Search

This transcendental phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of five Mexican American women pursuing or who obtained a doctorate from one university in southeast Texas. The Chicana’s experience achieving a doctorate has been overlooked by the literature, with much of the research on Mexican American women being outdated or focusing on completing high school and a bachelor’s degree. In Texas, literature has found that Mexican American women receive slightly more doctoral-level education than males. Although in Texas, they may excel more than Mexican American males, many Chicanas do not reach their full potential. Mexican American women continue to be underrepresented and the least educated in the United States. Often, Chicana women find it difficult to reconcile the discrepancy between their culture, familial expectations and roles, and ambitions. For this reason, this research focused on exploring the lived experiences of Mexican American females pursuing a doctorate to discover motivators and challenges and understand their experiences. A Chicana feminist and symbolic interactionism theoretical framework guided this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the hegemony of racial superiority, the oppression of gender dominance, and the demands of religious homogeneity, Mexican American Gloria E. Anzaldúa proposes a New Mestiza Consciousness that seeks to achieve a multifaceted transcendence of La Frontera (Borderlands). Using Krsiteva's semiotics and mythology-based feminism as a theoretical guide, this paper will analyze the cultural, gender, ethnic, and religious manifestations of New Mestiza Consciousness and the logic behind this consciousness in terms of women's writing in the Chicana women's literary community and the re-shaping of the maternal mythological archetype in indigenous culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the hegemony of racial superiority, the oppression of gender dominance, and the demands of religious homogeneity, Mexican American Gloria E. Anzaldúa proposes a New Mestiza Consciousness that seeks to achieve a multifaceted transcendence of La Frontera (Borderlands). Using Krsiteva’s semiotics and mythology-based feminism as a theoretical guide, this paper will analyze the cultural, gender, ethnic, and religious manifestations of New Mestiza Consciousness and the logic behind this consciousness in terms of women’s writing in the Chicana women’s literary community and the re-shaping of the maternal mythological archetype in indigenous culture.

This article provides a context for the publication of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). As Chicana literature and feminism flourished, the visibility of Chicanas increased dramatically, and at the same it became noticeable that Chicana lesbian representations lacked considerably. During this time roughly from the 1980s through 2000, the focus on Chicana lesbian representation reached a new level of awareness which ultimately led to an increase in demand for publications by and about Chicana lesbians. However, this new visibility did not materialize so easily and there were still resistances in the academy and at national conferences that led to major, well-documented confrontations. This was a dramatic and momentous period for the establishment of a public discourse about Chicana lesbians within Chicana/o studies that still continues today. Arguably, contributions by Chicana lesbians provided many foundational theories critical to the development of Chicana feminist thought and Chicana Studies that merits recognition. Published by Third Woman Press in 1991 and edited by Carla Trujillo, this book collection signaled a turn in perceptions of Chicana/o gays and lesbians across communities and in academic circles. This article argues that the publication of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mother Warned Us About was made possible by a confluence of social, cultural, and literary engagements with other publications that arose from a politics of love and desire. As a result, love and desire are epistemic expressions that shape the collective voices in Chicana Lesbians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece examines the work of Elvira and Hortensia Colorado via the Coatlicue Theatre Company, the first MeXicana Indigenous all-women's theater group in the U.S. This piece contextualizes their personal journey and the formation of their theatre company in New York City. The essay takes a deep look at their work to pay tribute and acknowledge a story not widely known about these sisters and how they impacted MeXicana Indigenous storytelling and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American feminist theories have long energised Polish scholarly work, and many Polish academics have drawn on the research of renowned American writers such as Judith Butler. Polish translations of numerous American authors may well have increased readership, which would otherwise be confined to English-speaking intellectuals. Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, a left-leaning publishing house, offers a wide selection of crucial works by American feminists and sells those books at affordable prices, making certain texts by Butler, Carol Gilligan, and Katha Pollitt widely accessible. Most works published in Polish have been authored by white women with some attempts to be more racially inclusive (the works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and bell hooks, for example, can also be found in translation). Chicana writers, on the other hand, are not part of Krytyka Polityczna’s canon. This paper aims to address this oversight, arguing for the benefits of drawing on Chicanas’ research in the analysis of various social, political, and cultural phenomena in Poland. It also takes a close look at several relevant terms/concepts proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and Chela Sandoval, as well as the ways in which these could be applied in the Polish context.

