Abstract
Despite the considerable body of scholarship and practice on interconnected systems of dominance and its effects on women in different social locations, Chicanas remain “outside the frame” of mainstream academic feminist dialogues. This article provides an overview of the contributions of Chicana intersectional thought, research, and activism. We highlight four major scholarly areas of contribution: borders, identities, institutional inequalities, and praxis. Although not a full mapping of the Chicana/Latina presence in intersectionality, it proffers the distinctive features and themes defining the intersectional terrain of Chicana feminism.
An extraordinary amount of work on intersectionality has been done and has become institutionalized as a field of study within the academy. In feminist research, intersectionality is a major paradigm and celebrated as women’s studies’ “most important contribution” (McCall 2005, 1771). After a long history of exclusion, women of color are vital subjects and producers of feminist theorizing about how race, class, gender, and sexuality mutually construct each other as unjust power systems in the United States. Along with its unprecedented acclaim, intersectionality is generating controversial tensions about the consequences of its “mainstreaming.” How does this widespread use affect intersectionality’s definition and its transformative applications (Collins 2015)? Has it been depoliticized? Has it drifted from its roots in race and activism? Has social class fallen out of the discussion (Hancock 2016)? Has intersectionality been appropriated and “whitened” by mainstream feminism? Does it represent subordinate groups or does its current use prompt their exclusion, or misrepresentation (Bilge 2013, 1)? Here, we pose another pressing question: Where are Chicanas/Latinas in this burgeoning field of study and practice? This article joins the ongoing dialogue on trends that are now shaping intersectionality’s potential for decolonized knowledge production and activism.
Despite a strong presence in early multiracial feminist writings and activism, Chicanas’ contributions are obscured in the intersections canon, often disappearing in the undifferentiated category of “women of color.” Although commonly used generalizations about “African Americans and other women of color” appear to embody intersectional plurality, they often work to sideline, exclude, and erase Chicanas in academic feminism. Paradoxically, the concept “women of color” homogenizes differences across race, ethnicity, and national origin. It subsumes and substantively neglects Chicanas and Latinas, thus making intersectionality “largely about Black women” (Carbado 2013, 812). In this article, we do not challenge black feminism’s foundational frameworks in the development of intersectional thought. We do argue that work by and about Chicanas/Latinas is neglected in dominant intersectional thought.
We use the term Chicana when referring to U.S. women of Mexican descent, Mexican origin, and Mexican ancestry. Chicana scholars are the founding mothers of Latina intersectional feminist thought. We broaden our frame to place Latinas at the center, as subjects of inquiry and active agents in the gathering and analysis of our subordinate social locations. We caution that “Latino/Latina” as a social construct must be problematized, that it is complicated by differences in national origin, citizenship, race, class, and ethnicity and by the confluence of these factors. An intersectional approach acknowledges these differences and seeks to reveal and understand how they shape social experience (Zambrana 2011, 6-7). When we use the term Latinas, it is not as a unitary term that homogenizes distinctive heritage groups, but as a term of implicit solidarity with other U.S. groups with a Spanish colonial history and genealogical, political, cultural, and ethnic ties to Latin America (Latina Feminist Group 2001; Saldivar-Hull 2000). Latinas represent about 16.4 percent of the female population in the United States, of which 64 percent are of Mexican origin.
Since the 1960s, scholarship by and about Chicanas has proliferated. Sixteen years ago, Hurtado (2003, 2) described Chicana feminism as “provocative, incendiary, and a true call to action.” She described Chicana lived experiences as “a product of the stigmatized multiple group memberships that operate simultaneously” (66).
Today, intersectionality is a firmly established project within Chicana and Latina research and activist communities. However, the new scholarship has not substantively permeated larger intersectional discourses. Rarely do feminist academic reviews, discussions, or debates about intersectionality provide competent coverage of Chicana conditions, let alone reflect on how this ongoing work raises new questions about interdependent systems of inequality. To paraphrase Davalos (2010), there is good news and bad news about the relationship between Chicana intersectional work and the broader field of intersectionality. The good news is the outpouring of publications on the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender and sexuality in Latinas’ everyday lives. The bad news is that intersectional scholarship is neither widely cited nor engaged outside of Latino/a research communities. As Davalos so aptly puts it, “We are known only to ourselves” (2010, 550).
Why are Chicanas overlooked in academic feminist conversations about intersectionality? Two developments in social theory and research offer insight into the omission. They are best understood as epistemic, rooted in social science treatments of inequality. The first reason for the omission lies in sociology’s long-standing race paradigm, a black/white divide. This bi-racial model did not apply to Latinos; “ethnics” often counted as white in spite of their racialized identities and expected to assimilate into dominant society’s institutions. Racial reality, however, and the scholarship that examines it, have altered sociological understandings of Mexican-origin and Latino/as demographic groups. Ongoing immigration, more visible discrimination, and a shifting color line have required a new analytic framework. Race scholars have begun to challenge the bi-racial model and to insist on the inclusion of Latinos/as more centrally into racial inequality research (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Saenz and Manges Douglas 2015). But as the new racial paradigm has developed, theorizing about intersecting inequalities, particularly of race and gender, was primarily being anchored in black feminism.
