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“‘Porque sin madres no hay revolucion’: Mothering the revolution in contemporary Chicana/Latina literature and cultural production

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“‘Porque sin madres no hay revolucion’: Mothering the revolution in contemporary Chicana/Latina literature and cultural production

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Content “‘PORQUE SIN MADRES NO HAY REVOLUCIÓN’: MOTHERING THE REVOLUTION IN
CONTEMPORARY CHICANA/LATINA LITERATURE AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION
by
Cecilia Caballero
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
December 2022
Copyright 2022 Cecilia Caballero
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation was made possible by my abuelas and their abuelas and beyond. Their
dreams have taught me that there are many other ways of knowing and being beyond the rational
and the ordinary. I also thank women of color writers whose legacy I have inherited, like Audre
Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Octavia Butler, and more. Thanks to them, I know that I can also take
root among the stars.
My deepest thanks to my committee for their continued support to see my dissertation
through to its completion. Thank you to my chair, Dr. George Sanchez, for his support to finish
the program after many years. Also, thank you to my committee members, Dr. Elda Maria
Roman and Dr. John Carlos Rowe, for their generosity of spirit and feedback.
Also, thank you to my many ASE friends and colleagues who have supported me over the
years. A special thank you to Dr. Jolie Chea, Dr. Flori Boj-Lopez, Dr. Jenn Tran, and Dr. Gretel
Vera-Rosas. Our many shared coffees and conversations are so incredibly meaningful to me.
Also, thank you to Dr. Alisa Sanchez, who has believed in me since my undergraduate years, and
Professor Carlos Delgado, who has wholeheartedly supported the ways that I have pushed the
boundaries of the traditional university classroom.
Outside of USC, thank you to Dr. Ester Trujillo. Through all of the challenges and the
celebrations in our lives, our friendship has only strengthened. Also, thank you for modeling that
we deserve more than we can imagine.
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To my healers over the years: Andrea Natalie Penagos, Dr. Elena Esparza, Dr. Andre
Rafael, and Dr. Ramos, all of whom have reminded me that my ability to feel deeply is a gift.
They are a gift, too.
To Marisol Silva, my MMUF graduate student mentor at UC Berkeley, who modeled
what it meant to be a mother and scholar at the same time. Also, thank you to my undergraduate
MMUF faculty advisor at UC Berkeley, Dr. Genaro Padilla, for encouraging me to pursue
literature. Thank you also to Dr. Gabriela Spears Rico, whose poetry inspired me to keep going,
and Dr. Alberto Ledesma, a fellow Macondista who encouraged my poetic voice even way back
then.
My deepest gratitude to my childhood friends, Brittany Boyer and Jennifer Villareal, for
their unwavering love ever since the sixth grade. Brit, thank you for your immense heart and
your companionship as a fellow single mom. Jen, thank you for your infectious optimism and
long car talks and handwritten cards. Thank you both for your unconditional love.
To Chicana M(other)work, I would not be here without you. Gracias to Yvette
Martinez-Vu, Judith Peres-Torres, Christine Vega, and Michelle Tellez for the laughs, tears, and
love that sustains our work and our ofrendas.
Thank you to the editors and staff at The University of Arizona Press and The Feminist
Wire Book Series who made The Chicana Motherwork Anthology possible. A special thanks to
acquisitions editor Kristen Buckles, who believed in our vision from the very beginning. It is an
incredible privilege to share this anthology with the world.
Thank you to my family for believing in me, especially my mother, Juana, and my
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siblings Myrna, Tony, Jesus (Jesse), and Jaime. I’ve always been the “nerd” of the family and
now I can say it’s official! Thanks believing in me, even when things seemed uncertain. I’m done
now!
Finally, to my son, Alonzo Heredia-Caballero. We grew up together over the past decade.
Thank you for your comics, your patience, your music, your humor, your love. I am always in
awe of you. Thank you for dreaming up all kinds of things with me, forever.
To the Creator and ancestors, thank you. I will try my best to fulfill my purpose with
intention, through my gift and talents, my heart and my writing, to be of service to this world.
Gracias.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………..ii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………......1
Chapter 1: Communal Mothering and Spirituality in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings and
Faith and Fat Chances…………………………………………………………...........................13
Chapter 2: Speculative Chicana Visions, Sacred Mothering Acts in Fleshing the Spirit and
Chicana/Latina
Mothering…………………………………………………………………………………….......36
Chapter 3: “I Didn’t Just Define Myself as a Chicana Mother”: Sylvia Morales’s A Crushing
Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, and Activis……………………………………………………….62
Chapter 4: “Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución”: Chicana Mothering as Theory and Praxis
in Academia and Beyond…………………………………………………………………….......90
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………........113
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ABSTRACT
In “Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución’: Mothering the Revolution in Contemporary
Chicana/Latina Literature and Cultural Production”, I examine narratives in Chicana/Latina
literature and cultural production to better understand how mothering is imperative in social
justice movements. I draw on a range of literary texts and cultural production, including two
novels by Carla Trujillo, an anthology edited by Dorsia Silva Smith, a second anthology edited
by Elisa Facio and Irene Lara, a documentary film by Sylvia Morales, and my own testimonio as
a mother-scholar within and beyond academia. In this dissertation, I ask: how do these narratives
of Chicana/Latina mothers in the arts, activism, and academia re-imagine Chicana/Latina
feminist mothering and healing through everyday acts of mothering and social justice? To
answer this question, I use motherwork as a framework to analyze the was that mothering labor
and activism are inextricable from each other (Collins 1992). I argue that these narratives of
Chicana feminist mothering makes visible the complexity of their daily lived experiences as an
act of social protest. My dissertation contributes to an emerging body of work about
Chicana/Latina mothering within and beyond academia to demonstrate that mothering is a
radical act of dissent which can create more communal spaces of storytelling and healing for
justice. This interdisciplinary project contributes to the fields of women of color feminisms,
Chicana/Latina mothering and motherwork, gender studies, and literary theory.
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INTRODUCTION
At a panel screening of the groundbreaking film titled A Crushing Love: Chicanas,
Motherhood, and Activism (2009) held at Self Help Graphics in Boyle Heights to honor Mother’s
Day in 2018, Sylvia Morales, director of the film, spoke about Chicana mothering to a small
audience of mostly Latina women and their children. Morales told the crowd, “The patriarchy is
not child-centered. But never give up because that’s what they count on” (2018). Morales’
powerful words are a rallying cry for the resistance of Chicana/Latinas mothers who are also
artists and activists. As demonstrated in the documentary film A Crushing Love and elsewhere in
contemporary literary and cultural production, Chicana feminist mothering is part of an ongoing
legacy of feminist resistance which has often been devalued in the context of Chicana/o
movements. As an act of resistance against this erasure, Morales’ film demonstrates what
Chicana mothering looks like, sounds like, feels like, what has been hidden or unseen or
unacknowledged, through her interviews with prominent Chicana activist-mothers such as
Dolores Huerta and Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez. Throughout the documentary, Morales weaves
historical footage of the Delano Grape Strike and the Chicano Moratorium alongside scenes of
the Chicana activists with their children at home.
As an Afro-Chicana first-generation student, single mother, teaching artist, and founding
member of the Chicana M(other)work collective, this film prompted numerous research
questions. For example, how do Chicanas/Latinas “mother the revolution” through the arts and
activism? How do Chicana/Latina mothers navigate the complexity of pursuing careers, fighting
for social justice, and raising children of color “in a world that says that we should not be born,
and that says ‘no’ to our very beings everyday”? (Gumbs 2017). This dissertation offers an
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answer to this question through my analysis of Chicana/Latina mothering in contemporary
literature and cultural production, including novels, personal essay and testimonios, a
documentary film, and my own narrative of Chicana/Latina mothering in higher education and
the arts. Ultimately, I argue that Chicana/Latina mothering is a radical act of reproductive justice
in both institutional and interpersonal settings. As activist Loretta J. Ross notes in her analysis of
the origins of reproductive justice activism by Black mothers, “the reproductive justice
framework demanded that in addition to fighting for birth control and abortion,” mothers and
caregivers also demanded the “right to parent in safe and healthy enviornments,” enviorments
which are often made hostile due to racism, classism, and sexism (2019). In light of the recent
overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court in June 2022, the stakes of Chicana/Latina
and women of color mothering and reproductive justice have only increased. Our battle
continues.
“Telling To Live:” Testimonio As Method
The theoretical framework in this dissertation is deeply informed by Chicana/Latina and
women of color feminisms. More specifically, I build upon the work of theorists who utilize
testimonio as method. According to the Latina Feminist group, as stated in their introduction to
the anthology, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, they write that testimonios highlight
“the significance of the process of testimonio in theorizing our own realties as Women of Color”
(2001). Moreover, as Chicana/Latina and women of color scholars like Lindsay Perez Huber
(2009) and Dolores Delgado Bernal (2001) have demonstrated, testimonio as method centers
theory that is grounded in lived experiences alongside critical analysis. Additionally, as
referenced in the introduction to The Chicana Motherwork Anthology, the editors highlight the
interweaving of “research and testimonio throughout [the anthology] to contextualize our theory
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and create a foundation” for Chicana/Latina and women of color mothers who are “creating,
writing, organizing, and pushing against our marginalization within institutions that fail to
recognize our existence or needs as mothers and parents” (Caballero et al 2019). Ultimately, this
dissertation builds upon the long history of testimonio as method by Chicana/Latina and women
of color theorists and writers, from This Bridge Called My Back (1981) to Revolutionary
Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016). As Gloria Anzaldua asserted: “A woman who writes
has power, and a woman with power is feared” (1981). My analysis of Chicana mothering
narratives in contemporary literature and cultural production in this dissertation demonstrates
how Chicana/Latina and women of color mothers and caregivers embrace their power through
the telling of their own narratives, and more specifically through the genre of testimonio.
Theory And Praxis: Motherwork and Revolutionary Mothering
In this dissertation and elsewhere in my creative writing and teaching, I draw heavily
upon Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins’ theorization of “motherwork.” In her
groundbreaking article, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing,” Collins
states that “for Native America, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American women,
motherhood cannot be analyzed in isolation from its context” (1994). Here, Collins theorized
motherwork within the context of intersectionality, which makes visible the raced, classed, and
gendered differences among mothers of color.
Furthermore, her theoretical framework “disrupts gender roles and defies the social
structures and construction of work and family as separate spheres for Black women” and other
mothers of color (Caballero et al 2019). Motherwork makes visible the labor that mothers
perform beyond the domestic, and this is central to my own analysis of Chicana/Latina and
women of color mothering in literature and cultural production.
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More recently, Chicana/Latina, Black, and mothers of color artists and activists have
embraced the term “revolutionary mothering,” which is rooted in the legacies of women of color
feminism and resistence. Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes that in order to survive, “we need to look
at the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life that we call mothering,” in a
manner that challenges biological essentialism and hegemonic family formations (2016).
Likewise, academic mothers of color like Victoria Duran (2019) and Irene Lara (2019) have built
upon the theory and praxis of revolutionary mothering in their scholarship. Duran offers what she
calls MALA (Mama Activist Liberadora Activista) MADRE activism. For Duran, MALA
MADRE is rooted in Critcal Race Theory (Crenshaw et al 1995) and women of color feminism
and her framework includes five tenets: “modeled hope, audacious love, determination, relentless
resilience, and emancipation” (2019). By cultivating MALA MADRE, informed by her
mothering, academic work, and activism, Duran aims to raise “critical consciousness,
self-determination and critical hope” (2019). Similarly, Irene Lara (2019) draws upon
Chicana/Latina feminism to explore her engagement with platicas as a space where “our bodies,
minds, and spirits” can birth a “decolonial feminist conocimiento” (2019). Taken together, I
engage deeply with this long history of motherwork and revolutionary mothering in my analysis
of mothering narratives in contemporary literature and cultural production.
Honoring the Sacred: Chicana/Latina Spirituality and Las Tres Madres
In this dissertation, I am especially influenced by the work of Gloria Anzaldua and her
theorization of “spiritual mestizaje” to better understand the complexity of Chicana/Latina
mothering narratives and testimonios. As Anzalduan scholar Theresa Delgadillo contends,
“spiritual mestizaje is at the center of Anzaldua’s autobiographical, historical, theoretical, and
poetic text about personal and social transformation at the U.S.-Mexico border” (2011).
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Delgadillo interprets Anzaldua’s spiritual mestizaje as “the transformative renewal of one’s
relationship to the sacred through a…critique of oppression in all its manifestations and a
creative and engaged participation in shaping life that honors the sacred” (2011). Additionally,
Chicana feminist scholar Laura Perez, who has written extensively about Chicana spirituality and
cultural production, contends that “the spirit work of Chicana visual, performing, and literary
artists…counters the trivilization of the spiritual” because spirituality “is inseperable form
questions of social justice, with respect to class, gender, sexuality, culture, and race” (2007). In
this dissertation, I extend Anzaldua’s theory of mestizaje and engage with research on Chicana
feminist spiritualities to analyze Chicana/Latina mothering narratives because mothering also
aims to “honor the sacred” through child-raising and consciousness-raising as a means to fight
for social justice.
I also draw upon research pertaining to “las tres madres,” or the three mothers, in
the Chicana/o cultural imagination. In this way, I contextualize my analysis of Chicana
mothering by considering the ways that the “good/bad” mother binary has been reified in
Mexican and Chicana/o culture. According to historian Alma Garica, Chicana feminits of the
1960s and 1970s challenged the inherent Chicano nationalism of the Chicano movement (1997).
These early Chicana feminists, such as AnaNeito Gomez, Marta Cotera, and numerous others,
utilized various strategies to “construct a Chicana feminist ideology” that both critiqued
marianismo and embraced La Virgen de Guadalipe through a Chicana feminist lens (1997). As
Cristina Herrera asserts, she calls on scholars to “(re)write the maternal script” of Chicana
mothering in Chicana/o/x literary criticism in order to challenge the virgin/whore binary that
remains pervasive in Chicana/o and Mexican culture (2014). Herrera writes that “the binary
symbolized in the archetypical mothers of Chicana/o cultural, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La
5
Llorona, and La Malinche” have been “the motif on which Chicana womanhood or motherhood
has been defined, and it is no surprise that Chicana writers and scholars have been instrumental
in contesting, challenging, and resisting the construction of maternity on such narrow terms”
(2014). The Chicana feminist rejection of the virgin/whore binary—as they relate to the “three
mothers” of Mexican culture, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, and La Malinche—is
necessary to not only imagine new literary and cultural landscapes that include complex Chicana
mother-daughter relationships, but also to challenge the “maternal script” of Chicana mothers. In
this way, Herrera aims to reclaim Chicana motherhood “as a means through which mothers and
daughters construct empowered subjectivities and identities'' (2014). In this dissertation, I extend
Herrera’s theorization to my own analysis of literary and cultural representations of Chicana
motherhood beyond the “good/bad” mother binary. Moreover, I call attention to the spiritual
nature of Chicana mothering, which “honors the sacred” and the interconnection of life.
“Now Let Us Shift”: Chapter Summaries
My dissertation analyzes narratives of Chicana/Latina mothering in contemporary
literature and cultural production. In chapter one, titled, “Communal Mothering and Spirituality
in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings and Faith and Fat Chances,” I compare two novels by
queer Chicana writer, Carla Trujillo, to reveal how mothering oneself and one’s community
creates sacred spaces of communal healing, survival, and possibility for Chicana women. In
Trujillo’s first novel, What Night Brings (2003), the protagonist, Marci, questions Catholicism
and her queer sexuality while enduring physical abuse from her father. While Marci’s mother and
other community members fail to protect Marci even though they are aware of or suspect the
abuse, I argue that Marci’s queer engagement with Catholism and spiriuality, coupled with her
escape at the end of the novel to her grandmother’s home, demonstrates the power of queer
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Chicana spirituality, mothering beyond limited biological definitions, and survival. Ultimately,
Marci’s spiritual practices, such as prayers, dreams, and the use of medicinal herbs, are acts of
Chicana feminist resistance as a self-described “triple queer,” a term she creates herself to
articulate her intersecting identities. In doing so, Marci produces a critical space of survival and
healing from spiritual, physical, and institutional violence beyond hegemonic understandings of
sexuality, spirituality, and gender that she inherited as a Mexican American girl.
I compare Marci to the protagonist in Trujillo’s second novel, titled Faith and Fat
Chances (2015). The local curandera, named Pepa, navigates her healing work alongside
political community activism when her hometown of Dogtown is threatened by gentrification.
While Marci searches for safety in her hometown, Pepa works to create more safe spaces in her
community as a curandera and activist. Ultimately, Pepa draws upon her spiritual gifts to drive
away the developers who would have gentrified her community. I contend that Pepa’s spiritual
and activist work constitutes a form of what I call “communal mothering,” in order to ensur ethe
survival of her community. In these two novels, I argue that Gloria Anzaldua’s theorization of
spiritual activism works to empower these Chicanas protagonists because they both perform
versions of self and communal mothering to imagine the radical possibilities for social justice in
their communities. The types of oppressions that these Chicana characters survive and resist
include physical violence, homophobia, physical illness, intergenerational trauma, environmental
racism, and the threat of housing displacement and gentrification in their communities. More
specifically, the protagonists in these novels also demonstrate the utilization of “red medicine,”
which includes the use of herbs, dreams, and engaging with the syncretic nature of institutional
Catholicism in alternative, transformative, and empowering ways
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(2012). Through these “red
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Patrisia Gonzales, through her work scholarly work as an anthologist and community work as a holistic
doula, outlines in her text Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (2012)
how Mexican Traditional Medicine, or what she calls “red medicine,” is a technology of indigenous
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medicine” practices, both Marci and Pepa re-imagine and re-assert their power and spirituality in
ways that affirms what social justice looks like for Chicanas and Latinas who strive to heal
themselves and their communities with ancestral knowledge and power.
In chapter two, titled, “Chapter 2: Speculative Chicana Visions, Sacred Mothering Acts in
Fleshing the Spirit and Chicana/Latina Mothering,” I compare two anthologies and closely
analyze four testimonios about Chicana/Latina feminist mothering which have made a significant
impact upon the field of Chicana/Latina motherhood studies. The Chicana/Latina Mothering
(2011), edited by Dorsia Smith Silva, I draw from two essays written by Ana Castillo and
Michelle Tellez. They both address single Chicana mothering and how they challenge
heteropatriarchy through platicas, communal mothering with tias and friends, and modeling a
version of Chicana mothering that is empowering. In the second anthology, Fleshing the Spirit:
Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’ s Lives (2014) edited by
Irene Lara and Elisa Facio, I analyze two essays written by Patrisia Gonzales and Irene Lara to
show how mothering is a sacred act that requires the use of ancestral modalities, such as herbs
and rituals. I read these two anthologies and analyze these four testimonios alongside each other
because they mark an important component of the emerging field of Chicana/Latina mothering,
particularly through the unapologetic use of testimonio. I context that these four testimonios by
Michelle Tellez, Irene Lara, Ana Castillo, and Patrisia Gonzales demonstrates how each of these
Chicana/Latina mothers and caretakers draw on ancestral ways of knowing and being to create
what I call “speculative visions” of a future made possible by radical forms of mothering. As
adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha assert, “all organizing is science fiction,” and the
science fiction and speculative nature of organizing includes mothering (2015).
women’s survivance from colonization to the present. Her work advances the argument that
Mexican-descended people can reclaim their indigenous roots through practicing “red medicine.”
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In Chapter Three, titled “‘I Didn’t Just Define Myself as a Chicana Mother’: Sylvia
Morales’s A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, and Activism,” I analyze the documentary
film by prominent Chicana feminist filmmaker Sylvia Morales. The documentary film profiles
and interviews five prominent Chicana activists and artists who have made a significant impact
in the Chicana/o movement. The profiled women are: Cherrie Moraga, Dolores Huerta, Elizabeth
“Betita” Martinez, Alicia Escalante, and Martha Cotera. Rather than offer an analysis that
focuses on the individual biographies of the women, I am more interested in the ways that
Morales and her daughter and the five profiled women “take up theorizing space” in the film by
discussing the complexity of mothering in the context of their activist and artistic work (2001).
Furthermore, I contend that these interviews reveal how Chicana activist mothering challenges
normative heteropatriarchal scripts for the Chicana/o/x family in Chicana/o/x film and cultural
production. Furthermore, the inclusion of behind-the-scenes moments with Morales and her
daughter showcases the often unacknowledged mothering labor that makes front-line activism
possible. For Morales, her daughter, the five Chicana mother-activists, and their children, these
everydays acts of Chicana activist mothering offer new ways to understand collective mothering
acts as liberatory.
In Chapter Four, titled, “Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución”: Chicana Mothering as
Theory and Praxis in Academia and Beyond, I write about my lived experience as a mother of
color in academia. I draw upon Chicana/Latina and women of color feminist theorists such as
Gloria Anzaldua and Audre Lorde to show how I have navigated higher education while
mothering a child. More specifically, I use Gloria Anzaldua’s theorization of the seven stages of
conocimiento to explore the difficult and nonlinear work of what she calls conocimiento (2002).
Anzaldua writes that “conocimiento questions conventional knowledge’s current categories,
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classifications, and conventions” and that as a form of spiritual inquiry, “conocimiento is reached
via creative acts, writing, art-making, dancing, healing, teaching, meditation, and spiritual
activism, both mental and somatic (the body, too, is a form as well as site of creativity)” (2002).
In my own lived experience as a mother of color, the creativity of conocimiento has guided my
path as I navigated various institutional and interpersonal struggles as a mother of color from a
working-poor class background. Furthermore, I couple the theory of conocimiento with Audre
Lorde’s analysis on “the uses of anger” (1984). Lorde writes that women of color often wield a
“well-stocked arsenal of anger,” and rather than suppressing or fearing it, we can learn to sit with
these emotions because “anger is loaded with information and energy.” In other words, anger is a
resource of “information and energy” that can be utilized to combat racism. For me, as a mother
scholar of color, anger has guided my work as a teaching artist, writer, and mother, to demand
more justice and healing as I strive to survive and mother within the interlocking systems of
oppression.
Conclusion: Mothering the Revolution
The initial seed for this dissertation was born out of my own lived experience as a
low-income, first-generation student, and mother of color. In 2014, after our first panel together
at the American Studies Association (ASA). I became a founding member of the Chicana
M(other)work collective with Yvette Martinez-Vu, Judith Perez-Torres, Michelle Tellez, and
Christine Vega. Shortly after the ASA panel, we began co-writing an article that was later
published in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of MALCS (2017). During our research
process for the article, we discovered that most of the literature about academic mothering
centered white, middle-class, and married mothers. However, with the publication of our
MALCS article in 2017 and the Chicana M(other)work anthology in 2019, we slowly cultivated
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more visibility for mothers of color in academia within academia and beyond. Now, research on
this topic continues to grow, particularly in the field of Education and the ongoing theorization of
the term “ParentCrit,” also referred to as Critical Race Parenting which is informed by Critical
Race Theory (2021). Furthermore, Cheryl Matias continues to publish extensively on the term
“motherscholar,” which she initially coined in 2011, to demonstrate how motherscholars resist
injustice through their scholarly and mothering work (2022).
And although Chicana/Latina mothering is a site of critical inquiry that offers much
potential, there are limitations in this field. For example, I anticipate that there may be critique
about my use of the term “mother” because, historically, this identify has largely been afforded to
cisgender women who have given birth to children. Although this dissertation explores
communal mothering and engages with theory that views mothering as an action and set of
practices versus a fixed biological identity, more research on these topics by those who identify
as trans and/or non-binary mothers, parents, and caregivers is necessary. Other marginalized
groups, such as adoptive parents of color, mothers of color who are incarcerated, immigrant and
transnational mothers, single mothers of color by choice, and more, should be centered in this
research. Mothering is an action, and often, those mothers and parents of color who are most
marginalized can lead our social justice movements.