This article examines Belinda Acosta’s Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over (2010) through the lens of testimonio narrative methodology, particularly as employed by US Latina feminist writers. This second book in Acosta’s Quinceañera Club series is set in San Antonio, Texas, interweaving plot connections to Juárez, Mexico. A close analysis reveals that Acosta’s novel reflects characteristics of Latinx testimonio narrative methodology with its inclusion of the character Perla Sánchez, who is erased from her family’s history and then killed in Juárez decades later. While the novel focuses on family separation and healing with the quinceañera in the background, Acosta highlights the erasures of young Chicanas and the violent consequences of breaking with hegemonic expectations for girls in Latinx culture. Acosta’s novel testifies to the social injustice of women who are disappeared and violated in the Latinx culture, and even silenced and forgotten in the Latinx family. Moreover, the novel employs the quinceañera ritual and strong Chicana characters to correct the condoned silences in the Latinx family.

This essay introduces the embodied ceremonial practices of deep presence and sustained attentiveness as Chicana lesbian poetic devices that shape-shift Chicana lesbian subjectivities, socialities, and simultaneously the violence of colonial capitalist racial heteropatriarchies. My reading of the poem "If" in Carla Trujillo's rendering of Chicana lesbian desire in Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, delves into the shape-shifting and time-bending potentiation at the heart of Chicana lesbian poetics. Cherríe Moraga's "If" generously offers a map that stalls time with the magnificence of sustained attentiveness. The poet's observations entice the reader with a depth of presence that illuminate the subject, casting life-sustaining reimagined meanings onto otherwise commodified individuated bodies. Moraga's "If" refracts the meaning of loss, ghostly pasts, and unimaginable futures through embodiment, imbuing a vivid and deep presence capable of casting spells on futures yet to come. The poem posits total immersion in being—ecstasis, that blooms with the transformational potential of the ecstatic. This essay reads the poem "If" in the context of Moraga's oeuvre as ceremonial world-making incantation conjuring collective consciousness through Chicana lesbian po(i)esis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing the 1991 publication of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, editor and visionary Carla Trujillo identifies the seed planted by Juanita Ramos' 1987 anthology Compañeras: Latina Lesbians. Detailing her experiential arc from exuberant to unsettled, Trujillo explains: "Compañeras had only teased me. Not only did I want more, I needed more" (ix). Trujillo's editorial recognition of a lack—of presence, voice, power, visibility—as well as the need to foster spaces for the nurturing of more Chicana lesbian voices and work engage two key components of what I identify as "needing more," a critical engagement of Chicana lesbian desire as intervention and offering. Using analysis of queer, decolonial, and performance studies, I suggest that Chicana Lesbian desire as articulated in Trujillo's anthology can be seen as a critical unsettling that posits both a critique of existing norms and structures as well as an active envisioning of new modes of self and queer familia. Shifting from theory to literature, I offer an application of "needing more" to two original contributions from Chicana Lesbians by Monica Palacios and Diane Alcalá. My analysis illuminates the three key elements of "needing more"—a recognition of lack, a conscious and ongoing envisioning of "more," and an active renegotiation of familia within the context of queer desire and community. I close the essay with my letter testimonio in the spirit of Trujillo's "needing more" and the collection's enduring engagement with and impact on queer familia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ana Castillo's So Far from God draws attention to the effects of global toxicity on female bodies as the characters of the novel fall victim to various forms of social, economic, and environmental injustice such as war, AIDS, cancer, and rape. This essay engages theories on decoloniality to illustrate how Castillo textualizes spiritual practices and alternative forms of knowledge to weave an epistemically disobedient narrative. By constructing Chicana figures who embody hybrid, subversive spiritualities enabled by the syncretic space of the US-Mexico border, Castillo offers avenues for liberation from colonial and patriarchal ideologies that are textualized as physical, sexual, and spiritual transformations. Notably, the characters who refuse to see the colonial difference are consumed by the colonial matrix of power, eventually falling victim to war and industrial toxicity. By weaving spirituality, curanderismo, and the supernatural into the lived experiences of the female characters in So Far , Castillo constructs Chicana subjectivities that enact body politics of knowledge and decolonial forms of being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The violence of academia experienced by Chicanx/Latinx students is countered through the distinct pedagogical and care work that Chicana/Latina professors perform in academic spaces. Yet, the common practice of marginalizing the contributions that Chicanas and Latinas make to different movements and institutions is also salient in studies of U.S. higher education. In this autoethnographic essay, I highlight the unique ways that Chicanas and Latinas work to counter academic violence through the practice of curanderismo académico. As healers and agents of transformation, they engender a sense of belonging in the classroom by way of their positionality as both influential academics and cultural kin. Through sharing, cultural connectedness, and the valuing of student testimonios, they facilitate inclusion in the classroom for Chicanx/Latinx and minority students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“‘Nobody told me’: Chicana Women’s Madness and Mourning in Sandra Cisneros’s Have You Seen Marie?” employs interdisciplinary research to understand Sandra Cisneros’ tale of women’s mental illness in Have You Seen Marie?. Building on Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s critique of the inequitable treatment of mental illness in literary criticism of women’s writing, I argue that Cisneros draws awareness to the distinct challenges that Chicanas face while struggling with mental illness. Contextualizing Cisneros’ representation of the grief a Catholic Chicana woman experiences after losing her mother, I draw on the work of scholars from theology, psychology, sociology, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and disability studies to further understand the impact of colonization on familial gender roles, the importance of la Virgen de Guadalupe, and representations of mental illness.