The second set of epistemic developments tying black women with intersectionality rests in the framework’s genealogy and historic development (Nash 2011; Puar 2012). In the mid-eighties, women of color began to confront their race/gender oppressions and their omission from mainstream feminism (Baca Zinn et al. 1986). In the early nineties, multiple marginalization was coined as “intersectionality” by Crenshaw (1991) and fully developed as a form of social knowledge based on the social location of black women by Collins (1990). This important work made it appear that black women were the only originators and original subjects of intersectionality (Hancock 2016, 12).
A related explanation of Chicana omission lies in intersectionality’s historic development alongside standpoint feminism. Feminist standpoint theory (Collins 1990; Harding 1991; Smith 1990) claimed that women’s social locations, viewpoints, and experiences are resources for conducting knowledge about the social world. The development of this new paradigm coincided broadly with the development of women of color feminisms. Using their own marginalized standpoints, diverse groups of women strongly challenged what were once universal categories of gender (Baca Zinn and Dill 1996). Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990) became a leading exemplar of feminist standpoint theory. Along with work by other women of color, the canonical works of Collins and Crenshaw challenged mainstream feminism’s exclusion of women of color and the misinterpretation of their experiences. As standpoint theory and multiracial feminism developed concurrently, ongoing feminist discussions of race/gender oppressions tended to focus on black women, leaving the standpoint of Chicanas unacknowledged.
Recent discussions about intersectionality’s foundational moments and intellectual history underscore the multiple and simultaneous origins and invention of the concept (Collins and Bilge 2016; Hancock 2016; Nash 2011). Hancock (2016) warned of the danger of replicating the hegemonic politics that intersectionality was created to contest. She challenged the standard narrative that makes intersections a product of black feminism alone, and highlighted many locations of intersectionality’s emergence and development. For example: “In 1980, Moraga and Anzaldua interviewed Black feminist twins Barbara and Beverly Smith and began with the following question: “In your experience, how do class and race intersect in the women’s movement?” (Hancock 2016, 29; emphasis added). We note here, that their question rests on standpoint and intersectional principles. The marginalization of Chicanas in the field illustrates how epistemic inequality can develop within sociological and feminist thought. It reveals how “certain standpoints get marginalized as inferior . . . or lesser, while other standpoints get valorized as superior” (Go 2017, 105).
Having addressed why black women became the normative standard for intersectional analysis, we turn to the long-standing use of intersectional frameworks to understand Chicana experiences and struggles. We highlight distinctive features of what Collins and Bilge (2016, 35) call “working at the intersections” (emphasis added), both as critical inquiry and as praxis. We ask: What would it mean to the study of intersectionality to draw from work by and about Chicanas and Latinas? Here, we take a first step toward answering this question.
We focus on the contributions of a historic, colonized group of Mexican-origin women whose work early on examined the multiple interconnected oppressions of race, class, ethnicity, citizenship, and sexuality. We summarize current trends in intersectional knowledge production in the study of Latinos/as. Ours is the first comprehensive presentation of scholarship on Chicanas that is explicitly intersectional, with a dual focus on its interdependent forms of analysis and practice. A brief review of early Chicana feminism illustrates major advances in the development of intersectionality. We then provide an overview of the major contributions of four areas of thought, research, and practice and their prominent themes: borders (race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship), identity (being and knowing), institutional inequalities, and praxis (bridging, crossing, and resisting). These topic areas of multiple interconnected oppressions organize our analysis.
Like intersectionality itself, these major themes intertwine, overlap, and merge. But given our contention that the architecture of Chicana intersectionality is unique, we highlight distinctive manifestations of Chicana/o oppression and resistance. Taken together, our overview of the four major areas woven through Chicana scholarship and practice add breadth and depth to the larger field and reveal many areas of social life that are unrecognized and unacknowledged in current intersectional work. Incorporating the intersectional scholarship by and about Chicanas forges more comprehensive understandings of interconnected power systems and social protest in the twenty-first century.
