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Decolonizing Chicana HistoryAuthor(s): Emma PrezSource: The
Women's Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 5 (Feb., 2000), pp.
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commitment that a generation of young scholars made to feminist
history. Many in this generation are now so respectably en- sconced
in privileged academic positions that it is easy to forget that
they began as outsiders, more closely affiliated with the women's
movement than with academic culture. When the first women's history
courses in the early 1970s were dismissed by their critics as
"consciousness raising," these critics were right. Those courses
were different from history-as-usual: they were designed to promote
personal trans- formation rather than to achieve tenure for their
instructors. In case after case these scholars risked the
equivalent of profes- sional suicide when they researched, wrote
and taught about women. Future historical accounts of how they
confronted and dealt with that risk will make fascinating read-
ing. Bits and pieces are starting to emerge; Linda Kerber has
written movingly about her experience in the introduction to her
1997 book, Toward an Intellectual History of Women; I've described
my graduate stu- dent and early faculty years in a co- authored
introduction to Ruth Bordin's Women at Michigan (1999).
A third level of change in the process by which the historical
profession was transformed by feminism lies in the accep- tance of
women's history-history written with women at its center as a valid
analysis of the past. This change has been uneven and is still in
progress, yet without it feminist history would remain an embat-
tled outpost on the margins of the profes- sion rather than the
remarkably secure achievement that it constitutes at the cen- ter
of historical studies today. Good femi- nist history has been
accepted as undenia- bly good history.
W x sHAT EXPLAINS THIS acceptance?
Surely not professional good will. Or historians' need to
know
about women. Or even the desire to in- crease departmental
enrollments. Even the friends of women's history notoriously fail
to incorporate findings about women into their own work. And high
enrollments have never constituted a shortcut to pro- fessional
esteem.
Rather, the acceptance of women's his- tory seems to have arisen
from a deep con- gruence between the methods used by feminist
historians and those used by other historians, a congruence that
benefited feminist historians by making it difficult to exclude
them from the trade. In their abil- ity to find new evidence and
use it to con- struct a convincing argument, feminist his- torians
abided by the same rules and spoke the same language as other
historians. It became very hard to deny that they were
practitioners of the historical craft, very
hard to close the guild doors against them. The profession as a
whole had said that evidence about women just didn't exist, but
feminist historians of women had shown that was not true. They beat
the pro- fession at its own game. With increasing momentum during
the 1 970s, a sea-change occurred that recognized feminist scholars
as bona fide members of the profession.
There was nothing inevitable about this three-tiered process of
change; it might have stopped or been stopped at any step along the
way. It certainly would have gotten nowhere if a cultural revolu-
tion had not occurred on college cam- puses in the late 1960s. And
without a vi- brant women's movement to nurture a symbiotic
relationship between its early students and teachers, it would
never have acquired its first cadre of committed scholars. Its
institutionalization in the 1970s might not have happened if condi-
tions outside the discipline had helped its members deny or
marginalize the field's validity. In fact, however, these three
lev- els of change built on one another to cre- ate an impressive
alteration in the sociol- ogy of historical knowledge.
Feminist scholars in other disciplines played a crucial
supporting role in this story, for during those early years when
historians of women were few and their opponents many, colleagues
in other de- partments-especially sociology, English literature,
anthropology and psychol- ogy-assisted their survival. The energy
with which historians contributed to the creation of women's
studies programs on campuses throughout the country ex- pressed
their need for institutional support outside departments of
history. It wasn't long, however, before feminist historians
themselves became life-lines for scholars in other disciplines.
Sometime in the late 1 970s historians of women began to stand on
stable professional ground. Having won their space within the
historical disci- pline, their place within the academy was
especially secure.
We can hope that the first decade of the twenty-first century
will witness a cascade of memoirs and oral histories about the pro-
cess by which women historians changed the historical discipline.
