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DOI: 10.1163/156916307X211008

2007 33: 709Crit SociolBenita Roth

A Dialogical View of the Emergence of Chicana Feminist Discourse1

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www.brill.nl/cs

A Dialogical View of the Emergence ofChicana Feminist Discourse1

Benita RothDepartment of Sociology, Binghamton University,

P.O. Box 6000, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, [email protected]

Abstract

I argue that a convergent dialogical approach to the understanding of social move-

ment discourse drawn from sociology and feminist studies is best suited for under-

standing challenges made by dissenters within social movements. I analyze second

wave Chicana feminism which arose in the 1960s and 1970s. I first discuss two

dialogical approaches in social movement and feminist theory to understand the

strategies that challengers within already oppositional movements use to confront

locally hegemonic discourse. Chicana feminists built their arguments on estab-

lished Chicano movement practice and values, but transformed/inverted the mean-

ings of movement concepts and appropriated movement practices to their own

newly forming feminist ends. In conclusion, I explore what the case of discursive

strategies in Chicana feminism tells us about the creation of blind spots in move-

ment discourse and what dialogical approaches can offer vis--vis an understand-

ing of discourses role in movement fragmentation.

Keywords

social movements, feminisms, Chicanas/os, discourse, history, family, lesbians,

gays, homophobia

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/156916307X211008

1 I would like to thank Dolores revizo at Occidental College, and my colleagues at Bing-

hamton University Nancy Appelbaum, Michael Hames-Garca, and Carlos Riob for com-

menting constructively on early drafts of this article. Members of the Workshop on Contentious

Politics at Columbia University also gave extremely helpful feedback. Tanks are due to Jean-

Pierre Reed and Hira Singh for organizing the panel at the Canadian Sociological and Anthropo-

logical Association meetings that led to the inclusion of this article in this issue of Critical Sociology.Lastly, many thanks to Verta aylor for essential comments that helped shape the final version.

Critical Sociology 33 (2007) 709730

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710 B. Roth / Critical Sociology 33 (2007) 709730

Introduction: Converging Looks at Social Movement Discourse

In the following, I argue that a convergent dialogical approach drawn

from sociology and feminist studies is best-suited to making sense of thedynamic and relational arguments for feminism made by women activistsalready situated in oppositional movements. I extend already existing dia-logical approaches that explain social movement challenges to hegemonicdiscourse to a different, more localized terrain: that of the social movementitself. Movements have internal power structures; these are penetrated bysocial relations of inequalities. Internal challenges to localized power withinmovements proceed dialogically, building on locally understood members

meanings about movements. Hence, even as challengers look outside theirmovements to disrupt the status quo, internal dissenters use movementlanguage and imagery to disrupt internal inequality.

Te internal disruption I analyze is the emergence of Chicana feminismfrom the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Chicana feminism

was one of a group of feminisms that arose in the 1960s and 1970s, duringAmericas second wave of feminist protest (Roth 2004; Garca 1997;Gluck et al. 1998; Springer 2005). I argue that previous accounts of thedevelopment of Chicana feminist discourse (Garca 1989; Ruiz 1998) have

described but not accounted for the specific emphases on Chicano historyand family structure in Chicana ideological formations. Chicana feministsbuilt their arguments on established Chicano movement values, but theytransformed/inverted the meanings of concepts and appropriated move-ment practices to their own newly forming feminist ends. A dialogicalframework reveals how Chicana feminists argued for space withina nation-alist movement that rejected feminism as vendidismo[selling-out] to Anglo[i.e., white] culture.

o understand how internal movement dissenters appropriate move-ment meanings to their own ends, I first discuss two dialogical approachesin social movement and feminist theory that uncover the discursive strate-gies that social movement challengers use to confront locally hegemonicdiscourse. I highlight the convergences I see in these theoretical strains,namely 1) the reliance by challengers on hegemonic discourse in the con-struction of fighting words; 2) the existence of blind spots or contradic-tions in challengers ideologies as a consequence of refashioning hegemonic

discourse; 3) the location of the development of oppositional discourse in

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B. Roth / Critical Sociology 33 (2007) 709730 711

challengers everyday worlds; and 4) the inherent instability of discursivestrategies developed by challengers. Next, by using archival sources, inter-views I conducted, and secondary sources, I consider a case of internalmovement dissenters, namely Chicana feminists, who challenged genderrole contradictions that affected their activism, particularly in the Chicanostudent movement. I consider how Chicana feminists dialogically arguedfor a feminist presence in the movement by appropriating Chicano move-ment discourse to rewrite Chicano/Mexicano history and recast communalunderstandings of family and machismo[masculinism]. In my conclusion,I come back to the question of what the case of Chicana feminism can tellus about the creation of blind spots in movement discourse, and what

dialogical approaches have to offer vis--vis an understanding of discoursesrole in generating social movement fragmentation. By using a dialogicalapproach to understand how internal movement dissent was constructedin this one case, I hope to make clear that challenging groups are capableof puncturing locally hegemonic discourse in the making of new claims forrecognition and equality.