Early Chicana Feminisms
While Chicanas are often absent in current discussions of intersectionality, they have never been silent. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chicanas participated actively in social protests. In many ways, they were like past generations of Mexican women who crossed the border at the turn of the century to flee revolution, economic displacement, and poverty. But now Mexican-origin women mobilized in a social movement for racial justice. Guided by the nationalist ideology of Chicanismo, the Chicano Movement of the 1970s united divergent protest groups, communities, and families. Chicana participation within El Movimiento led to their feminist awakening, speaking, and writing. A. M. García’s (1997) classic collection and analysis of the basic Chicana historical writings detail the intellectual trends and Chicana feminist projects that foreshadowed intersectionality as a field of study. Early Chicana writings appeared in essays, newsletters, editorials, and conference proceedings. A. M. García traces the emergent Chicana thought that began with race and class and later addressed gender. Like black feminism, evolving Chicana feminism was based on specific social locations and experiences that were markedly different from those of white women. Early Chicana feminism viewed oppression as the simultaneous product of race, class, and gender subordination (Blea 1992). Chicana feminists expressed a high level of frustration with both the Chicano movement and the women’s movement. Sandoval (2000) later proposed a methodology of the oppressed, analyzed as “oppositional consciousness” in Chicana feminism, and detailed how it was at odds with hegemonic feminism. Blackwell’s (2011) comprehensive history of Chicana feminism provided a new analysis of social justice, civil rights, and sexual identity struggles. Chicana feminists of the 1960s and 1970s helped to develop an intersectional analysis of oppressions that has not only created a political philosophy that embraces multiple identities and multi-issue organizing, but also multiplies the spaces and places in which Chicana feminisms are practiced. As Chicana feminisms developed, some writers, including Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981) and Pérez (1999), included sexuality as a structure of domination. Based on their own experiences and perspectives as lesbians, they enriched Chicana feminist analysis with discussions about race, class, gender, and sexuality as converging forms of oppression. Through the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial body of Chicana writing on race, gender, and sexuality became what Hancock (2016) called “intersection-like thinking.” Hancock’s founding narrative of intersectionality underscores the activist roots and political narratives of unheralded and diverse women including Chicana women whose writings “refused to engage in political analysis without attention to multiple categories” (Hancock 2016, 63). Following this approach, other Chicana feminist scholars, for example, Pérez (1999) and Fregoso (2003), analyzed selected features of Mexican women’s histories, identities, and feminisms on both sides of the border. Without directly labeling their approaches “intersectional,” they provided a rigorous examination of multiple interconnected oppressions in transnational settings.
Intersectional Precursors
Two foundational works by Chicanas stand out as intersectional precursors. The first is This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (1981), edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa. Bridge was an anthology of writings by women of color from diverse U.S. racial groups who challenged white feminists for inattention to issues facing minority women and their prescriptions for women’s universal solidarity. Like African American and Native American women, Chicanas emphasized the multiple historical and structural forces working together to subordinate them. In addition to highlighting race, gender, and class, the collection reflected the struggles of lesbians of color. Especially noteworthy is Moraga’s succinct intersectional thesis: “My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression. . . . In this country, lesbianism is a poverty—as being brown, as is being a woman as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions” (1981, 28; emphasis added).
The second distinctly intersectional Chicana classic is Anzaldúa’s first single-authored, semiautobiographical book, Borderlands, La Frontera (1987). This volume, now in its fourth edition, is perhaps the most widely read, studied, analyzed, and cited Chicana work. Here, Anzaldúa, a sixth-generation Chicana, used the geographical location of her birth in south Texas as the source of her Chicana feminist thought. Anzaldúa combined prose and poetry to express and conceptualize the various components of her oppression, identity, and agency as Chicana, lesbian, and a part of opposing races, nations, and cultures divided by invisible borders. Anzaldúa’s writings about borders and borderlands have traveled to many fields, including women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the social sciences. Her work is the subject of journal symposia (N. Cantú 2011a, 2011b; Segura and Zavella 2008), as well as edited volumes in the United States and around the world (Keating 2009; Keating and González-López 2011). While there is no unified theory of Chicana or Latina intersectionality, several distinctive Anzalduan themes and concepts are reflected in the following overview of broad areas of scholarship and practice.
Topic Areas of Chicana Intersectionality
Borders
Anzaldúa’s intersectional framework encompasses the five themes found within Chicana intersectionality: multiple interconnected oppressions, being and knowing, resisting, crossing, and bridging. Anzalduan thought rests on two concepts: borderlands and mestiza.
She built on the borderlands as a specific geographic location: the Southwest border between Mexico and Texas, with a well-known history of conquest, land-takeover, and subordination, layering one nation over a preexisting nation and creating a political dividing line between Mexico and Texas. Anzaldúa posited that ideas about borderlands are complex, have multiple meanings, and represent social spaces in which “races” conflict, and “otherness” are formed. First, the borderlands include the geopolitical space around the U.S.–Mexico border, a site where people, products, and ideas are in constant movement. Borders are not confined to geographical space. Instead, they are places of exclusion and marginality—spaces that are safe and unsafe (Anzaldúa 1987), distinguishing us from them, as well as places of identification, of feeling “in between” cultures, languages, or places. Borderlands are also spaces where the marginalized voice their identities and resistance (Segura and Zavella 2007, 4).
