Chicano Movement – CHST 404 – Chicana Feminisms

So Let’s Put Some of the Pieces Together

This is part of a longer blog series, which you can find links to the previous as well as the next blog posts at the bottom of this blog.

I think its time I put some things into perspective and piece some of the history and blogs together.

I have complied a time line with the perspectives of the blogs but also some big events of the Chicano History.

1947: Mendez v. Westminster Supreme Court: This case is critical to the birth of the Chicana/o Studies program because it is the case that desegregated schools for Mexican and Mexican American students in Orange County California School.

1968:Chicano Blowouts: Stepping stone towards establishing a formal conversation around the development and implementation of the programs as students walked out in response to the lack of an inclusive curriculum and discrimination they felt in their classrooms.

Plan de Santa Barbara: Noted as the manifesto for implementing Chicano Studies educational programs.

United Mexican-American Students (UMAS) of Loyola-Marymount Proposes a Chicano Studies Department: In a pretty hefty document the students of UMAS began to demand a Chicano Studies Department at LMU.

1970:Chicano Moratorium: An anti-Vietnam war protest that united the Chicanos under one cause, yet it went terribly wrong.

1973: Loyola Marymount University(LMU) officially merge and changes its name to what we know it as currently.

Mexican-American Studies Program proposed at LMU: Five years after UMAS proposes an immediate implementation of a Chicano Studies Program, a proposal for a Mexican-American Studies program emerges.

1974: Chicana/o Studies Department is finally borned at LMU.

Mid 1970’s:Chicana feminist get recognized in El Movimiento thus allowing the discourse of our Chicana Feminism class to occur.

2010: Governor of Arizona signs HB2281 and Tucson Unified School District disbanded Mexican American Studies.

2012: LMU’s Centennial Celebration!

The start of my Chicana/o Studies blog series.

So although this is the end of the series, it is time to recognize this would not have been possible without the help and support of Dr. Annemarie Perez, Dr. Karen Mary Davalos, Raymundo Andrade, Mahnaz Ghaznavi, and Christine Megowan and all those who laid the foundation of the department that gave birth to my interest to its history. Gracias!

The Birth of the Chicana/o Studies Department, Setting the Stage, Students Propose a New Program, From Chicano Studies Department to Mexican- American Studies Degree Program, Capstone Project Gone Blog

So You Want to Take Introduction to Chicana/o Studies?

This is part of a longer blog series, which you can find links to the previous as well as the next blog posts at the bottom of this blog.

From my work in my capstone project, I wanted to take a moment and reflect on the bigger picture and discuss why the birth of the Chicana/o Studies Department at Loyola Marymount Univesity is so important.

Consider being in history class and taking some time to learn about the Chicano movement so all you get is a couple of passages on the United Farm Workers Movement. Now this was part of the Chicano history but not the whole story. In other words, sometimes we not only want to learn HIStory but also our story. As stated in Mythohistorical Interventions where we not only hear the demand “that our side of the story be told,” as Lydia R. Aguirre, an activist of the time, retells but also asserts the need for more equal education and curricular equality.

Back in 1968, when high school students were walking out, this was one of the demands they had, curriculum reform. Departments like the one found at LMU or similar programs and departments across the nation can trace their roots back to students who wanted a say in their education. They wanted an equal education, which encompasses the telling of their side of the story but also an opportunity to tell the story. Thus driving many Chicano student activists to fight for the creation of Chicano studies programs and cultural centers in universities and colleges. Within this environment, now the Chicanos had an avenue to prosper in thus a dramatic increase in academic recognition in Chicano-produced work as seen over the years that followed. The creation of departments like LMU’s Chicana/o Studies department developed a professional organization in which a better dialogue across educational communities was born.

In a country that finds many great leaders in those who want change, it is sad to not recognize these sudents’ merits who worked towards the educational equality and curriculum reform . Their hard work and devotion to the programs that now exist across the nation starts to get devalued as the program they help set up get questioned and in some cases even banned. I hope I can now at least shine a light on why they are so important and need to be preserved.

