Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: "Mothers of East Los Angeles"

The relatively few studies of Chicana political activism show a bias in the way political activism is conceptualized by social scientists, who often use a narrow definition confined to electoral politics.' Most feminist research uses an expanded definition that moves across the boundaries between public, electoral politics and private, family politics; but feminist research generally focuses on women mobilized around gender-specific issues.2 For some feminists, adherence to tradition constitutes conservatism and submission to patriarchy. Both approaches exclude the contributions of working-class women, particularly those of Afro-American women and Latinas, thus failing to capture the full dynamic of social change.3 The following case study of Mexican American women activists in Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA) contributes another dimension to the conception of grassroots politics. It illustrates how these Mexican American women transform traditional networks and resources based on family and culture into political assets to defend the quality of urban life. Far from unique, these patterns of activism are repeated in Latin America and elsewhere. Here as in other times and places, the women's activism arises out of seemingly traditional roles, addresses wider social and political issues, and capitalizes on informal associations sanctioned by the community?. Religion, commonly viewed as a conservative force, is intertwined with politics.5 Often, women speak of their communities and their activism as extensions of their family and household responsibility. The central role of women in grassroots struggles around quality of life, in the Third World and in the United States, challenges conventional assumptions about the powerlessness of women and static definitions of culture and tradition.