For Anzaldúa, the border between Mexico and the United States was a metaphor for all crossings including geopolitical boundaries, sexual transgressions, social dislocations, and crossings in multiple nationality, citizenship status, racial, linguistic, and cultural contexts (Alarcón 2003, 38; N. Cantú and Hurtado 2012, 6). What some now call “borderlands theory” (Hurtado 2009, 172) or “border theory” provides an overarching lens that scholars and activists use to understand lived reality by speaking to the borders inhabited across cultures and nations (N. Cantú 2011a, 2011b).
Chicana feminist borderland studies are firmly rooted in Anzalduan thought of place, space, and identity, crossings, and interconnected power formations in transnational space. An outstanding introduction to feminist social science borderlands research is provided by Segura and Zavella in the Gender & Society special issue on Gendered Borderlands (2008). They examined multiple meanings in four key dimensions of borderlands: structural, discursive, interactional, and agentic—any one of which can be a site of feminist analysis (see also Segura and Zavella 2007; Zavella 2011). Their conceptualization of borderlands projects’ key dimensions underscores the strong Anzalduan foundation. Moreover, they leave no doubt that intersectionality infuses the growing body of work: By exploring multiple sites of gendered control and contestation, borderlands feminist projects reveal the complex representations, experiences, and identities that Latinas, other women and men construct in the context of globalization, transnational migration, social formations, and imaginaries that span national borders. . . . They interrogate social locations within the matrix of domination to reveal the humanity and agency of persons presented as “other.” (2008, 543)
Borderlands articulated a new contribution to social theory. Grzanka (2014) explained that it introduced: A geographic, affective, cultural and political language (Black/White, gay/straight, Mexican American) . . . Anzaldúa’s borderlands are a very real space of cutting, overlap, collision, violence, resistance, blending and complexity; simultaneously, the borderlands are very nearly unrepresentable insomuch as no singular scientific, geometric, or cartographic framework can adequately capture the dynamic, co-constitutive process that characterizes life in the borderlands. In this sense, Anzaldúa’s work exemplifies the concept of intersectionality perhaps better than the traffic intersections metaphor so central to the field. (106; emphasis added)
The new specialization of gendered migration incorporates Anzalduan thought on borders, struggles with multiple oppressions, and social crossings. Research conducted in border settings has uncovered social arrangements once unknown in feminist thought. It offers new topics and fresh insights by probing gender’s connections with other power systems and how they operate in “in-between” spaces, places, and conditions.
Research on migration and gender began emerging in the 1990s when several important studies examined the relation between migration and gender (Boyd 1989; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Pedraza 1991). In her classic study of undocumented Mexican immigrants, Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994) demonstrated that gender shapes migration and the migration process itself shapes gender. Since then, immigration/gender scholarship has developed into a specialization in its own right, examining gender and care work, sexuality, sex trafficking, borderlands, and children. Two features of this ongoing effort to acknowledge gender as a fundamental component of migration are important. First, research by and about Latinas is prominent. Second, the focus on intersections in these research streams is “palpable,” according to Hondagneu-Sotelo. In her discussion of new directions in gender and immigration research, she summarized how gender is intertwined with nation and race in studies of migration and care work. She examined “inequalities between immigrant women and nation, the way these are constituted by the international unloading of domestic and reproductive work from women of the post-industrial, rich countries onto women from the less-developed, poor countries of the global south” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013, 182).
Not all border and border-crossing studies are categorically Anzalduan. A growing body of research on illegality sharpens our thinking about anti-immigrant sentiments, actions, and policies in the twenty-first century. Intersectionality has catalyzed new understanding of how illegality and deportation are racialized and gendered (García 2017; Romero 2008). Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2013) study revealed that current U.S. immigrant restriction policies have shifting race, class, and gender components. For example, today’s targeting of Latino men immigrants as criminals is different from the past, when Mexican women were seen as breeders and a drain on social welfare, and immigrant danger was viewed as a feminine threat. García (2017) highlighted Mexican women living in an anti-immigrant society where discrimination is intersectional and extends through institutional contexts that include the workplace, criminal justice system, educational institutions, and heath care settings.
Identities
Not only do borders and borderlands represent locations of varying and cross-cutting inequalities, they also produce complex identities constituted by race, gender, class, nation, citizenship, language, and sexuality. An impressive body of intersectional work reveals multiple dimensions of identity and unique forms of resistance. Adding to Anzaldúa’s (1987) first concept of borderland is the concept of mestiza, which means racial and cultural mixing. She advanced two constructs—the new mestiza, and mestiza consciousness—to explain hybrid identities and insights shaped by subordinate social locations. Here, ways of being and knowing are forged “in between” two countries, two social systems, two languages, and two cultures. Such “in-between” social positioning and its effect on identities is notably illustrated in two classic works on immigrant women: I’m Here but I’m There (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997) and I’m Neither Here nor There (Zavella 2011).
