La Chicana

 This blog was created to emphasize what la chicana in contemporary society really is and how it is defined in a positive way.

[lachicanaredefined]

...The confining binaries of virgin/whore and good/bad mother represented by the mythic and historical figures of La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe have become so embedded in the Mexican/Chicano cultures that many Chicana writers use this theme in their literature to illustrate how this destructive binary of women inhibits women's self realization.

Cristina Herrera, Malinches, Lloronas, and Guadalupanas: Chicana Revisions of Las Tres Madres.

[fuckyeahnightmares]

La Llorona

La Llorona (“The Weeping Woman”) is a widespread legend in Mexico, the American Southwest, Puerto Rico and Central America. Although several variations exist, the basic story tells of a beautiful woman by the name of Maria killing her children by drowning them, in order to be with the man that she loved. When the man rejects her, she kills herself. Challenged at the gates of heaven as to the whereabouts of her children, she is not permitted to enter the afterlife until she has found them. Maria is forced to wander the Earth for all eternity, searching in vain for her drowned offspring, with her constant weeping giving her the name “La Llorona”. 

Read below to read her story. 

Read More

[houseofgears]

[mochazombie]

[lachicanaredefined]

La Llorona

[graylandscapes]

[reclaimingthelatinatag]

Josefina Fierro de Bright was born in Mexico in 1920. She grew up in farm labor camps as the daughter of a bordera who served meals to migrant workers in Maderna, California. Josefina gave up her studies at UCLA to become an organizer. As executive secretary of El Congreso (the first national Latino civil rights org) from 1939 to the mid-1940s, she organized protests against racism in the LA schools, against the exclusion of Mexican-American youths from public swimming pools, and against police brutality. In 1942, she was a key figure in organizing the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, to support the seventeen Chicano youths held without bail on little evidence for the alleged killing of one youth. With Moreno, she helped to coordinate El Congreso’s support for Spanish-speaking workers in the furniture, shoe manufacturing, electrical, garment, and longshoremen’s unions.

—from Dolores Hayden, “Reinterpreting Latina History at the Embassy Auditorium,” The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History

[laramadelmesquite-deactivated20]

Hers was a household name in Depression-era South Texas, and you either loved her or hated her. Emma Tenayuca roused admiration for her work on behalf of workers’ rights or stirred hatred for her politics and union organizing. At the height of her fame, the young woman, barely out of her teens, convinced 12,000 pecan shellers threatened by a 50 percent pay cut to walk off their jobs. Most of them were Mexican and Mexican-American women making little more than $2 a week in cramped, dusty rooms without toilets or running water.

Their strike is considered the first successful action in the Mexican-American struggle for economic, social and political justice.

[thinkmexican]

Emma Tenayuca Organizer: 1916-1999

“I was arrested a number of times. I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.”

Born in 1916 in San Antonio, Texas, Emma Tenayuca lived at a time when Mexican-Americans were allowed few freedoms and fewer privileges. Her close relationship with a grandfather who read the newspapers with her and took her to rallies for the rights of the poor fed the young girl’s profound hunger for both learning and social justice.

At age 16, already determined to challenge injustice, she became involved in community organizing and was jailed and threatened numerous times. In a time when neither Mexican-Americans nor women were expected to speak out, she spoke out fearlessly, and was soon known as a fiery orator and a brilliant organizer.

By age 21, Emma was considered to be the most effective organizer for the National Workers’ Alliance. That same year, 1938, when the wages of the city’s lowest paid workers were cut almost in half, they decided to strike. The city’s 12,000 pecan-shellers, most of them women, elected Emma to lead their strike. In less than two months, the pecan-shellers forced the owners to raise their pay. The Pecan-Shellers’ Strike is considered by many historians to be the first significant victory in the Mexican-American struggle for political and economic equality in this country.

Emma was so articulate and outspoken, that the Workers´ Alliance replaced her when she was 22. There was only so much at that time for a woman — a Mexican woman — to be an ambitious and intellectual champion for justice.

In 1939, as Emma was giving a speech, an enraged mob attacked the San Antonio´s Municipal Auditorium. Fearing that she would be lynched, Emma was led away through a secret passageway. The mob threw bricks, broke windows, set fires, ripped out auditorium seats, and later that night, together with the Ku Klux Klan, burnt the city’s mayor in effigy for having defended Emma’s right to free speech. This event is still on record as the San Antonio’s largest riot.