On Chicana Artists: Isis Rodriguez

Picking up on the subject of Chicana Symbols, I wanted to present one that came to mind when discussing the idea in class.

Chicana Art: Isis Rodriguez – a second-generation Latina, known in the Chicana art community for her cartoon-styled pieces. Specifically her series – Little Miss Attitude (1998), depicted Chicanas and Latinas in different ways. Although she was part of the art movement that was more about personal representation as opposed to covering the broader subject of Latina women, her works navigate through adolescence in a way many girls (especially Latina girls) can relate to. But unlike Coyolxauqui, neither her or her pieces stand as major symbols for the Chicana community, instead, Isis expresses herself through the symbols. Her pieces include images of the Virgin Mary, a native girl, and a “roughneck” chola girl, among others. All images of what a (Latina) girl has been, or could be seen as.

Thus the female symbols, like those for the Chicano movement, are varied and dynamic. Chicana feminists have taken advantage of their understanding of these women and their struggles as a way to display their current struggle.

Women’s Leadership in the High School Blowouts of 1968

Education inequality has always been a common subject in the Latino community but the first time this issue was actually heard of across the country was during the 1968 East L.A. School Blowouts. These protests began in five East L.A. High Schools including Belmont, Garfield, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson where the student dropout rates were about fifty percent. The participants and supporters of the blowouts wanted to implement a bilingual and bicultural training for teachers, the elimination of tracking based on standardized tests and overall better access to a quality education. These high school walkouts were the beginning of a wave that brought about the student-ran organizations that create the main focus of the Chicano movement. Today there are plenty of articles and news stories that can be found on the Blowouts including how much has changed since then (http://articles.latimes.com/1988-03-07/local/me-488_1_lincoln-high-school-graduate). Yet, the role of women participation during these walkouts continues to be unrecognized. As Dolores Delgado Bernal mentions in “http://www.jstor.org/pss/3347162,” “their participation was vital to the Blowouts, yet because of a traditional leadership paradigm does not acknowledge the importance of those who participate in organizing, developing consciousness, and networking, their leadership remains unrecognized and unappreciated by most historians” (262).

A protest always takes a lot of planning; however this is the “behind the scenes” stage of an event that is never quite noticed. Before coming to the conclusion of a Boycott, numerous women including Tanya Luna Mount, Vicky Castro, Paula Crisostomo and Rachel Ochoa Cervera, attended and actively participated in meetings that were necessary to develop strategies from which to gather enough information of what really went on at these schools. The attendees for these meetings were primarily women and some even took place at the home of Tanya Luna Mount’s parents.

Another important stage of a protest is developing the consciousness of individuals, in which women took a great lead. “Developing the consciousness of individuals is crucial to generating and maintaining the momentum needed for any social movement,” and Delgado Bernal knows that this was possible thanks to the commitment of women. In her article, Delgado Bernal shares the stories of several women who participated in raising consciousness through informal conversations with their peers, family and other community members. They raised consciousness in any way they could regardless of the number of people that may not have believed them. It was in this step of the process that women also used print media to raise consciousness. Tanya Luna Mount and Mita Cuaron used their families’ mimeograph machines to duplicate their informational flyers that they would distribute throughout the community. Others were somehow connected to community activists newspapers like Inside Eastside and La Raza. Those that were directly involved with the publishings of these newspapers tried writing articles on the issues they saw in the education inequities and those that did not work directly in publishing all read and encouraged others to read these newspapers. Since Tanya Luna Mount and Paula Crisostomo were both still high school students at the time, they wrote articles that specifically addressed the educational conditions they had themselves witnessed in the East L.A. schools. Developing consciousness is often not seen as big of a task normally associated with the traditional characteristics of leadership, yet it is this type of “behind the scenes” work that sets up the stage for a movement to actually come about. It takes a leader to gather a community and to get a community together for a specific cause takes the time and effort to spread consciousness, this was one of the most important roles in women leadership during the walkouts, and although it may not be recognized as such, it was the fondation for the development of the movement itself.