Hurtado’s (2017) extensive scholarship on Anzalduan thought yielded fresh insights and innovative directions of inquiry. Her fusion of the Anzalduan borderlands framework with social identity theory offered an analysis of stigmatized social identities as they vary from context to context. She named multiple subject positions “intersectional identity constellations,” which take into account the history and sociopolitical context in which Chicanas/os and Latinas/os exist in the United States and all of Latin America” (9). These identity constellations take shape in liminal social locations that afford inhabitants the ability to understand the system itself while also retaining the knowledge of one who comes from outside the system. New mestizas are social constructions produced by distinctive social arrangements of nation, race, class, gender, sexuality, and language or citizenship status. While standpoint principles run as a consistent thread in Chicana intersectionality, the scholarship on identities is particularly effective in demonstrating the value of situated knowledge. New mestizas occupy sites of analytic advantage. Anzaldúa’s theory of the new mestiza identified a subjective understanding of oppression she called “mestiza consciousness” (Keating 2009, 10). As Hurtado (2003) explained, a mestiza consciousness permits individuals to perceive multiple realities at once: “The basic concept involves the ability to hold multiple social perspectives while simultaneously maintaining a center that revolves around concrete forms of oppression” (15).
Martinez (2002) likened Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness to W.E.B. Dubois’s concept of “double consciousness” and African Americans’ development of various forms of opposition and resistance. The conceptual merging of Anzaldúa and DuBois is expanded by Falcon (2008) where, in a case study of Afro-Peruvian activists, she proposed an emergent mestiza double-consciousness—a gendering of double-consciousness and a broadening of mestiza consciousness to account for additional borderland existences along with transnational struggles beyond the U.S./Mexico border.
While skin color and black phenotypic features have been hidden dimensions of inequality and identity in Latino/a discourse, an emerging body of knowledge integrates colorism into contemporary scholarship (Bonilla-Silva 2013; Hurtado 1996; Telles and Ortiz 2008). Additional dimensions of racial heterogeneity are examined by Lopez and colleagues (2018), who found that multidimensional measures of race including “street race,” socially assigned race, and self-perceived race differ for Latino women and men when examined intersectionally.
The ability to “see” concrete forms of oppression accounts for the distinctive insights of marginalized people, providing “new angles of vision on social institutions, practices, social problems, and other social phenomena associated with social inequality” (Collins 2015, 3). The ability to “see” differently can also produce unique coping and resistance strategies. Estrada’s (2016) research on children of Latino street vendors finds that children who work with their parents develop “economic empathy,” a strength that develops from experiencing their parents’ position of oppression. Other findings showcase the identities and narratives of “intersectional dignities” to counter the young workers’ experiences of shame and stigma associated with street vending, an economic activity commonly viewed as deviant and low status (Estrada and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2011).
Epistemological benefits of seeing through the eyes of “the other” is an ongoing theme within the domain of Chicana intersectionality. In a study of Chicana college students, Delgado Bernal (2011) drew on Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness to analyze various ways of balancing and negotiating identities and resisting oppressive structures and micro-aggressions in an educational system that often excludes and silences Mexican American women. Scholars address methodological issues in studying interwoven forms of inequality. For example, Cuádraz and Uttal (1999) examined common dilemmas that arise when using in-depth interviews to conduct race, class, and gender analyses.
Identities are also important in generating activism. Sexual identity, for example, is a more recent area of significant knowledge production (Acosta 2013; Decena 2011) and has served as the basis for grassroots political mobilization (L. Cantú, Naples, and Ortiz 2009; Pastrana 2006). Queer Brown Voices (Quesada, Gomez, and Vidal Ortiz 2015) documented the experiences of activists who organized on local, state, and national levels in the 1970s through the 1990s. Through autobiographical stories and personal narratives of progressive mobilization and activism against racism, sexism, and homophobia, the authors highlighted how activists’ sexual identities are interconnected with other social roles comprising their struggles. Terriquez (2015) underscored collective identity formation and intersectional mobilization of LGBT youth in the immigrant rights movement. Analyzing “intersectional activism” expands our understanding of social divisions, how they build on each other and can be mobilized for empowering individuals and communities. This body of work shows that Chicanas and other Latinas have mobilized both in the United States and across borders to create alliances and movements to promote social justice.
Institutional Inequalities
Chicana theoretical intersectional analysis and activism contribute new understandings to intertwined institutional oppressions. While this scholarship spans major social institutions and addresses both macro and micro institutional relations that create and sustain multiple interconnected forms of inequality, we restrict our discussion to strong clusters of research in two settings: labor/economic arrangements and education. We provide brief descriptions of research that is not widely recognized in the intersectionality field, and much of this work could fit in several categories.
