Latina Feminism

US Central Americans are destabilizing, reconceiving, and revitalizing the US Latina/o canon, and in doing so, they are forcing us to reconsider hegemonic ideas about Latinidad. The cultural production of Latinos/as of Central American descent has engaged in a critical denunciation of the violence that characterizes not only the history, but also the current situation, of the Central American isthmus. This essay examines the strategies used by US Central American poet William Archila and visual artist Alma Leiva to (re)construct the past and memorialize the victims of violence across Central America. I argue that Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s installation-photography series Celdas are examples of the “art of witness.” As such, their works play a key role in the reconstruction of Central American collective memory from the diaspora.

In 1891 the Cuban intellectual José Martí made public his ideas about the identity of post-colonial Spanish America in a text that appeared in Mexico City under the title of "Nuestra América" ["Our America"]. This text has had many interpretations, some of them dealing with the beginning of a new way to understand the political realities of the region. José David Saldívar, for example, mentions that in Foucault's sense, "Martí stands between two ways of thinking: the last representative of a nineteenth-century romantic idealism and the first forerunner of a Latin American socialist ideology of continental solidarity" (The Dialectics 7). But, among all the possible interpretations that a text of this magnitude can have, there is space to think about it also as an attempt to develop a new understanding of identity after the introduction of Darwinian ideas in the region.

Hubert Dreyfus and Ada María Isasi-Díaz both look to the everyday as the paradigmatic space in which we act as knowers. This essay compares the ways that Dreyfus and Isasi-Díaz conceptualize the everyday and the knowing that happens within it. Whereas, for Dreyfus, everyday knowledge is understood as ‘skillful coping,’ or the intuitive exercise of deeply engrained expertise, Isasi-Díaz argues that for the impoverished Latinas in New York City who are the focus of her work, knowledge involves struggling to navigate obstacles and setbacks that are characteristic of everyday life for the oppressed. I argue that Isasi-Díaz’s recognition of the influence of social location on how we know poses an important challenge to Dreyfus’ work on the knowledge of the everyday. Comparing Dreyfus and Isasi-Díaz’s work allows me to highlight one of the ways that Latina/o philosophy can contribute to work on problems typically seen to be universal in scope.

This paper strengthens the theoretical ground of feminist analyses of anger by explaining how the angers of the oppressed are ways of knowing. Relying on insights created through the juxtaposition of Latina feminism and Zen Buddhism, I argue that these angers are special kinds of embodied perceptions that surface when there is a profound lack of fit between a particular bodily orientation and its framing world of sense. As openings to alternative sensibilities, these angers are transformative, liberatory, and deeply epistemological

The following paper discusses Latina feminist debates on selfhood and identity. Since work by Latina feminists is not widely recognized or studied within the discipline of philosophy, the aim of the first section of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to Chicana feminism as it has been and continues to be pivotal in the development of Latina feminism. Included in this section is an introduction to the work of celebrated Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa who has played a major inf luence in the theories of selfhood and identity developed by Latina feminists discussed in this paper. The second section analyzes the work of key contemporary Latina philosophers and theorists and shows the manner in which these theorists are reclaiming the notion of experience.

This paper offers a critical reading of María Lugones’s engagement with intersectionality theory, as primarily developed by Black feminists. I argue that her "linguistic critique" of intersectionality risks jeopardizing the possibility of coalitional politics emphasized by decolonial feminisms, especially between Black women and Latinas. We should instead attend to her "coloniality critique" that shows what undergirds the categorial logics intersectionality names, interrogating their source as a colonial imposition. By furthering the insights of intersectionality, I argue that decolonial feminism helps us to reorient our practices of resistance to categorial logics and the possibility of forging decolonizing coalitions among women of color.

This anthology foregrounds scholarly, activist, and creative refl ections on spirit, spirituality, and "spiritual activism" (Anzaldúa 2002a) from the perspectives of Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous women. We, the coeditors Elisa Facio and Irene Lara, have been studying Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous women's spiritualities and, just as significantly, living our own spiritualities since the 1990s. Through our distinct yet interweaving paths as spiritually identified Chicana scholar-activists from working-class backgrounds, we are committed to decolonizing the academy that largely devalues or misunderstands spirituality, both as a serious academic topic and as an integral aspect of being alive. We have encountered many others who are also committed to a life of inquiry , teaching, writing, cultural activism, or social justice that values a spiritual perspective and praxis grounded in the decolonial histories, politics, and dynamic cultures of our Indigenous and mestiza/o ancestors and in solidarity with Indigenous people and people of color, across constructed "races" and "nations." Built on the supposition that spirituality often plays a decolonizing role in creating meaning, inspiring action, and supporting healing and justice in our communities, this anthology contributes to an emerging body of knowledge focused on voicing and understanding spirituality through an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and nonsectarian lens. Although they are widely perceived to be a religious or spiritual group, until recently there have been few works that address the gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized spiritualities of Chicanas, Latinas, and Indigenous women, particularly through their own voices.

