Reading: Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (2)

10 thoughts on “Reading: Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (2)”

1. I have definitely encountered both Anglo and Chicana feminism before. But I think I was introduced to Anglo feminism earlier on in my education when learning about American history throughout middle and high school. It wasn’t until I took classes in college that I was introduced to the history of Chicana feminism. I always thought of Anglo feminism started during the American Revolution with Abigail Adams writing letters to her husbands about how the roles those women had were changing as their husbands were off at war. For Chicana feminism I always assumed that it went right along the Chicano Movement. After reading this chapter I started to rethink the situation. I agree with the statement that just because early movements and organizations didn’t associate with or used the word “feminism” doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t supporting it (24). I also agree that this “add-and-mix” technique on history doesn’t really add much. It sort of takes away from the importance of women of color feminist movements. I think that this linear line of looking at history is favored because it is “neat”. By breaking off that linear line, historians are able to dig deeper into history and find out more and that tell another version of the same history. It might not be as neat as the linear path but we get more out of it.

2. I was specifically drawn to a section in Blackwell’s book called “Multiple Origins, Autonomous ( Or Separate) Traditions.” She argues that feminism has multiple sites of origin which are rarely noted and included in history. Therefore, she examines the genealogy of the movement which is also a concept discussed by Michael Foucault that is meant to counter hegemonic history. There are “three interrelated but distinct historical processes […] that form the basis for understanding the multiple feminist insurgencies of women of color” (from ¡Chicana Power! 22). The third site is a result of third world feminism where women of color in the U.S. acted in solidarity with women in third world countries. The concept that really stood out to me was “internal colonies” because talks about the exploitation of women in the U.S. for the sake of capitalism (23). I really like how women of color feminists realized the importance of freedom for ALL women especially in third world countries thus making feminism transnational.This then led me to think of women who work in the maquiladoras. This really should be a national issue. Many of the deaths connected to working in those abusive factories continue to be concealed by men and also by very patriarchal governments, police, etc. Also we can’t forget we also have sweat shops in the U.S. Many women are silenced which really upsets me because it demonstrates that countries view some women as disposable and worthless.

3. At first I was a little hesitant about Chicana Power! both on content and ideas but after reading further I enjoyed most sections. The simile of how a historian is like a DJ is extremely relevant and compares two normally unrelated professions. She describes how she is able to blend many stories together to make them one piece. I believe they are cohesive because they both take emotional testimonies both in words whether formal interview or song and they are both able to inform their audience about a particular issue or event.

   Another section I enjoyed was that on the waves of feminism. The first being a struggle for suffrage, the second being through racial politics and the third one of separating slightly from the second by excluding women of color. I believe our history evolves around these waves of feminism. And I enjoyed learning about them because her first sentence of the chapter described how feminism was universally constructed based on the white middle class and when I thought of feminism I admittedly fell under that category.

4. Prior to this class I had also associated Chicana feminism as something directly connected to the Chicano movement. While in high school I had the opportunity to attend the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference and learned about the walkouts in the late 60s. I saw this as a movement that involved the entire Chicano/a community so it was surprising to see this idea of the vendida

5. Logic within the Chicano community. However I think Blackwell does a good job in outlining the four main arguments used against the chicana feminist, and two of them really called my attention. When she says that feminists were blamed for dividing the Chicano movement, I think that Chicana feminists can use this same argument today against all the Chicano male leaders because even though Chicanas contributed to the movement all along, they are the ones that have now been left out of the movement, hence the real divisors of this movement would not be the Chicana feminists but those that left them out of the historical context. Also the argument that they were seen as culturalists made me reflect on some of the things that go on even today. Feminists were “inauthentic/outside of/ antagonistic to Chicano culture” back then but this argument is still used today, no longer is it referred towards feminists but there seem to still be expectations of what an ” authentic Chicano/a” should be. Blackwell mentions that during the emergence of feminism, women engaged in la politics were seen as untraditional and today this idea of what a “traditional” Chicanas characteristics are still continues to exist.

6. I had heard about Chicana feminism prior to this class in my other Chicana/o Studies courses but I had never been introduced to its history; I figured there would be some kind of oppression on behalf of the white feminist movement to the Chicana feminists. Maylei Blackwell in “¡Chicana Power!” states that since women of color feminists who were activists and organizers of the movements had not used the word “feminism” they were not included in the “history of feminism” (24). Does it really matter if these women used the word as they were involved with the movements? I think the focus should be the ultimate goal of feminism which is to gain an equal status as men, to be regarded with equal dignity and honor as men, and as women who also have a voice and can no longer be silenced. Not only were women of color feminists subjugated to the margins of their own communities by the male organizers of the movements, but they were also marginalized by other women, white feminists who thought to be more powerful. As Blackwell comments, the only source of consciousness for the white woman feminists were the portrayal of how “strong” black women were; they did not care to know more about black women feminist movement or the way they thought about gender (19). White women were portrayed as the historical heroines of feminisms, whereareas women of color feminisms were in the shadows and nonexistent to the general public.