Ultimately, I aim to shine a light onto the wounds, erasures, fears, successes, and love
that defines Chicana/Latina mothering as a radical form of resistance. As these novels, film, and
testimonios show, there is not one singular single narrative about Chicana mothering. Rather, for
these artists, activists, and academics whose words and images and visions I have analyzed in, I
contend that these narratives can shape a futurity where Chicana/Latina mothers, caretakers and
children are loved and supported in every way, and only then can heteropatriarchy be abolished.
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And, perhaps like most things, the solution can sometimes be simple. Loira Limbal, an
independent filmmaker and director of the powerful documentary Through The Night (2020)
which follows the experiences of three working-class, women of color mothers and caregivers,
shared these powerful words on a panel for the Allied Media Conference (AMC). Limbal stated:
In movement spaces...we are all enthralled by the fight, but I am interested in what it
could look like if we were equally enthralled with the care...I think the lessons of how to
care for each other and what self-determination could look like in building the future that
we want...that already exists in the daycare center.
Ultimately, this dissertation asserts that Chicana/Latina and other mothers and caregivers of color
offer a vision for the future that is already here and has been here in our communities and
classrooms. The self-determination that Loimbal describes already occurs every day in our
communities, in the daycare center, in the coffee shop, in the bookstore, at the cultural
celebration. By centering the narratives of Chicana/Latina and women of color mothers and
caregivers, we can learn how to liberate ourselves.
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Chapter 1
Communal Mothering and Spirituality
in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings and Faith and Fat Chances
If La Virgen de Guadalupe, or ‘Lupe,’ as I would affectionately call her, decided to spend some
time with me as my woman, I would make sure that life would be different and much more
fulfilling for her. I am certain that I would not make the same kinds of demands that, say, a
monsignor, or even my father, might make. Let me elaborate: First, we’d have to have sex. (She
must also be a “bottom,” though not the passive kind. I really hate having to do all the work.)
This whole standpoint she’s got about chastity would dissipate once she made love with me. She
would remark about the pleasure she receives and would become an avid spokesperson for equity
in sexual pleasure for all women...Now anyone can see that Lupe would end up getting a much
better deal if she hung out with me. I think once she got a taste of the benefits of associating with
lesbians, she’d probably never go back. Fact is, people probably flipped out in the community
over her being placed on the cover of Chicana Lesbians because they feared she would like it a
little too much. I suppose they might be onto something. Don’t you? (Trujillo, 228-229).
Mothering Ourselves Through Guadalupe and Beyond in Chicana Narratives
I open this chapter with this excerpt from a critical essay by Chicana
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feminist
intellectual, editor, and novelist, Carla Trujillo, in order to foreground my analysis of the
intersections between Chicana spiritual activism and radical self-love, or what Alexis Pauline
Gumbs terms “mothering ourselves,” through a comparative analysis of Trujillo’s novels What
2
In this chapter, I use the term “Chicana” because this is how Carla Trujillo describes herself
throughout her writings. The word “Chicana” connotes a politicized feminist identity that originated
out of Mexican-American organizing and politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For the historical
origins of this term, see Alma Garcia’s Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings
(1997). However, it is important to note that not all Mexican-American descended women and/or U.S.
Latinx folks identify with this term. Furthermore, recent scholarship from the emerging fields of
indigenous, Central American, and Afro-Latinx Studies are challenging the conflation of race and
ethnicity. Also, throughout my dissertation, I use the term “Chicanx” and “Latinx” because the “x” is
inclusive of all genders. For more, see Alan Paleaz Lopez’s “The X In Latinx Is A Wound, Not a
Trend.”
13
Night Brings (2003) and Faith and Fat Chances (2015).
3
In this excerpt, Trujillo imagines
herself in an erotic and playful relationship with La Virgen de Guadalupe, the patron saint of
Mexico, who is reimagined here as a Chicana feminist icon. As Trujillo demonstrates in the
essay, Guadalupe is not merely the stoic and reserved mother of mestizos. Rather, by playfully
imagining Guadalupe as “her woman,” Trujillo dismantles the heteropatriarchal script. In doing
so, Trujillo challenges Guadalupe’s historical narrative as a submissive figure who lacks agency,
which limits queer expressions of Chicana sexuality, desire, spirituality, and mothering.
4
Other
Chicana feminists in the field, such as Sandra Cisneros, have also written extensively about
embracing La Virgen de Guadalupe in an empowering way. Specifically, in Cisneros’
“Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” essay, she describes how she rejected the traditional narrative of
La Virgen in favor of a different version of Guadalupe who embraces both her sexuality and
spirituality. The work of both Cisneros and Trujillo is representative of the larger field of
Chicana feminist and literature because they reveal how La Virgen can be reframed as a feminist
figure who embraces her liberation and autonomy from these gendered oppressions and
expectations.
Trujillo flips the power dynamic in hierarchical and heteronormative Catholic doctrine by
centering herself and the value that she would bring as a queer Chicana to Guadalupe. Trujillo
writes, “I would make sure that life would be different and much more fulfilling for
[Guadalupe].” Here, Trujillo describes the collaborative nature of Chicana feminist liberation
4
See Sandra Cisneros’ oft-cited essay, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” in Carla Trujillo’s edited anthology
Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991). Cisneros’ creative non-fiction essay
informed how the field of Chicana feminism viewed Guadalupe as a Chicana feminist figure with an
empowered sexuality and feminist agency beyond the confines of hegemonic Catholicism and Chicano
nationalism.
3
In this chapter, I engage with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s scholarly work on Black mothering which she
views as “a counter-narrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of
Black people outside and after their utility to capital” (iv).
14
through imagining an affirming, mutually beneficial, and liberatory relationship with Guadalupe.
As queer Black feminist Audre Lorde theorized in her groundbreaking essay “The Uses of The
Erotic,” Lorde wrote that “our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge” (89). Similarly,
for Trujillo in this essay, she explores how the erotic is the most important indicator for “genuine
paths” to social justice. Moreover, by directly referring to Guadalupe’s pleasure in the essay,
Trujillo playfully but directly states that Guadalupe may just become an advocate for “equity in
sexual pleasure for all women.” She follows this statement by discussing how this power is
feared and she addresses the reader directly by asking, “I suppose they might be on to something,
don’t you?”.
Furthermore, Trujillo’s body of work challenges what Richard T. Rodriguez calls
compulsory heterosexuality in the Chicana/o family.
5
Additionally, as Clara Roman-Odio writes
in her scholarship about sacred iconographies of Guadalupe in Chicana literature and cultural
production, these Chicana feminist interpretations are transformative precisely because of the
ways in which they disrupt hegemonic narratives and structures of power. In this chapter, I draw
upon Chicana literary studies by exploring how communal mothering and spirituality are
represented in Carla Trujillo’s two novels as a form of resistance. I argue that although
spirituality may sometimes fail to fully protect Chicana characters in Trujillo’s novels, such as
Marci who experiences physical violence in What Night Brings or when Pepa’s curanderismo fail
to produce the desired outcomes in Faith and Fat Chances, what does succeed is communal
5
See Richard Rodriguez’s Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) in which he
explores a compelling archive of gay Chicano cultural production in order to show how compulsory
heterosexuality and Chicana/o cultural nationalism inform the cultural politics of the Chicana/o family.
Drawing upon queer Chicana feminist theory and cultural studies, he calls for new kinds of queer
Chicana/o kinships which exceeds the oppressive boundaries of the normative Chicana/o family. These
innovative kinds of queer Chicana/o kinships are also represented in Trujillo’s archive of published
writings through the lens of queer Chicana characters who practice queer Chicana spirituality, as I
demonstrate with my close readings of her novels in this chapter.
15
mothering, or what Alexis Pauline Gumbs terms “mothering ourselves.” In this way, Marci and
Pepa ensure the survival of themselves and their communities.
Both novels both center strong-willed Chicana characters that encounter both institutional
and interpersonal challenges in their working-class communities of color. In the novel What
Night Brings, the novel follows Marci, a young, queer Chicana who comes of age in the 1960s
with her family in a California town. Meanwhile, in Faith and Fat Chances, the novel follows a
curandera named Pepa, who lives in Dogtown, located on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
I argue that both Marci and Pep creating communal spaces for mothering and healing in spite of
the institutional and interpersonal forms of oppression and violence that they experience due to
their identities. Taken together, the characters survive various traumas such as physical violence,
homophobia, physical and spiritual forms of illness, environmental racism, and housing
insecurity due to gentrification. Additionally, I contend that these novels showcase how these
Chicana characters utilize Chicana spirituality, or what Patrisia Gonzales calls “red medicine,”
which include the use of herbs, dream analysis, and engaging with Catholicism in alternative,
transformative, and empowering ways
6
. Ultimately, Marci and Pepa reclaim their agency in ways
that offer more nourishing and sustaining forms of communal mothering and spirituality.
These other ways of being are critical because women of color and other oppressed
groups are what Cherrie Moraga calls “refugees in a world on fire” (iv). Women of color cannot
rely upon the state or even their own families or cultures to support them. As a result, spirituality
becomes a radical and politicized site of knowledge and resistance. AnaLouise Keating defines
6
Patrisia Gonzales, through her scholarly work as an anthologist and her community work as a holistic doula,
outlines in her book Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (2012) how Mexican
Traditional Medicine, or what she calls “red medicine,” is a technology of indigenous women’s survivance from
colonization to the present. Her work advances the argument that Mexican-descended people can reclaim their
indigenous roots through practicing “red medicine.” However, more recent scholarship from the emerging field of
Critical Indigeneity Studies may challenge and complicate the reclamation of indigenous identity among mestiza/o/x
people.
16
Anzaldua’s spiritual activism as a theory and praxis of “spirituality for social change, spirituality
that posits a relational worldview, and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and
one's worlds” (54). Keating writes that the entirety of Anzaldua’s published work as well as her
archival materials which are housed at the University of Texas at Austin (which includes
numerous interviews, keynote speeches, journals, drawings, and unfinished manuscripts,
including her dissertation drafts) are all deeply informed by Anzaldua’s cosmovision. However,
Keating notes that Anzaldua’s spirituality is often ignored by some scholars who have attempted
to separate spirituality from Anzaldua’s theorizations. Keating and other scholars of
Chicanx/Latinx spirituality, such as Gaston Espinosa, Mario T. Garcia, and Laura Perez, note that
these attempts indicate how largely secular academic institutions disavow Chicanx/Latinax
spirituality as a serious topic of research and inquiry. For the purposes of this chapter and my
dissertation project as a whole, my work on spirituality directly challenges these disavowals.
Moreover, as my analysis of the novels reveals, Trujillo’s work offers a radical Chicana feminist
approach to healing through communal mothering and spirituality.
Gloria Anzaldua’s Spiritual Activism as Theory and Praxis
In this section, I will engage with Gloria Anzaldua’s work on the spiritual to further
contextualize my analysis of communal mothering and spirituality in Trujillo’s novels. For the
purposes of this chapter, it is important to illuminate Anzaldua’s contributions to Chicana
feminist spirituality and theory writ large. While Anzaldua only briefly references what she calls
“spiritual activism” in her most cited work, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Anzaldua details a
process of spiritual activism in her essay “...now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner
work, public acts.” In a subsection of the essay titled, “ "shifting realities . . . acting out the
vision or spiritual activism," Anzaldua writes:
17
You reflect on experiences that caused you, at critical points of transformation, to adopt
spiritual activism. When you started traveling and doing speaking gigs, the harried,
hectic, frenzied pace of the activist stressed you out, subjecting you to a pervasive form
of modern violence.... To deal with personal concerns while also confronting larger issues
in the public arena, you began using spiritual tools to cope with racial and gender
oppression and other modern maldades-not so much the seven deadly sins, but the small
acts of desconocimientos: ignorance, frustrations, tendencies toward self-destructiveness,
feelings of betrayal and powerlessness, and poverty of spirit and imagination (Anzaldua,
57).
For Anzaldua, spiritual activism encompasses a full spectrum that begins with an individual
woman of color and ends with the interlocking systems of oppression at the other end of the
spectrum. Anzaldua speaks from her individual positionality as a Chicana lesbian feminist public
intellectual, scholar, activist, and poet, “doing speaking gigs, the harried, hectic, frenzied pace of
the activist stressed you out, subjecting you to a pervasive form of modern violence.” This
“pervasive form of modern violence” can refer to capitalistic and often violent demands of
women of color and their bodies, time, energy, and labor because Anzaldua was forced to survive
by any means necessary. For Anzaldua, this meant inconsistent access to proper medical
treatment and precarity with her employment and income. Anzaldua, then, turns to “spiritual
tools to cope with racial and gender oppression.” Her deep inner reflections serve to illuminate
these larger institutional structures and forms of hegemonic power, which she calls “the small
acts of disconocimentos.” These every day acts of violence serve are “disconocimientos,” or the
opposite of a radical consciousness.
Anzaldua then continues the essay by outlining the seven stages of conocimiento.
Anzaldua writes, “All seven are present within each stage, and they occur concurrently,
chronologically or not...together, these stations constitute a meditation on the rites of passage, the
transitions of life from birth to death, and all the daily births and deaths in-between” (546). These
stages of conocimiento range from nepantla to the Coatlicue state, the latter of which she also
18
theorized in her earlier publication Borderlands/La Frontera (1987). In this essay, Anzaldua
further elaborates upon the seventh and final stage of conocimiento, spiritual activism. However,
since all seven stages can “occur concurrently,” spiritual activism can potentially co-exist and
inform every other stage in the process of conocimiento. Anzaldua describes “spiritual practice
of conocimiento: praying, breathing deeply, meditating, writing...dropping down into yourself,
through the skin and muscles and tendons, down deep into the bones’ marrow” (572). These
daily spiritual practices, the act of “dropping down into yourself,” alludes to the second half of
the essay’s title, “inner work, public acts.” In other words, it is these kinds of “inner work” that
results in “public acts” of transformation, empowerment, and social justice.
More recently, scholars such as AnaLouise Keating, Theresa Delgadillo, David Carrasco,
and Roberto Sagarena have advanced new theorizations about Anzaldua’s work on spiritual
activism. In Carrasco and Sagarena’s co-written essay, “The Religious Vision of Gloria
Anzaldua: Borderlands/La Frontera as a Shamanic Space,” they posit that Anzaldua’s work is
what they call a “a shamanic space where a different quality of knowledge is achieved through
ecstatic trance states which inspire the birth of the ‘New Mestiza.’” For them, “this shamaic
space is...central to her poetic imagery and attempted cultural healing” through “its attention to
spiritual journey, songs, the voices of ancestral spirits, psychic injury, and interior healing” (224).
As such, I locate this chapter among literary scholars who work on the emerging body of
scholarship on the representation of spirituality in Chicana literature and cultural production. My
analysis of the two novels written by Carla Trujillo demonstrates how the Chicana protagonists
challenge social injustice and actively resist oppression through the “inner work” and “public
acts” of communal mothering and spirituality.
“Triple Queerness,” Family, And Healing in Carla Trujillo’s What Night Brings
19
“I have to tell you what I need from God. I have to change into a boy. This is what I want
and it’s not an easy thing to ask for. Not like wanting a new bike or a football. This takes
special powers, and let me tell you, I’ve been wanting it for a long time. It’s not because I
think I’m a boy, though sometimes it sure seems like I am. It’s because I like girls. I don’t
know how or when it happened...Now, I know you can’t be with a girl if you are a girl.
So that’s why I have to change into a boy” (Trujillo, 2003).
In the opening lines of Trujillo’s debut novel, the theme of queer Chicana spirituality is
immediately established and foreshadows its centrality in this narrative. The eleven-year-old
Chicana narrator, Marci, questions the intersections between spirituality, gender, and queer
sexuality within the context of institutional and gendered violence that she experiences within
the spaces of the Catholic Church and her working-class Chicana/o household. Marci struggles
with her same-gender desires and she constantly prays to God, Jesus, and la Virgen de Guadalupe
to change her gender to male because she believes that this is necessary for her to openly express
her sexuality. In this section, I argue that Marci’s spiritual practices, such as prayers, dreams, and
the use of medicinal herbs, are acts of Chicana feminist resistance. Marci’s self-naming and
self-acceptance as a “triple queer,” a term she creates herself to articulate her intersecting
identities, produces a critical space of healing from spiritual, physical, and institutional violence.
I privilege Marci’s engagement with the sacred in the novel because, as M. Jacqui
Alexander and other women of color scholars of spirituality have noted, the personal and
spiritual is political. In the novel, Marci comes to understand her spiritual way of being in the
world by self-identifying as a “triple queer.” For Marci, this syncretism between institutional
Catholicism and Indigenous knowledge systems mobilizes her acts of decolonial feminist
resistance against the power structures of the Catholic Church, on the one hand, and her
heteropatriarchal Chicano family structure, on the other hand. Taken together, Marci’s spiritual
activism enables her to perform “inner work” which eventually prompts her to take direct action.
She ultimately has no choice but to save her own life by removing herself from her unstable
20
family household in order to escape the escalating physical violence inflicted by her abusive and
alcoholic father and the neglect of her enabling mother who did not make any real attempt to
stop the violence.
Marci consistently performs “inner work,” which I identify as an important aspect of
spiritual activism, throughout the novel through the medium of prayer. Marci repeatedly asks
God to change her gender to male, a biological change that she believes is necessary for her in
order to openly express her sexual desire for other girls in a heteropatriarchal culture. While
Marci appeals to institutional Catholicism through her prayers by addressing God, it is her
practice of syncretism and her utilization of what Patrisia Gonzales terms “red medicine” that
queers her spirituality. Gonzales defines red medicine as indigenous “medicinal practices that
address...cultural and spiritual fragmentation” (xix). This fragmentation refers to what Anzaldua
describes as the process of conocimiento, or coming to mestiza consciousness, as I referenced
earlier in this chapter. As the novel progresses, Marci becomes increasingly critical of
institutional Catholicism during her catechism classes. In class, she asks questions related to her
interest in science, much to the dismay of the nuns who refuse to answer her questions. Instead
of engaging with her questions and curiosity, they shame her and label her “disruptive.” At one
point, a nun exerts her power by telling Marci to stop asking questions because they confuse the
other children in the Catechism class. Although Marci is silenced in the classroom, her inner
work remains a site of resistance.
However, Marci becomes increasingly disillusioned and distressed when she comes to
accept that God will not change her gender. Yet, in spite of her frustrations, Marci does not
completely abandon her spirituality. Rather, she seeks support from an unlikely source, the town
priest, in an unlikely place, the confidential confession room. Much to Marci’s surprise, Father
21
Chacon supports Marci when she “confesses” that she likes girls because she understands that
Catholicism categorizes her sexuality as a sin. Father Chacon, acting in his official capacity as a
priest, advises Marci that her attraction to other girls is not a sin and Marci feels a sense of
immense relief. However, Father Chacon’s positionality as a priest affords him privileges in the
Mexican-American community that Marci lacks and, beyond this moment of support, he
ultimately fails to protect her from further institutional and physical violence.
Marci accesses more spiritual tools for survival and healing. Specifically, she draws upon
indigenous frameworks of spiritual knowledge through her dreams, or what Patrisia Gonzales
calls “dreamtime.” Marci notes:
“When night comes, that’s when everything is best. Right before I go to sleep, I turn into
Supergirl. Don’t be surprised. It feels good to be her. When I’m Supergirl, I can fly over
people’s heads, and San Lorenzo, where I live. On TV , George Reeves plays Superman,
but he’s fake because he’s soft and doughy...I’d make a better Superman because I’m
stronger and smarter. They ought to put me on that show. Girls could be on it. They could
make me Superman’s sister” (Trujillo, 5).
Through her dreamtime, Marci takes on a new identity of an empowered Chicana
Supergirl who soars through space and time where she can momentarily escape homophobia and
her violent household. Marci is “stronger and smarter” than Superman who is the epitome of
white male masculinity in the popular American imagination. Marci as Supergirl, then, reinvents
cultural scripts for queer Chicana youth. Yet, Marci’s re-imagining is also a spiritual process.
Patrisia Gonzales writes that “dreams establish relationships with the sacred” and that dreaming
is “a simultaneous co-creative process that involves the bodyspiritland and life-moving powers in
which there may or may not be borders between flesh, mind, spirit, cosmos, or place...dreams are
a form of data gathering and method for asking for knowledge, just as are ceremonies” (172).
22
For Marci, creating an empowered brown Supergirl identity in her dreams constitutes a
sacred ceremony in which she enacts empowered possibilities to challenge and resist injustice
and harm. I argue that this dreamtime ceremony is necessary for Marci due to the oppression and
violence due to the “heteropatriarchal and nationalist impulse of the Chicana/o familia” and the
Catholic religion. Through dreamtime, Marci finds new ways of being through a “co-creative
process” that informs her ability to resist. In addition to dreamtime, Marci also draws upon
medicinal herbs for holistic healing. When Marci’s mother suspects an instance of mal ojo, a
spiritual Chicana/o malady which translates to “bad eye,” Marci narrates, “the next thing you
know, Tia Leti had to come over to scare away the evil eye with her velas and hierbas that she
gets from the botanica” (5). Although Marci’s mother and Marci are not very familiar with the
traditional use of velas and hierbas, they are able to easily draw upon their powerful kinship
network, such as Tia Leti, to share these medicines that they have collectively inherited. Marci
continues: “Tia Leti uses hierbas, and it isn’t just when you’re sick either. I’m not supposed to
know this, but I like to sneak and listen to my tia talk to Mom about her polvos, candles, and
hierbas” (5). Marci’s access to these spiritual knowledge systems of holistic folk remedies, such
as polvos, candles, and hierbas, are learned in secret due to the transgressive nature of these
knowledges. It is in this fear that causes Marci’s tia to keep these “bruja” knowledges and
practices secret even though they are hidden in plain sight.
Marci turns to traditional medicine and spirituality again as her father’s physical violence
towards her escalates. This time, Marci directly asks her aunt for assistance with hierbas herself.
Tia Lety gives Marci a polvo, a powder, called, “Polvo Para Dominar a Su Hombre.” She tells
Marci, “Pero, you need just a little bit. Es muy fuerte. This stuff can do very special things. I
never tell no one, not even tu mama, that I use this, but it works for me” (205). She tells Marci
23
that this is how she keeps her husband “nice.” Tia Lety instructs Marci to “take just a little bit
and put it into his comida...The only days you do this is on Tuesdays and Sundays. No lo pongas
on any other day. Use this and after a while you gonna see a difference in your daddy” (207). For
Marci and Tia Leti, they access these spiritual tools for their collective empowerment and
survival. Although in this specific instance, the primary targets are Marci’s father and Tia Leti’s
husband, their attempt to protect themselves from men exemplifies Anzaldua’s assertion that
“inner work” can directly impact “outer work” of institutional change.
7
For Marci and Tia Lety,
then, they draw upon these spiritual technologies toward their own ends for justice, survival, and
healing. Ultimately, however, the polvo fails and Marci’s father becomes even more physically
violent which reflects the escalating cycles of abuse. Tia Lety advises Marci to visit the botanica
again to “see if they have something mas duro para su daddy.” While Tia Lety does not directly
intervene in stopping or preventing the physical violence against Marci, they both rely upon the
spiritual technologies offered by the botanica because they do not have many other options. The
botanica, a small business often run by Latina women, offers a space of healing and comfort, and
this is all that Marci has.
As I have discussed, Marci’s various acts of spiritual “inner work” leads her to name
herself and accept herself as a “triple queer,” a term she creates for herself which embraces the
very specific axis of her sexuality, gender, and spirituality. Throughout the novel, Marci grows
increasingly skeptical of institutional Catholicism, and she comes to accept that her gender
change will not happen. During one of her prayers toward the end of the novel, she expresses her
7
Importantly, this special polvo is to be secretly added to Marci’s father’s foods and specifically to his
beans. Beans are an indigenous staple and one of the “three sisters” of the Pre-Columbian indigenous diet:
corn, squash, and beans. As Robert Gonzales observes, mestiza/o connection to Indigeneity is “reinforced
and nourished daily through diet/sustenance.” See Rodríguez, Roberto Cintli, Our Sacred Maíz is our
Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014.
