Chicana Liberation: Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945–1981

Chicana Liberation: Women and Mexican American Politics in Los Angeles, 1945–1981, contributes to the small but growing field of Chicana history and feminisms. Inspired by Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, Marisela R. Chávez employs a concept of “bridging activism” to demonstrate how ethnic Mexican women in Los Angeles created a multi-faceted movement that arched organizational, generational, transnational, and ideological differences. Chicana Liberation foregrounds an alternative view of the Mexican American political scene in Los Angeles that centers on the activism of ethnic Mexican women. Doing so gives insight into how Chicanas fundamentally transformed the movement.Chavez's re-examination of the movement through a gender framework and analysis dispels several paradigms that obscure Chicana's full political contributions. First, Chávez rejects claims of Mexican women as absent, late, or auxiliaries to the Chicano movement and women's movement. Instead, she identifies the collective activism of ethnic Mexican women between 1950 and 1980 as its own entity called the Chicana Liberation Movement. Not only were Chicanas active during this time, but the Chicana Liberation Movement belongs to a long lineage of Mexican American women's activism. Locating women's activism in the postwar period further challenges the periodization of the Chicana/o movement and disrupts the generational model used by Chicanx historians to explain the shift in Mexican American politics. The divide between old and young, assimilative and radical is not as definite as once believed. For example, many women associated with Chicana-era organizations, such as the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional (CFMN), trace their political activism to the postwar period and helped establish the League of Mexican American Women (LMAW) in 1963 as a precedent to CFMN.Chicana Liberation further builds on scholarship recognizing the heterogeneity and plurality of Chicana feminisms. Because Chicanas bridged generational, ideological, and transnational approaches to their activism, there existed a multiplicity of Chicana feminisms. Chapter 4, for example, highlights the multiple strands of Chicana feminisms that did not always advocate for the same reproductive policies but were all grounded in support of women's bodily autonomy. The wide range of membership in CFMN and the falling out of the Chicana Service Action Center (detailed in chapters 2 and 4) showcases the complexity and diversity of Chicana feminisms.It is a short read, composed of only four chapters but brimming with insight into the movement. Each chapter demonstrates Chicanas bridging activism in developing their feminist praxis. The first chapter begins in the 1950s with Chicanas bridging various organizations and ideologies, such as the Communist Party, Mexican American civil rights organizations, and labor unions when they decided to form LMAW. Ethnic Mexican women expressed an emerging feminist consciousness before the rise of Chicano nationalism or mainstream feminism. Chapter 2 explores how those in LMAW bridged their intergenerational gap with emerging Chicana voices by creating the CFMN in 1970. Next, chapter 3 focuses on the International Women's Year Tribune in Mexico City to explore how Chicanas bridged local and international politics. Doing so opens a complicated conversation about identity and national belonging. Many women left the conference questioning their positionality in global politics as citizens of a first-world country while also recognizing their minority status within the United States. As a result, some immersed themselves in anti-colonial politics, aimed to build solidarity across borders, and embraced third-world feminism.Lastly, chapter 4 centers on the complex topic of body politics to showcase how Chicanas bridged activism through coalition building to advance a reproductive justice movement. This chapter deeply explores the contradictions between cultural nationalism and feminism, especially as Chicanismo hinged cultural preservation on the family. Chávez intricately weaves a discussion about how Chicanas subverted cultural nationalism with the formation of organizations such as the CFMN that publicly supported bodily autonomy. To do so openly rejected the movement's rhetoric, which restricted women's roles to their childbearing capabilities. Chicanas, however, responded in various ways, once again exposing the multiplicity of Chicana feminisms.Chicana Liberation borrows from various sources, including movement archival collections and organizational records, ephemera, and periodicals. However, it relies on the power of oral history to fully recenter the experience of Chicanas in their quest for liberation. Historians of marginalized communities face silences in the archive even when consulting movement organizational records. For example, the CFMN's records provide a glimpse into the organization's operation but omit the personal papers of its founding members. Turning to oral history fills the missing narrative that vitally shaped the movement. In all, Chávez consulted twenty-five oral histories, some previously recorded, and some conducted by the author.Chicana Liberation is part of an emerging scholarship pushing Chicana/o movement history in new directions. It provides new approaches for reading the movement while centering the experience of Mexican American women. It is an essential read for those interested in women of color feminisms, Mexican American history, and US social movements.