Labor market organizations and occupational segregation together with unpaid forms of reproductive labor have long been viewed as the core of race/gender/class inequalities (Baca Zinn and Dill 1994; Segura 1994; Zambrana 1982, 1995). Long before the term intersectionality was used, a body of literature on Chicanas’ placement in the labor force by race, class, and gender was ascending in feminist scholarship. Much of this early scholarship presaged the concept of intersectionality by analyzing the simultaneous effects of inequalities on Chicanas’ work—in both colonial labor systems and family life (Dill 1994). Like other women of color, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Glenn 1992), Chicanas were embedded in coercive labor systems that denied them social and economic supports. Research continues on how Latinas are located in twenty-first-century labor markets that distribute resources on the basis of race, class, and gender. For example, Flippen’s (2013) study of Latina immigrants’ labor market position in a new immigrant destination of the South highlighted multiple interrelated constraints on employment in a labor market segregated by gender, undocumented status, and family responsibilities. Sweet’s (2015) study of Latinas’ informal community work in an anti-immigrant city found women collectively challenging institutional practices affecting daily life. The change strategies they implemented were “multilayered,” and complicated by the intersection of gender, race, language, citizenship, and class, making for a comprehensive planning practice.
New clusters of labor scholarship have emerged. One example demonstrating the utility of intersectionality in clarifying how inequalities are structurally interconnected is the emerging body of research on ethnic entrepreneurship. In The New Entrepreneurs: How Race, Class, and Gender Shape American Enterprise (2011), Valdez examined how race, class, and gender at the macro level shape Latinos’ capacity to succeed in business. She used an expanded conception of entrepreneurship that incorporates a broad intersectionality framework to reveal a highly stratified U.S. social structure that conditions the life chances of entrepreneurs from different social locations within the same ethnic group. Ethnic entrepreneurship in intersectional perspective is further explored in a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, edited by Romero and Valdez (2016). This collection illustrates how intersectionality advances the study of entrepreneurship. Vallejo and Canizales (2016) and Estrada (2016) demonstrate an expanded conception of Latino entrepreneurship that includes multiple dimensions of identity and collectivity.
Education is a field highly receptive to intersectionality, as the growing research on Chicana/os confirms. Using multiple methods, scholars have exposed persistent inequalities from kindergarten through higher education. Findings underscore the severe underfunding of public education, the gendered differences in educational experiences, the economic challenges and familial obligations that first-generation students with multiple social status identities encounter, along with the daily microaggressions they experience navigating predominantly white institutions. Covarrubias’s (2011) quantitative analysis of the Chicana/o educational pipeline provided a detailed portrait of educational outcomes as they are shaped by distinct social, economic, political, and legal conditions. Núñez’s (2014) multilevel intersectional model examined the contextual factors shaping Latino immigrant students’ college access. Scholars use intersectional frameworks to analyze conflicting messages embodied in Latinos’ educational socialization (Chávez 2012; Espino 2016). Others focus on factors associated with decisions to attend graduate school (Ramirez 2013; Segura et al. 2011). In an edited volume, research is synthesized on the educational journeys of Mexican American students by gender, class, and nativity across the life course, highlighting the intersecting forces that hinder educational success and limit future employment opportunities (Zambrana and Hurtado 2015).
Scholars also are examining institutional transgressions and unwelcoming climates that compromise the retention and promotion of Chicano and Latino faculty in higher education due to the historic lack of systematized mentoring support systems, discrimination and institutional service burdens (Zambrana 2018). Education research also identifies new methodological questions and opens up new areas of investigation. For example, a symposium by education scholars highlighted how alternative ways of knowing can transform research tools and categories for the study of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality (Calderon et al. 2012). Chicano and Latino educational scholars are actively engaged in shifting institutional practices to open access to higher-quality educational opportunity. Valenzuela (1999) examined the patterns of immigrant achievement and U.S.-born underachievement for Mexican American youth and set an agenda for an activist politics of caring for parents, teachers, and scholars.
Praxis
Intersectionality’s contributions extend far beyond social research and analysis to address social injustices in wide-ranging settings and institutions. As a tool for empowering people, intersectionality is best characterized as transformative in that “it is seen not only as transforming knowledge but using knowledge to transform society” (Dill and Zambrana 2009, 13). Chicana feminism originated in and remains firmly rooted in interdependent dimensions of theory and praxis. As Hurtado (1998) theorized three decades ago, “For the Chicana feminist it is through our affiliation with the struggles of the other Third World people that we find our theories and methods” (153). A decade later, Davalos (2008, 8) described Chicana feminism as a knowledge project that is “accountable to social problems and aims to root out injustice.” Still, like other groups that are local and/or grassroots and draw upon intersectionality (Collins and Bilge 2016, 43), Chicanas remain understudied.