24
disappointment that she has not yet been changed into a boy. She prays, “I believe in you Jesus,
and I’ve prayed to you. Everyone says you listen and answer our prayers. But where’s my
answer?...Maybe you can give me some kind of sign. Okay? Amen” (210). Marci engages in the
ritual of prayer to seek knowledge, answers, and signs. Although she remains skeptical of
institutional Catholicism, she trusts that “everyone says you listen and answer our prayers” and
she engages in this syncretic practice to seek resolutions.
Shortly after the prayer scene, Marci does receive a sign that leads her to embrace her
identity as a “triple queer.” She overhears her father call her Uncle Tommy a “queer” and Marci
takes it upon herself to go to the public library and look up the word in the dictionary. When
Marci reads the definition of the word “queer,” Marci brainstorms the following list on a sheet of
paper:
“Queer:
the church
too much of the church = holy roller
holy roller = queer?
queer nuns = Mother Superior
queer priests = Father Chacon
Uncle Tommy called a holy roller
Uncle Tommy called a queer
Father Chacon acting queer
Uncle Tommy and Father Chacon in the same confessional booth = queer
Uncle Tommy hit Eddie hard when he called him a queer
Queer = something bad
Too much church makes you queer, or
You’re already queer and that’s why you go to church.
25
The church is queer.
If the church is queer, then God must be queer.”
Marci’s repeated use of equations, such as “queer = something bad” and queer priests = Father
Chacon,” evokes a comparison to mathematical formulations. However, for Marci, the use of
equations in her list exemplifies the beginning of a critical queer consciousness which makes
sense of her intersectionality as a “triple queer.” She concludes her list by writing “God must be
queer,” which means that she, too, can be queer. Through her own analysis and coming to
conocimiento. Marci wonders to herself, “And since I like God, Baby Jesus, and Mary, and
they’re the church, then I must be a double homosexual queer….but then what happens if I want
to be a boy. Does that make me a triple?” (215).
In these passages, Marci draws connections between the intersecting categories of gender,
spirituality, and sexuality and comes to name herself a “triple queer” as a new category of
identity. I argue that Marci’s self-identification and self-affirmation as a “triple queer” is a
powerful act of Chicana feminist resistance, survival, and healing. As Patrisia Gonzales writes,
“acts of healing are ceremonies” because they gesture toward holistic healing at the intersections
of generational trauma, violence, and more (xix). Additionally, Irene Lara argues that “nurturing
la Bruja within and outside of ourselves is part of social change that legitimizes indigenous and
mestiza spiritual and sexual conocimientos that, in turn, can inspire and facilitate more positive
social change” (13). As a self-described triple queer, Marci engages with spiritual technologies
such as prayer, herbs, and gender fluidity, as she plans and then executes an escape from her
household and away from her abusive father. In other words, she queers the heteronormative and
nationalist impulses of the Chicana/o family by leaving the home because it failed her. The novel
closes with Marci and her sister living with their Grandmother, a single woman, in a nearby
26
town. However, Marci’s mother chooses to remain at the family home with her father. The reader
is left wondering why Marci’s mother makes this decision and there is a heartbreak in this too. In
this case, Marci’s mother does not mother Marci from a place of liberation or healing. In many
ways, Marci’s mother is a victim too. While the complexity of Marci’s mother is beyond the
scope of this chapter, scholars of Chicana/Latina motherhood such as Grace Gamez have
contested the “good/bad” mother binary (54). Due to the lack of her mother’s support, Marci had
no choice but to challenge the normative scripts for Chicana girls and compulsory
heterosexuality by creating her own pathway for survival as a triple queer living at the
intersections of both institutional and interpersonal violence.
In Audre Lorde’s poem, “Litany For Survival,” she writes “we were never meant to
survive.” Marci, as a young queer Chicana, was never meant to survive, and therefore she left her
family home and her hometown. M. Jacqui Alexander, a Caribbean feminist scholar and healing
practitioner who writes extensively on women of color spirituality and theory, states that “if
healing work is a call to remember and remembering is embodied, then we would want to situate
the body centrally in this healing complex” (316). Marci’s body is situated “centrally in this
healing complex” because she is now safe with her grandmother, another maternal figure to love,
guide, and protect her. The novel closes with Marci kissing a friend around her age in her new
neighborhood, “and you know, I didn’t know what to do or think, but for once I could say it felt
so good it didn’t matter” (242). For queer Chicanas, Marci’s feelings, or what Audre Lorde
termed the erotic, help her envision a radical future of healing and liberation. For Marci, “it felt
so good it didn’t matter” means that pleasure and joy is also a technology of resistance, much
like the excerpt from Trujillo’s essay that opened this chapter. While Marci in What Night Brings
offers a child’s perspective on the intersections of sexuality, mothering, and spirituality, Trujillo’s
27
second novel is narrated from an adult’s perspective to showcase similar themes. As an adult,
Pepa has more autonomy to both heal and help others in her community, which is especially
relevant in her activist work to fight gentrification. I now turn to Carla Trujillo’s second novel,
Faith and Fat Chances, to explore how the themes of healing and resistance are expressed
through curanderismo, communal mothering, and activism.
Curanderisma as Communal Mothering in Faith and Fat Chances
In the novel Faith and Fat Chances (2015), the main protagonist, a local Chicana
curandera named Pepa Romero, organizes the residents of Dogtown, New Mexico, to fight
against a local business development proposal which would displace families from their homes
and gentrify their community. Through her dual roles as both a curandera and a community
organizer, Pepa demonstrates how spirituality and communal mothering is integral to social
justice. Pepa performs limpias for community members, prescribes hierbas, performs a
malpuesto during Mass at the local Catholic church, and communes with the spiritual realm to
seek guidance from those who have passed on. Pepa’s medicine is incredibly powerful for her
community as demonstrated by their trust and faith in her. Even when Pepa’s technologies of the
sacred fail, such as her malpuesto, her curanderismo is a form of communal mothering which
ensures collective survival and justice.
Additionally, the New Mexican landscape plays an integral role in the novel due to how
the exploitation of both brown women’s bodies and land have been historically linked together in
the aftermath of colonization. Near the beginning of the novel, Jules, a white physicist with the
Los Alamos Nuclear Lab, uses his high security clearance to access the lab’s archives. There,
Jules learns that the impact of the 1945 nuclear testing was much more devastating than what has
been released to the public. Jules discovers that “large swaths of land, people, and animals had
28
been contaminated or killed, leaving paths of destruction across the lower half of the state...when
he finished reading, that he finally decided he could no longer work for the lab” (30). Jules
resigns from his position as a physicist in order to research and expose this hidden history of
environmental racism. Although he publishes articles for the local newspaper, there is very little
public response. However, these violent racist legacies continue to be expressed within the
diseased bodies of Dogtown residents who have become ill. Many have died, including Pepa’s
mother who died from cancer.
As a result, Pepa’s importance as curandera and community organizer becomes even
greater within the community. For certain Chicana/Latina women, their connection to the land
gestures toward their knowledge of these intergenerational traumas. However, as Pepa and her
curanderisma exemplifies, these connections to the land can also be powerful sources of spiritual
activism. As Karleen Jimenez states, “learning about the land could save the land, could
strengthen our bodies, could sustain our political struggles, and could nurture our imaginations”
(220). Specifically, Chicana feminist women’s connections to the land as stewards, defenders,
protectors, and healers of the land and the brown communities who live there are in direct
opposition to colonial and capitalist structures of power and the concept of individual ownership
of land which is extracted for its capital and resources. As radical historian Aurora Levins
Morales writes, “The wounding and the healing of nations are not different from the wounding
and healing of individuals” (55). Pepe, then, as a Chicana curandera, is particularly threatening to
the establishment because she works to heal herself, her community, and the land for healing and
liberation. In other words, her healing of individuals in her community can also lead to the
healing of the land.
29
Literary critic Ann Folwell Stanford, who writes on the intersections of U.S. women of
color literature and healing, argues that women of color novels challenge readers to “think about
illness and healing as something we are all responsible for” (14). Stanford observes that many of
the women of color characters and their bodies “pay the price for and carry within them the
symptoms of a sick world” (15). Similarly, in Faith and Fat Chances, Pepa uses spirituality to
heal herself and community members. They are all rooted in larger power dynamics, from white
supremacy, to the lingering toxic effects of atomic testing on New Mexican land, to the threat of
of displacement and gentrification their communities. However, even though the tools of
curanderismo are very powerful, there are certain limits to Pepa’s healing because a few
community members remain ill. Pepa, as an individual, cannot singlehandedly heal the entirety
of intergenerational trauma and environmental racism by herself. However, collectively with
other healers, such as her elder teacher, Don Manuel, and her younger apprentice, Camilo, they
can heal themselves and their communities. In these ways, they collective service to communally
mother their communities.
Throughout the course of the novel, Pepa treats various clients by prescribing traditional
medicine as well as challenging their investments in Western worldviews. She treats Emilio who
seeks her consultation about how to “earn a million dollars” by the time he turns thirty years old.
Pepa uses various technologies of spirituality, such as performing a limpia with an egg by rolling
it all over Emilio’s body, cracking the egg in a glass of water, reading the yolk for diagnosis, and
then prescribing herbs and offering spiritual guidance. She tells him that his wish can come true,
however, “that spot [in the egg yolks] says you’re going to get a heart attack if you do...think
about whether you want to work so hard to make your million dollars, because I guarantee,
you’re going to get one and a heck of a lot sooner than most hombres, too” (4). Emilio takes
30
Pepa’s diagnosis very seriously as she prepares him a vial of essential oils and tells him to
diffuse it in his office. “This stuff will calm you, pero it won’t stop a heart attack. Only you...can
do that” (5). Ultimately, she transfers the power of healing back into Emilio’s own hands. He can
heal himself, but only if he makes the choice to prioritize his health over the accumulation of
wealth. In this way, Pepa plays a vital role in mothering her community by reminding her
patients to value health and healing. In this way, Emilio can heal himself which can also
positively impact others in his life as well.
Additionally, Pepa selectively engages with institutional Catholicism in very strategic
ways that serve her curandera and communal motheirng work. After Pepa and her apprentice
Camilo meet with the town priest, the priest agrees to discuss the issues of gentrification to his
congregation while Pepa burns a small bundle of medicinal herbs at the back of the church.
Although this is a malpuesto, or a bad spell, Pepa “chanted prayers to the spirits around her to
guide this task and instill power to the hierbas...she hoped they would see that the intention of the
malpuesto was only for greater good” (139). Here, the line between “good” and “bad” medicine
is blurred and Pepa conducts this malpuesto as a means to an end. However, the malpuesto goes
wrong because everyone in the congregation falls asleep, including the priest. While using “bad
medicine” can be viewed as a serious transgression against the purposes of traditional healing
practices, this scene comes across as humorous and, ultimately, harmless. Although this
particular malpuesto failed, Pepa continues to engage with institutional Catholicism in other
ways because she knows that her community’s engagement with the church functions as an
important space for civic activism.
8
8
See Roberto Treviño’s The Church in the Barrio: Mexican American Ethno-Catholicism in Houston
(2006) for his theorization of “ethno-Catholicism” in Mexican-American communities and how
community activism and civic engagement can shape conservative religious values through an affirmation
of Mexican-American identity.
31
However, an unintended consequence of the malpuesto is that the town begins to
experience torrential rainstorms and the town begins to flood. Pepa and Camilo work hard to halt
the overwhelming rainstorms and they ask the priest to once again speak to the congregation to
encourage them to apply pressure to the city council to stop the gentrification efforts in their
community. During Mass, the priest tells the congregation:
“But the fact that I’m a priest doesn’t really matter. Because any man, woman, or child
can clearly see this rain has to mean something. Indeed,” he said, glancing toward the
ceiling, “it could be such a sign.” He gestured toward the mountains. “Or perhaps a
warning from ancestral spirits...the spirits many of our Native American brethren believe
reside in these mountains. In either case, I believe this rain signifies a sign of our
weakened souls. A sign of greed...lack of compassion...struggle for power...lack of faith.”
He studied his hands as they gripped the podium. “At the very minimum, it’s a sign we
need to think of others besides ourselves” (265).
As shown in this passage, the priest attempts to downplay his power as a priest by stating that
“any man, woman, or child” can interpret the rain as a sign. He suggests that the rain is “a
warning” and his words hold power as the local priest. While he does not directly reference the
gentrification efforts, he does emphasize that the congregation “need to think of others besides
ourselves.” In this way, the community can reflect upon the needs of themselves and their
community. Ultimately, Pepa finally succeeds in garnering more community support to stop the
proposed displacement and gentrification of the community and Pepa could not have
accomplished this without engaging in the space of institutionalized Catholicism.
As Anzaldua’s theory of spiritual activism demonstrates, an individual can engage with
spirituality in many spaces, simultaneously, in multiple ways. Therefore, while Pepa successfully
infiltrates the Catholic church for “the greater good” of the community to fight gentrification and
displacement, she also seeks guidance from her spiritual mentor, Don Miguel, an elder who
passed away several years ago. In the novel, Pepa and Camilo travel to Don Miguel’s home to
commune with his spirit. According to Anzaldua and traditional worldviews, these
32
multidimensional “spirit worlds” are taken very seriously in her cosmovision. In the novel, Pepa
and Camilo respectfully engage with Don Miguel’s home, which has been boarded up, and they
receive necessary knowledge and support by carefully handling sacred objects, such as his home
altar, herbs, and candles. The objects, then, also function as a technology of spirituality that
challenges secular and normative constructions of time and space. Taken together, the novel
shows how Pepa’s sacred work as a Chicana curandera utilizes spirituality, both within and
outside the Catholic Church, in order to heal herself and her community. In these ways, expands
the conceptualization of spiritual activism and communal mothering.
Conclusion: “I Heal Myself, I Heal the World.”
For the Marci, Pepa, and their communities, they collectively draw upon spiritual
activism to enact “new ways of being” in the world through mothering themselves and, therefore,
their communities. In addition to utilizing technologies of spiritual activism, such as drawing
guidance from dreams and using herbs, both Marci and Pepa selectively draw upon the religious
institution of the Catholic Church toward liberatory ends. For example, the local priests in each
novel acquiesce to Marci’s and Pepa’s requests for assistance in profound and moving ways
which defy strict institutional dogmas. In What Night Brings, Marci confesses her same-gender
desires during confession to Father Chacon and he is supportive, most likely due to his own
(secretive) same-gender relationship with Marci’s married uncle which is revealed later in the
book. In Faith and Fat Chances, Pepa convinces Father Miguel to burn her herbal blend during
Mass which ultimately helps Pepa to garner more community support for her anti-gentrification
campaign. In both of Trujillo’s novels, priests serve as unlikely allies for Marci and Pepa’s
ambitions. While a deeper analysis regarding the radical role of priests in Trujillo’s novels is
beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to consider how masculinity can also deepen our
33
understanding of mothering and healing. Additionally, as scholar Patrisia Gonzales writes, herbs
form an important basis in Traditional Mexican Healing because “plants are part of our oldest
‘body memory,’ and reveal a profound story about the human condition” (18). Placed within a
larger context of curanderismo, herbs and bodies help inform Marci’s and Pepa’s radical
self-mothering. For them, this investment in healing forges their paths toward liberation from
gendered oppression and violence.
Emerging scholarship about the women of color mothering reveals how mothering is a
complex act of social justice. As the editors of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front
Lines (2016) contend, mothering is “messy” because it exceeds and challenges the normative
categories of gender, race, sexuality, and even biological essentialism. For Marci in What Night
Brings and Pepa in Faith and Fat Chances, these two Chicana protagonists are forced to navigate
a heterosexist society and fight for the survivance of themselves and their communities. Marci,
as a young queer Chicana in an abusive household, is forced to mother herself and survive while
Pepa, an older single Chicana mother with two grown children, performs healing in service of
the community through her role as a curandera. Together, Marci and Pepa showcase the
complexity of spirituality and communal mothering by illustrating the intergenerational and
community-based aspects of survivance. Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What would it mean for
us to take the word ‘mother’ less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a
technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us
right now?” (23). I posit that both What Night Brings and Faith and Fat Chances illustrate how
communal mothering is “a technology of transformation” related to the healing of self and
community through these two characters who experience a multiplicity of oppressions: a
physically and emotionally abused “triple queer” Chicana adolescent and a
34
curandera-mother-healer who is striving to heal her community and save Dogtown from
gentrification.
Throughout this chapter, I have explored how Trujillo’s two novels challenge dominant
understandings of institutional Catholicism and the hegemonic formulations of the Chicana/o
family which often reinscribe culturally nationalist and masculine understandings of belonging,
citizenship, and heteronormativity. However, through acts of communal mothering and
spirituality, I contend that Marci and Pepa challenge these norms that they have inherited. Marci
paves the way for other young Chicana girls to refuse any form of abuse, even if that means
leaving her family home. Meanwhile, Pepa models how Chicana women can organize their
community, and in her case, stop gentrification. Furthermore, I have demonstrated how Trujillo’s
renderings of spiritual activism and communal mothering in her novels work together to queer
these inherited cultural scripts. For example, the characters’ use of what I call “spiritual
technologies,” such as prayers, herbs, dreams, limpias, and more, affirms their traditional
gendered knowledges and makes space for holistic healing as a form of social justice. In these
ways, I contend that these narrative representations of Chicana spiritual activism and communal
mothering envision a future in which we can imagine a world without gendered oppression or
violence. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua wrote, “I change myself, I change the
world,” but I reframe these statements for Marci and Pepa and their communities: “I heal myself,
I heal the world.” But, as Pepa gently cautions one of her patients early on in the novel, “the
remedy only works if you believe in it” (110). It would be wise for us to read these novels and
believe their remedies, for women of color to believe in themselves and each other.
35
Chapter 2
Speculative Chicana Visions, Sacred Mothering Acts
in Fleshing the Spirit and Chicana/Latina Mothering
“We say that mothering, especially the mothering of children in oppressed groups, and especially
mothering to end war, to end capitalism, to end homophobia, and to end patriarchy is a queer
thing. And that is a good thing. That is a necessary thing. That is a crucial and dangerous thing to
do. Those of us who nurture the lives of those children who are not supposed to exist, who are
not supposed to grow up, who are revolutionary in their very beings, are doing some of the most
subversive work in the world.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016)
For Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a self-described “queer Black feminist love evangelist,”
scholar, poet, and activist, the ancestral power of what she calls “revolutionary mothering”
encompasses the radical imaginaries and labor performed by Black and women of color mothers
on a daily basis (Gumbs 132). She writes that revolutionary mothering is “a necessary thing” yet
“a crucial and dangerous thing,” but mothers do it anyway in a world that is often hostile,
dangerous, and even fatal for mothers of color and their children. Because of this, then, Gumbs
asserts that revolutionary mothering is “the most subversive work in the world” since its ultimate
goal is to transform all raced, gendered, and classed oppressions into liberation. The subversive
liberatory work of mothering that Gumbs has written extensively about resonates deeply with the
speculative visions of adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, editors of Octavia’ s Brood:
Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (2015). In their book, brown and
Imarisha remind us that “when we imagine a world without war, without prisons, without
injustice, we are engaging in speculative fiction” (1). I foreground this chapter with Gumbs’s
work on revolutionary mothering and brown and Imarish’s work on speculative visions because
this chapter explores narratives about Chicana mothering which also work toward healing and
liberation. In these ways, Chicana mothering envisions the speculative through mothering acts in
36
the kitchen, in the classroom, the playground, the garden, in letters to one another, and among
conversations with one another. Taken together, these are nourishing relational acts that create a
sense of a shared speculative future grounded in healing and justice.
Drawing from these discussions about Black feminist speculative fiction and Black
feminism more broadly, I extend this framework to my analysis of mothering narratives in
Chicana literature and cultural production because I contend that Chicana mothering is also a
speculative act. While brown and Imarisha illuminate the visionary nature of speculative fiction,
I extend their analysis to the genre of Chicana feminist testimonio. Both brown and Imarisha
urge us to imagine a “world without injustice” through speculative fiction, and, similarly, I argue
that Chicana feminist mothering also constitutes a demand for justice. In these ways, I argue that
Chicana feminist mothering is another form of resistance to “end war, to end capitalism, to end
homophobia” (Gumbs 132). Chicana mothering is speculative, too, because it conjures a world
where children of color can exist, which is the “most subversive thing of all” (Gumbs 123).
In this chapter, I analyze mothering through the genre of testimonios written by
Chicana/Latina women from two anthologies: Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in
Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’ s Lives (2014) edited by Elisa Facio and Irene Lara and
Chicana/Latina Mothering (2011) edited by Dorsia Smith Silva. From these two anthologies, I
analyze four testimonios written by Ana Castillo, Patrisia Gonzales, Irene Lara, and Michelle
Tellez. I show how their testimonios collectively illustrate what I call “speculative Chicana
visions.” I argue that Castillo, Gonzales, Lara, and Tellez draw on ancestral healing technologies
and modalities, which ranges from holding platicas (intimate conversations) with their children
to using Mexican Traditional Medicine to intergenerational and transborder Chicana mothering
across time and space. Additionally, I draw from Black feminist theory about motherwork to
37
show how these Chicana feminist mothering testimonios create speculative visions for liberation
and justice for themselves, their children, and their communities through their radical acts of
mothering labor. Chicana/Latina mothering, then, is indeed “the most subversive work in the
world.”
Mothering the Revolution: Motherwork and Chicana M(other)work
Throughout this dissertation and elsewhere, I draw upon heavily upon Black feminist
theorist, Patricia Hill Collins, who coined and defined the term “motherwork” as a form of Black
feminist maternal resistance, defiance, and justice.
9
In her work, Collins illuminates how Black
mothering is a radical form of reproductive labor which has sustained Black families and
communities for generations, often at great personal costs to the Black mothers themselves.
Although Black mothering should not necessitate extreme forms of self-sacrifice, it is important
to note that Black mothering defies the systemic devaluation of Black mothers which can be
traced back to chattel slavery in the United States. In her theorization of motherwork, then,
Collins argues for an anti-racist intersectional Black feminist lens to challenge oppressive
ideologies about Black mothers and their motherwork. Similarly, other Black feminist theorists,
including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Angela Davis, and the Combahee River Collective, also view
Black mothering as a powerful form of social justice work in the United States.
Furthermore, the significance of motherwork takes even greater importance when placed
within the context of what Michelle Alexander calls the “new Jim Crow” and our current era of
mass incarceration. As revealed by on-going state-sanctioned police brutality which
disproportionately affects Black people, and particularly Black mothers, motherwork is a vital
9
Collins, Patricia Hill, “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about
Motherhood.” In Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency. New York. Routledge, 1994.
38
tool of survival and resistance.
10
Within the context of these interlocking systems of oppression,
Black motherwork is not only necessary, but it is a tremendously heroic act in the face of racism
and premature death.
I connect Collins’ theory of motherwork to Chicana mothering in this chapter because
both Black and Chicana motherwork share overlapping histories of state violence in the United
States due to their positionalities which are rooted in similar raced, classed, and gendered social
oppressive conditions.
11
In addition, both Black mothering and Chicana mothering employ
similar communal strategies of collective resistance, strategies which are often feminized and
therefore devalued, such as storytelling, plant medicine, spiritual practices, and much more.
12
In
my collective work as a founding member of the Chicana M(other)work collective, I co-created
the term “Chicana M(other)work” as a theory to describe these devalued and invisible forms of
Chicana mothering labor as acts of resistance (Caballero 2017). Furthermore, the parenthesis in
the term “Chicana M(other)work” is used to reveal the layered and shifting identities of Chicana
mothers across time and space: Chicana, mother, other, work, motherwork. There is no one
singular version of motherwork or Chicana M(other)work and yet these shared mothering acts
and visions must be centered in movement work.