Dialogical Approaches to Understanding Activists DiscursiveStrategies

In the late 1990s, sociologists Patricia Hill Collins and Marc Steinbergboth published books about social movement discourse that featured thephrase fighting words in the title. Hill Collins 1998 work, FightingWords: Black Women and the Search for Justice, and Steinbergs 1999 bookFighting Words: Working Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse inEarly Nineteenth-century Englandhad disparate intellectual goals, but both

were concerned with the production and content of oppositional discourse.Steinbergs focus was the formation of working-class political discourse inearly nineteenth-century England; Hill Collins addressed the usefulness ofcontemporary academic discourses for African-American womens politi-cal resistance. Te authors use of the phrase fighting words indicates aconvergent way of thinking about how challengers constructed their wordsin dialogue with the hegemonic constructions of meaning.

Steinbergs work (1998, 1999a, 1999b:743) relies strongly but not exclu-

sively on the work of Bakhtin (1981), whose focus was discourse as an



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ongoing process of social communication. Steinberg argued that earlyEnglish working class use of reformist rights language rather than class-based rhetoric can be explained by the need to engage and remake hege-monic liberal discourse. He emphasized how the qualities of discourseitself especially its multivocality, the way that words, phrases, and utter-ances do not have one unambiguous meaning but often have multiplemeanings both made challenges to hegemony possible and constrainedchallengers language (1999b:744: emphasis in original). Steinberg arguedthat a dialogical approach could account for how challengers used lan-guage in a relational manner with hegemony; how they redefined termsand reconstructed symbolic systems (see also Kane 1997); and how they

appropriated hegemonic meaning to their own ends. Discourses multivo-cality meant that hegemony was never complete; hegemonic discourseprovided its own seeds of challenge from below. In constructing challenges,then, activists were creative builders but did not have complete freedom.Tey used existing materials (although Steinberg does not characterizediscourse as a resource) to expand or discard categories of meaning usefulto their challenges, but they could not go outside of hegemonic meaningsystems to do so.

Hill Collins approach to discourse production dovetails with her previ-ous work in feminist standpoint theory, which emerged in the 1970s as afeminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowl-edge and practices of power (Harding 2004:1). Hers is therefore an explic-itly political project. Hill Collins arrives at the dialogical approach shetakes to oppositional (albeit academic) discourses by challenging themfrom Black womens self-defined standpoint[s] (1998:47). From suchstandpoints, Hill Collins argued, we can see where contemporary progres-sive academic discourses in sociology, postmodernism, and Afrocentrism unwittingly aid what she calls a new politics of containment(1998:13-14)aimed at using Black womens newly won visibility in the social world tomake invisible still existing practices of racial/gender exclusion. For HillCollins, the development of oppositional discourses needs to be examinedin light of the critical lacunae that result from failures to acknowledge theview of the outsider within (1998, 2004 [1986]) those participants

who are marginalized within social spaces, even as they are physically (and/or nominally) included. Hill Collins therefore sees the need for continuing

challenges to new hegemonies of critical theory, and positions her own



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work as a temporary resolution to the tensions inherent in creating newtheory (1998:xx).

Given such disparate projects, how are these scholars convergent in theirapproach to understanding the production of challengers discourses? First,Hill Collins and Steinberg agree that challengers do not invent their fight-ing words from whole cloth. Both authors are clear that it is activists rela-tionships with forms of dominant meaning that lead to contradictions ortensions in progressive discourse. Second, both authors stress that activ-ists blind spots in constructing ideologies are intelligible; they arise as aresult of challengers use of hegemonic conceptual apparatus. Steinbergnotes (1999b:771) that working class appropriation of dominant notions

of production and property had an unexamined masculinist cast thatmade it diffi cult for women workers to understand their place in politicaleconomy. Hill Collins sees some of Afrocentrisms masculinism as an appro-priation of and response to Western notions of science which left hierar-chical gender relationships unexamined (1998:180181). Tird, both HillCollins and Steinberg locate the development of fighting words in theeveryday world of socially situated resisters (Hill Collins 1998:xiii; Stein-berg 1999:xiiixv), even if the words are appropriated from a hegemonic

outside. Tey further believe we should understand fighting words asappropriated and refashioned in order to be useful for specific struggles,that is, fighting words are usually strategic. Lastly, both Hill Collins andSteinberg agree that the creation of a liberation discourse is an inherentlyunstable project and thus subject to critique. For Steinberg, this instabilityis due to the multivocal nature of discourse itself; Hill Collins does notcontradict the emphasis on multivocality so much as strongly question theadequacy of critical theory developed without incorporating the stand-points of the most oppressed. Tus, her conceptualization of the source ofdiscourses instability is more rooted in notions of unjust social stratification.