American feminist theories have long energised Polish scholarly work, and many Polish academics have drawn on the research of renowned American writers such as Judith Butler. Polish translations of numerous American authors may well have increased readership, which would otherwise be confined to English-speaking intellectuals. Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, a left-leaning publishing house, offers a wide selection of crucial works by American feminists and sells those books at affordable prices, making certain texts by Butler, Carol Gilligan, and Katha Pollitt widely accessible. Most works published in Polish have been authored by white women with some attempts to be more racially inclusive (the works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and bell hooks, for example, can also be found in translation). Chicana writers, on the other hand, are not part of Krytyka Polityczna’s canon. This paper aims to address this oversight, arguing for the benefits of drawing on Chicanas’ research in the analysis of various social, political, and cultural phenomena in Poland. It also takes a close look at several relevant terms/concepts proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, and Chela Sandoval, as well as the ways in which these could be applied in the Polish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Laura Aguilar, a photographer and lifelong Angeleno, often foregrounds her intersecting queer, Chicana, fat, and dyslexic identities. This reading addresses Aguilar's claim to power in objecthood, actualizing a selfhood beyond the limits of subjectivity or negation by staging opacity in her photographs. Aguilar engages in what Uri McMillan calls "prosthetic performance": co-significations by an animate body and an inanimate but catalytic thing, or actuant. Layering objects upon objects, Aguilar's prosthetic performances refract normative, dominant gazes that would overdetermine the bounds of her selfhood according to the markings her body bears. She plainly addresses the trauma of misrecognition as a queer Chicana, but her performances are neither defined by her pain nor reducible to gestures of refusal. The opacity of Aguilar's flesh subverts photographic truth effects, making the archive another actuant in her performance of self-becoming and potentiality. This paper sutures critical discourses surrounding Aguilar, braiding foundational analyses of her oeuvre at their intersections with Black and Chicana feminisms, performance studies, and new materialist theorizations of the object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing queer, decolonial, and asexual frameworks, this paper offers the language of homointimacy and homointimate friendship to read the platonic, yet deeply queer, relationship between Teresa and Alicia in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters. While relationships with men are evident throughout the novel and often serve as subjects of the women’s correspondence, I challenge the heteronormative gaze that governs most readings of the novel by illuminating Teresa and Alicia’s homointimate bond and its disruption of the colonially constructed platonic/romantic binary. Revealing how the queer decolonial narrative structure of the novel aids in interpreting Teresa and Alicia’s queer relationship, this article invokes a decolonial imaginary attuned to queer asexual life to assert new ways of seeing and knowing “queer” beyond sex and sexual attraction. While most scholarship on queer Chicanx identity and relationships centralizes the subversive nature of queer sexualities against the demands of compulsory heterosexuality, this article seeks to elevate the equally liberatory and transgressive nature of homointimate friendship which equips us to better understand “queer” as an expansive, radical mode of relating often inclusive of, but not inherently dependent on, sex and sexual attraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing a Chicana Feminist Epistemology (CFE) and Gloria Anzaldúas Coyolxauhqui analysis in theory, I offer a narrative and examination of the ways to challenge patriarchy through birth stories. More importantly, discuss the ways we build on scholarship offered by Chicanas and Indigena identified women who may or may not be mothers of children, but rather as producers of knowledge; academic, spiritual, or self-fulfilling. In addition, I discuss the ways in which women can piece together the fragmented story of Coyolxauhqui, via the multiplicity of complicated, but critical identities, by sharing their stories.