it makes significant philosophical contributions to feminism, epistemology, aesthetics, ontology, critical philosophy of race, and social and political thought at the same time that it calls into question how we conceive of and organize these areas of study to begin with. Indeed, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro thematizes the process of thinking, writing, and creating, "question[ing] its own formalizing and ordering attempts, its own strategies, the machinations of thought itself, of theory formulated on an experiential level of discourse" (7). Anzaldúa's excavation of her own writing and thinking practice throughout this text--as well as her unique mode of working between languages and genres--builds on her previous work, but in Light in the Dark/ Luz en lo oscuro her creative process is even more richly rendered. The manuscript itself is composed of six chapters and a preface, distinct but interconnected threads that recast and reimagine central philosophical questions surrounding oppression, resistance, identity, knowledge, and experience. Throughout, Anzaldúa thematizes the practice of writing, analysis, and theoretical work, making vivid the process and possibilities of theory and philosophy.

Luisa Capetillo (1829-1922) has been heralded as the first feminist writer of Puerto Rico. She authored four books and embodied her emancipatory philosophical commitments, but has received scant philosophical
attention. In this paper I recover the philosophy of Capetillo as part of a Latin American and Caribbean philosophical tradition centered on radical praxis places sexuality at the centerfold of class politics. At the intersection between gender equity and class emancipation Capetillo advocated for the liberatory possibilities of education, which served as the key to unlearning the social norms that engendered the marginalization of working people and working women.

In this article, I examine the relationship between self-knowledge practices among women of color and structural patterns of ignorance by offering an analysis of Gloria E. Anzaldúa's discussions of self-writing. I propose that by writing about her own experiences in a manner that hails others to critically interrogate their own identities, Anzaldúa develops important theoretical resources for understanding self-knowledge, self-ignorance, and practices of knowing others. In particular, I claim that in her later writings, Anzaldúa offers a rich epistemological account of these themes through her notion of autohistoria-teoría. The notion of autohistoria-teoría demonstrates that self-knowledge practices, like all knowledge practices, are social and relational. Moreover, such self-knowledge practices require contestation and affirmation as well, including, resistance and productive friction.

In this introduction to the first in-depth analysis of scholar-activist María Lugones’s writings, the editors provide an overview of key themes in Lugones’s work, a history of her political and intellectual evolution over the past thirty years, and an intimate reflection on the collaborative process of writing this book. Concepts considered include speaking face to face, deep coalition, multiple selves, the colonial-modern gender system, popular education, feminist praxis, decolonial praxis, Women of Color, intersectionality, activism, and others.

In a novel approach to the writings of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004), Andrea J. Pitts addresses issues relevant to contemporary debates within feminist theory and critical race studies. Pitts explores how Anzaldúa addressed, directly and indirectly, a number of complicated problems regarding agency in her writings, including questions of disability justice, trans theorizing, Indigenous sovereignty, and identarian politics. Anzaldúa’s conception of what Pitts describes as multiplicitous agency serves as a key conceptual link between these questions in her work, including how discussions of agency surfaced in Anzaldúa’s late writings of the 1990s and early 2000s. Not shying away from Anzaldúa’s own complex and sometimes problematic framings of disability, mestizaje, and Indigeneity, Pitts draws from several strands of contemporary Chicanx, Latinx, and African American philosophy to examine how Anzaldúa’s work builds pathways toward networks of solidarity and communities of resistance.

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood.

This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits.

In this article I argue the conceptualization of the multitude as a diffuse network and the attendant archipelagic metaphors in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as related Autonomous Marxist scholarship belie the vital role of identity and difference in social organizing under Empire or global capitalism. In order to energize these archipelagic metaphors and to flesh out Autonomous Marxist theory and praxis, I suggest this theory take cue from Chicana third space feminism, specifically Gloria Anzaldúa's metaphor and praxis of "bridging," which foregrounds the significance of identity and difference in contingently connecting to and moving with others in pursuit of being in common.

“Abrazos de Conocimiento Across the Generations: Chicana Mothering and Daughtering in the Borderlands.”  The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución. Eds. Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, and Christine Vega. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 223-42.