Mindful of the convergences between these scholars, I extend dialogicalviews regarding social movement discourse to dynamics within movementsthemselves. I maintain that a dialogical approach is useful in understand-ing challenges to the locally constructed counter-hegemonies established

within social movements. Following Comaroff and Comaroff (1991:23), Idefine the hegemonic as that which has become taken for granted, as signsand practices, relations and distinctions, images and epistemologies drawn

from a historically situated cultural field that come to be taken for granted



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as the natural and received shape of the world and everything that inhabitsit. Oppositional communities create counter-hegemonies, and these new,movement-based meaning structures can become subject to contestationinternally, especially if and to the degree that they are constructed withoutinput from those disadvantaged by pervasive structural inequalities, likegender and race. Challengers can appropriate hegemonic discourse becauseof the qualities of discourse itself the way that discourse is the socialproduction of meaning that is essentially dialectic, dynamic, and riven

with contradictions (Steinberg 1998:8512). It is therefore possible forinternal movement challengers to shift movement meanings to advancetheir agendas.

In the next section, I briefly narrate how emerging Chicana feminists inthe 1960s and 1970s experienced contradictions regarding gender rolesthat led to their contesting Chicano movement priorities. I address howprevious accounts of the development of Chicana feminist discourse, thoughvaluable, have been descriptive of ideological content rather than analyticalas to how that ideology was made. I argue that the specific content of Chi-cana feminism its focus on rewriting Chicana/o history and revising themeaning of family should be understood as a product of dialogue with

Chicano nationalists, particularly in the student movement, who opposedfeminist praxis.

Te Emergence of Chicana Feminism in the Chicana/o StudentMovement

Chicana feminism arose chiefly from the part of the Chicano movementcentered on college campuses; several Chicana feminist groups also formed

out of urban community organizations. Te Chicana/o movement, likeother movements on the left in the 1960s and 1970s had several differentloci, both urban and rural.2While there were connections between rurallybased activists and college students, it was urban community organizing like the Crusade for Justice in Denver, Colorado, led by Rodolfo Corky

2 On the rural front, Chicanas/os formed the United Farm Workers (Mirand and Enrquez

1979; Cotera 1977, 1980) and the land grant movement in New Mexico, which sought the

return of land to Hispanofamilies who had lived in the state prior to the 1848 conquest (Ludwig1972). Urban organizations included the Crusade for Justice in Denver; the La Raza Unida



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Gonzales that had more direct, although complicated, relationships withthe Chicana feminism that grew up on college campuses. In a famousexample, the Crusade for Justice helped sponsor the 1969 Chicano YouthLiberation Conference, which was attended by up to fifteen hundred activ-ists, and which issued the Chicano nationalist program, El Plan Espiritualde Aztln [Te Aztln Spiritual Plan]. It was at the Youth Liberation Con-ference that a workshop on womens issues sent out a statement that readin part (i)t was the consensus of the group that the Chicana Woman doesnot want to be liberated (Flores 1971a:2; La Raza1971:43; Lpez 1977:2324).3Tere were different views as to what was meant by the workshop state-ment, but it appears to have furthered claims that feminism was unnecessary

for Chicanas, who would achieve liberation through the nationalist movement(Blackwell 2000; Cotera 1977; Longauex y Vasquez 1970; Vsquez 1977).

Younger Chicano activists in the 1960s and 1970s were more confron-tational in their politics than earlier activists, influenced by the rise inmilitancy in the Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement (de la Garza1979; Gmez-Quiones 1990). Student activists took a cultural national-ist approach, constructing a vision of Chicanismo[roughly, Chicano-ness]

which they felt put their community at odds with mainstream America. As

they found themselves in growing numbers on university campuses, butstill vastly outnumbered by whites, Chicana/o students worked for Chi-cano studies curricula and for greater links between the university and thecommunity (Ortego 1971:168). Tey formed organizations like UnitedMexican American Students (UMAS), most of which later changed theirnames toMovimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztln[Te Chicano StudentMovement of Aztln], abbreviated as MEChA (Gmez-Quiones 1990;Rosen 1974). As in other left movements of the era, women were crucialto the day-to-day running of Chicano movement organizations. Chicanastudents were by and large first-generation college attenders, most of whosemothers worked in the home (Cooney 1975). By 1969, contradictionsaround movement participation emerged for Chicanas, as student organi-zations followed the trend toward an exclusively male public leadership

[United Race] Party, which spread from Crystal City, exas (Lpez 1977); and the Chicano

Moratorium movement (see Escobar 1993 and Herrera 1971).

3 Aztln refers to the area conquered by the United States in the Mexican-American War,

namely the Southwest. It is the symbolic homeland of the Chicano people.



