowouts, young Chicana activists including Vickie Castro reported

83 Espinoza, 25.

84 Espinoza, 26.

taking advantage of their perceived feminine softness to work more discretely or subversively than their male counterparts could, with their ever-solidifying presence within the Brown Berets, Chicana women challenged this allegedly inherent deference, subversively embracing (to an extent) the street, chola perception thrust upon them.85 Although historically, the soldadera or adelita was viewed less as a fellow soldier and more as a servant to or follower of her male army counterpart, through their active participation in the militarized training of the Berets, Chicana members began to rework this cultural archetype.86 Andrea Sanchez Beamish emphasized the homogeneity and submission to the collective goals of the movement that the drills produced, stating that, “You weren’t offended by taking orders. That helped you to see things in a more military manner. If you were gonna be in this type of group, you needed to think that way.”87

Promoting this rigid equality allowed Chicanas to disappear into the ranks of the Berets, with hierarchy and participation no longer determined by gender and replaced with a blanket allegiance to the movement, for Chicanas and Chicanos alike.

Militaristic imagery naturally emerged in this time as one of the most effective encapsulations of changing cultural attitudes of the era. Most famously, the below photo (see figure 2) captured at a protest by photographer Raul Ruiz embodies the early formation of this shift, portraying la Chicana as the reinvented soldadera.

85 Dolores Delgado Bernal, "Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no. 2 (1998): 134-35, https://doi.org/10.2307/3347162.

86 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 114.

87 Espinoza, 26.

Figure 2. Hilda Reyes. Chicano Student Movement 2:2 (August 1969): 3. Reprinted in Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 115.

The female subject, a Brown Beret named Hilda Reyes, stands amid a group of her peers, signifying the collective force and identity of the Brown Berets. With the bandoleras crossed over her chest, we witness her participation in this militaristic effort, no longer following behind the army camps to offer favors, as las adelitas famously did in the corridos, but instead actively standing at the front lines of both the effort and our own cultural consciousnesses, through this photo. Even so, with her angled face, her gaze remains inaccessible to the viewer: a testament to the Chicana’s restricted voice and recognition within the movement at the time.88 Indeed, this composition centers Reyes’ body within the image, emphasizing the conceptualization of the female body and its role as the mother of the revolution a complex idea both emphasizing the 88 Blackwell, 116.

power of la mujer, and diminishing her role to the mere biological.89 This picture was widely published and disseminated within Chicana(o) circles nationwide, and was likely similarly read through these diverse lenses, some heralding the actualization of la Chicana and others relying on the submissive adelita framework of decades past. Still, the sheer presence of discourse around the image asserts the possibility of this level of autonomy and agency for la mujer, even if the transformation may not yet be complete, the gaze not quite bold enough to meet your eye. Indeed, recognizing this staccato sense of progress for women in the Brown Berets proves fundamental to our understanding of their history, and, particularly, why they eventually departed from the organization. Their disillusionment within the organization was undoubtedly fueled by the general sexism they faced from their male counterparts, as logically revealed itself in the daily, casual dismissal of their voices that their testimonies have established here. But this same chauvinism had various violent consequences, some of which were reported to have driven women away from the Chicano Movement as a whole in general. In her 2016 interview with the Library of Congress, Arellanes described various instances where she herself feared sexual violence and rape at the hands of male Berets, like when she was called to an all-male meeting under ambiguous pretenses or was pressured by a chapter leader to come to his house alone while he was intoxicated.90 Especially considering her relative position of power as a minister within the organization, she reported her fears that her female peers experienced these same pressures and worse before their departures from the movement entirely. She regretted not being able to protect her peers from this violence, and simultaneously acknowledged how Chicano cultural trauma, from demasculinization to various systemic inequities facilitating their general abuse, figured into this destructive, rapidly exploding equation.

89 Ibid.

90 Arellanes, Oral History Interview, 2016, 19-20.

If I went through that as a minister, then I think my members went through that.

