Sandra D Garza

Northwest Vista College, Mexican American Studies Program, Faculty Member

University of Texas at San Antonio, Bicultural Bilingual Studies-Culture, Literacy, and Language Program, Alumna

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I have a PhD in Culture, Literacy, and Language with a focus on Mexican American, Chicana/o, and Latina/o Culture and History from the University of Texas at San Antonio. From 2009-2014, I served as the Managing Editor/Review Coordinator for Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of MALCS and currently serve on the Editorial Review Board for this peer-reviewed publication.
Supervisors: Josie Mendez-Negrete, Martha Menchaca, Juliet Langman, Marie "Keta" Miranda, and Marco A. Cervantez

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Papers by Sandra D Garza

Dissertation: GÜERAS Y PRIETAS: REMEMBERING LIVED EXPERIENCES WITH COLORISM THROUGH HISTORY AND ETHNOPLÁTICA

Dissertation: This study explores colorism with a focus on women who identify as Chicana/Tejana. ... more Dissertation: This study explores colorism with a focus on women who identify as Chicana/Tejana. Since the 1980s, empirical studies on Chicanas/os and skin color have evidenced colorism as a widespread practice with material consequences. Relying largely on quantitative approaches, these works were among the earliest to reveal statistically significant relationships between skin color and educational attainment (Murguia & Telles, 1996), socioeconomic status and income (C. Arce, Murguia et al., 1987; Telles & Murguia, 1990), as well as psychosocial health (Codina & Montalvo, 1994). More recent scholarly discussions about skin color continue to emphasize the significance of colorism as a long-standing and widespread practice impacting local and global relations, socioeconomic status, and identity formation (Hall, 2010, 2008; Herring, Keith et al., 2004; Hunter, 2005; Nakano Glenn, 2009). I build on these earlier works in order to take seriously colorism as a lived experience and to better understand how colorism is remembered, reproduced, and resisted. I draw from “ethnopláticas,” or conversational-style, one-on-one, interview methods, with eight women who self-identify as: (1) Chicana/Tejana, (2) born and raised in South Texas, and (3) willing to share their experiences with colorism. This analysis focuses on how participants remember and make meaning of experiences with colorism. The overarching research questions guiding this project are: How do contemporary Chicanas/Tejanas living in South Texas remember and make meaning of experiences with colorisms? What are the historical discourses of colorism as it pertains to Chicanas/Tejanas? What are the relationships between historical discourses and their contemporary lived experiences?

Decolonizing Intimacies: Women of Mexican Descent and Colorism

This essay explores colorism, or the ranking of individuals based on skin color or racialized phe... more This essay explores colorism, or the ranking of individuals based on skin color or racialized phenotype, with a focus on women of Mexican descent. I offer a history of skin color consciousness, linking it to Spanish and Anglo American colonial beliefs about the value of women as reproductive objects and to contemporary articulations of lived experiences with colorism. First, I trace colorism historically, considering how discourses of difference built on sixteenth-century notions of gendered contamination and nineteenth-century notions of purity and prestige were used to construct and privilege whiteness. Next, I draw from interviews with four women who self-identify as Mexican-descent to document how personal experiences with colorism are remembered and understood. These narratives reveal the importance of the family as an institution within which a collective memory of historical white supremacy is continuously performed through colorism. The recognition that colorism is both reproduced and resisted through intimate familial relations opens a space to ask questions about the relationships between contemporary experience and histories of colonization and suggests, finally, that the family is a critical site for decolonial healing.

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M.A. Thesis--"Between the binaries: Women of Mexican descent and skin color in south Texas

Histories Buried in Flesh: Skin Color and the Chicana Experience in the United States