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typical of many of older nationalist Chicano organizations (del Castillo1980). Male activists argued that strong public roles for men and support-ive private roles for women were needed to preserve Chicano culture andmovement carnalismo[comradeship]. In one case, Chicana student leaders

were actually hidden from Rudolfo Corky Gonzalez when he came tospeak to a student organization (del Castillo 1980). Other Chicana activ-ists found themselves ignored when they spoke as individuals in meetingsand increasingly, women felt silenced (Baca Zinn 1975; del Castillo 1980;La Raza1971).

Te contradictions that Chicanas in the student movement experiencedbetween the expansion of gender roles due to movement work and the

movements masculinist emphasis on maintaining those roles in the nameof cultural preservation led to a feminist reconsideration of the terms of

womens participation within the movement. Some of the internal move-ment structures that Chicana feminists challenged, such as the lack of lead-ership opportunities for women, were similar to those addressed by feministsin other left movements (Comision Femenil Mexicana1971; Cotera 1976a;Flores 1971a, 1971b; Mirand and Enrquez 1979; Vidal 1971a). Someissues were culturally specific, such as those involving sexuality. Chicana

feminists repudiated cultural mores that they felt contributed to the move-ments double standards regarding womens sexuality (see especially Anon-ymous 1997 [1970]; Hernndez 1997 [1972]), while at the same timeseeking to confront the existence of unwanted and unnecessary steriliza-tions of Chicanas by the Anglo medical/welfare establishment (Espino2000 [1993]).

From 1969 on, Chicana feminists created autonomous womens groupsand womens caucuses within mixed Chicano organizations (see Blackwell2000; Bennett 1971; Cotera 1977; Flores 1971a; Lpez 1977; Nellhaus1971; Roth 2004; Vidal 1971a, 1971b). Teir insiders critique of move-ment gender roles grew despite considerable backlash from those opposedto their organizing. Anti-feminists in the Chicano movement loyalists,to use Ana Nieto-Gmez term (1997[1974]) charged feminists withbeing agabachadas [Anglocized or Americanized]. Loyalists constructedfeminism as something alien to the Chicano community, a charge seem-ingly bolstered by the simultaneous eruption of feminist organizing in the

white and Black left, not to mention in the liberal mainstream (Roth

2004). Chicana feminists had to contend with the depiction of feminism



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as a suspect Anglo infection of the Chicano body politic, while theythemselves envisioned feminism as part of the Chicano movement, ada-mant about the need to work together with men to achieve liberation(Flores 1971a, 1971b; Cotera 1976; Comision Femenil Mexicana 1973;Mirand and Enrquez 1979; Vidal 1971a). Given their desire to staylinked to the Chicano movement, feminists faced the continuing politicalchallenge of justifying feminist praxis as indigenous Chicano/a praxis.Backlash against feminist organizing was met dialogically by emergingChicana feminists as they fashioned arguments designed to assuage loyal-ists fears of outside Anglo infection, and as they assured themselves that afeminist agenda was squarely in line with Chicano movement values.

Previous Accounts of Chicano Movement Backlash to Feminism

Before turning to the dialogical development of Chicana feminist discoursein the 1960s and 1970s, I wish to briefly consider previous accounts of thedevelopment of Chicana feminist discourse. Alma Garcas article, TeDevelopment of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970-1980, focused on

what she saw as three major issues with which Chicana feminists were

concerned: the relationship between Chicana feminism and the ideologyof cultural nationalism, feminist baiting within the Chicano movementand the relationship between the Chicana feminist movement and the

white feminist movement(1989:217). Garcas assessment of the argu-ments made by Chicana feminists to justify feminist praxis is an accuratebut largely descriptive account, aimed at showing that Chicana feministideology was distinct from other feminist ideologies of the time. She arguedthat Chicana feminists were interested in keeping a nationalist frameworkfor their feminism, and she is particularly strong at showing how long-standing conflicts about Chicana feminisms position in the communityvis--vis white feminism continued through the 1980s. But she does notanalyze how Chicana feminist arguments were made out of particularmovement-level discursive materials, and she treats as unproblematic the earlyChicana feminist silence around questions of lesbianism (see 1989:2267).Garcas account is thus a history of the appearance but not the underpin-nings of Chicana feminist discourse.

Vicki L. Ruiz account of 1960s Chicana feminism is the main part of a

chapter entitled La Nueva [the New] Chicana: Women and the Movement,



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in her 1998 book From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in wentiethCentury America. Ruiz, a historian, pays particularly close attention to howemerging Chicana feminists used Chicana/o history, noting, for example,how feminists reclaimed disparaged female Mexicana/Chicana historicalfigures as part of their feminist activism. Ruizs view of these feminist proj-ects is much closer to the one I will outline below; for one thing, she ismore analytical in her assessment of how reclaiming historical figureshelped solve Chicana feminist dilemmas over where they fit into thenationalist project. I wish, however, to take her analysis further by under-standing feminists reclaiming of history as not solely activism in itself, butas the strategic deployment of discourse aimed at reshaping internal move-

ment relationships. I will also examine how Chicana feminists transformedmovement meanings around questions of family in arguing for the incorpo-ration of feminist praxis into Chicano movement politics. Tus, a readerfamiliar with previous accounts of Chicana feminist ideology will find myaccount dovetailing with these accounts, but (hopefully) extending themby showing the ways in which feminists both accepted movement values andtransformed/appropriated movement practices toward new feminist aims.