…Something traumatic happened to them, or something was so wrong that they can’t

“Uh-uh, I don’t want to deal with those people anymore.” ... These are why people do violent things and abusive things. I know it starts in your family. I know it’s a cycle. I understand that. But in the movement, where we were supposed to treasure each other, and we were valuable, and the family was a beautiful unit.91

While these forces had been present in the organization from its beginning, as the broader Chicano movement gained traction particularly around late 1969, it also garnered greater scrutiny from policing organizations, leading to an aggressive masculinization campaign of La Causa in response to heightened police surveillance and brutality.92 Once this broad refocusing on the militaristic aims of the organization began to infringe on the immensely impactful welfare-based work the Chicana Berets had pioneered and directed to great success which will be discussed in the following section several prominent Chicana members and administrators within the Berets resigned, concretizing the gender schism within the organization.93 In a parting display of the very chauvinism that drove these leaders within their communities out of the group, Arellanes recalled being told in her exit interview, “You’re not indispensable.”94 Soon enough, she would prove them wrong.

In the aftermath of their exit from the Berets, these Chicana activists decided to create a new forum for their involvement in their community, founding Las Adelitas de Aztlán. With their titular reference to the adelitas and soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, the emergence of this group solidified the reconstruction of the cultural narratives that compelled them to depart

91 Arellanes, Oral History Interview, 2016, 21-22.

92 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 36.

93 Espinoza, 37.

94 Ibid.

from the Berets in the first place, elaborating the same cultural subversion platformed within other sectors of this movement and crafting new histories upon which to lay the foundations of future activism.

Within this new self-instantiated community, las Adelitas sought to assert their departure from the repressive aspects of the Berets, marking a further redefinition of culture from the new soldadera of the Beret era. Their immense collective emphasis on establishing a sisterhood revealed itself within one of their most popular promotional slogans, “porque somos una familia de hermanas” (because we are a family of sisters).95 Simultaneously evoking the cultural importance of the family, these Chicanas reframed this mandated cultural allegiance to the family and community, replacing the obligation to serve the community with the idea that women could serve each other and find an unhindered sense of community and mutual empowerment that they lacked within the Berets alone.96 Although the militarism of the Brown Berets was, to be fair, contingent upon the consent of each of its members, las Adelitas also differentiated themselves from the Beret’s harsher conception of militarized identity, where the individual was erased and bound to an invisible, amorphous collective by cultural heritage. Instead, las Adelitas emphasized their “voluntary friendship” within this chosen family of likeminded sisters, compelled by shared passions, interests, and ambitions for empowerment instead of the mandated-by-blood compadrazgo (a complex kinship) that predominated the culture of the Berets.97 In her testimonio for Mario García’s book, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, Arellanes highlighted this intentional framing, with their flyer at the time reading:

95 Espinoza, 40.

96 Ibid.

97 Espinoza, 39.

Chicanas, find Yourself! Do you have a part in the Movement? Are you satisfied? Are your ideas suppressed? Come & CREATE your ideas! HELP CREATE Las Adelitas de Aztlán.98

Notably, as part of this reinvention of la adelita, many promotional posters and political illustrations sought to align the figure of the “revolutionary sister” with those of celebrated male liberation fighters, such as Emilio Zapata or Ché Guevara.99 This realignment of cultural imagery figured itself not only visually but also rhetorically; in their statement of resignation from the Brown Berets, las Adelitas signed off with the phrase, “Con Che!” in reference to Che Guevara’s enduring activist legacy (see figure 3).100

Figure 3. "Letter of Resignation from the Brown Beret Female Segment to the minister of the Brown Beret Organization" (February 25, 1970). Gloria Arellanes Papers, accessed via Chicana por mi Raza, CSULA.

98Gloria Arellanes, "Reliving the Chicano Movement," in The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, ed. Mario T. García (University of California Press, 2015), 281.

99 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 32.

100 “Letter of Resignation from the Brown Beret Female Segment to the minister of the Brown Beret Organization," February 25, 1970, Gloria Arellanes Papers, accessed via Chicana por mi Raza, CSULA.

