SEÑORITAS ON AND OFF THE SILVER SCREEN: HOW CHICANA WOMEN ORGANIZED FOR EQUALITY AND CHALLENGED THE CULTURAL PRISON OF SEXUALIZED MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY

This research is personal for me due to lived experience and day-to-day situations where I have felt the pressures of unattainable beauty standards and society’s fluid definition of beauty and femininity surrounding Chicana, Latinas, Mexican, and Mexican-American women. What inspired me to pursue these issues and topics was the work of Dr. Vicki Lynn Ruiz in her book From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. This research focuses on rival and contested images of Chicana, Mexican, Mexican-American and Latina labor advocates and activists from the early twentieth as opposed to sexualized and eroticized packaged caricatures that Hollywood created in the early twentieth century to today. This research draws on newspaper articles, fiction and film, and recent scholarly work to examine how women were portrayed in contrast to real-life figures fighting injustice, white supremacy, and the patriarchy during this period. The Hollywood portrayal of women in media as sexual femme fatales, housekeepers, and illiterate, reinforced the stereotype of a hypersexualized damsel in distress. These portrayals of Mexican women reflected existing racism, sexism, and classism by neglecting and diminishing the accomplishments of their counterparts. This research hopes to draw parallels between the mistreatment and hypersexualization of Mexican and Mexican-American women from 1910 to today. This research will answer the following question: How do fictional portrayals of Mexican and Mexican-American women affect nonfictional representation and overall social perceptions?