“Telling to Live”: Testimonios as Chicana Feminist Methodology
12
Although this dissertation and my engagement with the concept of “motherwork” primarily focuses on
the similarities between Black and Chicana mothering, race can and does impact Black and Chicana
mothering differently, and especially for non-Black Chicana mothering. While both Black and Chicana
feminist mothering share a commitment to social justice values, more comparative scholarly research
needs to be conducted about the divergences between Black and non-Black women of color feminist
mothering.
11
See “Our Labor Is Our Prayer, Our Mother Is Our Offering”: A Chicana M(other)work
Framework for Collective Resistance,” by the Chicana M(other)work Collective in Chicana/Latina
Studies: The Journal of MALCS 16:2 Spring 2017 where we discuss the many layers of racialized,
gendered, and classed work that Chicana mother-scholars perform.
10
See Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s dissertation, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer
Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 (2010), Angela Davis’s “Women, Race, and Class” (1983), the
Combahee River Collective statement (1977), and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” for her
groundbreaking work on the prison-industrial complex in the United States.
39
In this chapter, I ask: how do Chicana mothers “write back” and break the stereotypical
narratives about Chicana mothers? How do these Chicana narratives break multiple forms of
institutional and interpersonal violence? In the field of Chicana feminism, testimonio remain a
powerful tool that evokes what Cherrie Moraga calls “theory in the flesh.”
13
Although the field of
Chicana/Latina feminism has flourished since its inception in the 1970s, many forms of Chicana
feminist methodologies, including testimonio, continues to be devalued among hegemonic forms
of knowledge production. In other words, testimonio is often relegated outside the boundaries of
“rigorous” and “serious” academic inquiry, particularly due to the use of first-person narration
which centers Chicana lived experiences. In other words, testimonio as a genre defies the
presumed objectivity of Western research and scholarly production. Despite these institutional
barriers and biases in academia, testimonios remain a vibrant and radical genre that continuously
deepens Chicana and women of color feminist thought. In this chapter, I am particularly
interested in the use of experimental narrative strategies, or what Anzaldua calls auto-teoria
historia and Audre Lorde calls “biomythography.”
14 15
Armed with these literary strategies and
narratives, Chicana and women of color feminist writers create space for lived experiences as
theory that raises consciousness and contributes toward social justice in speculative and material
ways.
15
See Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Audre Lorde’s
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythology (1982) for two superlative examples of genre.
14
Women of color writers have published a large body of work in groundbreaking anthologies such
as The Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981), Homegirls: A Black
Feminist Anthology (1983), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical
Perspectives by Women of Color (1990), Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About
(1991), Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (1993), Goddess of the Americas: Writings
on the Virgin of Guadalupe (1997), Living Chicana Theory (1998), Telling to Live: Latina Feminist
Testimonios (2001), Colonize This: Young Women of Color on Today’ s Feminism (2002), Chicana/Latina
Mothering (2011), Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (2016), the forthcoming Chicana
M(other)Work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolucion (2019), among many more.
13
See Cherrie Moraga’s essay “theory in the flesh” describes The Bridge Called My Back
40
The genre of testimonio as a form of Chicana/Latina feminist methodology is rooted in an
ancestral tradition of oral storytelling that spans across cultures, generations, borders, and time.
In the Latina Feminist Group’s groundbreaking anthology, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist
Testimonios (2001), they emphasize that testimonio is an accessible way to facilitate greater
social change. The editors write, “Our book expands the construction of testimonio in our
feminist desire to make visible and audible our papelitos guardados, the stories often held from
public view, to express the full complexity of our identities” (20). For the Latina Feminist Group,
testimonio is a public act of communal sharing where their papelitos guardados, which can be
translated from Spanish into English as “guarded” or “private” papers, can be expressed with
others. Furthermore, the Latina Feminist Group discusses how the power of testimonio originates
“back to our mothers’ and other relatives’ kitchens” which again illuminates the power of
communal oral storytelling among the women, mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors in our
families (12). They contend that testimonio is a “pedagogical, methodological, and activist
approach to social justice that transgresses traditional paradigms in academia” (363). Unlike
second-wave white feminism which sought to liberate upper-middle-class white mothers from
their families and home, Chicana/Latina feminisms view aspects of these traditional gendered
roles in their families as a sacred source of immense power for transmitting and sustaining
ancestral knowledge, cultivating resistance, and retaining gendered cultural memory through the
everyday acts of mothering and carework.
I contend that Chicana/Latina activist mothering seeks to both “go back to our mothers”
and move forward into a speculative futurity. This dual movement in time connects both the past
and future because this connection demonstrates that Chicana/Latina feminist mothers draw from
both ancestral strategies of resistance and draw inspiration from the radical potential of the
41
speculative where both mothers and children of color can exist without fear and outside our
current systems of oppression. Furthermore, the transmission of ancestral and intergenerational
knowledge between and among women in Chicano/Latino families can also potentially reveal
ways that they have embraced “feminism” without using that specific term. In these ways,
“going back to our mothers’ kitchens” can also mean time-traveling to a speculative future where
feminism has always influenced Chicana/Latina mothering.
Con Las Manos En La Masa: Anzaldua’s Spiritual Activism and Chicana
Speculative Visions, Mothering Acts
To contextualize my analysis of testimonio in this chapter, I draw upon many of Gloria
Anzaldua’s theorizations, including nepantla, autoteoria-historia, and conocimiento. In this
section, I am interested in how Chicana mothering overlaps with the speculative nature of
Aznaldua’s theories. I use the term “speculative” here and throughout this chapter deliberately as
a direct reference to science fiction. As Susana Ramirez, a scholar of women of color speculative
literature, states, “Spiritual activism...means merging the technologies of political activism
(direct action, protests, boycotts) with spiritual work (meditation, ceremony, rituals)” (v).
Ramirez interprets Anzaldua’s theoretical work through a term she coined, “nepantlerX
cosmologies,” to show how Anzaldua’s work engages both the material and the metaphysical.
Furthermore, she argues both are necessary for social justice. While scholars like AnaLouise
Keating, and Theresa Delgadillo have written about the spiritual nature of Anzaldua’s work, I
build upon their work by bringing Chicana mothering more directly into conversation with the
speculative. I extend their analysis to my inquiry of the testimonios by Castillo, Gonzales, Lara,
42
and Tellez because I argue that Chicana mothering can create new speculative visions of social
justice.
16
Here, I closely read Anzaldua’s essay, “Con las manos en la masa: Spiritual Activism,”
in order to show how carework within the home can constitute acts of spirituality toward a
speculative futurity. In the essay, Anzaldua describes how the seemingly innocuous act of
making handmade tortillas is actually an ancestral technology that activates the healing of the
body, mind, and spirit through the cultivation of intergenerational knowledge that is coupled with
the strengthening of kinship networks. She writes, “healing means using the life force and
strength that comes with el animo to act positively on one’s own and other’s behalf” (89).
Chicana mothers similarly use “the life force and strength” to perform acts of mothering labor,
such as cooking, that sustain themselves and their communities within the home and beyond. It is
“el animo,” or life force that Anzaldua describes, which are behind these acts that have the
potential for healing of the self and others. While mothering and carework are gendered acts
which are often unseen and exploited, healing can also occur in other acts in various contexts.
Anzaldua also refers to the importance of what she calls “shadow work” in the healing
and caretaking process. Anzaldua writes, “In shadow work, the problem is part of the cure-—you
don’t heal the wound, the wound heals you” (89). Here, Anzaldua clarifies that shadow work
entails not only learning from the wound but healing from within the wound itself, which echoes
her observation in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) that the borderlands “es una herida abierta
where the third world grates against the first and bleeds” (57). In the Chicana mothering
testimonios that I analyze in this chapter, the “open wound” of the border parallels the “open
wounds” that Chicana mothers contend with within their homes, such as gendered poverty,
16
Imarisha, and Brown, Adrienne Maree. Octavia's Brood Science Fiction Stories from
Social Justice Movements. New York: AK Press, 2015. Cite at the end!
43
misogyny, and other forms of oppression. More specifically, Chicana mothers are also oten
forced to navigate the “in-between space” of nepantla where the “third world grates against the
first and bleeds.” In other words, while Chicana feminist mothers raise their children in the “first
world” space of the United States, the intersectionality of their race, class, gender, and more as
Third World women means that they are disproportionately oppressed. Furthermore, it is within
the context of difficult “shadow work” in which Chicana speculative visions are made possible, a
conocimiento which is informed by a full understanding of “the wound.” Anzaldua writes:
You have to plunge your hands into the mess, plunge your hands en la masa, into
embodied practical material spiritual political acts. This politics of embodied spiritualities
(that I term “conocimiento”) es nuestro legado. We struggle to decolonize and valorize
our worldviews, views that the dominant cultures imagine as other, as based on
ignorance. We struggle to cultivate nuestras facultades that rely on inner knowledges.
(Anzaldua, 89-90).
Anzaldua uses the metaphor of “plunging your hands into the mess” as an example of a
“spiritual, political act.” For her, these and other seemingly innocuous everyday acts remind us
that mothers perform these acts on a daily basis in the “in-between” space between the first and
third worlds.
Here, I contend more deeply with Anzaldua’s theorizations of gendered acts of care
within the home:
We attempt to heal cultural ‘sustos’ resulting from the trauma of colonial abuses
fragmenting our psyches. Pitched into states of nepantla, we step through the gates of
change. Fragments and contradictions are stirred en la olla and cooked to a new soup.
During this process, the ego is ousted as the self’s sole authority. In the cauldron, the
culture unseats its gatekeepers, resolves its fragments and contradictions, and recasts its
entire heritage. En la olla the culture reorganizes itself, creating order out of chaos.
(Anzaldua, 91)
While Anzaldua uses “en la olla” as a metaphor to explain the fragmented state of nepantleras in
the United States, she also gestures toward the ancestral act of cooking beans and its sacred
meanings and to create order out of chaos. As Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel contend
44
in their work on Chicana/o food pathways, the “relationship between food and community offers
one way to reclaim indigenous knowledge” (15). La comida es medicina and for Anzaldua, en la
olla is a way to “create order out of chaos.” Furthermore, this is a process that can shatter many
preconceived ideas but it can offer opportunities to heal from these fragmentations.
Fleshing the Spirit: Body-Centered Chicana Speculative Visions through Mothering
In this chapter, I analyze two testimonios from Fleshing the Spirit (2016). These two
chapters are written by Chicana mother-scholar, Irene Lara, and Latina midwife and scholar,
Patrisia Gonzales, in order to show how their testimonios offer Chicana feminist speculative
visions through the praxis of mothering. For Lara, the creation of her Chicana speculative visions
means mothering her children and herself through new understandings of Chicana feminist
thought whereas for Gonzales, she “mothers the mother” through her work as a traditional
birthworker who is rooted indigenous gendered practices which have been hidden or suppressed
due to colonization of the Americas. In addition, Lara theorizes what she calls “mami facultad,”
which expands upon Gloria Anzaldua's theory of “facultad,” or the ability to see “beyond
perceptions of reality.” Whereas for Gonzales, through her work as a midwife trained in Mexican
Traditional Medicine (MTM) both formally and informally through academic coursework,
partera training, and mentoring by elders in her lineage, she views her healing work as a
powerful way to maintain, cultivate, and transmit ancestral knowledges through the use of plant
medicine and healing modalities by caring for mothers throughout their pregnancies and
childbirth journeys. Together, I argue that the testimonios by Lara and Gonzales demonstrate how
Chicana speculative visions are created during the body-centered practices of mothering and
pregnancy.
45
Furthermore, the testimonios align with what Lara calls “mindbodyspirit.” The term
refers to the splitting of the mind, body, and spirit as the result of colonization throughout the
Americas. However, mindbodyspirit is honored within the anthology in multiple ways as
evidenced by the thematic content of the contributors’ essays as well as through the structure of
the book itself which is divided into four sections that are named after the sacred Four Directions
(they list these four directions as The East: New Beginnings, The West: Feminine Energies, The
North: The Direction of the Elders, and The South: The Direction of the Youth). As they explain
in the foreword, “From the moment we take bodies and begin to be fleshed spirits on this Earth
in this life, which emanates from this center towards the four directions” (Hernandez-Avila xvi).
The editors center the Four Directions in their work and they consider their anthology as an
ofrenda, or offering, to Chicana, Latina, and indigenous communities because their words offer
“a communal prayer and ritual to incite radical social change” (Anzaldúa 2002; Avila 1999). The
anthology’s theoretical and spiritual framing resonate deeply with the testimonios by Lara and
Gonzales, which I will analyze in this next section.
In Irene Lara’s testimonio, “Sensing the Serpent in the Mother, Dando a Luz la Madre
Serpiente: Chicana Spirituality, Sexuality, and Mamihood,” she integrates both theory and lived
experiences through Chicana mothering acts. Specifically, she discusses how she grew to better
understand herself upon becoming a mother. Lara coins the term “mami facultad,” or a deeper
understanding of Anzaldua’s theory of “la facultad,” through the lens of Chicana mothering. In
her testimonio, Lara begins by stating that she views her writing “as a prayer for social justice,
healing, and the greater good” (113). By linking social justice, healing, and the greater good in
this way, she understands her writing to be “dando a luz la madre serpiente,” which translates to
“giving birth (light) to the mother serpent.” In Chicana feminist thought, the mother goddess
46
refers to Coatlicue, mother of the Aztec (Mexica) gods who is often depicted with a head made
up of two serpents facing each other, a skirt of snakes around her waist and a necklace of human
skulls, hearts, and hands. While her work is imbued with spirituality, Lara discusses the difficulty
of enacting this work. Citing Anzaldua, Lara writes, “It is not always easy to practice what we
know, to be self-reflective ‘spiritual-activists’ who work to [connect] the inner life of the mind
and the spirit to the outer worlds of action” (114). Lara’s reference to the “inner life of the mind
and the spirit” and the “outer worlds of action” also gesture toward Anzaldua’s essay, “Now Let
Us Shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts,” where Anzaldua delineates the
process of what she calls “conocimiento” that challenges the dominance of Western material
reality which inhibits the full use of our “facultad,” or nonrational senses, which can inform
public acts such as writing and other forms of creativity (540).
Lara draws upon Anzaldua’s theories in order to advance an understanding of what she
calls “mami facultad” by embracing serpentine knowledge through her mothering acts. Lara
writes, “like Anzaldua who embraces the ‘snake [as] a symbol of awakening consciousness, the
potential of knowing within, an awareness and intelligence not grasped by logical thought,’ I am
learning to accept and welcome a more serpentine process of creating decolonizing feminist
knowledge and art” (114). This “serpentine process” uplifts Chicana feminist sexuality,
mothering, and even destruction, as evidenced by the sacred imagery of Coatlicue with her
necklace of human hearts, skulls, and severed hands. Lara applies the incredible power of
Anzaldua’s serpentine theory to Chicana mothering in the sense that this allows Lara to “give
birth” to herself as a Chicana mother alongside her other interlocking identities. Lara writes, “I
have worked to sense and give birth to the serpent in me as a whole being, mother, daughter,
lover, spiritual activist, teacher, and writer” (115). This difficult process, to “sense” and to “give
47
birth,” to oneself refers to the fragmentation of Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec (Mexica) goddess of the
moon. She was a daughter of Coatlicue who was dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli,
which parallels heteropatriarchy violence upon women. In her testimonio, Lara resists the
violence of dismemberment, the violence of misogyny, and the violence of heteropatriarchy, by
“birthing herself’ as a “whole being,” which includes being a Chicana mother but also a person
who is simultaneously “daughter, lover, spiritual activist, teacher, and writer,” all at once. In this
way, Lara challenges how Chicana mothers are often perceived.
In these ways, Lara’s testimonio offers a new understanding of Chicana mothering as a
body-based and visceral lived experience which encompasses all aspects of her identity: a
mother who is spiritual and sexual and much more. Furthermore, Lara carries her ancestral
knowledge that from oral traditions, ceremonies, and healers and she bridges this traditional
knowledge with various theories to show how she has given birth to herself, another aspect of
self mothering which Alexis Pauline Gumbs discusses (112). Although Lara’s essay centers the
serpentine process of Chicana mothering, she also gives attention to the necessity of mothering
herself as a “whole being,” an individual with needs, wants, desires, and work that may or may
not fall outside her identity as a mother.
While she clarifies that her identity as a Chicana mother does not constitute her “whole
being,” Lara does emphasize that the serpentine praxis of her Chicana mothering facilitates a
deeper understanding of what she calls “mami facultad.” In a subsection of her testimonio titled
“Rereading Anzaldúa with Mami Eyes,” Lara engages deeply with Anzaldua’s theories through
the lens of her Chicana mothering. Citing Anzaldua, she writes that facultad means “the capacity
to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities” (121). This definition informs
Lara’s “mami facultad” in a number of ways. For example, Lara describes how she began to
48
practice many of Anzaldúa’s theorizations during her college years soon after she was introduced
to Anzaldua’s work. And yet, “it was not until I became a mother did I realize I had been
analyzing her work with daughter rather than mami eyes” (121, my emphasis). The shift from
daughter to mami “eyes,” or perspective, marks an extremely significant shift in the development
in her mami facultad abilities. While her “daughter eyes” may still be applicable in many
instances, it is with this new perspective of “mami eyes” that enabled her experience a deeper
meaning of what she calls “mami facultad.” Ultimately, for Lara, these new “mami eyes” can
reveal deeper truths and connections as opposed to the “daughter eyes” that she initially had
when she first encountered Anzaldua’s work as a young college student. In other words,
returning to Anzaldua’s texts with “mami eyes” enables Lara to discover new meanings in the
text and within herself as a Chicana feminist mother.
Furthermore, Lara’s serpentine sense of mamihood is fluid and expansive, particularly
when taking into account what Lara calls “erotic-spiritual mamihood” (123). By embracing the
erotic in the context of Chicana spirituality and mothering, Lara disrupts Mexican
heteropatriarchal and hegemonic systems which often deny mothers their full agency, including
an empowered sense of sexuality. Lara explains that “becoming a mother has led to new
experiences, new facultades, new erotic-spiritual inquiries, and so on continuously in a spiraling
serpentine fashion” (124). For Lara, the shape of this continuous process, a “spiraling serpentine
fashion,” connotes ancestral forms of feminist power, spirituality, knowledge, and sexualities.
The fluid nature of mamihood is “an erotic maternal facultad that helps me to see through the
dangers, act in spite of fears, and ‘shift attention’ to refocus purposefully on the empowering
creativity of an erotic-spiritual mamihood” (121, my emphasis). As Lara writes here and
elsewhere, including her dissertation, she strives to explode the hegemonic puta/virgen
49
dichotomy through the reclamation of these ancestral worldviews. Lara cites Tlazolteotl, a sacred
figure who embodies “a duality of maternity and sexuality” simultaneously, thus disrupting the
colonial binary that is often imposed upon Mexican and Chicana women to deny or suppress
their sexuality and other identities. In this way, Lara’s insistence that Chicana mothers, like
herself, can be both maternal and sexual, both spiritual and sexual, both creative and destructive,
remains a radical concept because of material oppressions which continuously seek to undermine
women’s power, sexuality, and resistance.
Lara’s understanding of her mami facultad extends beyond her own individual mothering
because she includes her daughter’s agency as well. In her testimonio, Lara describes a game she
plays with her daughter Belen where she pretends that she is still inside her mother’s womb.
However, it is more than a game. It is a way to maintain intergenerational knowledge and power.
Lara writes, “As I retell the story, me llega el conocimiento that our game is also a ceremony that
provides us both with a healing occasion to rewrite our birthing story to be less traumatic” (125).
Instead of a painful labor, Lara and her daughter re-imagine a painless, three-minute birth. Lara
writes that this game is “a playful reminder that every day we are reborn, every day we can work
toward our own healing, every day we can sense the serpent moving within us as
mother-daughters ” (125). Their game continues, Lara “holds [her] belly and leans back, opens
[her] mouth and [her] panocha, just like the Tlazolteotl-like Mesoamerican birthing figure on the
altar...together we land, body-spirit together and transformed...this is you daughtering and me
mothering” (126). This game takes on a ceremonial quality because it encourages somatic
healing by acting out a new healing scenario with new memories upon the body, mind, and spirit.
It is made much more powerful by the bond between “daughtering” and “mothering” across
50
generations. In this way, Lara’s daughter Belen also takes agency as the writer of her own birth
narrative.
Lara’s development of her mami facultad echoes the regenerative nature of Coatlicue, the
snake woman, the sacred goddess of life and death. Lara writes that “becoming a mami still feels
like being in a world of continual (re)generation, where I continually grow and shed my serpent
skin” (131). In this way, Lara reinscribes the (re)generation of identities and realities that she
moves through with the wisdom and power of the snake woman, the never-ending cycle of
shedding (destruction) and growing (creating), and that one cannot happen without the other. She
thanks Anzaldua for the ofrendas of her theorizations, “for helping [her] to work toward sensing
the serpent in the mother and as the mother, to nurture the serpent’s presence within and in
others” (131, my emphasis). While Western frameworks may label the mami facultad as
“irrational,” and therefore, as something that can be threatening, Lara’s testimonio is a medicinal
offering to our community, to inspire others to walk shared paths which are deeply rooted in
social justice and healing.
Mothering Through Plantcestors
Likewise, in Patrisia Gonzales’s testimonio, “Anatomy of Learning: Yauhtli, Peyotzin,
Tobacco, and Maguey,” she describes how she similarly draws on the process of carework and
“mothering the mother” through her sacred work as a partera (midwife) to Chicana/Latina
mothers. As a partera who is trained in Mexican Traditional Medicine (MTM), Gonzales views
pregnancy and childbirth as a radical act that reconnects mothers, children, and communities to
ancestral knowledges that has been persecuted, destroyed, and suppressed (239). Throughout her
testimonio, Gonzales develops what she calls a “Red Medicine” framework, which she defines as
sacred cosmologies and healing modalities from the cultural and regionally specific
51
Mesoamerican context. This is evidenced in the title of her testimonio and its listing of medicinal
herbs which contain potent healing properties within the MTM framework.
Throughout her testimonio, Gonzales emphasizes the sacred role of medicinal plants for
Chicana, Latina, and indigenous mothers as a powerful way to reconnect with their ancestral
healing modalities, and therefore, the associated cosmologies and traditions that have been
suppressed or hidden. For Gonzales, plants lead the path for her work. Gonzales writes:
...ceremonial plants organize this story of how I learned their power and application.
These plants are my guides in understanding fertility, pregnancy and labor, and general
imbalances whether physical or spiritual. Plant knowledge is so important for Nahua
cultures that we literally ‘plant’ who we are, our ombligos and placentas (219).
As indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, plants and humans
are in a reciprocal and interdependent relationship. In this excerpt, Gonzales echoes this
indigenous worldview by honoring plants as her guides. Furthermore, her reference to the
burying ombligos (umbilical cords) and placentas exemplifies the central role of the earth in
healing practices. The care and attention given to ombligos and placentas also underscore the
significance of reproductive justice for mothers of color who reclaim these healing practices.
Furthermore, Gonzales elaborates upon the hidden role of MTM and the importance of
oral traditions and relationship-building in her work as a partera. These elements are generally
not taken seriously in Western forms of pre- and post-natal maternal health care. Gonzales
writes, “I have received instruction through this hidden medical system from the oral tradition,
often obscured from the world of scholars, which I present here as an anatomy of learning among
my peoples” (220). This “anatomy of learning” refers to the intricate mindbodyspirit nature of
her work and the autonomous nature of this process is critical for maternal health care. In
addition, she contextualizes herself within what she calls Native science. She writes that she “has
to understand it [Native science] within my own personal and collective context” (220). In other
52
words, she defies Cartesian objective perspective for her midwifery practice. Citing indigenous
scholar Gregory Cajete, she stresses that “unless the cultural/ecological context of relationship is
understood, one cannot fully comprehend a particular Indigenous technology” (220). For
Gonzales, relationships form the foundation of her work as a midwife trained in MTM and as a
native scholar trained in Western universities. Drawing from her MTM and Western training, she
centers relationships, interdependence, storytelling, and the reciprocal relationships with plants
as major components of her decolonizing methodologies and praxis in her work to “mother the
mother.”