Las Adelitas continued their primary efforts during their time with the Brown Berets of establishing support for the oft-neglected issues disproportionately affecting Chicana members of the community, such as the lack of institutional welfare or the destruction of the family unit, as was seen for example in staunch protests against the drafting of Chicano men into the Vietnam War.101 Despite the strength of these efforts, las Adelitas would disband in the same year as their formation, a victim of the fracturing and disillusionment sweeping the Chicano Movement after the failed Chicano Moratorium, a woman-led protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War and the young Chicano lives it cost.102 But their legacy lived on both tangibly, in the powerful welfare programs they established which will be examined in further detail in the next section and in the historically significant resistance they constituted against the masculine, militaristic machine that sought to subsume them. Arguably, part of this work constituted allowing themselves to be subsumed, and then re-emerging as fellow members of the machine, as seen in the gender-blind, militarized mass of the Brown Berets. Chicana participation in these organizations, from Las Adelitas to the first female members of the Brown Berets, reinvented the image of la Chicana and of la hermana to cultivate a strengthened, progressive cultural pride: in this era, Chicano pride would not derive from protecting the powerless mujer and child; it would stem from her own strength.

Domestic Roles and Social Welfare

One of the most prominent features of Chicana activism as a whole is its distinct focus on lived experience. As referenced in many modern historiographies of the era, Chicanas turned to the Chicana body as a sitio for critical examination, investigating the difficulties in their realities

101 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 38.

102 Vanessa Martínez and Juila Barajas, "The Chicana Revolt," Los Angeles Times, last modified August 13, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/projects/chicano-moratorium/female-brown-berets-create-chicana-movement/.

as emblematic of a broader, systemic discriminatory force.103 For many Chicanas, this consciousness rooted itself in the inequalities of the welfare system, stemming from many activists’ personal experiences grappling with a deeply prejudiced institution, one whose impacts accumulated generation after generation.

Arguably, the most prominent figure within this “Chicana health movement” was Alicia Escalante. An East L.A. Chicana, she found herself at odds with the system as early as twelveyears-old, when her mother needed a spinal surgery and was grossly mistreated by her doctors.

104 The experience ignited her outrage with this system, and she long pointed to the memory as a pivotal moment in her activist journey. Her poem “El Canto de Alicia,” which was first published in Encuentro Femenil, narrates this radicalization.

I remember feeling such anger at the Anglo woman…/ And I hated her for stripping my mother of her pride / Who was kind, good, struggling to survive. / If I had only known then, / If I had only known then, what I know now about welfare / Things would have been entirely different for my mother. / That was my first exposure to the welfare system. / I will never forget it.

105

However, this emphasis on welfare, particularly as it related to the health of the family and children, was not restricted solely to Escalante. Given the cultural norm of women taking charge of the domestic sphere, many Chicana activists naturally gravitated towards these questions, as welfare was one of the most immediately impactful and apparent areas of concern.106 Even for those who were drawn towards other sectors of the movement, gender-

103 Hurtado, Voicing Chicana, 268.

104 Alicia Escalante, "Canto de Alicia," Encuentro Femenil 1, no. 1 (1973): 10.

105 Ibid.

106 Monique Isabelle Garcia, "Sana Sana Colita de Rana/Heal, Heal, Little Frog's Tail: The Chicana Health Movement" (master's thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 2023), 19.

based divisions of labor or social divisions within movement organizations largely funneled Chicana activists' efforts into either less-regarded positions, such as secretarial work, or the welfare initiatives that the men largely ignored and the women controlled to great success.107

This role distribution encapsulated the idea of the public and private patriarchies. Whereas culturally, Chicana women were relegated as individuals to the household sphere, clearly restricted from parts of society in a display of the private patriarchy, the public patriarchy involved their collective aggregation into these limited roles.108 This separation was enforced blatantly within the Brown Berets, for instance, where it was decided that the men and women would hold their meetings in different physical locations.109 In part, this allowed Chicana women to successfully form and execute an agenda that specifically served their most imminent needs: the health of the family unit.110 Chicana scholar Aída Hurtado highlighted this success as an example of the many-layered, intersectional confrontation that comprised Chicana resistance in this era, working within the Chicano movement to combat their marginalization by gender, while simultaneously working within Anglo-dominated feminism to defeat racial oppression.111

However, this division limited Chicana representation in positions of leadership and prevented them from retaining their autonomy within the organization.112

Even within these restraints, Chicana welfare initiatives grew into one of not only the Chicana feminist movement’s but also the Chicano Movement as a whole’s greatest and most enduring successes. Escalante founded one of the first of these efforts, the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, in 1967, after the state government threatened cutbacks to the

107 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 33.

