Chicana Feminism

Influence of the Chicano and Feminist Movements

The Chicano movement grew out of a history and experience of labor inequalities and oppression and the efforts of activists and community leaders to correct them. While these efforts had begun as early as the first decades of the 20th century and throughout the southwest United States (chiefly Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California), the Chicano movement was most strongly influenced by the efforts of the United Farm Workers (UFW), led by César Chávez. This activism was the Chicano counterpart to the civil rights movement in the United States. Chicano university students in the 1960s became involved in supporting the UFW, as well as in questioning the general absence of Chicano experience from university curricula. In response, a Chicano Plan for Higher Education was published—El Plan de Santa Bárbara—calling for what would eventually result in the field of Chicano studies and the birth of Chicano studies scholarship. The U.S. feminist movement similarly responded to the fervor around civil rights. Inspired by the history of the women's suffrage movement in the 1920s, this movement worked to secure equality between the sexes in social, economic, and political contexts.

Chicana feminists responded to the ways in which they found themselves essentially absent from these two movements, despite the fact that they were in solidarity with the fundamental goals and purposes of both. The women's movement, as the feminist movement was often called, was largely a movement centered around White, Anglo (English-speaking) women, often of higher socio-economic status than most Chicanas and influenced by very different root experiences and ways of life. Although women shared in the experience of sexism, the experience of race and class generally was not reflected in the feminism of the women's movement.

Similarly, although the Chicano movement was making great strides for the Chicano community, even its very name—the masculine form Chicano—reflected the taken-for-granted invisibility of Chicana women and of their rights to equal participation with men in the privileges being gained. The emphasis on the family, or familia, as the unifying concept or metaphor for Chicanos, like Mexicans, assumed the role of the woman as unquestioning child bearer and mother, sexual partner to the dominant man, and self-sacrificing—as Mary was in the “holy family.” The roles of women in Mexican history and in the Chicano movement were largely invisible and unacknowledged; Chicana feminists found themselves bringing the awareness of the history of Mexican feminism to the attention of Chicanos as part of their claim of relevance.

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