Like other aspects of the past, the historical profession in the
late twentieth century was shaped by the choices that individuals
made. Those choices-and the costs they incurred for the individuals
who made them-deserve to be better known. By telling their indi-
vidual stories women historians can docu- ment one of the most
improbable transfor- mations of American academic life. Col-
lectively these stories will constitute one of the most notable
achievements of feminism's second wav e. 0
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is an equal opportunity employer and actively encour- ages
applications from women, members of ethnic minorities, and
individuals with disabilities.
Chicana history by Emma Perez 'THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT and
demands for economic independence have left her [the Mexican woman]
untouched. Uncomplainingly, she la- bors in the field for months at
a time.... The supremacy of the male is sel- dom disputed." So
wrote Ruth Allen in "The Mexican Peon Woman of Texas" in 1931.
The words affronted. "Uncomplain- ingly"? For whom? To whom had
this professor spoken in the cotton fields of Texas where my
grandmother had la- bored in the 1930s? Not to my grand- mother.
Nor to my great-aunts. And not to my mother, sisters and cousins
who came after them. I knew that these Mexi- can women from Texas,
whom I ad- mired, had complained, commanded, laughed, loved,
suffered and quarreled with each other and with the men in their
lives. I knew they had transformed their own lives (and mine) as
cultural survi- vors in a geographic space that came to be called
the Southwest. Their empower- ing voices I would hear again and
again throughout my life. In 1976, in an under- graduate women's
history class at UCLA, I read Ruth Allen's words. They incited me
to study history.
Now, 23 years after my undergradu- ate days, I remain distressed
over the paucity of studies by Chicanas. We have made inroads, but
too few. In 2000, we
can boast that our infinitesimal numbers have soared, but at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, only twenty-one Chicanas
have earned Ph.D. degrees in history, half of them from UCLA, Ber-
keley, Stanford and Yale.
Those numbers reveal what is not hid- den at all-the problems we
face in the academy. The representation of women of color, whether
students, professors, administrators, or editors ofjournals and
presses, concerns me. Given that ten of the history doctorates were
earned by Chicana historians in just the last dec- ade, and that
few graduate students are in the pipeline (the majority, nine, are
at Stanford), it is not a mystery that only seven books, three in
the past two years, have been written by Chicana historians.
Recently, a young white female col- league who lives in the
Southwest asked me whether there is a need for more Chi- cana
historians. The question baffled me. The current backlash against
af- firmative action permits some moderate
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liberals to pose questions formerly asked by conservatives. For
many at the univer- sity, affirmative action has already achieved
its purpose. Well-intentioned colleagues now stop us in the hallway
to ask: Is it fair to spend time and money to train or hire more
minority scholars at the expense of white women and men who are
better prepared and can remain objective? Is it necessary to
consider minority applicants for positions be- yond minority
studies?
It is as if these social and political re- sponsibilities have
been met-even though the Mexican American, or Chi- cano/a,
population is increasing rapidly in the United States and yet less
than one percent of historians in academe are Mexican Americans.
The problem of representation lies in universities built upon
writing the history of the "other" by the privileged. Many of us
dispute es- sentialized notions about race and eth- nicity, about
gender and sexuality, to un- ravel these charged controversies. Not
only Chicanas can write Chicana his- tory, of course. But the
nagging di- lemma-who represents whom-contin- ues to fester in the
academy. Postcolo- nial critics have cautioned that if those
previously erased from history are re- covered and constructed only
by the privileged, then we risk univocal bias. But who has been
privileged in the acad- emy to tell the story of the colonized, ra-
cialized, gendered others?
I N MY WORK, I CONTEND that history is devised through power.
Knowledge is constructed through and by those
in power who may erase, empower, si- lence, or privilege that
which will be-
come the official story. Those who have accepted the tradition
and its norms, ac- cepting objectivity as science, often ig- nore
colonial relations already in place and write history replete with
coloniality that has not been disputed. For those of us who divide
history into categories like colonial relations and postcolonial
rela- tions, what I call' a "decolonial imagi- nary" creates that
rupturing space and an alternative to that which is written in his-
tory. For me, the historian's political project is to write history
that decolo- nizes otherness. Only then will we hear women's
commanding voices. Only then will we begin to interrogate who
author- izes history and for whom.
New studies have begun to honor the women erased and silenced.