Sources:

Delgado Bernal, Dolores. “Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Vol. 19, No. 2, Varieties of Women’s Oral History (1998), pp. 113-142

Image:

http://vivirlatino.com/2006/03/27/vl-en-casa-walkout-on-hbo-fidel-on-dvd.php

Reading Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (5)

Reading Assignment: Your reply (under Comments) is due before class on Monday, February 6. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.

Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (133-191)

How does Blackwell define and characterize the emergence and importance of Chicana print cultures and print communities? How do they fit with Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities? How does gendering post-colonialism change Chicano nationalism?

How did the writings of Hijas de Cuauhtemoc influence Chicana/o groups outside of Long Beach? What was their influence in Los Angeles, in California and the southwest?

How did Hijas de Cuauhtemoc evolve into Encuentro femenil? What significance did the newspaper and then journal have to the Chicano Movement? How did it shape Chicana feminism?

What were the issues of the Houston Chicana Conference? How did succeed and to what extent? How did it breakdown? What were the issues (and the feminisms) being contested? What were the outcomes of the breakdown?

Reading Aida Hurtado and Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo

credit: www.nataliedee.com

Aida Hurtado, “An Invitation to Power: The Restructuring of Gender in the Political Movements of the 1960s” (From The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism 91-122)

Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo, “Machismo Is Part of Our Culture,” “No More Cookies, Please”

What was your reaction to the poems? Did you like them? How do they connect to the reading we’re doing in Blackwell? Can you relate “Machismo Is Part of Our Culture” to the reading by Hurtado as well?

What are the Chicano masculinities described by Hurtado? Do you see Chicanas in the 1960s and 1970s defining their feminism against the masculinities of Chicano Movement? How do you see this working and what evidence for and against it have you seen in the readings?

Reading Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (4)

Reading Assignment: Your reply (under Comments) is due before class on Wednesday, February 1. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.

Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (91-125)

How were images of Chicanas deployed? Do you agree with Blackwell’s description of how images of Chicanas circulated within the Chicano Movement?

What were / are the Chicana critiques of nationalism according to Blackwell? What is your impression of nationalism?

How does Blackwell delineate the origins and usage of the term “machismo”? What would you add to her definitions? What is the Chicana critique of it?

Who were the original Hija de Cuauhtémoc? Why did the Chicanas at CSULB come to identify with them? How does their identification echo the connections between the Mexican Revolution and the Chicano Movement?

Chicana of Many Voices

Lorna Dee Cervantes is known as one of the greatest poets in Chicana literature. She was born on August 6, 1954 in San Francisco, California. Her parents came from Mexican and Native American descent. When she was young, her parents divorced and her mother took her and her brother to San Jose, California to live with her mother. Cervantes had a tough childhood living in a neighborhood filled with poverty, gangs, and violence. However, she found comfort in writing poetry; at the age of 8 she composed her first poem (Women’s History).

During her teenage years, she was influenced by African American women poets and reading their poems “politicized her.” She started questioning the dynamics of oppression, especially of women, and this made her very angry. Cervantes went on to work as an activist for the National Organization for Women, the Native American Movement, and the Chicano Movement. She used her poetry as a “weapon to denounce racism, sexism, violence against women, and the oppression of the disempowered” (Gonzalez). Later on in life, she went on to publish three books of poems: Emplumada, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, and Drive: The First Quartet.

In 1975, Cervantes wrote the poem Para Un Revolucionario [For a Revolutionay]. The following is my own interpretation of what she is trying to tell us in this poem. Given by the title, it is evident that this poem is directed toward the Chicano (men) on behalf of the Chicanas. She begins by describing that the words of liberation spoken by the Chicanos are like snow and the warmth of sun. Their Chicano spirit is so high that no army, police, or city can bring them down. His persuasive words draw her in and the “snow” raining from his mouth covers her breasts and hair. This can be a reference to how the men in the movement tried to get the young women to sleep with them. In Blackwell’s, Chicana Power, she mentions “sexual politics” and how men used Chicanismo to get women into bed.