Among Latinas’ most distinctive contributions to intersectionality are those that are global in scope—the critical engagement with processes and structures of domination and empowerment operating in transnational space. Themes of resisting, crossing, and bridging are prominent here, yet they are not reaching larger intersectional discussions despite calls for intersectionality’s needed reorientation to nations, borders, and migration and linking theory to social and political struggles (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Grzanka 2014). Collins (2009, viii) asserted: “Transnational feminist communities come closest to approximating the radical potential of intersectionality.” Cross-border activism may well be Chicanas’ most exceptional intersectional advance. Although transnational perspectives remain largely unnoticed in mainstream intersectional discourse, they have always been an integral component of Chicana feminism.
The Anzalduan view of the U.S.–Mexico border as a transformative space—a site of agency and change—has yielded notable developments in transnational praxis. For example, border themes of identity, hybridity, and bridging are prominent in Segura and Zavella’s collection, Women and Migration in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (2007). Their transnational framework identified social, economic, and political experiences and coalitions across the geopolitical border where race, gender, sexuality, and class are negotiated daily. When women’s agency transcends geopolitical borders, they engage in what Segura and Zavella (2008, 537) referred to as “subjective transnationalism,” a range of women’s activities and identities anchored in power relations within and across national borders.
The borderlands context allows for new dimensions of intersectional thought. Facio and Segura (2011, 177) moved intersectionality beyond a nation-bound discourse in their discussion of “borderlands community praxis,” binational formations that include structural forces and women’s collective agency incorporating women’s perspective on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border. Téllez’s study (2008) of women’s social activism in a settler community near the northern Mexican border illustrated how living on the U.S./Mexican border can generate a political consciousness directed simultaneously at the neoliberal state and women’s unequal place in the home.
“Encuentros” were conferences or symposia that bridge the academy and community and connect activists from both sides of the border (Segura and Zavella 2007, 14). Sampio (2004), provided a vivid account of alliances between a group of U.S. Chicanas and Latinas from Colorado and indigenous women in Chiapas, Mexico. She illustrated shared resistance strategies across boundaries of space, geography, language, and culture. Through the organization Las Hermanas, the U.S. women sought to move beyond the confines of both Colorado and the United States to link their strategies with the histories of other women (especially indigenous women) in Mexico: Much like Anzaldúa’s (1987) articulation of a mestiza consciousness, or Sandoval’s (1991) “oppositional consciousness” Las Hermanas maintained that Chicanas shared a social, political, and economic location with women in Mexico by virtue of the relationship to colonialism, globalization, and racial, gendered, and class subordination in this century. (Sampio 2004, 188)
Anzalduan themes of “in-between space,” political consciousness, and resistance are found in Blackwell’s ethnography of Lidres Campenesinas (2010), a statewide farmworker women’s organization in California. This study examined how life experience on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border—in family structures and community-based social worlds—are sources of grassroots organizing and empowerment that challenge racialized and gendered forms of structural violence exacerbated by neoliberal globalization. Blackwell argued that immigrant women’s organizing offers new thinking for transnational and cross-border feminisms concerned with how gendered, sexual, economic, and racial power operate at local and global junctures. An example of this work is the creation of transnational alliances on anti-racist feminist organizing at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism (Falcon 2008).
Cross-border community praxis transcends the treatment of local and global as opposites, when in reality they are constitutively connected. The alliances described above move beyond analytic and political bifurcation, as they combine national or domestic activism with struggles against transnational imperial power targeting disenfranchised populations both here and there” (Go 2017, 197).
Implications and Challenges
As we have argued, the vast amount of work conducted by Chicana scholars since the late 1970s has remained relatively invisible in national feminist discourses and women’s studies classrooms. Our overview foregrounds intersectional work in a way that identifies its distinctive features, themes, and unique contributions, which are different from those of black feminist thought and broaden the landscape of intersectionality. Chicana intersectional work has created diffuse understandings of social locations, identities, experiences, and struggles and how they shift, change, and differ in particular historical and spatial contexts.
We argue that intersectionality must become more fully oriented to broad, historic, mixed indigenous U.S. populations of Mexican origin and racialized Latino/a immigrant transnational processes and structures, and to movements, borders, and dislocations. While intersectionality is already an interdisciplinary project, we urge scholars and practitioners to cross borders in other ways—by drawing from the knowledge bases of various marginalized groups. We return to the question we posed earlier: What would it mean to intersectional study and practice to draw from work by and about Chicanas? Our overview of intersecting power systems in Chicanas’ lives reveals distinctive forms of multiple oppression, being and knowing, resisting, crossing, and bridging. This body of work is instructive on many levels. It uncovers dimensions of oppression in addition to race, class, gender, and sexuality. By examining migration, language, nation, class, and citizenship as they vary in different local and global contexts, the work expands intersectionality.
