Stuck Between A Chicano And The White Race Summary

Stuck Between a Chicano and the White Race

Chicana feminism was born out of Chicana women realizing that the Chicano Movement failed to acknowledge their struggles as women, and the Women’s Rights Movement was largely led by and focused on white women. Chicana women lived in a heterosexist and male dominant society, and faced sexism at home, even as they were expected to work for their husbands in the Chicano movement. They were also isolated from the Women’s Rights Movement because it focused largely on issues affecting First World white women, and Third World Chicanas’ needs conflicted with those of white women. The Chicana movement was hence centered around creating not only legal protections for Chicana women, but also around creating

literary work and art that described the Chicana experience.
The Chicano movement required the clout of Chicanas advocating for their cause, but the Chicanos did not wish to dilute their message by addressing problems that Chicana women faced.

Chicana women were told to wait for their turn, because the issues affecting the whole race took precedence over them (Ruiz, 2008, 111). As Padilla points out, Chicano culture was patriarchal, and women were encouraged to be submissive to their machos. This led to feminine issues, like that of abortion, becoming something that actively defied Chicano culture, and made Chicanas traitors for buying into the American idea of a surgical abortion (Padilla, 1972, 121). Padilla states that discussions on how to have an abortion took place since the time of their viejitas, but these were treated as individual problems that could be taken care of at home, without involving a public doctor. Padilla then questions

the safety of these “home-remedies” and claims that by enforcing this standard upon Chicana women, the Chicano is helping his own oppressor in maintaining the status quo (Padilla, 1972, 121). Chicano culture also treated the sexuality of women and men differently. Moraga addresses this repression of sexuality by stating that her brother’s sex was white, while hers was brown (Moraga, 1983, 90). Moraga states that she was seen as the property of her brother, and was hence desexualized to all his friends as his property (Moraga, 1983, 91). Moraga also criticizes the heterosexist nature of the Chicana discourse that focused on bettering their men (Moraga, 1983, 105). This further isolated queer Chicana women, like Moraga, from the paternal Chicano movement, and necessitated the creation of a new movement.
As a racial minority, Chicanas were discriminated against in the mainstream feminist movement, as white women assumed that they were uneducated.

White feminists were happy to put portraits of Chicanas in their homes, but rarely addressed the issues faced by lower-class Chicana women (Ruiz 110). In the case of forced sterilizations, these class and race differences led to these two groups of women having directly conflicting positions. With the growing fear that America did not have the resources to feed its rising population, doctors started to offer tubectomies to working class women, and Latina women who did not speak English were coerced into signing consent forms that effectively sterilized them (No Más Bebes, 2015). This led the Chicana movement to advocate for waiting periods before an abortion or a tubectomy was performed, so that women could fully understand what they were consenting to. The mainstream feminist movement, on the other hand, wanted to remove such obstacles to a woman having the access to abortion (No Más Bebes, 2015). The policies that ensured one set of women’s autonomy over their bodies threatened to do the opposite to the other. To many mainstream white feminists, this experience was so far removed from their experiences that they had never considered that it could be an issue, and perceived it as a fringe issue that would only dilute their message for their struggle for a more significant right. Besides not affecting most white women, forced

sterilizations also affected a group of women that many First World white feminists may not have seen as allies. They affected traditional Latina women, many of who prided themselves over being mothers, and feared that their husbands would abandon them if they were sterilized (No Más Bebes, 2015). First World white feminists read works like Paul Ehrich’s The Population Bomb, and many bought into the racist idea that Latina women were crossing over the border solely to have children, who would grow up to be American citizens, and dilute the vote of white women (No Más Bebes, 2015).
These struggles to find a place in one or both of these movements also caused conflict among the Chicana community. Some Chicanas believed that the Women’s Liberation Movement was only focused on the struggles of capitalist white women, witches, and lesbians, and that women of color were completely overlooked (Moraga, 1983, 106). While this was true to an extent, it ignored the fact that women of color, including queer women, had been active in this movement (Moraga, 1983, 106). The unwillingness to consider the issue of abortion and the issues of lesbians as something that may affect Chicana women brings the conflicts between different groups of Chicana women to the surface, and reveals the heterogeneity within Chicana feminism. These conflicts were in fact so divisive, that during the first national Chicana conference, half of the 600 women gathered walked out because they couldn’t agree on a common platform for issues like family planning and household management (Ruiz, 2008, 108).
Chicanas hence had to consolidate not only their differences from the Chicano mainstream feminist movements, but also the differences amongst themselves. Chicana feminism attempted to create its own narrative by embracing both their Mexican culture, and their queer and feminine identities. Border art by Chicana feminists often used supposedly repressive figures from their culture, and reframed them to better fit their narrative. For instance, Yolanda Lopez drew la Virgen de Guadalupe as an athlete, who had the autonomy to move her body, and show her skin, unlike the traditional image of a stationary and pious Guadeloupe (Anzaldua, 2015, 53). Similarly, Ester Hernandez, a lesbian Chicana feminist, painted Guadeloupe as a lesbian with short hair and an exposed back (Anzaldua, 2015, 53). Chicanas organized politically against forced sterilizations, and were able to make consent forms translated in Spanish a mandatory requirement (No Más Bebes, 2015). Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldua also developed interventions like mestiza consciousness in order to describe the experience of Chicana women who lived between two worlds (Anzaldua, 2015, 71). Chicana women formed a community with women of color and other minorities, and Chicana feminism expanded to a political ideology that was no longer restricted to a race or gender.
In conclusion, the Chicana movement came about due to the issues that Chicana women faced as a result of their intersecting female and Latina identities. The intersection of these identities shaped the political views of Chicana women in a manner that clashed with both the Chicano movement, which ignored feminine issues, and with the mainstream feminist movement, which ignored how their demands could adversely affect working class Chicana women, like in the case of sterilization. Chicana feminism hence had to create its own space and narrative, and did so by seeking political rights for its members, and by creating art that encapsulated the Chicana experience.