Seven monographs by Chicana historians authorize an otherwise
cryptic past. I ap- point the books to temporal categories specific
to what I name the Great Events of Chicano/a history. Placing the
studies in these categories reveals how much more needs to be done.
Simply put, the Great Events are the Spanish Conquest of 1521; the
US-Mexico War, 1846-48; the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and
post-revolution immigration to the US; and the Chicano/a movement
of the 1960s and 1970s. Gendering those Great Events is the work of
Chicanas.
When Vicki Ruiz inaugurated Chi- cana history with Cannery
Women, Can- nery Lives: Mexican Women, Unioniza- tion and the
California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (University of New
Mexico Press, 1987 ), she gendered Mexican immigration studies. At
last, we had a Chicana history text for our classes. In 1990, two
monographs were
published that featured Mexican women prominent in the Mexican
Revolution: Elizabeth Salas' Soldaderas in the Mexi- can Military:
Myth and History (Univer- sity of Texas Press), and Shirlene Soto's
Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman; Her Participation in
Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910-1940 (Arden Press). Four
years later, Camille Guerin-Gonzales presented Mexican Workers and
American Dreams: Immi- gration, Repatriation, and California Farm
Labor, 1900-1939 (Rutgers Uni- versity Press). Through 1994, all
the books scrutinized the first half of the twentieth century, in
which post- revolution immigration was central. Not until 1998 was
a comprehensive history of Chicanas across the twentieth century
published: Vicki Ruiz' From Out of the Shadows. Mexican Women in
Twentieth- Century America (Oxford University Press). In 1999, the
nineteenth centuiry received attention in Deena Gonzailez' Refusing
the Favor: The Spanish- Mexican Women ofSanta Fe, 1820-1880 (Oxford
University Press). Also issued in 1999, my book, The Decolonial
Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into His- tory (Indiana University
Press), pro- poses that Chicanas (and colonized oth- ers) have been
caught in a decolonial time-lag in which the colonial must be
reinvoked if the postcolonial is ever to succeed. History, after
all, is a tool for liberatory consciousness. Ruiz and Gonzalez have
furthered such liberatory studies.
From Out of the Shadows led Ruiz to women formerly eclipsed in
the Chi- cano/a social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. She guides
us through "Bor- der Journeys," tracking circular and chain
migrations for women who trav- ersed boundaries between northern
Mex- ico and the US. Her third chapter, "The Flapper and the
Chaperone," will un- doubtedly be the foundation for future studies
probing the imprints of popular culture on young Mexican American
women. In the last two chapters of her book, Ruiz reveres Chicanas
who have configured contemporary political movements. In an
epilogue, she quotes from an open letter written by activists
protesting the beatings of undocumented immigrants in California
in1996. Ruiz highlights migrant patterns to warn that Mexicans will
not be deterred from crossing geographic borders. Her use of
"Mexican" unites all Mexicans who defy political borders, setting
them apart from ethnic European immigrants.
In Refusing the Favor, Gonzalez rein- terprets
nineteenth-century New Mexico and paints a new vision for the
history of the American West. Spanish-Mexican women were not gentle
tamers who ac- commodated those with whom they in- termarried. The
women refused to as- similate harmoniously with incoming
Euro-Americans. Gonzailez shows that ninety percent of the
Spanish-Mexican population living in the region of New Mexico lost
their lands to colonizing Euro-Americans after the US-Mexico War.
Yet it is curious how historians of the American West have stressed
that conquest was "relatively painless."
Gonzatlez has consciously chosen to tell the story of
coloniality in nineteenth- century America, a history often down-
played if not negated. Finally, a Chicana historian announces that
which some have only whispered-"conquest and colonization
impoverished the major- ity... It disempowered women, who had
previously exercised certain rights guar- anteed by Spanish
law."
