Chicana Feminisms

The end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 codified in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the colonized status of Mexico's former citizens in what became part of the U.S. southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Mexicans residing in this region lost their citizen rights and saw their language and culture displaced overnight. It was this act of colonization that Chicanos in general and Chicana feminists in particular use as central in claiming a particular social and economic position in the United States that makes them different from other immigrant groups. The initial act of colonization influences even recent Mexican immigrants as they join Chicano communities in the United States that are treated differently from mainstream white communities.

During the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s, many Chicano writers sought to expose the suppressed history of Mexicans in the United States. Chicana feminist writers focused on highlighting the political resistance and "underground" feminisms of many important women leaders since 1848. Women of Mexican descent in the United States have a long history of resistance and political mobilization, as demonstrated by strong women leaders such as Emma Tenayuca, who was a labor leader in Texas, and las soldaderas (women soldiers) who fought in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Dolores Huerta (b. 1930) followed this tradition of political leadership as she fought side-by-side with César Chávez (1927–1993) to unionize California farmworkers and continued into the twenty-first century carrying out Chávez's important political work after his untimely death in 1993.