This article focuses on the educational journeys of two Chicana doctoral students born and raised along the U.S.–Mexico border. These scholars analyze how the intersection of their multiple identities, specifically border identities, has informed their socialization into the academy. Specifically, the authors use a combination of autohistoria, platica, and reflexión to theorize their doctoral experiences and examine how the concept of Home manifests in their research and praxis as graduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Latino Studies is the property of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Gender & Language is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In her biographical novel, Sor Juana's Second Dream (1999), Chicana writer Alicia Gaspar de Alba formulates a counternarrative to readings that have concentrated on the rise of the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-95) as a criolla intellectual while downplaying or effacing her identity as a woman who loved women. Using a self-referential genre that may be termed "lesbian autohistoriography," Gaspar de Alba re-creates the historical figure as a symbolic foremother of contemporary Chicana lesbians' ongoing struggles for legitimacy and voice among heteropatriarchal institutions such as the Catholic Church. Sor Juana emerges as a passionate protofeminist artist whose intellectual ascent countered the misogynistic social restrictions of her time. This analysis harnesses the trope and semiotics of reproduction (in particular, copying and conjugation) to illuminate the need for a wider spectrum of creative choices for women beyond biological motherhood. Consolidating critical interventions by such contemporary Latina feminists as Emma Pérez, I argue that Gaspar de Alba's version of Sor Juana strips reproduction of its exclusively heterosexual underpinnings and offers a lesbian hermeneutics of selfhood that recalibrates and diversifies women's hard-earned right to create, coexist, and resist concurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abstract is included in the article.

Resumen: En este ensayo se analizan los temas de la homosexualidad y el homoerotismo en la pieza teatral Shadow of a Man , de Cherríe Moraga, atendiendo a la identidad queer de los personajes de Manuel y su compadre Conrado. A través del papel de la institución del compadrazgo, la figura del macho, las negociaciones de la masculinidad, los efectos del patriarcado y las tensiones de culturas, políticas, géneros y sexualidades fronterizas, observamos esta obra de Cherríe Moraga con una perspectiva diferente. Mientras que la crítica, acertadamente, ha destacado la lucha feminista de las mujeres protagonistas y la agresión que ejercen los personajes masculinos, no se ha tomado en cuenta la posibilidad de una relación homosexual y homoerótica entre los compadres, la cual devela la complejidad de las relaciones entre los familiares, los tormentos de cada uno de los personajes, una reflexión sobre las tradiciones de género y sexualidad en la cultura mexicana/chicana y las conexiones con la propia experiencia de la autora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, deciphering two key motifs—the rose and trees—is fundamental to unpacking the central tension of the book: the protagonist’s desire to leave Mango Street and return in writing. While the tree motif is well-studied, that of the rose has eluded critical attention. This article shows how Cisneros unveils the centuries of patriarchal oppression distilled in the image of the rose and, in turn, offers new metaphors for women seeking to escape traditional constraints.

