La Chicana: A Bibliographic Survey

Rape and territorial conquest have often gone together in history. The Spanish men who took possession of what is now Mexico in the sixteenth century also freely took possession of native Indian women, and thus it is said that Raza,[2] the mestizo race, was born of Spanish father and Indian mother. It is from Mexico's native peoples, their conquest and transformation by Spain and their reconquest in the Southwest by the United States in 1848, that Chicanas descend. America being their native land, it is not they but the descendants of European conquerors and immigrants who are the true aliens in the United States. Women historians have argued that knowledge of women's lives calls into question conventional views of history and of historical periods.[3] It seems clear to me that coming to grips with Chicana history would demand a fundamental altering of historical conceptions not yet even imagined by herstory. It would require not just a feminist, but an anti-colonialist history of America. It is not only racism or ethnocentrism that prevents our constructing this new history; it is also that we hardly even know how to conceptualize a history of America that does not begin with Columbus.[4] This essay will unfortunately not be able to lead the way into such uncharted territory. Its aim is necessarily more modest: to provide an introduction to Englishlanguage materials on Chicanas. While I assume no prior familiarity with Chicana issues or literature, I do take for granted a certain acquaintance with the issues and literature of what is commonly referred to by Chicanas as Anglo feminism. A preliminary note is necessary on the problems the reader/researcher is likely to encounter in exploring literature on La Chicana. First of all, for those lacking Spanish, access to resources is significantly restricted. Secondly, locating existing English-language sources in our ethnocentric library collections and bookstores can present formidable obstacles, as I soon found out in the course of this project. These two barriers to the existing literature are extremely frustrating, but ultimately less disturbing than the general paucity of sources. Historical materials were suppressed or destroyed in the course of the Spanish and U.S. conquests.[5] Others lie buried in archives, invisible until the contours of Chicana history are better known. Studies by the Federal Government often deprive us of data on Chicanas by submerging it with data on Chicanos (the minorities and women approach), on Hispanics, or even whites. Finally, one finds Chicanas overlooked or tokenized in both the feminist and the Chicano literature of the last decade. I will emphasize easily accessible works wherever possible in this essay. However, failure to include the hard-to-locate Chicana/o sources would only contribute to their continued invisibility; I include many of these sources with the hope that readers will pressure their libraries to increase their collections in this area. Finally, I am emphasizing very recent works.