Rewriting History: Chicana Feminists Strategic Recovery of theFeminist Past

Why wrestle with communal history in order to develop strategic feministdiscourse? Such wrestling would not emerge naturally from a set of fem-inist concerns about gender egalitarianism, child care, sexual double stan-dards, equal pay, and the like. Te striking concern of emergent Chicanafeminists with rewriting their history is intelligible if we consider the spe-

cific movement base from which Chicana feminists, particularly students,organized. Te discursive strategies used by Chicanas in arguing for femi-nist space in the student movement reflected their awareness of what mightplay well within that movement. At issue especially was the need to positChicana feminism as an indigenous phenomenon, a development internalto the Chicano oppositional community.

One of the key cultural/political practices of 1960s Chicano studentactivism involved uncovering buried Chicano history in order to establish

new curricula in educational institutions. Te high school blow-outs[walk-outs] by Chicana/os in the Los Angeles area in the mid- to late 1960s



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were in part prompted by students dissatisfaction with an Anglocentriccurriculum (Rosen 1974). College student activists were part of the afore-mentioned conference sponsored by the Crusade for Justice in Denver inMarch of 1969. El Plan Espiritual de Aztln stressed the total recastingof education as vital for Chicano rebirth (Muoz 1989). A month later, in

April of 1969, student representatives from almost thirty campus groupsgathered in Santa Barbara to coordinate the establishment of Chicanostudies programs; this gathering resulted in El Plan de Santa Barbara, amanifesto demanding that universities support students already existingefforts toward transforming the curriculum (Muoz 1989:136). Studentsargued that new knowledge would help tie campus and community

together into a unified, resistant whole.Te practice of recovery by Chicano student activists resulted in a his-

tory of heroism in struggle against Anglo domination on both sides of the1848 border. Tis history was not a simple history of domination nor acatalog of luminaries, as inclusion in the pantheon of heroes was given tothose who explicitly challenged Anglo power.4Student activists could thenposit their struggle as the next step in a process of resistance. Te logic ofuncovering heroes in order to locate current resistance was exactly the logic

that Chicana feminists followed in their search for female role models inChicano/Mexicano history; however, they shifted the emphasis to that ofrediscovering the Chicana feminist past. Tey thus accepted the valueplaced by the nationalist student movement on recovering a heroic Chi-cano history, but they sought a redefinition of this history that highlighted

womens participation as a means of sanctioning their own feminist orga-nizing as nationalist (Cotera 1976a; Ruiz 1998). Tese female historicalrole models were cultural productions used to bolster the idea that femi-nism was more like a national issue as opposed to an individual issue

which made us feel less selfish (Nieto-Gmez cited in Gluck et al.1998:47).

Te historical figures uncovered were heterogeneous as to social locationand drawn from both sides of the border between Mxico and Aztln.

4 I do not claim that only Chicano students concerned themselves with the fashioning of

Chicano history or that they only concerned themselves with reclaiming history, but that remaking

history was a salient element of their activism. See Gutirrez (1997) for a historiography of aca-demic/activist Chicano/a history.



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Names that continuously reappear in emergent Chicana feminist writingsinclude the maligned sixteenth-century Indian princess Malintzn en-pal; the seventeenth-century Mexican nun and writer, Sor Juana Inez de laCruz; Doa Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez, active in the Mexican indepen-dence movement in the early 1800s; the soldaderas[female soldiers], Las

Adelitas of the 1910 Mexican revolution; Mexican bourgeois feminists ofthe 1920s and 1930s; Chicana labor organizers in the United States, suchas Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers (Cotera 1976a, 1976b, 1977;de Alba 1998; del Castillo 1997 [1974]; Enrquez and Mirand 1978; Gar-ca 1997; Gonzales 1979; Martnez 1997 [1971]; Murphy 1971: Mirandand Enrquez 1979; Nieto-Gmez 1976: Rincon 1971; Ruiz 1998).