To reintroduce coloniality acknowl- 4dges its lingering
consequences. Voreover, just as historians argue that ;he Civil War
continues to imprint the Jnited States, Chicana historians like
3onza'lez contend through meticulous -esearch that the US-Mexico
War con- ;inues to inscribe relations between and imong Chicanas/os
and Euro- kmericans. She sums it up: Spanish- Mexican women "left
us a legacy, an in- :lination toward many responses. It seems
important therefore to know something about them, to return the fa-
vor, and to exorcise their omission from [istory by suggesting
patterns, revealing linkages between their society and cul- ture
and that of the encroachers, and in- sisting on more complex
readings of their lives."
B EYOND NEW MEXICO, other regional histories beg for revision by
Chi- cana historians. Archives, family
papers, community stories must be lo- cated and sifted through.
Interdiscipli- nary studies that cross the boundaries be- tween
history and other areas like liter- ary criticism, political theory
and cul- tural studies will introduce different in- quiries with
fresh perspectives. Mexican immigration to the Midwest since the
1920s continues to require study, while recent immigration to the
South and the Northeast will eventually need consid- eration; in
New York City alone the Mexican population has jumped from 5,000 in
1990 to 300,000 in-1999. Al- though scholars must continue to re-
search twentieth-century topics, atten- tion to
pre-twentieth-century studies is crucial. The Spanish-Mexican women
who shaped the American West demand more investigation. The new
Western history must include interpretive histo- ries by Chicanas,
or else the American West will remain the discursive territory of
Euro-American scholars.
Similarly, colonial/Spanish border- land archival research calls
for Chicana researchers. Of the 21 Chicana histori- ans, less than
a handful conduct research on the nineteenth century; fewer still
fer- ret through documents of the Spanish co- lonial period. Among
works which do address pre-twentieth-century histories are
monographs by non-Chicanas Sara Deutsch, No Separate Refuge:
Culture, Class and Gender on the Anglo- Hispanic Frontier in the
American Southwest, 1880-1 940 (Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1987),
and Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in
California, 1769-1936 (University of California Press, 1995).
Antonia Cas- tanieda's forthcoming book with the Uni- versity of
Texas Press (scheduled for 2002) will be the first by a Chicana to
feature the Amerindian women of seventeenth-century California.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba's historical, novel, Sor Juana 's Second
Dream (University of New Mexico, 1999), about the
seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, renders
the lesbian interpretation that historians have avoided. This type
of historical novel in- vites historians to reassess the lines be-
tween history and literature, between fact and fiction.
To return the favor by honoring our an- cestors, to summon women
from the shadows, to decolonize otherness by writ- ing another
story, one that will con- sciously remake a liberatory narra-
tive-this is what future Chicana histo- ries must accomplish, if
our grandmoth- ers and the women who came before them are no longer
to be silenced. .0
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1 The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XVII, No. 5 / February
2000
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Article Contentsp. 13p. 14
Issue Table of ContentsThe Women's Review of Books, Vol. 17, No.
5 (Feb., 2000), pp. 1-16+A1-A8+17-32Front Matter [pp. 2-A8]Review:
Making Change [pp. 1+3-4]Letters [p. 4]Review: Correction: No End
in Sight [p. 4]Review: Consuming Desires [p. 5]Review: A Living
Monument [p. 6]Review: From Bad to Worse [p. 7]Review: New
Frontiers [pp. 8-9]Review: Bread and Roses [pp. 9-10]Review:
Witness to Her Age [pp. 10-11]Review: Taking the Road to Ruin [p.
11]Our Histories, Ourselves: Women Historians Assess the Past,
Present and Future of Their SubjectTransformation Scene [pp.
12-13]Decolonizing Chicana History [pp. 13-14]Too Soon to
Celebrate? [p. 15]From Parts to Whole [p. 16]History's Hybrids [p.
16]Editorial Imperatives [pp. 17-18]Digging Women [pp. 18-19]The
Longest Revolution [pp. 20-21]Optical Illusions [pp.
21-22]Essential Reading [pp. 22-24]Color Coded [pp. 24-26]Redrawing
the Map of History [pp. 26-27]Forgotten Forerunners [pp.
27-28]Actors and Analysts [p. 29]Ripple Effect [pp. 29-30]
This Month's Bookshelf [pp. 30-31]Back Matter [p. 32-32]