Read more at AWTT

Teacher Resources: That’s Not Fair! Emma Tenayuca’s Struggle for Justice

Image: “Emma Tenayuca” by Robert Shetterly

[lachicanaredefined]

Emma Tenayuca, Louisa Moreno, and Josefina Bright-- these women stood their ground in the cotton camps in the San Joaquin Valley, and were the first to be sent to Mexico by the U.S.

bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Home.

[lachicanaredefined]

Chicanos are people of the Americas who have been occupied twice--first by the Spanish, then by the Anglos.

bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains, Home.

[aguitada]

"In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor.  The danger lies in ranking the oppressions.  The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression.  The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base.  Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place." (52-53)

Cherrie Moraga, “The Danger Lies in Ranking the Oppressions” (1983) 

[brambled]

[becauseofthiswoman]

Name: Gloria Anzaldua Dates:1942-2004 Why she rocks: She is the leading scholar of Chicano cultural theory and queer theory, and has written several books based on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border. She is well known for using a blend of languages in her writing to challenge her readers to decipher meanings on their own.

Quote: “Though we tremble before uncertain futures, may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength. May we dance in the face of our fears.”

Because of this woman… we have texts that challenge feminists and LGBT studies students to see issues from a multi-cultural perspective.

[lachicanaredefined]

I am a woman with a foot in both worlds.

Cherrie L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years

[repliclit-blog]

Coatlicue (pronounced koh-ah-tlee-kweh) is the Aztec goddess who gave birth to the moon, stars, and Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and war. She is also known as Toci (Tocî, “our grandmother”) and Cihuacoatl (Cihuācōhuātl, “the lady of the serpent”), the patron of women who die in childbirth.

The word “Coatlicue” is Nahuatl for “the one with the skirt of serpents.” She is referred to variously by the epithets “Mother Goddess of the Earth who gives birth to all celestial things”, “Goddess of Fire and Fertility”, “Goddess of Life, Death and Rebirth”, and “Mother of the Southern Stars.”

She is represented as a woman wearing a skirt of writhing snakes and a necklace made of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Her feet and hands are adorned with claws and her breasts are depicted as hanging flaccid from nursing. Her face is formed by two facing serpents (after her head was cut off and the blood spurt forth from her neck in the form of two gigantic serpents), referring to the myth that she was sacrificed during the beginning of the present creation.

Most Aztec artistic representations of this goddess emphasize her deadly side, because Earth, as well as loving mother, is the insatiable monster that consumes everything that lives. She represents the devouring mother, in whom both the womb and the grave exist.

According to Aztec legend, she was once magically impregnated by a ball of feathers that fell on her while she was sweeping a temple, and subsequently gave birth to the gods Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl. Her daughter Coyolxauhqui then rallied Coatlicue’s four hundred other children together and goaded them into attacking and decapitating their mother. The instant she was killed, the god Huitzilopochtli suddenly emerged from her womb fully grown and armed for battle. He killed many of his brothers and sisters, including Coyolxauhqui, whose head he cut off and threw into the sky to become the moon. In one variation on this legend, Huitzilopochtli himself is the child conceived in the ball-of-feathers incident and is born just in time to save his mother from harm.

A new article by Cecelia Klein argues that the famous Coatlicue statue in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, and several other complete and fragmentary versions, may actually represent a personified snake skirt. The reference is to one version of the creation of the present Sun. The myth relates that the present Sun began after the gods gathered at Teotihuacan and sacrificed themselves. The best known version states that Tezzictecatl and Nanahuatzin immolated themselves, becoming respectively the moon and the sun. However, other versions add a group of female deities to those who sacrificed themselves, including Coatlicue. Afterwards the Aztecs were said to have worshipped the skirts of these women, which came back to life. Coatlicue thus has creative aspects, which may balance the skulls, hearts, hands, and claws that connect her to the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli. The earth both consumes and regenerates life.

Stephanie Guajardo, Coatlicue

[lachicanaredefined]

The 'unknown' is often depicted in racist literature as the 'darkness' within a person. Similarly, sexist writers will refer to fear in the form of the vagina, calling it 'the orifice of death...' And yet, the bulk of literature in this country reinforces the myth that what is dark and female is evil.

Cherrie L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years

[lachicanaredefined]

Because to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality.

Cherrie L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years