17
I situate Gonzales’s work in a larger lineage of women who have performed gendered
acts of memory and resistance in order to facilitate the reclamation of ancestral knowledge and
healing. Gonzales’s work to assist others during pregnancy resonates with Irene Lara’s
theorization of “bruja positionalities” and how “sexuality and spirituality of women of color in
las Americas has been dichotomized and colonized by social institutions, as well as how these
women decolonize such constructions through healing practices” (12). As a midwife, Gonzales
similarly embodies a “bruja positionality” to support mothers as they embrace their sexuality and
spirituality.
Platicas as Sacred Acts of Ancestral Technology In the Latina/Chicana Mothering
Anthology
While Gonzales and Lara draw upon Chicana/Latina feminisms and ancestral healing
modalities in the development of their theory and praxis, the testimonios written by Ana Castillo
and Michelle Tellez in the anthology Chicana/Latina Mothering (2011) show how Chicana
17
In her landmark text Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999),
Linda Tuhiwai Smith locates academic research within a long history of European colonialism and
imperialism in which knowledges were stolen or appropriated from indigenous peoples, cultures, and
histories. Smith challenges these racist systems of power by arguing that decolonizing research
methodologies should actively contribute to worldwide indigenous struggles for social justice and
indigenous sovereignty.
53
mothering destabilizes the regulatory mechanisms of white heteronormative family structures
that benefits the U.S. nation-state and the machismo of Chicana/o nationalism and
heteropatriarchy.
18
Through the power of platicas, or intimate talks among friends or family, I
argue that Castillo and Tellez utilize these talks as a way to challenge both interpersonal and
institutional heteropatriarchy through the mothering of their children as single Chicana mothers.
For Castillo, in her testimonio “Are Hunters Born or Made,” she re-claims the site of her home
as a critical space to challenge certain aspects of her teenage son’s masculinity while also
guiding her son to more critically consider the ways that his behavior is informed by his
gendered privilege. For example, Castillo encourages her son to talk through a conflict with his
girlfriend rather than avoiding accountability. Whereas for Téllez, in her essay “Mi Madre, Mi
Hija, y Yo: Chicana Mothering Through Memory, Culture, and Place,” she theorizes Chicana
Motherwork as a theory to describe intergenerational relationships between her own mother,
herself, and her daughter between and across the U.S.-Mexico border. This fluidity across and
between generations and borders enables her to “reinterpret mothering” through the lens of
Chicana M(other)work.
19
Furthermore, as evidenced by the theme of intergenerational mothering
in Tellez’s testimonio, Chicana mothering moves across both the past and the future.
In Ana Castillo’s testimonio, “Are Hunters Born or Made,” she discusses her experience
as a Chicana single mother as she discusses how her parenting has challenged heteropatriarchy.
However, she encounters conflict around certain aspects of her teenage son’s masculinity. She
writes, “Not that he just became a man—a natural process—but he became one to the fullest
extent of the sociological and traditional meaning of gender. How and when it happened exactly I
19
See chapter four of this dissertation, where I describe the founding of the Chicana M(other)work
collective by myself and four other Chicana mother-scholars.
18
See Richard T. Rodriguez’s Next of Kin: The Family in Chicana/o Cultural Politics (2009) for a
critique of Chicano nationalism and the political role of the heteronormative Chicano family through a
queer and woman of color feminist analysis of Chicana/o cultural production.
54
cannot say” (24). In this passage, her tone is serious as she wonders how her son “became a
man,” and not just a man, but a man to the “fullest extent of the sociological and traditional
meaning of gender.” While her tone is serious, it can also come across as tongue in cheek. What
does it mean to be a man “to the fullest extent”? Alternatively, this passage also appears to hint
that her Chicana feminist mothering has failed in a way. However, I am interested in Castillo’s
positionality as a Chicana mother disrupts the so-called “natural process” of “becoming a man”
in the United States. This “natural process” echoes the question posed in the title of her
testimonio—are hunters born or made?—and her Chicana feminist mothering offers a container
for alternative possibilities, where masculinity can be shaped into something else more healing.
In addition, Castillo discusses the concept of “unmothering” to show how this informs
her single Chicana mothering of a teenage Chicano son. She writes:
But then, there is no such thing as an “unmothered woman,” which doesn’t even
make sense. Or maybe it could, if you really gave it some deep thought and were
open to the concept. But not for me. Any feminist of my day worth her salt
knows: the revolution starts with one man at a time. (Castillo, 27)
Castillo remains hopeful about her Chicana feminist mothering, yet, she grapples with the fact
that “the revolution starts with one man at a time.” In this specific context, she is referring to
raising her son and that the personal is political. Her mothering does directly impact the ways her
son learned about gender and masculinity and the “pedagogies of the home” can inform larger
institutional change. Simultaneously, Castillo’s testimonio reminds us that mothering should not
fall solely on individual mothers, and particularly single mothers like Castillo herself.
Throughout the essay, Castillo ponders ways to counter how “the hunter is made” and she refuses
to comply with the pressure of heteropatriarchy. Rather, Castillo shows that another way is
possible. Castillo successfully intervenes against heteropatriarchy through the act of mothering
her son within her home, and particularly through her Chicana mother-son relationship. For
55
example, she writes that she intentionally filled her son’s life with powerful women of color
feminists who collectively modeled another way of being beyond heteropatriarchy, which can
sometimes be normalized in Mexican-American families.
Turning to Michelle Téllez’s testimonio, “Mi Madre, Mi Hija y Yo: Chicana Mothering
Through Memory, Culture, and Place,” I argue that Téllez’s Chicana single mothering is an act of
intergenerational healing and relationship building between and across the U.S.-Mexico border.
As opposed to Castillo who writes about mothering a son, Tellez focuses in three generations of
women in her family to illustrate how Chicana mothering is an empowering act of justice for her.
For Castillo, she contends more directly with heteropatriarchy by striving to teach her son about
Chicana feminist values. Whereas for Tellez, she draws on the strengths of intergenerational
Chicana mothering in order to empower her daughter to challenge not only racism, but sexism as
well.
In her testimonio, Téllez notes that her lived experience as a Chicana single mother is
“probably not very different from many families living in the United States” (78). While single
Chicana motherhood presents its own set of unique challenges, Tellez’s quote here gestures
toward the expansive forms of kinship networks which pre-date colonizationtion. Additionally,
another way that Téllez’s mothering acts constitute intergenerational mothering is the importance
she places on nurturing relationships between herself, her three-year-old daughter, and her
seventy-three year old mother who resides in Mexico. Téllez discusses how her mother, a
Mexican woman, both resonates and departs from Tellez’s Chicana feminist mothering. While
Téllez honors her mother’s caretaking labor, Téllez acknowledges that there are some tensions
concerning the role of machismo. As a Chicana feminist, Tellez challenges traditional gender
roles which have been enforced in various ways. Yet, even in spite of these differences, Tellez
56
focuses on the strengths of intergenerational mothering as expansive. In this way, Tellez’s
intergenerational mothering across borders echoes June Jordan’s words that “love is lifeforce”
and that it can lead our social justice movements.
Téllez reaffirms intergenerational Chicana mothering across the U.S.-Mexico border by
exploring the role of what Anzaldua called nepantla, which can be defined as an in-between
metaphysical space. Téllez writes, “My mother created links not only across national boundaries
through family ties and visits, but also through language by teaching us Spanish. When we return
to her hometown, the time and distance is erased and immediately we blend into the everyday
family life with our tías, primos, and community” (59-60). Her mother took an active role in
maintaining these familial links with her daughter and granddaughter in their hometown and
across the border. Furthermore, I posit that nepantla offers a space to challenge normative
understandings of time too because Tellez’s mother facilitates how “time and distance is erased”
during Tellez’s visits to Mexico, which emphasizes the radical potential of mothering and kinship
networks. Through regular visits to her family’s hometown in Mexico and by continually
engaging with various aspects of time, borders, and languages, Téllez and her mother both
challenge racist ideologies about women of color mothers. In fact, Téllez affirms and replicates
many of her mother’s caretaking strategies with her own daughter.
Additionally, Téllez coins the term “Chicana Motherwork” in this essay to describe these
intergenerational aspects of Chicana feminist mothering.
20
Téllez writes, “Chicana motherwork
requires an adaptation of cultural practices tools and exposure, it also means reinterpreting
motherhood” (64). While Chicana motherwork includes an adaptation from more traditional or
hegemonic forms of mothering, it also constitutes a shift towards mothering for liberation. Tellez
20
Tellez’s coining of the term “Chicana Motherwork” eventually led to the formation of the Chicana
M(other)work collective and I am proud to be a founding member. See the introduction in The Chicana
Motherwork Anthology (2019) for more on the collective’s origins.
57
continues: “As a Chicana single mother, I embrace many aspects of what my cultura has to offer,
but I refuse to believe that motherhood implies a relinquishments of self...instead, I choose to
argue that motherhood implies the creation of a greater self that is in constant regeneration” (64).
As evidenced in this quote, Téllez rejects the selflessness associated with traditional Mexican
motherhood in favor of achieving a “greater self” which requires a “constant regeneration.”
Indeed, this fluidity is necessary to adapt to rapidly changing societal structures and political
events.
Téllez connects her theorization of Chicana Motherwork to the concept of sobrevivir, or
surviving, which gains special importance for Tellez as a Chicana single mother who takes on the
full load of parenting without a co-parent. For Tellez, sobrevivir includes mothering herself and
ensuring her own health and well-being. Tellez writes, “[Chicana mothering] is a process that can
be painful and joyous; the truth remains that I hope to give to my daughter as much as my
mother gave to us; but, in embracing my multiple identities, I also hope that a part of me remains
committed to myself” (65). By modeling this commitment to self, Tellez shows her daughter a
healthy way of being. In these ways, Tellez showcases the vibrant legacy of intergenerational
Chicana mothering through the relationships between herself, her daughter, and her mother
across time, space, borders. In doing so, Tellez weaves together multiple strands of Chicana
mothering as a radical act.
Conclusion: “I will write, I will create, I will protest: I will mother.”
A leading scholar on Chicana mothering, Larissa Mercado-Lopez, argues that Chicana
mothers must create space for themselves in areas that are not necessarily accommodating for
mothers, such as higher education and activist spaces. Mercado-Lopez theorizes what she calls a
“third space Chicana maternal praxis” in which Chicana motherhood itself is “a site of
58
contradictions” that challenges stereotypes associated with Chicana mothering, such as passivity
and heteronormativity (50). She argues that “Chicana maternal praxis” is a body-centered act of
resistance that challenges Western forms of knowledge production. For Chicana mothers and
others who are in this “third space,” like Castillo, Tellez, Lara, and Gonzales, it is imperative for
Chicana mothers and those who perform the labor of carework to draw upon their lived
experiences to create new lived theories that accurately reflect their knowledge and realities. As
Mercado-Lopez asserts regarding Chicana mothers, citing Gloria Anzaldua’s call to “do work
that matters,” she writes “we have no choice when it comes to doing work that matters.” In the
spirit of Chicana feminist thought, Mercado-Lopez uses “we” rather than the “I” pronoun to
speak directly to her intended communal audience of fellow Chicana mothers, scholars, and
activists. She makes visible her third space Chicana maternal praxis by showing how “the
personal is political” when she triumphantly states, “I will write, I will create, I will protest: I
will mother.” This statement is a collective rallying call to action because “I will mother”
embodies writing, creating, and protesting all at once. Mothering is an action of creating,
including the creation of oneself in a feminist paradigm that exceeds limiting gendered roles. It is
this powerful collectivity and shared set of lived experiences that have the power to transform
institutional and interpersonal oppressions for Chicana mothers and caregivers, their children,
and their larger communities.
Heeding Mercado-Lopez’s call for Chicana activist mothering, the testimonios that I have
analyzed in this chapter have shown how Chicana/Latina mothers leverage testimonio as a means
to not only share their individual resistance and survival strategies for social justice, but also how
their lived experiences can offer new speculative visions for the future through what Lara calls
“mami eyes.” In other words, their testimonios offer guidance about how the full integration of
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mind, body, and spirit can encompass the multiplicities of their identities scholars, writers,
activists, and more. These four testimonios from Castillo, Lara, Tellez, and Gonzales collectively
contest oppressive conditions while simultaneously offering ofrendas to themselves, their
children, and their communities. It is within the realm of these ordinary, seemingly innocuous,
everyday mothering acts that have the potential to create speculative visions for justice for their
children because these acts contribute toward a imagination in which new worlds that are
possible, worlds where their children are not threats. Taken together, these testimonios offer a full
spectrum of what Chicana mothering can entail: contradictions, despairs, hopes, spiritualities,
activism, healing modalities, inherited trauma, and intergenerational knowledge. As the
contributors explore in their writing, the material, political, and spiritual are braided together like
the fabric of a rebozo (Caballero et al 2017).
21
In these ways, Chicana mothering testimonios
imagine a future where children of color are not targeted or oppressed and this can only be
achieved with collective visions and collective work.
The narratives promote new understandings about Chicana mothering, spirituality, and
healing in ways that can facilitate social justice. In particular, I contend that these mothering
testimonios expand Anzaldua’s theorizations about spirituality, healing, and nepantla. As
AnaLouise Keating writes, “For Gloria Anzaldua, writing is ontological, intimately connected
with physical and nonphysical beings, with ordinary and non-ordinary realities” and these
testimonios convey these various realities as they discuss their mothering, spirituality, and social
justice ambitions (xxxii). As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the speculative is
required in order to “raise children who aren’t supposed to exist,” therefore, revolutionary
mothering can indeed change the world.
22
As Anzaldua states, “activism is engaging in healing
22
Gumbs, 2016.
21
Caballero, 2017.
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work” and this includes Chicana activist mothering as a form of speculative healing in all of its
locations, identities, and visions for justice for mothering in the borderlands and beyond (90).
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Chapter 3
“I Didn’t Just Define Myself as a Chicana Mother”:
Sylvia Morales’s A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, and Activism
Chicana filmmaker Sylvia Morales wrote, directed, edited, and released her
ground-breaking independent documentary CHICANA in 1979 during the rise of Chicana
feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s (Garcia 2). In CHICANA, Morales makes visible the
Chicana feminist influences on Chicana/o social movements of the era, impacts which have
historically been overshadowed by charismatic Chicano male activists as described by Alma
Garcia and Maylei Blackwell, among others.
23
Through Chicana feminist filmmaking, Morales
retells Chicana/o activist histories on the Bronze screen with a Chicana feminist framework
(Fregoso 1993). Through the genre of documentary film, I analyze how Morales invokes
innovative film techniques, such as breaking the fourth wall, to demonstrate that Chicana activist
mothering breaks boundaries between the director and her interviewees but also between history
and storytelling. Morales, a single Chicana mother, appears in the documentary alongside her
adolescent daughter and the interviewees. In this way, Fregoso showcases the complexities of
collective Chicana activist mothering and their lived experiences which challenge machista
stereotypes, heteropatriarchal violence, and their erasure from Chicana/o activist movements.
Moreover, Morales’ work as a director also disrupts the historically stereotypical depictions of
23
Historian Alma Garcia compiled many of the very first Chicana feminist writings from the 1960s and
1970s in her text Chicana Feminist Thought (1997) which includes essays by Chicana activists such as
Ana NietoGomez, Marta Cotera, Bernice Rincon, Yolanda M. Lopez, among many others. In their essays,
Chicana feminist activists reveal the sexism and gendered violence that they experienced due to the
heteropatriarchal ideology of Chicano cultural nationalism. As Chicanas, they demonstrated how the
intersectionality of their gender and sexuality cannot be separated from their race. Additionally, Maylei
Blackwell’s book Chicana Power: Contested Histories of the Chicano Movement (2011) offers a
groundbreaking feminist analysis of Chicana feminist activism the 1960s and 1970s. Through archival
research, oral histories, and more, Blackwell showcases how Chicana activists challenged Chicano
cultural nationalism within the movement. Together, both Garcia and Blackwell demonstrate the necessity
of feminist methodologies and archival work in the larger field of Chicano Studies.
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Chicanas in Chicana/o film history (Fregoso 1993). Through a mujerista lens, Morales “takes up
theorizing space” in Chicana/o film history by speaking back to the stereotypes and silences as
an unapologetic Chicana, mother, activist, and independent filmmaker (Telling to Live, 2001).
Morales’ groundbreaking CHICANA (1979) documentary laid the foundation for the
sequel, a documentary titled A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, and Activism (2009). Her
decision to label A Crushing Love as the sequel to CHICANA, thirty years later, is incredibly
significant because while Chicana/Latina mother activists have been active in social movements
throughout the United States and Latin America for generations, their mothering activist labor
has often been overlooked, minimized, or unacknowledged. In addition, I contend that the thirty
year gap between the release of both documentaries represents a connection, rather than a
disruption, of history that binds Chicana activist mothers of the past and the present. As such, I
am particularly interested in how Morales utilizes non-linearity in her film. Influenced by
Morales’s non-linear storytelling, my analysis in this chapter does not focus on separate
biographical analyses of each Chicana mother-activist who is profiled in the film. Rather, I am
more interested in the collective challenges and successes of Chicana activist mothering and
what these hidden mothering narratives mean for the field of Chicana feminist history and film
more broadly.
In this chapter, I use a Chicana and woman of color feminist theoretical lens to analyze
the interviews of the five Chicana mother-activists who are profiled in the documentary. The five
Chicana mother-activists are: Martha Cotera, a Tejana-Mexicana writer, activist, and librarian;
Dolores Huerta, a Mexican-American civil rights and labor activist; Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez,
Chicana feminist organizer, activist, and educator, Alicia Escalante; activist and founder of the
East Los Angeles Chicana Welfare Rights Organization; and Cherríe Moraga, Chicana professor,
63
playwright, poet, and essayist. In addition, the documentary also features select individual
interviews with some, but not all, of their children. Importantly, the documentary does not
feature sweeping biographical overviews of the Chicana activist-mothers’ impressive
decades-long contributions to academia, activism, and the arts. Rather, the documentary is
structured around the five Chicana activist-mothers’ interviews as they reflect upon their
distinguished careers while navigating the successes and challenges of Chicana activist
mothering. In doing so, they reveal the complexity of Chicana activist mothers.
The interviews with Cotera, Escalante, Huerta, Martinez, and Moraga reveal how
Chicana activist mothering challenges normative heteropatriarchal scripts for the Chicana/o/x
family in Chicana/o/x film and media, and Chicano heteropatriarchy more broadly. While their
mothering were perhaps not deemed significant enough by historians and others who have
focused on other aspects of the Chicana/o movement, I argue that this erasure and minimization
does not make the contributions by Chicana activist mothers any less significant. Rather, Chicana
mothering is perhaps even more significant than many forms of public forms of leadership
because their unacknowledged mothering labor makes front-line activism possible. Second, I
argue that the nonlinear structure of the documentary disrupts normative Chicana/o movement
histories by building upon themes such as communal mothering. The director, Morales, breaks
the fourth wall and inserts herself and her daughter into the documentary as well. For Morales,
her daughter, the five Chicana mother-activists, and their children, these everyday acts of
Chicana activist mothering offer new ways to understand collective mothering acts as liberatory.
“Mujerista Moviemaking” in Chicana/o/x Film and The Bronze Screen
In the landmark text, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film (1993), Rosa Linda
Fregoso provides a provides a brief overview of Chicana/o/x film and offers a Chicana feminist
64
analysis of mainstream, canonical Chicano films like Zoot Suit (1981), La Bamba (1987), and
Born in East LA (1987). Specifically, Fregoso draws from Chicana feminism thought and utilizes
Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantla to analyze these gendered subjectivities and
representations of Chicana characters in Chicana/o/x film. Her groundbreaking Chicana feminist
analysis made a significant contribution to Chicana/o/x film criticism because there had been less
attention paid to Chicana characters. Often, as Fregoso discusses, the storylines center Chicano
male-identified characters in films whereas the Chicana characters tend to have less developed
roles or embody stereotypical gendered traits. As Fregoso writes, “Not that women have not
played major parts in Chicano films, but usually they are portrayed in terms of timeworn
stereotypes: as virgins or as whores in Valdez's films Zoot Suit and La Bamba; as sidekicks of the
main characters (supportive wives) in Jesus Trevino's Raices de Sangre and Seguin and in Isaac
Artenstein's Break of Dawn; as translators (malinches) between cultures, as in Robert Young's
The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” (93-94). The reification of these gendered stereotypes are
harmful because, as Fregoso argues, “in Chicano-directed films, the male subject is allowed to
occupy the position of the speaking subject whereas the female subject is excluded from
positions of authority both inside and outside the fictional universe of film” (93). Fregoso locates
these gendered film representations to the gaze of male directors and the ways in which this gaze
reflects the larger institutional realities of heteropatriarchal systems of power.
More recently, while Chicano and Latino male directors continue to dominate film and
earn more mainstream accolades and awards, it is important to note that Chicana filmmakers like
Sylvia Morales and Lourdes Portillo have been actively producing films since the 1970s. More
recently, a newer generation of queer Chicana/Latina filmmakers like Aurora Guerrero
(Mosquita y Mari, 2012) and Adelina Anthony (Amigas With Benefits, 2017) are also disrupting
65
the Chicano heteropatriarchal gaze by centering queer Chicanas, both behind the camera as
directors and on the screen as complex main characters. Within this context of Chicana film, I
argue that Sylvia Morales’ documentary A Crushing Love (2009) signals a significant
contribution to Chicana/o/x film because Morales incorporates her own lived experience into her
film as both a Chicana mother and as a Chicana filmmaker. Furthermore, as Teresa Hidalgo de la
Riva argues in her analysis of what she calls “mujerista filmmaking,” Chicana documentary
filmmakers like Sylvia Morales and Lourdes Portillo offer a way to shatter stereotypes about
Chicana women in film. De la Riva argues that Chicana films embody Chicana feminist
epistemologies in a different way than mainstream Chicano-centric films. De la Riva writes,
“When I speak in terms of mujerista healing...the definitions aim towards and derive from
neo-spiritual womanist/mujerista visions of ancient matrilineal non-western ways of thinking and
being” (vi). As such, Chicana documentary is a powerful visual medium for showcasing Chicana
characters, storytelling, and “mujerista healing” in a way that is not possible in most of the
classical, canonical Chicano films. Telling these stories on the bronze screen with Chicana and
Latina feminist directors, writers, and actors, then, can facilitate healing and challenge
heteropatriarchy. Chicanas can tell their own stories in a way that acknowledges their full
humanity.
The Chicana Mother in Chicana Literary Criticism and Literature
I contextualize my analysis of A Crushing Love in Chicana feminist literary criticism
24
. In
Cristina Herrera’s text, Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script
24
I use the word “Chicana” throughout this chapter because all of the Mexican-American women in the
documentary identify this way and the film title itself includes this term. However, it is important to note
that the women profiled in the documentary are both Mexican-born immigrants and U.S.-born.
Furthermore, while the word “Chicana” connotes a feminist politics that is rooted in social justice, not all
Mexican-American descended women identify this way, nor do all Mexican immigrant women identify
with the term.
66
(2014), she notes that Chicana/o literary studies often lacks robust scholarship about Chicana
motherhood studies and, more specifically, scholarship about Chicana mother-daughter
relationships. Herrera writes that she seeks “to rewrite the script of maternity outside existing
discourses, which present Chicana mothers as passive and servile and the subsequent
mother-daughter relationship as a source of tension, frustration, and angst” (21). Additionally,
Herrera effectively shows why rewriting the script of Chicana mothering in Chicana/o/x literary
criticism is necessary to challenge the virgin/whore binary that remains pervasive in Chicana/o
and Mexican culture. Herrera writes that “the binary symbolized in the archetypical mothers of
Chicana/o cultural, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, and La Malinche” have been “the motif
on which Chicana womanhood or motherhood has been defined, and it is no surprise that
Chicana writers and scholars have been instrumental in contesting, challenging, and resisting the
construction of maternity on such narrow terms” (22). The Chicana feminist rejection of the
virgin/whore binary—as they relate to the “three mothers” of Mexican culture, La Virgen de
Guadalupe, La Llorona, and La Malinche—is necessary to not only imagine new literary
landscapes that include complex Chicana mother-daughter relationships, but also to challenge
and transform oppressive cultural ideologies related to Chicana motherhood.