108 Ibid.

109 Espinoza, 34.

110 Ibid.

111 Hurtado, Voicing Chicana, 301-02.

112 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 34.

popular Medi-Cal aid program.113 Inspired by her experiences with the National Welfare Rights Organization, a male-led and African American-women-dominated organization, Escalante created a space to specifically serve the barrio. 114 Rather than directly supplying the services that East L.A. residents would lose with the new restrictions, the organization uniquely focused on targeting the institutional inequalities that fueled this disproportionate impact on the East L.A. community. Programs at the ELAWRO included informational sessions about navigating the welfare system, legal aid with appealing decisions, translation services, and political community mobilization efforts to target the inequalities in the bureaucracy.115 Systemic change did indeed result from these efforts; a social worker organization titled Social Action Latinos for Unity Development (SALUD) was established in the Los Angeles County of Social Services.

But Escalante knew she could do more. As with other community organizations, Escalante turned to the press to get the word out about her program and encourage Chicanos everywhere to take up the mission.116 She frequently contributed to La Raza, the Eastside Sun, and even the organization’s own newspaper (which ran for one issue), La Causa de los Pobres whose establishment emphasized the extensive development of these welfare networks in this era, beyond the efforts of Escalante herself to a community-wide initiative to equip people with new knowledge and awareness.117 Arguably, the greatest legacy of Escalante’s work and ELAWRO is not the aid it delivered to the East L.A. community. It is the community consciousness about institutional oppression that the organization raised, the challenges it historicized, and the new generations of welfare activists it birthed.

113 Espinoza, 132.

114 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 148.

115 Espinoza, "''Revolutionary Sisters,'" 132.

116 Espinoza, 134.

117 Ibid; Ruben Salazar, "Growing Communications Welfare Gap," La Causa de los Pobres, February 28, 1969, Chicana por mi Raza.

Indeed, it could be argued that many clinics and programs of the era owed their influence in part to the highly successful model Escalante founded. Most prominently, the female contingent of the Brown Berets launched El Barrio Free Clinic (East L.A. Free Clinic) in 1969, offering health care services via a mix of volunteers and professionals.118 The women-led administration implemented programs around reproductive health, a rare occurrence broadly in this era, and an especially impactful one considering the rampant forced sterilization that was covertly enforced by the government at the time.119 Other initiatives emerged nationwide, possibly fueled by the frequent coverage of the clinic in the nationally distributed La Raza.

The prevalence of welfare efforts within the Chicana consciousness and Chicana activism continues the practice of cultural reclamation. In sectors like the Brown Berets which tied clearly into the reinvention of Las Adelitas or in the literal rhetoric published in Chicana newspapers, cultural ties and continuities may appear more clearly. But where in both those sectors, Chicanas effectively broke from tradition to rewrite the narrative, with welfare activism, Chicanas functionally stayed within the cultural restraints that had been placed on them relegation to the domestic sphere and yet found new, and immensely powerful, avenues to empowerment. Scholars have coined the term “militant motherhood” to describe this alchemy, not merely “mothering” their communities through the challenges they faced but actively confronting them.120 They were not mothers first and activists second; they were activists because they were mothers. Similarly to the concept of republican motherhood from the Revolutionary Era, scholars also point to the indirect social impact of these women on future