Chicana feminists did not just add women to the pantheon of heroes;they claimed these new female heroes asfeministones, with little concernover using the word feminist anachronistically (Martnez 1998). Teyalso reclaimed disparaged female figures as worthy of inclusion, invertingpreviously held meanings regarding the cultural worth of some figures.Chicana feminist extension and appropriation of the meaning of heroismis evident in their inclusion of the figure alternatively known as Malintznenpal, Doa Marina, orla Malinche(del Castillo 1997 [1974]; see also

de Alba 1998 and Ruiz 1998). La Malinche was widely known (and dis-paraged) among Mexicans as Corts mistress; she reportedly bore hischild, and is thus regarded by some as the mother of the mixed-race, mes-tizoMexican (and therefore Chicano) people, a kind of Mexican Eve.She acted as a translator and interlocutor between the Spanish and local

Aztec elites; born into Aztec nobility, she was reportedly sold as a slave tothe Mayans, and then given to Corts as a spoil of war. With such a his-tory a disputed one at that she was an unlikely candidate for inclusionin a pantheon of heroines. In colloquial Mexican Spanish, to call someonea malinchistais to call them a traitor, with the even more specific connota-tion of selling out to foreigners (Ruiz 1998:106). But Chicana feminists,beginning with del Castillo in the early 1970s, argued for Doa Marinasagency and historical import. Ruiz (1998:1067) sees this reclamation ofLa Malinche as one of the first tasks Chicana feminists faced, but whyreclaim her for feminism? Why not downplay or discard her?

Chicana feminists, in a process of inversion of established movementmeaning, recast the failings of la Malinche her links to the Spanish,

and especially, her relationship with Corts as strong points. In feminist



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circles, Malintzn came to be regarded as a heroic mother of a new people,and the originator of Chicanos special cultural blend of mestizaje[blend-ing]. Te shame of bearing the conquerors child was inverted by feministsinto the honor of giving the gift of mestizaje; without Malintzn, the his-tory of la Raza, the mixed Mexican people, does not begin. Rather thanbeing a traidora a la patria [a traitor to the nation], del Castillo and otherChicana feminists saw Malintzn as a woman who made communicationbetween the two worlds [i.e. Aztec and Spanish] possible (del Castillo1997[1974] 1245). Malintzns cultural position of being a traitor, a ven-dida who sold her people out to the Spanish, makes this reclamation/inver-sion by Chicana feminists particularly telling of their desire to confront

putative charges of contemporary feminist vendidismo. As I discuss below,Chicana feminists confronted such charges by arguing that it was mascu-linist traditionalists los machos who were the real sell-outs to Anglovalues, further inverting existing movement imagery to make the case forfeminist activism.

Te example of Malintzn shows that emerging Chicana feminists activelychanged the meanings placed on female figures they were making visible,giving them a newly evaluated status and recasting them as indigenous

proto-feminists. Te nationalist Chicano movement practice of uncover-ing Chicano history was transformed by feminists into a nationalist andafeminist project, one that was both expressive of cultural identity and stra-tegic for feminists seeking inclusion of their agenda and organizing. EmergingChicana feminists recognized the ideological resource that their rediscoveriesof historical Chicana feminists represented. Marta Cotera, a exas-basedactivist and scholar, explicitly acknowledged the value of enlightening menas to their existence:

Tats a really neat argument we had to use it in the Sixties when the guys

said, Get back home yo en las conferencias, yo haciendola ms bonita, y tu

en la casa [Me at the conferences, I do it better than you, and you at home].

Tats one of the reasons we need our history to fall back on in these situa-

tions. (1976b:16)

Te assertion of the existence of historical and indigenous Chicana femi-nism through the appropriated practice of uncovering historical role mod-

els and the inversion of previous depictions of female figures seemed to



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have had some power. By the late 1970s, the idea crystallized among manythat Chicana feminism was a wholly indigenous phenomenon unlinked inany way to white feminist activism (see especially Gonzales 1979; Mirandand Enrquez 1979). Te assertion of utter indigenousness for Chicanafeminism was later criticized as limiting, but as emerging Chicana femi-nists battled backlash, the uncovering and assertion of indigenous feministresistance in Chicano movement history both accepted existing Chicanomovement practices and extended those practices into new feminist realms.

Remaking the Meaning of Familia: Gender Egalitarianism as

Communal Struggle

A second area where Chicana feminists worked to appropriate and invertChicano movement meanings was that of family. Movement loyalistsargued that feminism disrupted traditional male/female roles that werecrucial for the preservation of Chicano culture (Baca Zinn 1975). Tisview was answered, in the words of Francesca Flores, with the feminist cryof OUR CULURE, HELL! (Flores 1971b:1). Chicana feminists coun-tered that only the best of Chicano culture was to be fought for, withmachismo discarded in the interest of progress. Tey agreed with the move-ment idea of the family as a primary locus of resistance to Anglo domina-tion, and accepted hegemonic depictions of the movement as an extendedquasi-family engaged in struggle. But Chicana feminists also inverted ideasabout what being part of a traditionalChicano (movement) family meant,arguing that the Chicano family was never the repository of machismothat anti-feminists made it out to be. Tere was thus no traditional cultureto return to, as the loyalists claimed. In this, the Chicana feminist empha-

sis on the liberating potential of the (heterosexual, extended) family standsin contrast to some views in white feminism, where relations in the nuclearfamily were seen as limiting feminist advances (see Friedan 1963 and Polat-nik 1996).