7. Blackwell mentions that the Chicano histories of Chicana feminism have been neglected and deemed not historically significant. Chicano histories have “not only erased women’s early participation; it has produced a masculine hegemony within those narratives” (28). Chicana feminists were portrayed as “vendidas” or conniving, sexual deviants that did not care about the Chicano movement. Sadly, this is how Chicanos reacted because Chicano cultural nationalism “privileged males and marginalized females” (33). As a result, Chicano histories of Chicana feminisms were placed outside of the movement’s histories, and were not included in the larger agenda for social justice of the Chicano movement. Instead, Chicano feminist interventions were placed near the decline of the movement and were sometimes associated as the cause of the end of the Chicano movement. In addition, Blackwell also mentions a section of Carlos Munoz’s book where he indicates that “the various stances on sexism became another reason for division within MEChA, with many women deciding to spend their energy on the development of their own feminist organizations” (30). This in fact was not true, instead these women worked harder than any Chicano in the movement. Blackwell describes it as “double-time activism” because Chicana feminist did not want to form a separate organization; they wanted to merge their visions and strategies within Chicano Movement organizations.

8. I had previously heard of the “vendida” logic when I first heard of the story of Malinche. Malinche was a figure back from the colonization period, who is said to have betrayed her people by associating with the Spanish and causing the Aztecs to loose their land. On the other hand, some see her as the birth mother to the Mestizaje that occur at the time, which gave way to the culture we now live in. So for that reason when I read the section “Of Malinches, Agringadas, and other traitorous tales:Uprooting the Vendida Logic” on page 30 of Blackwell’s book, the claims made there did not shock me. I saw the logic in some of them but most importantly I saw the belittling of women occurring as people from the movement broke up a movement over an issue of fidelity. There has always existed this idea that a person can only be honest and true to one movement. In this case, the Chicanas were seen as agringadas for following and bringing up to light a sexist issue imposed by the patriarchy of the Chicano movement. While in the Anglo-Saxon world, they were seen as fighting too much for their culture thus not really working towards the same cause. But in any case I feel that these were just ways to undermine the women who participated in either movement. I think Blackwell best sums up the outcome of this challenge when she writes “everyone was so busy claiming they were not Anglo-cized feminist that it made it seem like there were many women in the Chicano movement who were,” (page 32). Through this line we see the importance of identity in the movement but we also see how women had to defend themselves thus instead of dividing the moment, it actually created an inner war. This war took energy and time away from the movement thus creating a distraction from the movement. Not because the chicana feminist had a different motive but because the rest of the chicanos question the women’s identity and therefore they caused the distraction for them.

9. This is actually the first time I have heard about the Chicana movement. I remember a Latino walkout in high school, but I didn’t know such tactics were just repeat movement outcry from the past when Latino high school kids walked out for protest reasons. I had no idea about the different layers to the Chicana feminism movement or to any women movement for that matter. I briefly learned about the white women suffrage in high school, when the women had hunger strikes and were thrown in jail. The history book I was reading didn’t mention anything about the women of color who were also fighting for equal rights during the 1960’s and 1970’s, it just highlighted the civil rights act. I think the chicana feminism movement has been to generalized some Chicano men and history book writers because some Chicano men see the movement as the women being traitors or sellouts. The women who are trying to stay as far as possible from selling out, but just seeking equal treatment in society are overlooked by such men. The history book writers seem to clump the Chicana feminism movement as one group that had the same goals when actually the was a divide amongst the Chicana feminism movement. Some women wanted to have a bigger role in Chicano movement while other women didn’t want to be seen as sex slaves and housekeepers. Such women were in the same Chicana movement, but weren’t fighting for the same thing.

10. For anyone who has ever taken a women’s studies course, or is even just casually interested in feminisms, the notion that women have been systematically oppressed for generations is a clear one. Most people understand feminism to be the fight against male hegemony. While I have known for some time that the stories of feminist women of color are underrepresented in the dominant narrative of feminism, it came as a shock to me to truly see how much of their histories have been erased or ignored to a support white, middle-class, liberal feminist hegemony.
    Even to put the words “feminism” and “hegemony” next to each other as a unit, rather than as opposing forces, is upsetting to me. But Maylei Blackwell presents the information in such a way as to make it undeniable in ¡Chicana Power! To fit into this narrative of upper/middle-class white feminism, the movements of women of color are primarily discussed as emerging in the third wave. Many women of color feminisms, like Chicana feminism, were born out of several different movements, not just the white feminist movement or movements like abolition that white feminism was born from. Chicana feminism, and feminist thinking (even before it was called that), has deep roots in Mexican culture, roots in socialism, roots in el movimiento, and far more. Because many of these movements are not connected to white feminism, and because even the definition of feminism is not inherently the same for Chicanas, their history (and the history of feminism as a whole) has been mistreated.

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