118 Espinoza, 35.

119 Ibid.

120 Rosie C. Bermudez, "Chicana Militant Dignity Work," Southern California Quarterly 102, no. 4 (2020): 425, JSTOR.

generations through the values they modeled for their children.121 As Rosie Bermudez expertly models in her article, “Chicana Militant Dignity Work,” Escalante and her fellow welfare activists emphasized the dignity that all humans in the open-access services they provided and especially mothers deserve.122 This paradigm shift proves especially powerful upon considering the traditional conceptualization of not only la Chicana but also the Chicana mother. Traditionally, the Chicana body was held not only in a domestic regard, as the source of reproduction, but also as a stand-in for the health of the culture and nation.123 This image was reinforced by the iconic figure of La Virgen de Guadalupe (the Virgin Mary) and her veneration (marianismo). As within many traditional Christian narratives worldwide, this framework establishes La Virgen’s and by extension, women’s worth as deriving from their relationships to their sons.124 The ideal, proper woman was expected to sacrifice endlessly to protect the child, and yet maintain the sanctified image of La Virgen.125 Thus, the male role within this culture would take on an overwhelmingly dominant force; male figures would be depicted as protecting this mother and child the nation and its future. Subversions by Chicana feminists within other sectors like the Brown Berets reconfigured la mujer as occupying a position of power, cradling her baby and her gun in parallel, adopting the masculinized weapon and militancy to assert an equal position on the hierarchy.126 But inherent in this conceptualization is the dual burden imposed on la mujer. Can she clutch both the gun and the child? Why should she have to take on both mantles?

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

123 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 118; 122.

124 Consuelo Nieto, "The Chicana and the Women's Rights Movement," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 191, previously published in Civil Rights Digest 6, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 36-42.

125 Ibid.

126 Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!, 113.

Where the welfare activists differentiate themselves is in how they became powerful with the metaphorical baby alone. In recognizing the institutional aspect of their oppression and creating new frameworks to confront it, Chicana welfare activists became the true protector of the child and the family, not the male Beret and his bayonet. Armed with knowledge, they cast aside the helpless, canonical role of La Virgen, not only conscious of the forces bearing down on them but also increasingly understanding of their potential to be the ones to combat them, as more and more members of the community led successful campaigns within the welfare sphere.

127 As Anna Nieto-Gomez wrote in her essay “The Chicana Perspectives for Education” for Encuentro Femenil, through welfare advocacy, Chicanas came to understand “the need to lift the veil of the Virgin’s face to show a real woman who is not exempt from the trials of life.”

128 And, considering the influence Chicana mothers inherently bore on their children as the predominant household figure, la Chicana became not only the protector of the nation, but also the director of its future. This paradigm shift was especially powerful considering the hidden compulsory sterilization campaigns undertaken by the American government at the time even as the institutions around her sought to destroy any possibility of a future, la Chicana built an even brighter one.

129

No one image can perfectly encapsulate the nuances of cultural gender dynamics. And, certainly, adopting this “militant motherhood” did not liberate la Chicana entirely; the aforementioned limited autonomy of groups like the female Berets at the hands of their male peers eventually led to the breakdown of many of their monumental welfare efforts. Whereas the

127 Bermudez, "Chicana Militant," 425.

128Anna Nieto-Gomez, "The Chicana Perspectives for Education," in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, by Alma M. Garcia (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 125, previously published in Encuentro Femenil 1, no. 1 (1973): 34-61.

129 Miroslava Chávez-García, "The Interdisciplinary Project of Chicana History: Looking Back, Moving Forward," Pacific Historical Review 82, no. 4 (2013): 561-62, https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2013.82.4.542.

image of the mother they constructed may have defied the conforming masculinization that other sectors like Las Adelitas could be said to have adopted, it also placed them at a disadvantage within the organization, confronting institutional inequalities in the world beyond the barrio but letting the sexism within their own community continue. Perhaps the bold Chicano Moratorium, a 30,000 member-strong, female-led, anti-Vietnam War march in August 1970 would have marked a greater equilibrium between these masculine, militaristic approaches and the attention to dignity and lived experience feminist advocates often preached.130 But its catastrophic end in a violent riot, which many attributed to unjust intervention and sabotage by police interventions, means we can never know with certainty.131 Thus, we may only conclude that while this “militant motherhood” could not unequivocally resolve the oppression of la Chicana, it still thrust la Chicana along on her road to empowerment, implying that her motherhood could be her power she merely needed to become conscious of it.