Borders, a foundational concept on which much Chicana intersectionality rests, offers powerful theoretical and empirical value beyond its situated U.S./Mexico origins. In the twenty-first century, boundaries acquire new national and political significance as international migrants cross borders fleeing war, poverty, oppression, and natural disasters. Anzaldúa’s treatment of borders, place, and space is as compelling in this historical moment as it was when she wrote Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). Despite its unique significance for intersectional knowledge, and the fact that its basic premises are profound for intersectional studies with a global reach, the absence of Anzalduan thought in mainstream intersectionality is striking. Although many cite Borderlands, it remains only nominally used. Engaging the global economy and its consequences for colonized peoples in developing nations, especially those marginalized by race, class, gender, and sexuality, has become an overarching theme of Chicana feminisms across various disciplines. Anzalduan thought provides a lens that scholars and activists use in analyzing transnational structures, experiences, identities, and social movements. It also applies to the formation of multinational networks and alliances. The SIGNS Comparative Perspective Symposium: Gloria Anzaldúa, An International Perspective demonstrated how “border theory” is used in other parts of the world and offered a glimpse of how scholars in a number of countries apply Anzalduan thought to their own location (N. Cantú 2011a, 2011b).
Borders can comprise various spaces where languages, cultures, classes, and races intersect, clash, and create contradictions. In Anzaldua’s words, “living in a multicultural society, we cross into each other’s worlds all the time. We live in each other’s pockets, occupy each other’s territories, live in close proximity and intimacy with each other at home, in school, at work” (Anzaldúa 2000, quoted in Jacobs 2011, 123). Intersectional examination of the daily practices of individuals and communities will uncover multifaceted oppositions across a variety of groups and locations: from microlevels of personal transformation to large-scale social movements. A borders framework offers insights about the perspectives they afford those who are confined, that is, knowledge of social locations and resistance strategies. A borders framework furthers our understanding of how knowledge and politics are purposefully configured and deployed (N. Cantú and Hurtado 2012, 7; Grzanka 2014, 7).
As race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship hierarchies expand across national boundaries, their interconnections and forms of control acquire new features not sufficiently addressed in current intersections literature. Calling out this limitation, Purkayastha (2012) stated, “It is not clear how our current conceptualization of intersectionality . . . might change if we incorporate social life in transnational space” (58). She argued that we must elucidate the complexities of using this framework beyond Euro-American societies. We maintain that transnationalism has long defined Chicana feminisms, critically assessing a global economy that expands opportunities for some while creating powerlessness and suffering for others, notably, women of color and indigenous women. As the body of knowledge on gender/migration/economics and praxis illustrates, intersectional inequalities move across national borders at both the macro level of social institutions and the micro level of individual lives.
Chicana intersectional praxis is an area with unparalleled insights for the larger field of intersectionality and its pursuit of social justice. Critical praxis remains underemphasized in the field of intersectionality (Collins 2015, 6). Yet transnational alliances reveal unique forms of resistance, crossing, and bridging. They are an integral component of Chicana feminisms, accountable to social problems and an activist agenda for change (Davalos 2008; Facio and Segura 2011). Chicana community praxis reveals how cross-border alliances and coalitions can produce unifying activities that address inequities in both local communities and transnationally.
We encourage us all in our teaching, research, and practice to find ways of crossing, bridging, and collaborating across borders on social and political divisions of global capitalism, white nationalism, and patriarchy that place population groups differently and produce new social and economic inequities. Ongoing Chicana/Latina intersectional scholarship and activism pose pressing challenges for their integration into national and transnational feminist discourses and agendas. Only by expanding and enlarging our thinking about intertwined systems of oppression will the field achieve its transformative potential.
Footnotes
Authors’ note:
Special thanks to Margaret L. Andersen, Lenora Knowles, Wendy Hall, and the Gender & Society reviewers.
Maxine Baca Zinn is professor emerita of sociology at Michigan State University. Her coauthored books include Women of Color in U.S. Society, Diversity in Families, Gender through the Prism of Difference, and Social Problems. In 2000 she received the Jessie Bernard Award, given by the American Sociological Association in recognition of work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society. She received the Charles Horton Cooley Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Michigan Sociological Association in 2013, and the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award from the Latino/a Section of the American Sociological Association in 2015.
Ruth Enid Zambrana, PhD, is professor and interim chair of the Department of Women’s Studies and Director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her latest book is Toxic Ivory Tower: The Consequences of Work Stress on the Health of Underrepresented Minority Faculty (Rutgers University Press, 2018). Her awards include the 2013 American Public Health Association Latino Caucus, Founding Member Award for Vision and Leadership, 2013 University of Maryland Outstanding Woman of Color Award for her lifetime achievements, and the 2011 Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award by the American Sociological Association, Latinos/as Section.