Campus groups, like other organizations in the movement, saw them-selves as forming extended families, with roles built on quasi-familial lines.Dolores Huerta (1975:21) commented on the familial structure of thefarm workers struggle:



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[I]ts really kind of old fashioned. Remember when you were little you had

always had your uncles, your aunts, your grandmother and your comadres

[godmothers] around. As a child in the Mexican culture you identified with a

lot of people, not just your mother and father like they do in the middle classhomes.

But activists recognition of the quasi-familial structure of movement orga-nizations did not have the effect of stabilizing the meaning offamilia[fam-ily] for movement participants, least of all for feminist challengers. Indialogical fashion, Chicana feminists took advantage of contradictions inattitudes and meaning structures among Chicanos as to how gender roles

in the family operated. For example, Francisca Flores (1971a, 1971b),Maxine Baca Zinn (1975) and other Chicana feminists challenged theentire conceptualization of Chicano culture as traditional in its genderroles. Baca Zinn argued that racism and internal colonization had alreadyrestructured the Chicano family along gender egalitarian lines, as familiesstruggled against domination together. She named this phenomenon ofmutual family struggle political familialism (Baca Zinn 1975:16) andused its existence to argue that Chicano culture was not traditionalisteither. It is clearly here where Flores cry of dismissal fits in terms of discur-sive strategy; according to feminists, theywere fighting for thepreservationof Chicano families, which were already characterized by nascent genderegalitarianism.

In their fight to re-envision the meaning of family in Chicano move-ment culture, feminists were aided by some nominally present nods towardgender egalitarianism in the student movement. One anonymous Chicanafeminist writer noted that El Plan Espiritual de Aztln recommendedthat the movement change the concept of the alienated family where the

woman assumes total responsibility for the care of the home... to the con-cept of La Raza as the united family (Anonymous 1997[1970]:147).

While this is clearly a hopeful feminist read of the piece, El Plan doesconceptualize the Chicano family as a locus of resistance to cultural domi-nation. Its drafters hoped that our cultural values of home and family willserve as powerful weapons to defeat the gringo dollar system and encour-age the process of love and brotherhood (Baca Zinn 1975:16); theseexpressed hopes gave feminists one way to challenge meanings of family.



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In their (in)versions of the meaning of family within the Chicano move-ment, feminists once again asserted the indigenousness of their praxis andfurther recast the loyalists calls for cultural traditionalism as alien. Femi-nism was indigenous; machismo, on the other hand, was a misplaced ele-ment of Anglo culture surviving in the wrong community. Machismo wasnot merely derided by emerging Chicana feminists as sexism; it was con-structed by them as foreign to Chicano culture. Te feminist critique ofthe macho male typifies the kind of meaning appropriation that a dialogi-cal framework would lead us to expect in challengers arguments; Chicanafeminists took the cry of some loyalist Chicanos that el problemo[sic] esel gabacho, no el macho [the problem is the white man, and not the Chi-

cano] and argued that the problem was el machowho failed to recognizehow much his behavior benefited el gabacho(del Castillo 1980). In short,feminists argued that the real sell-outs to Anglo values were the loyalistsand recast machismo as a vestigial cultural practice (La Raza 1971:40;Ugarte 1997 [1971]). Te macho was not a repository of traditional cul-ture; he was the outside infection who embodied the penetration of Anglovalues of domination into the Chicano world (Sosa Riddell 1974; Vidal1971a). Terefore, Chicanos who accepted machismo uncritically played

into the oppressors hands: they [anti-feminist Chicanos] are doing justwhat the white male rulers of this country have done (Vidal 1971a:67).

Te Chicana feminist remaking of the meaning of traditional familyand their inversion of the macho from an indigenous figure to an Angloimportation left in place the central value of family as a resource for themovement. By arguing that only feminism could save the Chicano family,Chicana feminists posited their actions as consistent with movement val-ues and indispensable for community survival (Rivero 1977).

Conclusion: Ongoing Dialogue and Ongoing Challenges WithinMovements

Chicana feminists in the 1960s and 1970s transformed their understand-ings of history and the family in arguing for feminist praxis in a nationalist(student) movement. Tey transformed histories of struggle to include

women, recaptured previous, sometimes denigrated, female figures as fem-inist, and thus appropriated the practice of historical discovery to feminist

ends. Tey redefined notions of what was traditional in Chicano family



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life, and they repudiated movement claims that machismo was central toChicano culture. Teir dialogically constructed arguments challengedChicano movement backlash against feminist organizing, especially chargesof feminisms alien nature, but kept in place central Chicano movementvalues and practices regarding the importance of family and nationalisthistory.

