Las Chicanas: Identity and Feminism.

 

 Las Chicanas: Identity and Feminism.

The perspective of cultural minorities usually remains on the sidelines of the traditional historical narrative. The Chicano movement has fought this trend by giving a voice to one of the most important communities on US soil. However, the success of this attempt would have been incomplete if it had not been for the tenacity of the women within it, who were determined to undermine the subordination determined by racism and gender roles.

In 1848, with the signing of the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty, Mexico ceded a significant portion of its territories to the United States. The treaty was signed during a peace conference between the two countries, ending a bloody territorial conflict almost two years earlier. The United States emerged victorious from the conflict and gained much of Texas - the Rio Grande was chosen as the new natural border with Mexico. However, with Texas, Mexico ceded a large part of its territories. Mexicans residing in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, and parts of Colorado came under US jurisdiction.

This moment marked the birth of one of the largest communities in the United States. Chicanos is the term the community of Mexican descendants identifies itself, whose population constitutes the majority of Latinos residing in the country.

Although the number of Chicanos continues to grow, mainly thanks to immigration, several factors hinder this group's complete integration and social mobility. This minority, like many others, has to deal with various social problems: poverty, crime, violence, poor access to health care, under-representation in US politics, and discrimination in schools. For this reason, historically, the Chicanos have struggled to reclaim their identity and improve their conditions in US society. The Mexican-American community grew following the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty throughout the century, not without integration problems. From the outset, members of this community were formally discriminated against by US institutions.

According to the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty, Mexicans residing in the territories ceded to the United States would have received US citizenship. In this sense, they were legally classified as "white" to allow them to obtain US citizenship, as the United States, according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, only allowed "white people" to become citizens. From historical reconstructions, however, it emerges that in most cases, citizenship was conferred only on the Mexican-Spanish elite and that the majority of Mexican citizens were considered a "second-class" minority. This new minority was subjected to the jurisprudence relating to "Indian tribes" heavily discriminated against and marginalized. 

During the next century, the conditions of this minority in US society did not improve significantly. For example, in the 1940s, Chicano was used as a derogatory term to refer to the Mexican-American working class in a predominantly Caucasian US society. Similarly, in Mexico, the term was used interchangeably with pocho (faded) to mock Mexican-Americans, "guilty" of having lost their culture, customs, and language of origin. Beginning in the 1960s, the Chicano community began to adopt the term originally derogatory and to claim a solid political and cultural presence in response to years of social oppression and discrimination. The Chicano Movement (El Movimiento) of the 60s and 70s was characterized by an intense political presence in the United States. 

El Movimiento represented the continuation of the Mexican-American civil rights movement of the 1940s. Under the leadership of Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales, César Chávez, and Dolores Huerta, who also collaborated extensively with the Black Power movement, the Chicano Movement has undertaken several essential battles: from the restoration of land concessions to the rights of agricultural workers to the improvement of education, the right to vote and the fight against stereotypes.

Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Chicane women began to build an autonomous space-all-female-within the US Movimiento. Faced with leadership and a political setting that is the prerogative of men, Chicana feminism (Xicanisma) operates a double break: from the Movimiento and the machismo that distinguishes it - interpreted as a colonial heritage - and from the predominant feminism in the United States, whose protagonists and the recipients were almost exclusively white and middle-class women. It emerges from the need to include identities and stories that were outside the hegemonic narrative to tell about lives crossed by ethnic and class conflicts. As with black feminism, it arises from a need for intersectionality: to tell non-white, non-heterosexual women, far from the stereotype of the hypersexualized Latina and the mother dedicated to sacrifice.

In 1971, the Conferencia de Mujeres por la Raza met in Houston, the first meeting of American Chicane women to discuss feminist demands within the movement. Among the issues that emerged were sexual and reproductive rights - above all, safe and legal abortion - and access to higher education as a driving force for emancipation. The crux of Chicano feminism is that of identity and emerges from the condition of second-class citizens. Feminist practice thus became an instrument of emancipation from a subordinate destiny in white and bourgeois society and recovery of the historical-family roots far from the Anglo-American (colonial) culture.

Characterizing the theoretical elaboration of Chicano feminism is, in particular, the image and posture of the mestiza (mestizo), developed in particular by Gloria Anzaldúa.

At the beginning of the 90s - coinciding with the fifth centenary of the "discovery of America" ​​- the use of the term Xicana(s) spread as an act of criticism expressed at the colonization process through the spelling "transgression" that is together recovery of a pre-Hispanic language.

Xicana thought it did not develop as a fundamental academic philosophy, but in the context of Chicane and gender studies, as a theory and practice of struggle fully inserted in the "Women of Color/Mujeres de Color." The latter denotes the invisibility of the differences between female experiences in US society, an intersectional approach that rejects the category of "woman" based exclusively on the white-bourgeois model and does not consider the different forms of oppression; linked to class and "race."