Furthermore, Herrera offers a critical and nuanced approach to her motherhood analysis;
that is, Chicana mothering is not always celebratory. Instead, these narratives serve a larger
purpose by representing the full complexity of Chicana mother-daughter relationships. Herrera
writes, “I seek a critical reading of contemporary Chicana novels that rewrite and reclaim
motherhood as a means through which mothers and daughters construct empowered
subjectivities and identities'' (23). By reclaiming Chicana motherhood, both mothers and
daughters can create deeper relationships with each other and themselves. And while Herrera’s
67
analysis focuses on Chicana novels, I extend her analysis to Chicana film because her argument
resonates with the ways in which the profiled Chicana mothers discuss their mothering and their
careers in the context of Chicana feminism.
Additionally, while my analysis in this chapter is primarily informed by Chicana feminist
theory and cultural production, I also draw from Alexis Pauline Gumbs who has written
extensively about the genealogies of Black mothering
25
. In an essay, Gumbs affirms the history
of Black mothers and their shared survival strategies in the midst of chaotic political and social
injustices. Gumbs is particularly interested in what she calls the “intimate practices of
homemaking” (Par. 3). Gumbs writes, “In the current moment, our communities are continuing
to do what we have done for generations, creating housing and spiritual space to breathe and
collective space to gather, without permission” (Par. 4-6). Gumbs’ analysis about Black mothers
and their “intimate practice of making a livable world” affirms the sacred space in Black homes
as radical spatial sites for collectivity and justice. Gumbs’ analysis also resonates with Dolores
Delgado Bernal’s groundbreaking theorization regarding “pedagogies of the home.” Although
Bernal’s article centers Chicana college students, Bernal similarly affirms that consejos and
resources that Chicanas learned within their homes empowers them to navigate microaggressions
and other forms of injustice (4). Similarly, Gumbs’ assertion that Black mothers “make space
livable” is a necessity for survival. Likewise, in Morales’ documentary, the Chicana mothers
show how they created multiple forms of resistance and how they also “make space livable” for
both their families and social justice movements at large. Indeed, Gumbs, Bernal, and Morales's
documentary collectively demonstrate how to “make revolution irresistible,” as Toni Cade
Bambara called for in the 1981 publication of This Bridge Called My Back.
25
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering.
68
Transgressing the Temporal And The Fourth Wall With Alicia Escalante and Sylvia
Morales on Film
In this section, I concentrate on a specific aspect of a film technique that Sylvia Morales
deploys throughout the documentary. I call it “transgressing the temporal,” or a non-linear way
of storytelling that is rooted in Chicana and women of color feminist theory. I explores how
Chicana activist Alicia Escalante’s interview scenes are bookended with “behind the scenes”
clips of Morales and her daughter as they prepare to film the documentary. In these ways,
Morales repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and transgresses the temporal by including her own
Chicana mothering in the film along Escalante and the other Chicana activist mothers to
emphasize their connection across time and space. Moreover, Escalante’s discussions of her
childhood and early young adulthood draw a direct parallel with Morales and her own Chicana
mothering during the making of the film.
In Escalante’s interview scenes, she locates the origins of her radical consciousness to her
childhood home, which is another illustration of Dolores Delgado Bernal’s theorization of
“pedagogy of the home” in which the domestic sphere is a rich source of affirmation, knowledge,
and courage. In Escalante’s first scene in the documentary, she states that her journey to activism
began during her childhood in Texas. Echoing the work of Bernal, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and
other feminist scholars who write at the intersection of political activism and radical motherhood,
this documentary showcases the myriad forms of political activism, from front-line political
activism and direct action in public spaces to performing mothering labor. In her interview,
Escalante recalls her teenage years as she discusses the racism and extreme denigration that her
mother experienced when her mother applied for welfare benefits. Escalante highlights one
specific humiliating incident in which the welfare office denied her mother welfare benefits and
69
she describes the shame her mother felt when she could not afford the bus fare back home.
Escalante shares how these experiences sparked her political consciousness, of what Gloria
Anzaldua calls “conocimiento,” and how it informed her groundbreaking work as founder of the
East LA Welfare Rights Organization in 1967. In this way, the documentary makes a connection
between Escalante’s political consciousnesses and how it was directly tied to this experience at
the local welfare office.
Throughout Escalante’s interview in the documentary, Morales repeatedly breaks the
fourth wall by including multiple scenes between herself and her preteen daughter. I argue that
Morales demonstrates how her own Chicana mothering is embedded within the collective
narrative of Chicana activist mothering alongside the other women in the documentary. In
various clips interspersed throughout the documentary, Morales is shown performing mundane
but necessary tasks, such as packing and preparing for the interviews with her daughter in tow,
making long drives on the road, and assisting her daughter as she gets ready for school in the
mornings and taking her to school. I contend that Morales deepens the complexity of her
documentary’s narrative even further with these “behind the scenes” clips because they depict
that invisible labor that makes this film possible. In addition, Morales also includes a few scenes
filmed by her own daughter. In one of these scenes, her daughter Michelle turns the camera onto
herself and speaks directly into it. From the viewer’s point of view, Michelle is directly
addressing the audience, and this is another moment where the film’s non-linear storytelling is
emphasized. Here, Michelle’s own curiosity about her mother’s actions parallels Escalante’s own
political awakening as a young woman. In these ways, the film affirms the significance of youth
voices and its importance to activism.
70
And while the documentary centers Escalante and the other Chicana activist mothers, it is
significant that the film opens with Morales because this reveals how the film was made in such
a way that not only affirms domestic labor but also places domestic labor on par with activism.
In the context of the historically male-centered and male-dominated Chicano film canon,
domestic labor is usually minimized or ignored, which emphasizes the significance of Morales’
decision to break the fourth wall. While the term “breaking the fourth wall” does not generally
refer to documentaries, I use this term to describe how Morales directly addresses the audience.
In doing so, Morales reveals her positionality as the director of this documentary while she
shares her own struggles to be both an artist and a mother at the same time in the making of this
film about Chicana feminist activism. In the documentary, the opening scene depicts Morales
sitting inside her home office while she edits interviews on her computer. Morales appears deep
in thought as she makes progress on her work. However, less than a minute into the film, she is
interrupted by a young girl’s voice from off-camera. The camera quickly pans away from the
office and focuses on Morales’s preteen daughter, Michelle, as she walks into the frame and asks
her mother to make her food. Morales pauses from her work and tells Michelle that she cannot
cook for her but that there is food she can get for herself in the refrigerator. Her daughter is
unimpressed by her response and simply asks, “Why not?”. Morales replies, “Because I’m
working right now...I’m busy right now, darling.” Her daughter’s expression changes to a look of
annoyance and she replies, “Fine” in an exasperated tone as she walks away from Morales in the
office. The scene then immediately cuts to the film’s title and credits. Here, Morales and her
daughter firmly take their place in the history of Chicana feminism to challenge hegemonic
Chicano history which would not even value such an ordinary moment from daily life. Yet, this
often-unseen domestic labor is what made this film possible. As Patricia Hill Collins wrote in her
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groundbreaking essay about Black motherhood and what she termed “motherwork,” these types
of every day moments are acts of survival for Black communities (6).
Rather than beginning the documentary with footage of a rally or other example of
front-line political activism that is more publicly visible, Morales establishes in the very first few
minutes of the film that Chicana mothering is a form of activism too. By breaking the fourth wall
and including these scenes in the film, Morales invites the viewer into her home for viewers to
witness mothering labor, even if this means showcasing how a “work-life” balance is not truly
possible for Chicana mother-activists. In this opening clip from the beginning of the film,
Morales demonstrates that she is unable to always meet her daughter’s needs, as depicted by
denying her daughter’s request to make food for her. However, this refusal allows Morales to
keep working on her documentary that the viewer ultimately is watching. In this way, her
decision to begin her film with this scenes cultivates a sense of compassion for herself and other
Chicana mothers-activists who often have little time, resources, or other forms of support.
Moreover, I contend that this scene also subtly challenges the “good/bad mother” binary. Grace
Gamez, building upon previous Chicana and Latina feminist theorization about “the three
mothers,” coins the term “fierce mothering,” which she argues “stands in opposition to, and in
spite of, state constructions of good and bad mothers” (78). Likewise, Morales illustrates
Gamez’s attention to “fierce mothering” as “characterized by those impossible choices and
agonizing dilemmas through which mothers see their authority, expertise, and analysis evolve
and sharpen” (78). Morales is not a “bad mother” for not meeting every single one of her
daughter’s needs and Escalante’s mother was not a “bad mother” for her poverty and being
discriminated against at the welfare office. Rather, the fierce mothering in the documentary
reminds viewers that mothering is complex but also full of radical activist potential.
72
After the title credits, the film cuts back to Morales in her home, which further
emphasizes the importance of carework in interpersonal and activist spaces. After the film cuts
back, Morales is depicted drinking coffee and waking up her daughter for school when she says
in the voiceover, “I was in the last stretch of completing my documentary about activist women
who grappled with the dual roles of motherhood and total commitment to social justice and
political change.” Here, Morales makes clear the major theme of the film, the intersections of
Chicana motherhood and political activism, while breaking the fourth wall to show how she also
grapples with the same challenges as the profiled Chicana mothers. Morales continues, “As a
single mother of two, working full time, I wanted to know how in the world did they do it?”.
When Morales questions “how they did it,” the camera pans across her kitchens and shows a sink
full of dirty dishes and a messy kitchen floor. In this way, Morales connects with her audience to
show that she, too, struggles to fulfill both her roles as an independent filmmaker and mother.
Morales continues, “When did they find the time to wash and dry the clothes and then fold them?
Shop for food, put it away, and later cook it? Help the kids with homework and care for them
when they were sick? Did they ever find time for themselves?”. As Morales poses these series of
questions about this group of accomplished Chicana mothers, her questions linger over scenes of
herself preparing breakfast in the kitchen, walking into the bedrooms and ensuring her children
are dressed and ready, and then driving them to school. As a Chicana mother herself, she
understands the invisible workload of motherhood. As a director, she strategically places these
images and questions right at the beginning of her film. In these ways, Morales intervenes in
Chicano history that has often ignored domestic labor.
Furthermore, I contend that these series of questions at the beginning of the film reveal
the institutional challenges and complexities that Chicana mothers are unfairly expected to
73
resolve by themselves as individuals. In other words, if Chicana mothers do not perform this
invisible domestic labor, then who? And, furthermore, many of their Chicano contemporaries are
rarely, if ever, asked these similar questions. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, women of color
feminists forged the path “to make the radical practice of mothering visible as a key to our
collective liberation” and, likewise, Morales and the profiled Chicana mothers showcase the
realities of parenting for liberation (9).
Furthermore, Morales’s decision to film much of the material for the documentary in her
own home emphasizes that there is no separation between career and mothering. As a Chicana
mother and artist herself, Morales recognizes this invisible labor that other Chicana activist
mothers must perform in order to accomplish their more public acts of social justice. Their
“tireless commitment to social justice work and raising their children” is fraught with
contradictions and pain and yet there is also deep joy and love that creates a solid foundation of
what Grace Gamez calls “fierce mothering.” For Gamez, fierce mothering challenges the “good”
and “bad” mother binary and opens up space for more complexities (68). Chicana activist
mothering demands that the entire spectrum of mothering should be acknowledged, affirmed,
and celebrated in order to continue the fight against social injustice.
Queer Chicana Mothering: “I Couldn’t Be Who the Cultura or Society Wanted Me
to Be”
The documentary also includes a special focus on Cherrie Moraga’s queer Chicana
mothering to push the limits of both Chicano nationalism as a “Chicana,” “mother,” and queer
person all at once. At the time of the documentary’s release in 2009, queer Chicana mothering in
most forms of popular media were vastly underrepresented. Indeed, this invisibility only serves
to highlight the importance of Moraga’s inclusion in the documentary. In the documentary,
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Cherrie Moraga discusses how her queer sexuality has impacted her mothering, her critiques of
Chicano nationalism, and her career as a writer. Although Moraga herself wrote about her
pregnancy and the first few years of her son’s life in her groundbreaking memoir Waiting in the
Wings: Portrait of a Queer Chicana Motherhood in 1997, her interviews in the documentary
offers more insight into her queer Chicana mothering. In particular, I am interested in how
Moraga’s queer Chicana mothering reframes mothering outside the normative boundaries of
Chicano nationalism and heterosexism by challenging traditional gender roles, parenting with her
female partner, and raising her son with a different version of masculinity that challenges
Chicano cultural nationalism.
Throughout the documentary, Moraga discusses how her queer Chicana mothering
disrupts the boundaries between both traditional Mexican and “American” standards and the
ways she sought to carve her own identity. Moreover, in the documentary, Moraga’s interviews
are overlaid with everyday scenes filmed inside the director’s home. For example, In Moraga’s
first interview appearance in the film, it begins by cutting back to Morales at home while her
daughter Michelle is filming her mother on a handheld camera. Morales reminds her daughter
that a documentarian is “supposed to ask questions,” although it is clear that they are having a
playful moment. Michelle playfully heeds her mother’s advice as she turns the camera back onto
her mother and asks, “What’s your favorite ice cream?”. Here, Morales deliberately expands the
communal nature of Chicana mothering by including this scene at the start of Moraga’s
interview. In other words, Morales and her daughter are just as much part of the Chicana
mothering narrative in the documentary, alongside the other profiled Chicana mothers.
Furthermore, the numerous scenes between Morales and her daughter reveals how her daughter
is incorporated into this legacy of Chicana feminism. Alternatively, for Moraga, while she
75
discusses her mothering, her son does not appear in the film. And yet, I contend that Moraga’s
queer Chicana feminist mothering of her son can expand our understanding of Chicana
mothering and its nuances when it comes to unlearning harmful forms of masculinity.
In these ways, Moraga’s experience as a queer Chicana mothering and Morales’ own
mothering are intertwined in the film. Although Morales does not explicitly state her own
sexuality in the documentary, single Chicana mothering necessitates a queering of the
heteropatriarchal nuclear family. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs states, mothering to end oppression is
“the queerest thing of all” (23). Therefore, the cuts between Moraga’s interview and scenes of
Morales with her daughter during the making of the documentary become even more powerful
because this represents the expansiveness and necessity of Chicana activist mothering.
Rather than leaving these seemingly innocuous behind-the-scenes moments on the cutting
room floor, these scenes remind viewers that Morales’s work as a documentarian also always
includes her mothering labor. By making her own mothering visible, Morales challenges the
minimization and erasure of Chicana activist mothering. In another scene in the documentary,
Morales and her daughter are depicted in a hotel while they prepare for their trip from Southern
California to Northern California in order to interview Moraga. Morales explains in a voiceover
that, “I wasn’t able to find reliable childcare for Michelle, so I took her along, and gave her a
camera to keep her occupied while I worked with my crew.” Although the lack of reliable
childcare did not prevent Morales from doing her job with her crew and completing the interview
with Moraga, this scene and voiceover emphasizes that Morales must handle simultaneous
responsibilities, including her own Chicana activist mothering. Whether childcare falls through
or not, these scenes show that children of color are always a central aspect of artistic, political,
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and activist work. Furthermore, these seemingly mundane challenges also reveal how mothering
can undergird Chicana/o activist and artistic work.
Another behind-the-scenes segment focuses on an interaction between Morales and her
daughter Michelle in a hotel room, which parallels the way Moraga approaches her work as a
Chicana mother artist and activist. In other words, both Morales and Moraga struggle to fully
integrate both their mothering and art, and often, the two cannot be separated. In this particular
scene between Morales and her daughter Michelle in the documentary, they depicted inside the
hotel room and Michelle directly addresses the camera. She says, “We’re going to be
interviewing [Cherrie Moraga] for about an hour and a half about her life and her achievements
and what she wished she could have done and hopefully we’ll get back soon so I can take a dip
in the pool. The focus is back on Mommy now.” In this way, Michelle playfully emulates her
mother’s career as a director as Morales laughs in the background. However, Michelle also
ensures that they will spend quality time together too once the interview is over. These playful
and seemingly mundane moments blur the lines between Morales and her interview subjects like
Moraga to show how Chicana mothering is a communal act. However, these scenes demonstrate
that Michelle is also absorbing and learning about Chicana feminism through these lived
experiences and exposures.
The connection between Morales and Moraga and their Chicana activist mothering is
reinforced because, immediately after the hotel room scene between Morales and Michelle, the
film cuts to a black screen with the following quote: “I couldn’t be who the cultura or society
wanted me to be.” For the viewers, this quote reveals how Moraga positions herself as a queer
Chicana mother. In one of her previous writings, “Queer Aztlan,” Moraga writes that she is
exiled from her own Chicano community due to homophobia. In the documentary, Moraga
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begins her interview by discussing the power of intergenerational, working-class activist
mothering. Moraga cites her mother and the way she was influenced by her. Moraga states that
her mother worked from a very early age and that she was always working. She says that her
mother “always wanted education and didn’t get one.” For these reasons, Moraga was inspired to
pursue higher education. However, her working-class origins continued to inform her politics as
an adult.
In the interview, Moraga discusses how her traditional Catholic upbringing clashed with
her queer sexuality. For her, this created a sense of un-belonging and exile from the Chicano
community. Moraga previously elaborated on her queer Chicana identity in an essay titled
“Queer Aztlan.”
26
In the essay, Moraga discusses how her sexuality informed her political
consciousness more so than her Chicana identity, which also includes the traditional Mexican
Catholic religion. Moraga elaborates upon her queer Chicana identity in the film when she states
in the documentary, “I was raised as a very strict Catolica and my spirit was in constant
resistance to the church yet I obliged it all the time.” Moraga describes that during her youth, she
felt “obliged” because she was not exposed to Chicana feminist models around her who
embraced both their queer sexuality and spirituality.
Moraga discusses her growing consciousness, or what Anzaldua would call
conocimiento, during her adolescence. Moraga states in her interview, “Around 11, I started to
have feelings. At the time, I knew they were feelings for women but I didn’t know those feelings
were lesbian, I didn’t have any name for it. But…I knew I couldn’t be who the cultura or society
wanted me to be both as a woman in terms of my sexuality and just in terms of my mind. It’s just
26
However, see Latino Studies V ol, 15 (2) for the special issue on Critical Latinx Indigeneities which
includes a critique of Chicanx/Latinx nationalism. While Moraga’s 1993 essay and her interview for this
documentary occured before the emerging field of critical Latinx Indigeneities, it is crucial to continually
reframe Chicanx/Latinx Studies, particularly with Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures of the
Americas at the forefront.
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when you’re young, there’s nothing around that tells you, you know, that you’re not crazy.” In
this interview clip, Moraga’s facial expression and tone of voice does not necessarily reflect the
pain of her experience. However, during her childhood, her sexuality was not affirmed by either
her culture or community and this isolation profoundly shaped her and her work in the future
once she began publishing her creative work. Additionally, the scene cuts back and forth between
Moraga’s interview and photos from her childhood, such as when she graduated high school and
posing with smiling family members. In this way, while Moraga did have the support of her
family in some ways, she was also cognizant that she “couldn’t be who the cultura or society
wanted [her] to be.” In this way, Moraga experienced double oppression from both “American”
society and Mexican heteropatriarchal nationalism.
“This Was My First Sense of Injustice”: Alicia Escalante and Mothering the Revolution at
Home and Beyond
The documentary film also profiled Alicia Escalante, a Civil Rights activist who was also
the founder and director of the East L.A. Welfare Rights Organization between 1967 and 1978.
Escalante’s interviews in the documentary contributes to the narrative of Chicana activist
mothering, and more specifically, to the significance of intergenerational Chicana mothering that
originated and cultivated in domestic spaces. In the documentary, Escalante traces the roots of
her activism back to her childhood when she left her father’s custody in Texas in order to reunite
with her mother in California. Escalante describes the aftermath of her parent’s divorce and
states, “The was my first sense of injustice.” The aftermath was “devastating” for the family
because the judge denied Escalante’s mother any custody because her mother did not have a job.
The judge justified his decision because her mother “did not have a home, did not have any
means or skills or education so to speak we were left to be in the custody of my father.”
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However, the judge’s justification illuminates the ways that mothers are punished for their
motherwork within the home (Collins 12).
In her interview, Escalante describes that she left her father’s home in Texas and ran away
on freight train to reunite with her mother in Los Angeles at nine years old. However, once in
Los Angeles, her mother struggled to secure housing, food, and even welfare benefits that she
was entitled to. Escalante states, “My first encounter with the welfare system was because of my
mother...she wanted assistance of some kind because her money was low and she had no car, no
transportation…I remember her being treated very coldly and looked at as if she was, you know,
less of a human being. And they told her no, that they couldn’t assist her.” In this passage, the
sense of rage and injustice is evident in Escalante’s tone. When her mother needed assistance the
most for herself and her child, she was “treated very coldly” and “looked at as if she was…less
of a human being.” Escalante states that her mother was taught to not question authority. And
yet, perhaps there was also an element of internalized shame that she did not even have enough
bus fare to return home. Also, even as a young child, Escalante recognized that there were
barriers to accessing welfare, including the treatment from the staff.
In addition, Escalante’s Chicana activism in East LA directly impacted her own children
which emphasizes the importance of intergenerational Chicana activist mothering. In the
documentary, her son, Alex Escalante, is also interviewed. He shares, “I think my mother’s
greatest contribution to the community was when she founded the Chicana Welfare Rights
Organization in 1969 because that gave a venue for recipients to receive assistance, especially
programs and rights that were in existence at that time.” Her son holds his mother’s activism in
high esteem and he recognizes that she addressed her community’s needs by advocating for their
welfare rights and dignity. Escalante elaborates upon her activism when she describes the “raids”
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that took place when welfare workers “would come through the back door and another one
would come to the front door unannounced as early five of six in the morning.” Here, we can see
how the state apparatus punished and terrorized poor and working-class mothers of color.
Furthermore, Alex’s speaks from his experience as her son to emphasize that his mother’s
activist mothering deeply impacted other poor and working-class mothers like her and to
improve their conditions. In these ways, Escalante’s Chicana activist mothering includes
mothering other mothers in that she ensured many more of them accessed the welfare benefits
and other resources that they needed to raise their own children and strengthen their community.
Defying “Bad” Chicana Mothering With Communal Caretaking and Activism
While Escalante’s son Alex praised his mother’s Chicana activism, other Chicana
mothers profiled in the documentary, like Elizabeth Martinez and Dolores Huerta, are honest
about their challenges to balance both their mothering and their activism, including during major
historical events such as Chicano Moratorium. Another profiled Chicana activist in the
documentary, Elizabeth “Betita” Martinez, discusses her involvement in the Chicano Moratorium
in 1970 in in East Los Angeles. She says, “I had just arrived from New Mexico with five
thousand copies of my newspaper El Grito Del Norte and we were giving them out in the park.”
The documentary displays images of historical footage that depicts the peaceful protesting of
Chicano which are contrasted with police brutality, as demonstrated by video footage of a police
officer who hits a young, unarmed Chicano man with a baton. Escalante continues, “It was very
frightening. My daughter was with me so I had to go look for her. I didn’t find her for hours...I
looked everywhere, guess where I found her? At 11 o’clock that night I found her at a party.”
Although Martinez recounts this memory with a smile and a sense of humor, her mothering
directly overlapped with her activism during the Chicano Moritorium. In other words, her
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mothering cannot ever be completely separated from her activist work. And, it is imperative to
include these moments because they add complexity to the larger historical narrative of what
Chicana/o activism looked like in this era. Who else, except a fellow Chicana mother like
Morales, would bother to inquire about this episode and include it in a documentary about
Chicana activism and the arts? As I discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 of this dissertation,
fellow Chicana mother Irene Lara discussed how she developed her “mami eyes” upon becoming
a mother. Perhaps Morales also employs a form of “mami eyes” in the documentary because of
her decision to include this scene with Escalante that would perhaps otherwise be discarded by
another director. Moreover, as I have contended throughout this dissertation, motherwork can
also reveal how the labor of mothering is imperative for social justice movements.