In the second half of the poem, the tone changes the Chicana is bothered by the fact that she is stuck in the kitchen cooking and cleaning while he’s in the living room spreading his dream to brothers. This represents the sexism in the movement. Women we not allowed to discuss their opinions and ideas and if they did, they would be ignored and not taken seriously. The women did the “work” in the movement the cooking, cleaning, and typing. The poem goes on to say, “Pero, it seems I can only touch you/ With my body.” Once again, this describes how Chicanas were seen as sexual objects and not as political comrades and the only way they paid attention to the women were for sexual favors.

At the end, she addresses the “hermano raza” with her fears. “I am afraid that you will lie with me/ And awaken too late/ To find that you have fallen.” She is warning the brother raza that the revolution will fail without the cooperation and equality of Chicanos and Chicanas in the movement.

References

Blackwell, Maylei. Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement Austin: University of Texas, 2011. 70-76. Print.

Garcia, Alma M. “Para Un Revolucionario [For a Revolutionay].” Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997. 74-75. Print.

Gonzalez, Sonia V. “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes.” Goliath: Business Knowledge On Demand. MELUS, 22 Mar. 2007. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-7647816/Poetry-saved-my-life-an.html.

“Women’s History – Lorna Dee Cervantes.” Gale Cengage Learning. Web. 30 Jan. 2012. http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/whm/bio/cervantes_l.html.

Photo (image): http://www.poetscoop.org/SPRING2010BIOS.htm

Reading Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (3)

Reading Assignment: Your reply (under Comments) is due before class on Monday, January 30. Remember, you don’t need to answer all or even any of the questions, but your response should demonstrate you’ve done and thought about the readings. Be sure to check and make sure your response posts.

Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! (43-90)

How would you describe the women who made up the Chicana activists in Las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc? What were their backgrounds and experiences prior to come to Cal State Long Beach? What sense do you have of them as people?

What were the problems Chicanas going to college in the late 1960s and early 1970s experienced? Which were the same and which were different from those experienced by Chicanos? How did Chicanas cope with these problems?

How did involvement with the Chicano Movement influence the Chicana students? How did they change it and how were they changed by it?

What were the issues surrounding Anna NietoGomez’s election to the leadership in her campus MEChA? How was her leadership opposed?

What was/is “political familialism”? Relate Blackwell’s description of it to our earlier readings.

From where does Blackwell trace the origins of Chicana feminism? Who were these early role models?

What were some of the issues involving sex and sexuality revealed in the oral histories? What details were the most striking? How does it related to “chingón politics”?

Reading: Alma Garcia’s Chicana Feminist Thought (1)

Please address the discussion questions for the following readings by replying to this post. You do not have to answer all the questions, but be sure to demonstrate your familiarity with the reading.

El Plan de Aztlán

Alma Garcia, Chicana Feminist Thought (see Readings Page)

”Introduction” (1-16)
”The Woman of La Raza” by Enriqueta Longeaux Vasquez (29-31)
“Our Feminist Heritage” by Marta Cortera (41-44)

What do you think of when you think of the 1960s and 1970s? How do these readings fit in with or change your impressions?

Enriqueta Vasquez’s “The Woman of La Raza” was written in response to the same conference, the First National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in March of 1969, where “El Plan de Aztlán” was written and adopted. What connections can you see between the two documents? What sort of conflict, if any, do you read into them? How did women of color respond to the civil rights movement (both Black Nationalism and the Chicano Movement)? Why was it important that Marta Cortera “found” feminism with Mexican roots?

Alma Garcia discusses a series of Chicano movements in New Mexico (for land rights), California (for farmworkers, education and against the war in Vietnam) and Texas (political rights), among others. How do you think the differences between these movements and their participants impacted each region’s Chicano movement?

Garcia also writes about Chicano Nationalism (Chicanismo) and the depiction of the “Ideal Chicana.” What are the problems associated with such an idealized image? Does it relate to the notion of a feminism based on “multiple oppressions”?

How did Chicanas organize themselves? What were the mechanisms and how was writing important to their organizations?