There is also a potent mix of de/post-colonial studies - through the recovery of indigenous history and identity embodied in the bodies of Latinas - and queer studies. In particular, the rejection of the stereotype of the hypersexualized and objectified Latin woman (also a cultural heritage) turns into a criticism of the heteronormativity of American society (and feminism).

Writer, poet, feminist-queer theorist, Mexican Chicano, patlache (Nahuatl word for lesbian), Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa is an essential exponent of Chicano feminism. Born in Texas to parents of Mexican descent, after a stint as a preschool teacher, she moved to California in 1977, where she began writing, lecturing, and dealing with feminism, Chicana culture and identity, and creative writing at various universities of the state. From this position, she tries to tell "the Frontera" and the experience of the women who live there - geographically, politically, culturally.

In “Borderlands/La Frontera,” published in 1987, Anzaldúa talks about borderlands as symbolic spaces and focuses on multilingualism (already from the title) as the founding element of mestizaje - a concept she introduced to the general American public. The work reconstructs the story of existence between different cultures near the border between Mexico and Texas. At the same time, it is a reconstruction of indigenous Mexicans' mythologies and cultural philosophies, with a particular focus on the role of women in Hispano-American culture.

In her works, Gloria Anzaldúa has recovered and reinvented some female myths born from the contact/clash of the native civilization with the European one. Like that of Malinche, the translator-lover of Cortés, long considered a "traitor" by the descendants of the Aztecs, presented instead as an example of a tiring linguistic-cultural mediation. Her work on border culture is considered part of the post-colonial vein and a precursor of Latinx philosophy (a recent approach that combines the Chicano experience with queerness). In "La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness," Anzaldúa analyzes the construction of non-binary identity, which challenges the rigidity of citizenship built on colonial schemes and the heteronormativity that, in particular on the bodies and lives of women chicane, shows itself in all its violence.

In this, Chi/Xicana feminist theorization is exemplary, which over time has (de) written the frontier as a place of theorization and denunciation. A place from which to talk and claim the specificities of hybridization. Anzaldúa is among the most authoritative exponents of border thought and, particularly, of the border between the United States and Mexico - from which she writes and is inspired - but which she uses as a metaphor for every other possible division built on race, gender, sexuality, class.

The choice to analyze these articles/academic publications was dictated by the need to carry out an in-depth study on the role of women in building the Chicana identity. An essential role that I had briefly indicated in the first two of my interventions published in the Blog aimed to highlight the historical chronology of the salient moments that characterized the construction of this identity. In this reconstruction of the historical and political and, above all, psychological and cultural processes, which led to the formation of the Chicana identity, the female wing and, later on, the homosexual one, began in the mid-seventies to distance themselves from machismo that strongly connoted, with its patriarchal values ​​- centered on the submission of women to men - most of the choices and orientations of the movement. In 1971, during a seminar held in Houston, more than six hundred Chicane women from all over the country met to hold the first national Raza women conference. It was then that the new denomination of Chicanas spread, born from the claim and pride of being first and foremost women and, secondly, belonging to the people of la Raza. It was a critical self-denomination that aimed to overcome the contradictions inherent in the marginal position these women occupied both within the movement and in society.

Therefore, these women should be given credit for having marked, through their battles, a significant turning point towards women's emancipation both within Anglo-American and Mexican-American society. 

This is the great lesson I have drawn from these exciting readings.

 

Sources and Insights

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Papers.” Texas Archival Resources Online, (1942-2004). Retrieved from

https://txarchives.org/utlac/finding_aids/00189.xml

Belausteguigoitia, Marisa. “Borderlands/La Frontera: El Feminismo Chicano De Gloria Anzaldúa Desde Las Fronteras Geoculturales, Disciplinarias Y Pedagógicas.” Debate Feminista Vol.40, pp.149-69. Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género (CIEG) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42625120

Cotera, Maria, “Chicana Ideologies and Issues.” Introduction to Latino Studies.The University of Michigan. (December 14, 2007) Retrieved from

http://websites.umich.edu/~ac213/student_projects07/latfem/latfem/Index.htm

Immigration History. “Nationality Act of 1790.” The University of Texas at Austin. Department of History. (2019) Retrieved from

https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-nationality-act/

Pardo, Mary. “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: “Mothers of East Los Angeles.“ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 11, no. 1, pp.1-7. University of Nebraska Press. (1990) Retrieved from

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346696?seq=1

Pulido, Cacheux, Margarita, Elena. “Feminismo chicano: raíces, pensamiento político e identidad de las mujeres.” Reencuentro, núm. 37, August, 2003, pp. 43-53. Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Xochimilco. Distrito Federal, México.

 

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