Once again, the film cuts to an interview with another grown child which foregrounds the
centrality of intergenerational Chicana activist mothering. In this brief interview, Martinez’s
daughter, Tess Koning-Martinez, says with a laugh, “That was a very typical mother-teenage
daughter kind of thing, we just happened to be at the big Chicano Moratorium.”
Koning-Martinez’s words echo Martinez’s own playful recounting of the story. However, the
film cuts back to Martinez, who states, “It’s very hard for me to talk about how I combined my
life as an activist with my life as a mother because I think I did not do well at all as a mother”
(my emphasis). While Martinez expressed an incredible amount of vulnerability with this
admission, I am interested in interrogating the unrealistic standards upon which Martinez likely
judges herself. Although Martinez does not specifically mention the good/bad mother binary or
the traditional version of “last tres madres” in Chicana/o and Mexican culture and history, I am
interested in the ways that she may have unconsciously internalized at least some aspects of
these standards and beliefs.
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Martinez continues to reflect upon her time as an activist during the height of her
activism in the Chicana movement, which also coincided with her daughter’s formative years: “I
was completely absorbed by the struggles going on and I involved my daughter in them
sometimes but I certainly didn’t mother her very well at all.” As Martinez makes this statement
during the interview in the documentary, her facial expression suggests a hint of guilt. And yet, I
question what “mothering well” means in this context for Martinez as a Chicana activist and
mother? In other words, I am interested in the larger institutional context of her Chicana
mothering because resources have historically been denied, such as children. Moreover, some
spaces can also be hostile to children. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs discussed extensively in her
dissertation, Gumbs affirmed “we can learn to mother ourselves” (Gumbs 20). Although
Martinez discusses what she believes to be her shortcomings as a mother, I assert that Chicana
activist mothering can also defy the “good/bad” mother binary in Chicanx literature and culture
(Herrera 14). Moreover, by learning to “mother ourselves” with a women of color feminist ethos,
we can learn to hold ourselves with more compassion and care even in the face of discrimination
and other forms of hostility against mothers of color.
During this section of the documentary, there are several cuts between the separate
interviews with Martinez and her daughter and their words. I argue that these cuts reflect the
complex reality of Chicana activist motherhood, which can challenge the concept of the
“good/bad” binary. In other words, the various cuts can serve to bolster the complexity of both
Chicana mothering and activism, and especially the ways that the children of the profiled women
have interpreted their upbringing. In her interview, Martinez’s daughter states that “the idea of
the mother dedicating herself to the child or the nurturing of the child, I have struggled with that,
because I do feel that is an important quality of a mother, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten
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enough.” Koning-Martinez’s honesty and vulnerability illuminates the complex nature of radical
Chicana motherhood, especially since the documentary gives her the space to share how she
believes that her needs were not fully met as a child. In other words, Koning-Martinez’s
statement contributes to an understanding about the full humanity of her mother. Furthermore, it
is interesting that Then, after this compelling statement, the film cuts back to Martinez, who
agrees with her daughter. She says:
I was so involved in other work, and I thought I’m doing all this work for humanity and I
didn’t pay enough attention [to my daughter]. And also, I worried about this a lot, I
thought am I this weird freak or whatever, I think that it wasn’t that I didn’t see my
daughter as a human being who needed love and attention, I just didn’t define myself as
just a mother.”
As evidenced by this quote, Martinez also feels conflicted about her mothering. Although
Martinez made deep and lasting impacts in her community, she feared that she was “this weird
freak” because she believes that she did not “pay enough attention,” or mother her daughter
enough. At the same time, Martinez is firm when she states that she “didn’t define [herself] as
just a mother.” While the phrase “just a mother” can be interpreted to devalue the work of
mothers who do not work for wages outside the home, I contend that Martinez’s use of this
phrase emphasizes her complexity in a way that challenges the “good/bad” mother binary
(Herrera 32). Although Martinez, and most likely her daughter, are grounded in Chicana feminist
theory and praxis, their reference to an ideal form of motherhood that is nurturing and present
may be an internalized form of “las tres madres” in Mexican and Chicanx culture.
Similarly, Dolores Huerta also discusses the challenges she experienced as a mother and
activist. While Huerta and her daughter also share some painful insights during their interviews, I
contend that their experience demonstrates the importance of communal mothering, which
echoes the concept of “motherFUL” parenting as theorized by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (33). In the
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film, Dolores Huerta begins her interview by stating, “When I came to Delano and started the
union, there was no money at all. But by that time, Celeste and Laurie, my older daughters were
14 and 12, so they could help me out with the younger children.” Although Huerta is highly
lauded and known for her activist work in Delano with the United Farm Workers and beyond,
she states here that her success in activism came at the expense of her limited income, which
directly impacted her ability to secure childcare and other forms of support. As a result, Huerta
had no choice but to rely on her older daughters to provide care for her younger children. The
film then switches back to an interview with Huerta’s daughter, Lillian Huerta, who comments,
“Well, her family thought she was crazy. What are you doing taking seven children and moving
to this farmworker town Delano where there’s no opportunity...you don’t have a man, you need
to get married, someone to take care of you and your family.” In this statement, Lillian
references the injustices and stereotypes associated with single Chicana women, that Huerta must
be “crazy” because she was not married and lacked “someone to take care of you and your
family.” However, this familial pressure and the stereotypes did not deter Huerta’s staunch
activism.
Huerta describes the criticism she faced as she pursued her activist work, which reveals
the ways that she defied the normative scripts for Chicana motherhood. Moreover, I assert that
Huerta’s activism and mothering necessitates what I call “communal mothering,” which I define
as an expansive form of radical mothering and caretaking in the community. In the documentary,
Huerta goes on to describes how she did eventually had childcare assistance when her youngest
four children were born. In addition, some of her children lived with a relative in Washington,
which emphasizes that she continued to mother across state lines.
27
Additionally, she often
27
Although Huerta is not a transnational mother, I draw a parallel to Pierrette Hondagenu-Sotelo and
Ernestine Avila’s article, “‘I’m Here, But I’m There: The Meanings of Transnational Latina Motherhood”
(1997). In this article, they theorize the concept of transnational motherhood and how Latina immigrant
85
brought her children with her around the country, such as New York City, San Francisco, and
elsewhere. As a result, Huerta calls her children “migrant farmworker movement children.”
However, Huerta’s daughter Lillian recalls that some family members warned it was “not a
woman’s place to make trouble and chaos.” The documentary juxtaposes Lillian’s statement with
historical footage of Huerta giving a speech while holding a sign that reads “huelga” with the
UFW logo. Huerta’s daughter adds, “She was not the [typical] role model or expectation but it
took a while to recognize that she’s a hero.” While it might be surprising for the viewer to learn
that her daughter believes that Huerta is “not the typical role model or expectation,” Lillian does
ultimately view her mother as a hero, even in spite of unresolved tensions during her childhood.
In other words, Lillian does not minimize or even attempt to hide her disappointments and pain,
but she does honor her mother’s work as an activist. Indeed, Huerta embraced the “trouble” and
“chaos” through her roles as both an activist and a mother.
Like Martinez, Huerta also locates the home as a radical source of power and
consciousness. In the documentary, Huerta emphasizes that she learned about politics by
observing her mother and especially the ways that she continuously disrupted the gendered
division of labor in the home. Huerta recalls that as a girl, “I never had to do anything for my
brothers, we had to do everything equally. That was the way my mother set up the household.”
For Huerta, the revolution began at home with her mother’s teachings because she understood
from a young age that it was indeed possible to “do everything equally,” including domestic
work. For Huerta and the other Chicana mother activists in the film, there is no separation
between the home and activism because they do not have one without the other.
Conclusion: “I Didn’t Just Define Myself As A Mother.”
domestic workers navigate their mothering across borders. For Huerta, she found powerful ways to mother
across various state lines within the United States.
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Throughout the documentary film, Sylvia Morales paints a communal portrait of Chicana
activist mothering, a feat which remains rarely represented on the bronze screen through a
Chicana feminist framework. Through interviews with the Chicana mother activists and their
children alongside the inclusion of Morales’s own inclusion of her mothering, the film showcases
how Chicana mothers perform radical acts of carework as forms of social protest, survival, and
self care. Ultimately, the documentary demonstrates that Chicana activist mothers do not act in
isolation as either activists or mothers. Rather, their mothering roles are communal and they shift
over time depending on the circumstances and due to real material resources such as a lack of
childcare and other forms of institutional support. While the labor of mothers and the Chicanx
family has often been devalued when compared to the standard of white, middle-class mothers
and families, scholars such as Dolores Delgado Bernal argues that the “pedagogies of the home”
counters the deficit perspectives of the Chicanx family in the context of higher education.
Delgado Bernal posits that the family is a powerful source of empowerment for Chicanas as they
navigate microaggressions and other challenges in higher education and beyond. She writes,
“The communication, practices and learning that occur in the home and community, what I call
pedagogies of the home, often serve as a cultural knowledge base that helps Chicana college
students negotiate the daily experiences of sexist, racist, and classist microaggressions” (624).
Similarly, the Chicana activist mothers in this documentary demonstrate other forms of
“pedagogies of the home,” and more specifically, when they discuss the influence and lessons
that they learned from their own mothers and how this was imperative for the development of
their own political consciousness.
Additionally, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, the full humanity of Chicana activist
mothers are represented in this documentary by including their challenges and fears about their
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mothering. Moreover, the reality of mothering is further emphasized with the inclusion of
selected interviews with the children who spoke candidly and honestly about their own
disappointments and unmet needs. In this way, the documentary film challenges the romanticized
perspective of Chicana/Latina mothers in Chicanx film, which is tied to the ideology the
“good/bad” mother which is embedded in the “las tres madres.” However, rather than
demonizing or judging these Chicana activist mothers for their challenges, I argue that the film
showcases how Chicana activist mothering is a radical act of social protest against both
interpersonal and institutional systems of oppression. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “those of us
who nurture the lives of those children who are not supposed to exist, who are not supposed to
grow up, who are revolutionary in their very beings are doing some of the most subversive work
in the world” (20). In the film, the Chicana activist mothers are celebrated for raising “children
who are not supposed to exist” while fighting for social justice in activism and the arts.
And while the sexuality of the profiled Chicana activist mothers is not a major focus in
this documentary film, I believe that the film expands upon Moraga’s assertion that Chicanas,
and specifically queer Chicanas, are often forced to “make familia from scratch” (32). As
revealed in the interviews with the profiled women, many of them relied upon their family and
community for childcare and other forms of support. For the Chicana activist mothers in the
documentary, they also “make familia from scratch” with other organizers and community
members in order to advance their activism and raise their children. By doing so, they
continually challenged stereotypes, the “good/bad” mother binary, and the “tres madres” scripts.
Instead, the Chicana mothers embody a form of leadership and revolutionary mothering which
calls on everyone, even those who do not have biological children, to play a role in the
caretaking of our communities and larger social movements. Ultimately, the documentary film
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demonstrates that Chicana mothering can, indeed, change the world. Filmmakers like Sylvia
Morales inspire our collective imagination to consider how mothering is a critical component for
liberation.
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Chapter 4
“Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución”: Chicana Mothering as Theory and Praxis in Academia
and Beyond
Introduction: Mothering As Medicine Story
In 1981, Audre Lorde wrote a groundbreaking keynote address titled “The Uses of
Anger” for the National Women’s Studies Association. As a queer Black feminist woman, she
challenged stereotypes by reclaiming her anger when she stated that her “response to racism is
anger” (2). More specifically, Lorde challenged the racism of white women feminists who have
repeatedly discriminated and devalued Black feminist women in numerous academic and activist
spaces. And yet, Lorde embraced the anger of Black women and women of color when she
wrote, “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those
oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being” (3). For Lorde and
her fellow women of color writers and activists, this “well-stocked arsenal of anger” can directly
inform social justice movements. Rather than fearing or suppressing anger, Lorde embraces
anger to better understand her own lived experiences, reactions, and feelings as a source of
“information and energy” to combat racism (3).
Furthermore, Lorde’s response to racism was informed by her positionality as a Black
mother. Addressing white feminists, Lorde wrote, “Some problems we share as women, some we
do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear
our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs
upon the reasons they are dying” (32). Here, Lorde challenges white motherhood because Lorde
understands that the interlocking systems of oppression will always privilege white mothers over
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Black and other women of color mothers. Unfortunately, even when children of color “will be
dragged from a car and shot down in the street,” Lorde recognizes that white women will still
turn “their backs upon the reasons they are dying” because they have historically benefitted from
racism.
As a first-generation, working-class mother-scholar and woman of color, my own anger
as a response to racism takes on a specific meaning in the context of higher education in a world
where children of color continue to be disproportionately killed by police while mothers of color
are routinely denied resources and equal opportunities. In this chapter, I draw heavily upon
Chicana, Black, and other women of color feminist theory to frame my own testimonio about the
ways that I have navigated racism and other systems of oppression in higher education and
beyond. More specifically, I engage deeply with the work of both Audre Lorde and Gloria
Anzaldua to better understand my own wayward path in academia and beyond. Additionally, this
fourth and final chapter of my dissertation makes a small contribution to the growing body of
academic scholarship about mothers of color in higher education. I also share my own story of
becoming a mother-scholar as an undergraduate student and I detail my own role as a founding
member of the Chicana M(other)work Collective in graduate school. Taken together, I aim to
demonstrate other ways of being, knowing, and mothering that prioritizes the value of lived
experiences and personal narratives for social justice.
And yet, there are many costs to this work. As Lorde and other women of color writers
have reminded us, far too many women of color academics and writers have become ill with
chronic health conditions, have gotten cancer, become disabled, and more. Gumbs reminds us
that “teacher-poet-visionaries Audre Lorde and June Jordan did (not) survive their lifetimes.
Writer-publisher-renegades Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith sacrificed wealth, health, and
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stability to (almost) leave a legacy in print” (35). Additionally, Gloria Anzaldua died at age 61
due to complications from diabetes, a chronic illness which was likely compounded by stress,
racism, and other institutional factors which were inextricably tied into her working-class
background. As a mother of color writer in higher education, I have inherited these women’s
words. They are on my bookshelf and in my notebooks and my heart, and I gather them tenderly
in my arms like the cempasuchitl that I place on my altar to honor the dead.
To me, mothering is a medicine story. Like other women of color writers and academics
before me, my body found a way to speak to me through various physical and mental health
challenges in the past several years. I came to understand these health challenges as a call for the
revolutionary mothering of myself, to nurture and support myself in ways that I have initially
denied. Gumbs writes that revolutionary mothering is for “those of us who create theory,
pedagogy and lifetimes, not out of thin air, but out of lines walked, impossible futures lived”
(305). In other words, our theory is not developed “out of thin air,” but rather, our work is
informed by these everyday acts of “mothering survival” in the face of systemic oppression.
Gumbs also challenges internalized forms of neoliberal individuality and conformity by directly
addressing the reader: “In the work of reading this, you are mothering the idea of survival on
queer terms, your engagement with these words is a chapter in the survival of the experiments,
counter-narratives, and poetic interventions” (my emphasis, 305). Engaging with this text by
Gumbs parallels the dynamic and interactive nature of mothering ourselves, each other, and our
children. In other words, mothering is always a co-creative process that is dependent on
interconnectivity. Furthermore, for Gumbs, mothering means that we have already “lived
impossible futures” where mothers of color have survived through trauma, oppression, genocide,
and violence.
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“Now Let Us Shift”: A Testimonio Toward a Mother of Color Scholar Imaginary
My version of Chicana mothering in higher education began when my son was born
during the final year of my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley. As the daughter of formerly
undocumented Mexican immigrants and the first person in my family to graduate high school,
attend community college, and transfer to a four-year institution, I felt the weight of
responsibility to succeed. I joined Cal as an English major, but I quickly learned about the Ethnic
Studies Department and its legacy of student activism and scholarship. During my second year
there, I declared a double major in Chicana/o Studies and was selected for the Mellon Mays
Undergraduate Fellowship program as part of its inaugural cohort there. In MMUF, I learned
what a PhD was and that it was possible to attain a career as a professor. My love for
multi-ethnic literature and women of color feminist theory blossomed as I read books for my
classes on BART, which was a big part of my three-hour round trip commute from Antioch,
where I lived with parents and siblings. At Cal, I was exposed to theories of race and racial
formation, gender and women’s studies, and much more, for the very first time. After I joined
MMUF, I continued seeking research opportunities and I began presenting at academic
conferences, all of which was preparing me for my goal of applying to PhD programs. And yet,
while I was thriving in my academic studies, I often traversed a sense of isolation. When I
returned home from Cal, my parents often returned around the same time from street vending.
Additionally, we often struggled to pay the household bills, and I gave most of my earnings from
my various part-time jobs to my parents. Although my parents were proud of me, I felt a deep
sense of increased responsibility to graduate and secure a higher-earning job.
I felt that my precariousness in higher education was only increased when I learned that I
was pregnant in the summer before my final year at Cal. Although I was happy to become a
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mother, I was worried about my ability to graduate. My fears only seemed to be confirmed when
a relative, upon hearing my pregnancy news, told me, “You were supposed to be the one who
made it in this family.” Somehow, I felt that I had failed and I shamed myself for it, especially
since I was unmarried and still living at home. However, one of the first people that I shared the
news with was a graduate student mentor who had been assigned to me the previous year. She
was one of the first people to tell me congratulations and that my pregnancy was something to be
celebrated. Her support and encouragement helped me navigate the other mixed-reactions that I
received from others, including a research program director who told me, “I didn’t want this for
you.” I felt judged and excluded from certain people, but I persisted. As my pregnancy
progressed, I continued taking classes as a full-time student, commuting, and working my
part-time jobs. Between classes, I often found solace in the Student Parent Center. I spoke with
other undergraduate and graduate students who were also parents, and I felt a sense of
understanding and belonging. And yet, I still struggled with internalized shame and
microaggressions from others, such as the comment from the research program director. At the
time, I was not quite able to fully articulate that these microaggressions reflected a very specific
kind of discrimination against mothers, and particularly against young mothers of color like
myself. Later in this chapter, I draw on Anzaldua’s theories to better understand my experiences
during this time. Moreover, drawing from Audre Lorde her “Uses of Anger” essay, I slowly
learned how to lean into my anger as a response to discrimination to advocate for change.
My son, Alonzo, was born in January 2010, right after the beginning of the Fall 2010
semester. I returned to campus for my final semester in Summer 2010. My mother cared for
Alonzo at home while I brought my books and pumping supplies. Between classes, I traversed
the underground walkway that connected Doe and Moffitt libraries to access a small bathroom
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that had been converted to a pumping station. I sat in a peeling leather chair while I leafed
through a spiral notebook that the other mothers used to write letters, notes, and jokes back and
forth to each other. This was my first written correspondence with other mothers in higher
education, although I never met them. And yet, over time, I grew to learn about their fears and
frustrations but also their joys and hopes as mothers who also navigated this campus. During
pumping session, we wrote notes to each other in that notebook.
For many years, I internalized that belief that it seemed safer to not be vulnerable about
my unique needs as a mother and first-generation student from generational poverty. Somehow, it
seemed safer to not talk about my parenting challenges, such as my lack of consistent or
affordable childcare, which was especially challenging after I moved to Los Angeles for my
graduate degree. As Michelle Tellez notes, “As a Chicana single mother, achieving academic
excellence, maintaining credibility, and modeling the professionalism and respectability
demanded of me within the university culture meant unnaturally hiding my pregnancy and
my motherhood” (84). Like Tellez, I also felt pressured to conform to these respectable
academic standards which did not account for my experiences, my needs, and even my civil
rights (in the case of illegal discrimination) as a single mother-scholar.
In this section, I theorize my lived experience as a mother of color in higher education by
drawing on the legacy of Chicana feminist testomonio as a methodology of power and resistance
(Bernal et al 2012). As the authors state, “the testimonialista is the holder of knowledge
thereby disrupting traditional academic ideals of who might be considered a producer of
knowledge” (365). In the following section, I use Gloria Anzaldua’s essay “Now Left Us
Shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts” as a framework to demonstrate the
ways that I have mothered myself, my son, and my community within academic institutions and
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beyond as a way to reimagine institutional and interpersonal transformation for mothers of color.
Ultimately, my testimonio is another contribution to writings by Chicana/Latina women and
other mothers of color who advocate for a world where mothers and children of color are safe
and free from violence, oppression, and harm.
In this following section, I engage deeply with Anzaldua’s essay, “Now Let Us Shift…”
because this essay describes the inner and outer work of activism and healing. I use Anzaldua’s
theory to analyze and better understand my own lived experiences as a mother of color in higher
education and beyond. Anzaldua opens the essay by describing a seemingly mundane moment
when she walks by a grassy path near her home in Santa Cruz, California. During her walk, she
observes a snake and she shares that the snake “is a symbol of awakening consciousness—the
potential of knowing within, an awareness and intelligence not grasped by logical thought.”
(540). Anzaldua writes that “often nature provides un ‘aja,’ or conocimiento,’ one that guides
your feet along the path” (540). Here, Anzaldua emphasizes the pre-Columbian and ancestral
connotations of the snake in order to affirm traditional forms of knowledge and power. By
opening the essay with this powerful reference to the snake, her testimonio becomes a “bridge
home to self,” as a way to validate her own inner knowing (540). Following Anzaldua’s call to
return to the self through testimonio, I share my own testimonio through the seven stages of
conoimiento (which she identifies as el arrebato, nepantla, the Coatlicue state, the call, putting
Coyolxauhqui together, the blow-up, and spiritual activism) in order to demonstrate how I have
navigate these institutional systems through a women of color feminist framework.
In my testimonio, I begin with the first step, el arrebato, which can be translated as
“rage,” or “outburst of emotion.” Anzaldua describes this step as an “arrebato—a violent attack,
rift with a loved one, illness, death in the family, betrayal, systemic racism and
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marginalization—rips you from your familiar ‘home.’” (546). For me, one of many arrebatos that
I experienced was as a young woman of color who was pregnant, unmarried, and living at home.
As the first person in my immediate family to graduate high school and pursue higher education,
I initially internalized feelings of shame and doubt and I also felt isolated from my fellow
undergraduate peers who were not parents. While I received some support from certain faculty,
friends, and other fellow student parents, I sometimes felt disorientated as I forged an unknown
path towards graduation. Over time, I grew to understand that this rupture was due to my
motherhood, was framed by numerous institutional barriers in academia, particularly for
low-income, women of color mothers of color like myself.
The second step in Anzaldua’s path to concimiento is nepantla, or the “in-between
space,” which I contend is reflected in my class positionality as a mother-scholar from
generational poverty. In this step, Anzaldua writes that “remolinos (whirlwinds) sweep you off
your feet, pulling you here and there….while home, family, and ethnic culture tug you back to
the tribe, to the chicana indigena you were before, the anglo worlds sucks you toward an
assimilated, homogenized, whitewashed identity” (548). Anzaldua’s reference to remolinos
(whirlwinds), or that which “pulls you here and there” illustrates the numerous pressures that I
felt to “class pass” as a middle-class academic even though I come from generational poverty. I
felt pulled “here and there” by conflicting demands of home and my family, while what
Anzaldua called the “assimilated identity” pressured me to conform to these standards.