What kinds of empirical/theoretical conclusions follow from this case? Iwill focus on two: 1) how a dialogical view points to the blind spots andcontradictions that activists construct in their counter-hegemonic dis-course; and 2) how movements can expect fracture and factionalizationalong ideological lines due to the inherently unstable nature of discourse

and how those fractures are likely to arise because of social structureinequality. First, internal movement discursive challenges will be them-selves characterized by blind spots and contradictions. Activists use dis-course to solve problems in organizing, and they make the particulararguments they do because these arguments are useful. As circumstanceschange, challenging arguments themselves became subject to critiquefromwithin, given the multivocality and inherent instability of discursive for-mations. Tis realization of internal as well as external political constraint

in constructing challenging discourse gives a different slant to our under-standings of the analytical shortcomings of movement-generated ideolo-gies; for one thing, it changes the view about whom to blame for ideologicalblind spots. Perhaps it obviates the question of blame altogether, as weunderstand challenging discourses as produced from below within nestedcontexts of discursive constraint.

In the specific case of emergent Chicana feminism, later Chicana femi-nists, writing in the 1980s and 1990s after Chicana feminism had solidi-fied as a movement, critiqued earlier Chicana discursive formations on twomain grounds. First, challengers from inside the feminist movement arguedthat earlier stresses on Chicana feminisms ideological indigenousness mil-itated against ideological creativity and creative links with other feminisms(Martnez 1998; Moraga 1983). Chicana critics of this forced ideologicalpurity stressed that an emphasis on indigenous ideology limited options;they argued instead that Chicana feminist attitudes toward, say, whitefeminism, were always marked by ambivalence and selectivity of engage-ment, both on personal and ideological levels (del Castillo 1980; Nieto-

Gmez 1976; Orozco 1976; Garca 1989; Prez 1991; Blea 1992).



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Another internal movement critique of earlier Chicana feminisms short-comings came from lesbian and gay Chicana/o activists who argued that inrecasting the meaning of traditionalism in the Chicano family, earlier Chi-cana feminists left intact assumptions of heteronormativity. Lesbian (andbisexual) feminists confronted earlier Chicana feminist timidity over address-ing movement homophobia, which led to the marginalization and silencingof Chicano lesbians (and gay men) within the Chicano community (Alar-cn et al. 1993; Anzalda 1999 [1987]; Castillo 1994; Moraga 1983; Prez1991; rujillo 1991). But even as internal challengers critiqued movementblind spots, they accepted central premises of Chicana feminist values. Inthe case of the lesbian challenge to movement homophobia, the centrality

of family as a movement value was not displaced; challengers argued for areinvention of the meaning of the term so as to include an array of alterna-tive family structures (Castillo 1994).

On the second point of movement fracture and factionalization alongideological lines, these fractures will occur due to the inherently unstablenature of discourse, but I would not expect fractures to be random. Rather,it is likely that fragmentation will arise because of social structure inequality

which has penetrated movement settings. We will see dialogical challenges

to power occurring in localized contexts the dynamics of appropriationand inversion of meaning operate within oppositional movements even asthey challenge society-wide power. In the Chicana/o movement, women

who were disadvantaged became internal dissenters; we might predict thatinternal challenges to inherently provisional counter-hegemonic discourse

within movements will come from those who are still disadvantaged ormarginalized. Gender, racial/ethnic, sexual or other wide-scale socialinequalities are likely to place the disadvantaged on the margins of local-ized power. Both Steinberg and Hill Collins argue, and the Chicana fem-inist case shows, that challengers positioned on the margins of powerstructures have access to the language of power andan incentive to chal-lenge that power.

Convergent feminist and social movement views of dialogical construc-tions of meaning in oppositional discourse highlight the following inevita-bility: that in challenging external power, movement participants innovate,appropriate, and transform dominant discourse in a way that tends to flat-ten internal relationships of inequality only for the short run. When emerg-

ing Chicana feminists downplay matters of sexual difference, when Blackwomens self-defined standpoints are ignored by critical theorists, when



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the English working classs appropriation of dominant ideas about themasculinity of work leave little room for female workers all these examplespoint to how challenging external power may mean silencing the discussionof some issues within challenging groups. But the silences themselves areunstable, as the creation of movement counter-hegemony sets an examplefor the marginalized within as to how to continue to challenge from inside.Chicana feminist arguments for feminism, conceived in struggle and con-ceived because they were useful for struggle, were the product of the spe-cific discursive tools at hand. Constructions that seemed well suited forone set of circumstances revealed limits as circumstances changed and ledto further challenges. A dialogical approach can alert us to what new coun-

ter-hegemonic meaning structures may be challenged because of whatactivists are notsaying about their local world. We can look at the subordi-nation that we know exists in the present to uncover possible silences, andthus foresee possible challenges of the future.

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Documents

7 a Dialogical View of the Emergence of Chicana Feminist Discourse