Conclusion

Within any study grounded in culture, it is vital to acknowledge and avoid the trap of Virginia Dominguez’s “culturalism”: denoting cultural values as the sole factors in the declining or disparate success, health, or other characteristic of a population.132 Indeed, any discussion of the practical effects of cultural shifts in this case the redefinition undertaken by the Chicana feminists must be considered within the context of the structural inequities faced by the population at hand. Simultaneously, however, we may not discount the potential of culture to change the way these hierarchies are formed; they derive from long-standing cultural values in

130 Mario T. García, "An important day in U.S. history: The Chicano Moratorium," National Catholic Reporter, last modified August 27, 2015, https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/important-day-us-history-chicanomoratorium.

131 Ibid.

132 Hurtado, Voicing Chicana, 115.

the first place. Culture is a living, breathing entity; it evolves alongside us when we make room for new voices in our discourse and affirm and uplift them. If cultures are renewed each day, why should institutions stay stagnant?

The work of the early Chicana feminists embodies this dynamic. In developing a robust print culture, Chicanas expanded traditions of inherited, oral knowledge, and created the space to legitimize and historicize the cultural shifts that were to come. Through their work with the Brown Berets, Las Adelitas de Aztlán, and other similar organizations nationwide, Chicanas subverted the submissive, auxiliary image of la adelita and captured the masculinized, militaristic power of these organizations. And in advocating so fiercely and so successfully for the welfare causes that they witnessed firsthand within the domestic sphere, the Chicana feminists proved that they need not adopt this masculinization. They could enact change as mothers, too.

Much as the Chicana identity is profoundly intersectional, existing across geographic and socioeconomic borders, contemplating womanhood, sexuality, and motherhood, no one aspect of this cultural revolution could exist without the other. Frustration with the lack of female recognition in El Movimiento kickstarted the establishment of female-specific spaces like the feminist print publications, which then created a platform to legitimize the new narratives emerging from all sectors of Chicana society. “Masculinized” approaches to activism allowed women like Arellanes to force their way into leadership positions within male-dominated organizations, often positioning them with the resources to launch the welfare activist efforts that would become one of the most enduring successes of the movement initiatives that derived from Chicana conceptualizations of motherhood, and would thus likely have been overlooked by the male majority in positions of leadership at the time. Were the Chicana feminists to have neglected an aspect of their identity, to have forgotten their roles as Chicanas, as women, as

mothers, they would not have even approached the level of progress their community embraced in this era.

The magnitude of the Chicana feminists’ cultural reclamation cannot be understated. As Blackwell initially elaborated, their approach of “retrofitting” cultural memory proved especially productive: they did not wish to destroy prior narratives, but rather, to bring the quiet, inherited knowledge of the strength of la mujer into the spotlight. Crucially, they did so using an approach that simultaneously embraced all those who had been cast into this darkness throughout history, highlighting the intersections of their complex identities as hybrid Mexican-Americans, as the descendants of Indigenous peoples, as women of color in an Anglo, patriarchal society, and as mothers.

Even attempting to address the injustices faced by each member of this vast web of identities was a massive undertaking. Confronting the range of factors and communities influencing the Chicana experience required a profound honesty with oneself; for example, despite her allegiance to the Chicano liberation movement, during her time in the Brown Berets Arellanes struggled to reconcile her female identity with the sexual violence she witnessed from her male peers. As we continue to work towards a more just world, we must be willing to adapt the vulnerability and flexibility that these Chicana figures did in turning to their history and investigating its deepest wounds and even, in the case of the domestic sphere and welfare advocacy, actively delving into and embracing ours scars. Indeed, the work has continued in the few decades since this major movement, with prominent academics like Gloria Anzaldúa or Cherrie Moraga further expanding scholarship around Chicana identity to heavily develop our

understanding of sexuality and its influence on Chicana oppression, an immensely personally vulnerable task.133

In the modern world, globalization and digital technologies make more and more contact between communities possible each day, in turn leading to the formation of increasingly hybridized identities. As we approach this new age of blurred personal, cultural, and physical borders, we can learn from the combined successes and struggles of the Chicana feminists to approach our own memories with a unique cultural plasticity and willing honesty. To take on the task of “retrofitting” our own histories can be daunting and requires an immense amount of vulnerability. But it may well be the only means we have to call all the voices back from the shadows and approach true, collective empowerment.

133 For example, see collected writings in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back : Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015).

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