Throughout my time in higher education, I have attempted to “pass” as middle-class even though
I constantly worry about how to assist my family with their household bills and not having
enough to save for my own retirement, investments, or savings. I often felt the “remolino,” or the
whirlwind sweep me off my feet, when I learned that many of my peers came from generational
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wealth and access to other resources that I did not have. As sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack
discusses in his research about lower-class students who attend Ivy League colleges and
universities, these “privileged poor” students often experience increased disadvantages due to
certain university policies which often do not fully account for their unique needs and
experiences (2019). As a mother of color, these disadvantages are only further intensified,
especially when my lack of affordable and consistent childcare meant that I would often miss
academic events and conferences. While these remolinos (whirlwinds) pressure me towards the
forms of assimilation that Anzaldua describes, my advocacy for academic mothers of color
through the Chicana M(other)work collective and elsewhere makes our unique needs more
visible. As a result, my aim is create more support for fellow mothers of color. In that way, my
hope is that others will not feel similar pressures or remolinos during the pursuit of their
academic and activist goals.
Interestingly, while Anzaldua outlines the seven stages of conocimiento in her essay, she
also emphasizes the non-linear nature of this process. As a result, I apply her theory to my lived
experiences in non-chronological order, which is especially important for the third step of
conocimiento. Anzaldua calls this the Coatlicue state, or a state of “desconocimiento.” As a
mother of color, I similarly embrace the creative and destructive aspects of myself and my
mothering, which challenges the “good/bad” mother binary in Chicanx/Latinx culture. Anzaldua
writes that the Coatlicue state is disorganized and non-linear with no clear ending or beginning,
and it embodies both life and destruction at the same time. The indigenous goddess Coatlicue,
who has the ability to give birth but also destroy and demand human sacrifices that she adorns
her body with, such as her necklace made of human hearts, illustrates this concept. “The call” of
desconocimiento requires the Coatlicue state to be complex because in this chaotic and nebulous
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state, there is no singular answer, there is no “good” or “bad,” there is only an ongoing process of
“desconocimiento.” Similarly, in my creative and collective work, I strive to challenge Western
hegemonic forms of knowledge production by drawing on women of color feminism and
integrating my lived experience as a mother of color into my work. While Western standards
may delegitimize these other forms of knowledge production and dismiss them as “illogical,” I
embrace the choas of the “desconocimiento” because this is a necessary step towards integration
and healing.
The fourth and fifth states of conocimiento are what Anzaldua terms “the call” for action
and “pulling oneself together,” which reflects the daily microaggressions that I must constantly
navigate as a mother of color. In these steps, Anzaldua refers to Coyolxaqui, an indigenous
goddess who been reclaimed as an empowering figure through Chicana feminist theory.
According to tradition, she was killed and dismembered by her brother Huitzilopochtli through
an act of heteropatriarchal violence. Coyolxaqui, who is depicted in a stone sculpture in her
dismembered state, resonates with Chicana feminist theorists and writers like Sandra Cisneros
who writes that, “The universe a cloth and all humanity interwoven…each and every person
connected to me, and me connected to them, like the strands of a rebozo” (Cisneros 389).
Although mothers of colors have historically been oppressed, understanding Coyolxaqui through
a feminist lens represents how I feel called to heal this fragmentation of the mindbodyspirit,
which is often ignored in more “traditional” academic spaces. My own process of “pulling
oneself together” meant that I sought both Western and traditional healing modalities. For
example, when I experienced stress-induced alopecia (which I view as a version of “the call” to
action), I sought acupuncture treatments, took herbal remedies, and the care of a local Chicana
curandera who has treated many other women of color academics in the East Los Angeles area. I
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also took steroid treatments and continued my talk therapy sessions with a therapist. For me,
“pulling myself together” means that I found ways to mother myself, and as a result, I was in a
better position to help others in the community who struggle with psychological or physical
symptoms.
The sixth state is what Anzaldua terms “the blow up,” and for me, this illustrates both the
ruptures and possibilities that I have experienced through mothering for revolution in higher
education and beyond. In this sixth state, Anzaldua notes that our viewpoints are questioned.
Throughout my pregnancy and childbirth process, I questioned why certain medical staff seemed
to act with hostility towards me during my prenatal appointments. Although I understood that the
medical staff perhaps viewed me through a stereotypical lens as a young, unmarried, and
pregnant woman of color on public assistance, I questioned why these microaggressions were
acceptable and even normalized. Much later, I learned later about the high maternal mortality
rates for Black mothers and other mothers of color in the United States. Additionally, another
“blow up” occurred for me when I learned that the county hospital’s policy did not allow anyone
to stay overnight with me in the maternity ward after giving birth. The first night when my son
was born, I remember lying alone in fear and with a high rate of physical pain. I was too weak to
walk unassisted to the bathroom on my own, much less properly care for my newborn without
any family there to assist me. Through these experiences, these “blow ups” motivated me to
advocate for more mothers of color through the Chicana M(other)work collective.
The seventh and final state of conocimiento is what Anzaldua calls spiritual activism,
which she describes as the way…I identify my mothering as a form of spiritual activism because
it has the capacity to offer healing for myself, my child, and others in my community because
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this is a practice that is non-linear, intergenerational, and communal. As a mother of color, I am
guided by these principles of spiritual activism. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes:
We know it from how we are transforming the planet with our every messy step toward
making life possible. Mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their
children, extended family and friends, community caregivers, radical childcare
collectives, all of us breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from
the past and what we need urgently to transform, are m/othering ourselves.
As Gumbs demonstrates here, revolutionary mothering “makes life possible,” which occurs
through mothering ourselves and our children in holistic and healing ways that affirms life, and
ultimately, the life of the planet.
The Conocimiento of Mothering and Critical University Studies
In the previous section, I illustrated Anzaldua’s seven stages of conocimiento through my
lived experiences as a mother of color within higher education spaces and beyond. In this
section, I draw on the field of critical university studies to further reveal and analyze the
injustices that mothers of colors often experience in these spaces. With a fellow colleague,
Christine Vega, I co-theorized the phrase “maternal microaggresions” to describe overt and
covert forms of institutional and interpersonal discrimination against mothers of color.
Furthermore, analyzing this maternal microaggressions makes visible the “endlessly shifting
goalposts of academic culture, which are defined by upper-middle class white cultural values,
ethics, and codes,” (Gutierrez y Muhs, 21). Additionally, research on academic mothers indicates
that “getting it right” in institutions, which often do not accommodate their needs, results in
further marginalization and an eventual push-out from academia (Mason, 25).
Here, I also briefly engage with critical university studies and the ways that these spaces
maintain its hegemonic power over “diverse” bodies. For the purposes of this chapter, I am
interested in the ways that scholars like Sara Ahmed have critiqued the neoliberal university I
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extend her analysis to my focus on mothers of color because I contend that mothers of color are
among the groups who are most impacted, and thus, mothers of color can reveal more nuanced
insights about the university write large. For example, Mothers of Color in Academia de UCLA
advocated for increased lactation rooms and other concrete forms of resources and support for
parenting students, needs which have often been ignored or minimized. Through their activism
they were able to raise more awareness and visibility for the needs of parenting students, which
forged a path for more change in educational institutions. Therefore, I am particularly interested
in the work of Sara Ahmed and her research in critical university studies. Ahmed argues that
academic institutions strategically leverage the rhetoric of “difference” and “diversity” in order
to maintain what she calls “institutional whiteness.” Furthermore, Ahmed argues “the very idea
that diversity is about those who ‘look different’ shows us how it can keep whiteness in place…if
diversity becomes something that is added to organizations, like color, then it confirms the
whiteness of what is already in place” (67). For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in
the ways that Ahmed’s analysis can extend to mothers of color in academia, who can also be
upheld as markers of “difference” and “diversity.” In other words, this analysis can reveal how
mothers of color can possibly become a symbolic token of “diversity,” which thereby often
reinforces the hegemonic power structure in educational institutions. In other words, concrete
policy and actions that support mothers of color are needed to challenge the rhetoric of
difference.
Similarly, scholars such as Roderick Ferguson interrogate the racist and neoliberal
historical legacies of higher education. While Ahmed is interested in the way that whiteness and
hegemonic power is maintained in academic institutions of higher education even while they
espouse “diversity,” Ferguson explores the radical origins of ethnic studies and women’s studies
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program and how, over time, these spaces have been co-opted. In Ferguson’s groundbreaking
text, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, he writes
about the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s that led to the creation of ethnic studies and
women’s studies programs and departments in the United States. However, Ferguson argues that
many of these programs, departments, and spaces have been co-opted, defunded, and controlled
over time. He also argues that “excellence” has been co-opted by the university through a
neoliberal lens. Additionally, he contends that the pursuit of “excellence” in higher education
eventually leads to self-regulation of hegemonic power in these programs and departments. For
mothers of color who inhabit these academic spaces and have inherited these legacies of
co-optation and hegemony in ethnic and women’s studies programs, they are forced to navigate
these potentially hostile terrains. Furthermore, holding mothers of color to these impossibly high
standards of “excellent” without adequate resources and support only further facilitates their
push-out from academia. For example, as Tellez has spoken about publically on the Chicana
M(other)work podcast, she was denied tenure from a women’s studies department after her
requests for maternity leave and other support were denied. Mothers of color faced increased
forms of pressures to “succeed” and demonstrate their “excellence,” and yet, tenure denials and
other forms of discrimination, even in ethnic and women’s studies department.
Working-Class, Mothers of Color As “The Privileged Poor” in Academia
I also draw upon the academic literature about women of color from working-class
backgrounds in academia to better understand my own positionality as a mother-scholar from
generational poverty. My parents were forced to stop their formal education in Michoacán,
Mexico, before high school due to poverty. My parents immigrated to the United States in search
of a better life and my four siblings and I were born in California. However, I am the only one of
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my siblings to graduate high school and continue to graduate school. In graduate school, I often
felt isolated, even among my fellow first-generation, student of color peers, because our finances
were constantly in crisis. My parents do not have any retirement or any other kind of investments
or savings, and this meant that they often called me to cover rent, utility bills, car repairs, and
more, and my graduate school stipend could not cover all of these expenses. Furthermore, this
constant financial pressure also took an immense psychological toll on me. In this section, I will
briefly engage with some of the academic literature about women of color scholar from similar
working-class backgrounds who address the mind, body, and spirit and its costs in academia.
In an article by Kishonna L. Gray and Reshawna L. Chapple titled
“"#TenureTrackHustle: Examining Academic Poverty of First-Generation Women of Color From
an Intersectional Standpoint," they contextualize their own lived experiences as Black women
professors from a working-class socioeconomic background. Specifically, they cite research by
Warnock (2016) who “identifies five characteristics that encapsulate working class academic
narratives: alienation, cultural capital, stereotyping/microaggression, survivor guilt/impostor
syndrome, and middle-class networking…it is important to highlight the impacts of
intersectionality on these and other narratives experienced by women of color...such as being
‘Black, and woman, and poor while academic.’” Although their article focuses on tenure-track
faculty, I have also experienced many of these five characters as an adjunct professor at a
California State University as well as a graduate student. For example, I have felt alienated in the
sense that my employment as an adjunct is unstable and underpaid.
Furthermore, their article is groundbreaking because being poor while academic is not
often explored in academic research, much less fully acknowledged or discussed in academic
spaces. Due to the white, middle-class nature of academic culture, those who lack financial
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sources for childcare, those who cannot pay conference travel and fees upfront, and more, are
actively pushed outside academia. Furthermore, due to my generational poverty, I am often asked
by my family to provide hundreds of dollars for bills while they continuously teeter on the edge
of homelessness with their minimum wage jobs. Like other working-class academics of color
who are both poor and academic, I struggle to walk the line between privilege and poverty.
Although earning a PhD with a fully-funded fellowship from a wealthy, private school did
increase my access to certain resources that I’ve never had before, such as high-quality, weekly
therapy, my current income as an adjunct professor remains well below the poverty line.
Additionally, Gray and Chapple further address more of the nuances associated with
being poor, academic, and a woman of color in academia. They write, “[we] are often burdened
with the reality of living in poverty in academia. Poverty connected to both a lack of financial
resources and losing one's soul and spirit. We often care for families and friends who need our
assistance. This is often done in the background without any recognition…we often operate in
the shadows" (my emphasis). The costs that they describe are not only financial, but also
spiritual, of “losing one’s soul and spirit” in institutions which often reward complicity and
assimilation into the status quo, or into the hegemonic power structure of academic institutions
that Ahmed describes. And yet, the reality of living in poverty in academia also means that our
families for financial, emotional, and spiritual support often call us upon. We were the ones who
“made it” by earning and PhD and working as faculty. And yet, adjunct wages and even some
tenure-track wages is not enough to solve generations of poverty that we have inherited.
Similarly, mothers of color who are faculty also often “operate in the shadows” while struggling
to balance academic duties with their mothering, family, and community responsibilities, which
can also include financial struggle. Also, while an analysis of the wage gap for mother of color
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academics is outside the scope of this dissertation, I am very interested in future research which
can potentially reveal more data about these forms of generational economic inequality.
Gathering Herbs: Toward A Healed Woman of Color Mother Scholar Imaginary
In a graduate seminar a few years ago, a flash of insight and conocimiento occurred to
me. On the cover of the book Chicana Feminist Thought by Alma Garcia, there is a photo of a
young Chicana with her fist raised in the air but if you look closely, you can see that she is
holding a baby, but all that remains is an arm, and the rest is cropped cleanly away. You can only
see the baby’s disembodied fist and then nothing. You must imagine the rest. But who imagines
what they do not see, or do not know, or do not even care to know? Other mothers of color do.
Shortly after sharing my observation about the cropped photo with Chicana mother
scholar, Christine Vega, she informed me that the original photograph came from LA VOZ, a
newspaper of the Chicana/o movement in East LA from the 1970s. In the original photo on the
newspaper cover, the baby is not cropped. We have always been here if you know where to look.
Whether you crop us out or not. I recall how years earlier, a mother of color told me that she did
not display any photographs of her children in her office because she did not want her students to
associate her with her mothering. While I understand the desire for privacy and various ways to
maintain personal boundaries, I could not hide my mothering as a undergraduate or graduate
student, especially because I have chosen to amplify my identity as a mother-scholar in my work
with Chicana M(other)work. For me, this means that I have brought my son to academic spaces
whether we’ve been welcomed, tolerated, or simply turned away. Who notices when we are
gone? Other mothers. We gather herbs for each other and flourish together.
This communal and interdependent flourishing happens at the same time as a collective
act in spaces that do not see us. More recently, Chicana/Latina and women of color scholars such
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as Dolores Bernal Delago, Larissa Mercado Lopez, and Michelle Tellez, among others, have
written about the role of Chicana/Latina mothers in academia with a critical lens toward social
justice. Delgado, a senior scholar who has written extensively about Chicana feminist pedagogies
such as testimonios, spirituality, and platicas in higher education, shares her own lived
experience as a Chicana mother-scholar. She writes, “To articulate the day-to-day teachings of
critical race parenting (Matias, 2016), I draw from what I and other Chicana/Latina feminista
scholars have referred to as pedagogies of the home, those communication, practices, and
learning that occur in the home which often serve as a cultural knowledge base that can help
children of color negotiate the daily experiences of racism, sexism, and heterosexism” (Delgado
Bernal 2001). Her Chicana mothering pedagogies directly address social justice issues by raising
her children’s conocimiento to better understand institutional dynamics.
Michelle Tellez has also written extensively about Chicana mothering and she initially
coined the term “Chicana Motherwork,” extending Patricia Hills Collins’ theorization of
motherwork among Black mothers and Black families. Tellez writes that her single Chicana
mothering in academia means that she will not separate her identities between her scholarship
and her mothering, that she can and has done both. And yet, this cannot be accomplished without
demanding changes in institutional structures and academic culture. Tellez discusses how she
was not supported as a new professor on the tenure-track with no maternity leave in a women’s
studies department. In fact, she returned to teaching only three weeks after giving birth because
she had no other option. As demonstrated by Tellez’s experience and her narrative, academic
institutions have co-opted even ethnic and women’s studies spaces, which extends to extracting
more labor from mothers of color like Tellez and disposing of them when they are told that they
are not meeting their standards.
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Likewise, Larissa Mercado-Lopez theorizes the term “maternal mestiza facultad” by
focusing on the lived experiences of Chicana mothers in Chicana literature. Lopez writes, “In my
development of maternal facultad, a defense mechanism honed through the bodily and social
experience of oppression and motherhood, I explore..the mestiza maternal body..[and] the effects
of power on gendered and racialized bodies” (1). Moving beyond an essentialist definition of
Chicana mothering, Mercado-Lopez asserts a kind of facultad that centers body-knowledge,
which subverts the intellect. Mercado-Lopez also considers the ways that “mothers can read
their bodies” to reveal new information about living under patriarchal conditions. In light of
Mercado-Lopez’s theorizing of the Chicana mother body, I ask, how do we obtain the skills
necessary to “read their bodies” when this is often not modeled or taught?
A few years into my program, a snaking pattern appeared around my scalp and it
prompted me to seek both Western and traditional forms of healing treatments. During my
first-ever acupuncture session at the USC Student Health Center, the acupuncturist asked me
questions such as, “How are you sleeping? How is your digestion?”. No one outside of friends
closest to me asked me such questions in many years. Although my research topic is about
women of color mothering, I realized that I had yet to learn how to re-mother myself. I also
realized that I stopped asking myself those questions many years ago. Although I mothered my
child, I was not mothering myself in a way that addressed my holistic self-care. As Resmaa
Menakem writes, people of color have inherited histories of racialized trauma which is stores in
our bodies and our DNA, which have compounded over time. Menakem affirms the inherent
wisdom of what he calls “the soul nerve,” or what Western science calls the vagus nerve. This
term refers to the winding, snake-like organ that conveys communication, information, and
emotion throughout the human body, rather than through words or intellect.
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Although I ignored my own body’s call for care, my body expressed its strong emotions
through my scalp, visible for all to see. During my healing process, I returned to Audre Lorde’s
“The Uses of the Erotic” again and again and each time, I reacted with sensations that are
wordless but I felt a deep affirmation with the warmth in the pit of my belly, a swelling of my
throat, how tears overtake logic. Lorde writes, “We have been raised to fear the yes within
ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future
lose their power and can be altered” (88). During my time as a single mother of color in
academia, I have been afraid to say “yes” to myself, especially since I felt pressured to assimilate
into academia. The stakes felt almost unbearably high for me, especially since Lorde’s words
remind me to say yes to myself, to my intuition, to my healing, and to my power and creative
forces. None of this can be contained.
Conclusion: “Survival is not a theoretical problem.”
In this chapter, I draw on Anzaldua’s essay “...Now Let Us Shift” and her description of
the seven stages of conocimiento to share some of my own testimonio and lived experiences as a
mother of color in academia navigating parenting, community work, and healing. And yet, as
Audre Lorde advised, “Survival is not a theoretical problem and poetry is part of my living.”
While academic spaces privilege the intellect, my mothering means that I prioritize the poetic in
my life. And yet, mothering also means more than surviving. In her essay “Shape of My Impact,”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about how she loves the word “survival.”
Survival is life after disaster, life in honor of our ancestors, despite the genocidal forces
worked against them specifically so we would not exist. I love the word survival because
it places my life in the context of those who I love, who are called dead, but survive
through my breathing, my presence, and my remembering. They survive in my stubborn
use of the word survival unmodified. My survival, my life resplendent, with the energy of
my ancestors, is enough. (Par. 2)
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Although Gumbs honors that “survival is life after disaster,” and she recognizes the ways that her
ancestors are alive in her “breathing, presence, and remembering” in her daily life, Gumbs also
critiques the ways that academia “watched cancer eat away at our geniuses, as they
simultaneously ate away at black women’s labor.” Because of this genocidal legacy in higher
education for Black women intellectuals, Gumbs knows that “the university does not intend to
love me…the university does not know how to love me…the university in fact, does not love me.
But the universe does.” These are acts and articulations of survival and resistance, which are
necessary to continue the legacy of Black feminist writers within and beyond these institutions.
Furthermore, rather than dedicate herself to a university, Gumbs is carves her own path toward
“an experimental intellectual life,” one that is the not dependent on external factors, or what the
institution deems worthy of service, research, and teaching. Rather, Gumbs prioritizes her own
self-determination and remains accountable to her communities through actions and not just
neoliberal symbolic gesture within an institution. As Gumbs and other women of color writers
have shown us, teaching and writing can happen in many spaces and in many ways beyond what
is acceptable for academic institutions. Moreover, Gumbs incorporates spirituality into her
mission as a writer. She states that she is “resplendent” with the energy of her ancestors, which
affirms a way of being and knowing beyond materialist Western understandings of the world.
Her writing and her worth is grounded within her and her spirituality, and it cannot be
compromised in any way by academia. Although she writes later in the essay that she is
uncertain about her income and lack of health care, she moves forward knowing that she is
supported by her community and her spirituality in other ways that can ultimately lead to
prosperity and abundance. She is “resplendent” with joy, power, and love, and this is something
that she refuses to allow academia to extract from her. She honors Black women writers who
110
have died while serving these same academic institutions. And by saving her own life, Gumbs
creates another pathway for Black and women of color writers to follow. There is another way.
Lastly, the emerging literature on working-class and first-generation Chicana and women
of color mother-scholars in academia and beyond signifies an important shift for academia. This
shift centers testimonios and the power that comes when Chicana/Latina and other mothers of
color and caregivers tell their own narratives. This is a courageous act because they tell their
truths even in the face of neoliberal institutions, in spite of poverty, in spite of indifference, in
spite of microaggressions, and more. As women of color mothers in academia, we can lead and
organize for policy change. Through the seven stages of conocimiento that Anzaldua outlined in
her essay, I have demonstrated how my own winding path of conocimiento is constantly
dynamic, shifting, and changing, much like a river because I am continually unfurling into
myself and others. I also do not do this work alone, as I have found mutual support and strength
through my role as a founding member of Chicana M(other)work and our various projects such
as podcasting, publishing, and presentations. During our talks and keynotes, we have
encountered many other mothers, and particular undergraduate mothers of color, who have found
parts of themselves and their struggles reflected in our work. Furthermore, while mothers of
color are often still forced to reckon with the pressures of the corporatized university. Although
there has been a long history of women of color activism in higher education, even today, more
policies and other material resources should support academic mothers of color. Additionally, a
radical change of workplace culture is required in order to fully abolish maternal
microaggressions which have become normalized. However, through my own revolutionary
mothering in my home, classrooms, and community spaces, I continue to strive for justice within
111
and beyond academia and to do my own part to contribute to this legacy where mothers of color
will truly be free.
112
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In “Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución’: Mothering the Revolution in Contemporary Chicana/Latina Literature and Cultural Production”, I examine narratives in Chicana/Latina literature and cultural production to better understand how mothering is imperative in social justice movements. I draw on a range of literary texts and cultural production, including two novels by Carla Trujillo, an anthology edited by Dorsia Silva Smith, a second anthology edited by Elisa Facio and Irene Lara, a documentary film by Sylvia Morales, and my own testimonio as a mother-scholar within and beyond academia. In this dissertation, I ask: how do these narratives of Chicana/Latina mothers in the arts, activism, and academia re-imagine Chicana/Latina feminist mothering and healing through everyday acts of mothering and social justice? To answer this question, I use motherwork as a framework to analyze the was that mothering labor and activism are inextricable from each other (Collins 1992). I argue that these narratives of Chicana feminist mothering makes visible the complexity of their daily lived experiences as an act of social protest. My dissertation contributes to an emerging body of work about Chicana/Latina mothering within and beyond academia to demonstrate that mothering is a radical act of dissent which can create more communal spaces of storytelling and healing for justice. This interdisciplinary project contributes to the fields of women of color feminisms, Chicana/Latina mothering and motherwork, gender studies, and literary theory.

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Creator Caballero, Cecilia (author)

Core Title “‘Porque sin madres no hay revolucion’: Mothering the revolution in contemporary Chicana/Latina literature and cultural production

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 10/18/2024

Defense Date 10/18/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chicana feminism,Chicana literature,healing,mothering,motherwork,OAI-PMH Harvest,women of color feminism

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sanchez, George (committee chair), Roman, Elda Maria (committee member), Rowe, John Carlows (committee member)

Creator Email caballec@usc.edu,ceciliaxcaballero@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112124628

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