This essay builds on a recent intervention made by Mariana Ortega, who has called on philosophers committed to decolonization to avoid reproducing "colonial impulses and erasures" in the very attempt to advance epistemic decolonization. When connected to "practices of un-knowing," these tendencies become an "affliction," which Ortega labels with the notion of "decolonial woes." The author focuses on the reception of the spiritual elements in Anzaldúa's work to identify a specifically secular form of a decolonial woe: the disregard for the potential that spirituality comprises for advancing the project of decolonization. To counter such secularist erasure, this essay offers an interpretation of Anzaldúa's well-known concept of la facultad as a postsecular methodology that can help advance the project of epistemic decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"'Nobody told me': Chicana Women's Madness and Mourning in Sandra Cisneros's Have You Seen Marie?" employs interdisciplinary research to understand Sandra Cisneros' tale of women's mental illness in Have You Seen Marie?. Building on Marta Caminero-Santangelo's critique of the inequitable treatment of mental illness in literary criticism of women's writing, I argue that Cisneros draws awareness to the distinct challenges that Chicanas face while struggling with mental illness. Contextualizing Cisneros' representation of the grief a Catholic Chicana woman experiences after losing her mother, I draw on the work of scholars from theology, psychology, sociology, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and disability studies to further understand the impact of colonization on familial gender roles, the importance of la Virgen de Guadalupe, and representations of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece of scholarship provides the testimonio of being a queer Chicana in academia. There is a long history of claiming space, exposing injustice, and truth telling in many Latinx cultures. As an ethnographic methodology testimonios have been used to provide insight of the experiences of marginalized communities. In bringing an indigenous methodology of narrative to bear witness this scholarship must be read as an experience of weaving the many strands of a person together, with endings and beginnings intertwined and revisited. This piece provides a glimpse into the difficulties of bringing, surviving, and salvaging a multiplicity of marginalized identities in academia, a space that are unsafe and unwelcoming for those of us who are not White, straight and male. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This narrative provides an overview of my educational journey as a young, Chicana student mother and now assistant professor in a large public research university in the Southwest. It documents the leakage points in my educational pipeline as well as the pivotal moments that contributed to my success, as only .2% of Chicanx earn a PhD. I offer recommendations for supporting underrepresented students in higher education and, particularly, in social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past two decades, critics have taken an interest in explaining the ideological ambivalence expressed in Chicana/o literature. Most critics correctly point out that Chicana/o ambivalence cannot be separated from the conflicted material realities historically experienced by Mexican Americans, but this view has not prevented some critics from tiptoeing into the idealist terrain of postruodernism. Postmodernist theory has provided Chicana/o criticism with conceptual tools for explaining the heterogeneity of culture, but its antagonism toward history and class analysis has limited the potential for Chicana/o studies to develop an effective social criticism. Two postmodernist terms used to describe ambivalence are "cultural schizophrenia" and "heterotopia." Historical materialism -a method that makes truth-claims about social existence after a rigorous critique of the concepts and ideas that emerge from that existence - stands as a - viable alternative to postmodernist theory for the interpretation of Chicana/o literature.

Chicanas and Latinas are still severely underrepresented in higher education. Much of the previous literature focuses on the barriers to their success. This article highlights studies related to Chicana Feminism and the ways this perspective can positively impact college attainment and success. The authors conclude by discussing implications of biculturalism and further recommendations developing biculturalism among Chicanas and Latinas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author/s María Henríquez-Betancor Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain ABSTRACT In this article I analyze how Gloria Anzaldúa’s seventh essay in Borderlands/La Frontera:The New Mestiza, titled “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness”, condenses and portrays a development towards the mestiza consciousness presented in the first six essays in the book. This is a well-structured as well as fluid process in which each step guides us in a complex identity-building awareness. This process is an inner journey as well as an evolution in the public scene where the “new mestiza” has to revise and reinvent herself in several ways in order to acquire “the mestiza consciousness”. This essay is also a clear example in which Anzaldúa represents three voices: the “I”, the “we” and the “she”. These voices are one of Anzaldúa’s strategies for diving into what she understands as her collective identity as a Chicana and as a “new mestiza”. As will be shown in this article, the author moves among these voices for various purposes of identity-construction.