Drawing on family photographs and documents, as well as archival research, the author reflects on her grandmother's migration to New York City from Puerto Rico in the mid-1940s and examines her journey and new life in New York in relation to the broader sociopolitical context. The reflective essay considers how housing and homeownership were positioned as key to the promises of the American dream, while also revealing the limits of such ideals as tied to U.S. empire building on and off the island. The author analyzes her grandmother's role as the president of her public housing tenant organization and her father's experiences growing up in Harlem to better understand what it means to strategically navigate sites of inclusion and exclusion. This reflection is written in the spirit of testimonio in an effort to honor and extend Latina feminist epistemologies and contribute to scholarship that challenges traditional modes of knowledge production.

Using critical race theory and Chicana feminist epistemology, I analyze the history of Chicanas and Latinas in Gender Studies spaces and the current presence of Chicanas and Latinas in the Gender Studies programs of the UC system. Chicana and Latina students encounter hostile educational environments on university campuses. Gender Studies, while holding the potential of being a revolutionary space for Chicanas and Latinas, often perpetuates practices of erasure and alienation. Chicana and Latina feminist scholars have withdrawn from academic spaces and continued their work within alternative spaces while demanding that the field of Gender Studies address its problematic roots. While the UC system calls itself an inclusive institution, an analysis of the Chicana and Latina representation in undergraduate Gender Studies programs shows they have substituted tokenism for actual integration of Chicana and Latina curriculum and faculty. The UC system must re-center their Gender Studies programs to include Chicanas and Latinas in order to be as truly diverse as they claim to be.

Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author of In- Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016). Ortega brings an original approach to questions of selfhood and identity by intertwining the work of Latina feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones with existential phenomenology, in particular the work of Martin Heidegger. Understanding the self as both singular and multiple, Ortega examines accounts of world-traveling and border crossings that illuminate the everyday experiences of marginality, migration, and exile. With keen attention to the experience of living between worlds and the borders that define—politically and conceptually—current categories of identity, Ortega’s work challenges abstract and general accounts of selfhood that remain central to the academic tradition of philosophy, a tradition that has marginalized and ig- nored the unique contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of colour who deeply understand the experience of being-between-worlds.

Gloria Anzaldúa characterizes a subject’s identities, her understandings of herself and her world, in terms of narrative formation. The subject in oppressive cultures is expected to, and to a great extent often does, formulate her identity narratives by unconsciously locating herself within larger social narratives, oppressive narratives that she did not create or consciously consent to. Anzaldúa proposes a method of developing alternative narratives, in which subjects create their own identity narratives through a self-directed process. This process includes (1) dismantling oppressive societally-imposed narratives and (2) searching for narratives of liberation.

Since college, La Puente, CA has been the focus of my research and activism from bilingual education, sanctuary to by-trustee area school board elections. As a graduate student in the 1990s, I returned to live and research in this city of my childhood and where my immigrant grandparents eventually moved to in the 1950s from Nicaragua and Sicily. Rooted in home lessons, research experiences, participation in community struggles, and informed by Chicana/Latina and other women of colour feminist methodologies, this piece uses storytelling and poetry to reflect on the politics and possibilities of researching where we live. In particular, it highlights the epistemological and methodological pushback, along with the benefits and lessons learned over a life course of learning from teachers, becoming neighbours, and studying educational inequalities. Unique to my Latina feminist approach are the enduring relationships that have unfolded over the course of three decades of being able to (re)search, learn, live, and organize in community.

Latina feminist writing has for decades provided critical concepts to innovate and transform feminist theory in the United States and beyond. While Latina literature has proliferated over the past forty years, this essay looks at key writers beginning from the 1980s to the present whose work has intervened in the field of feminist theory although their contributions to the field are not always recognized.1 In the 1970s and 1980s, women of color were in the process of defining themselves, asserting their agency, and building their own intellectual traditions. The publication of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzal- dúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (1982) set out to expand the definition of feminist to make this analysis relevant to women of color in the United States. These texts sought a signifier, a self-representation that would underscore women’s multiple subjectivities of race, class, sexuality, and gender, generating a theoretical space to critique sexism, homophobia, a gendered analysis of history, politics, institutionalized racism, and economic exploitation. Out of their subordin- ation as Latinas and their exclusion from both the male-dominated ethnic-studies movements and the white-dominated women’s movements, Chicanas and Latinas sought to create spaces to articulate a feminist con- sciousness as members of diverse national groups, and as pan-ethnic Latinas, while also articulating political solidarity between third world women in the United States and women activists south of the border. This chapter looksspecifically at Latina and Chicana writers whose writings, essays, poetry, and theatre are the foundation of Latina feminist theoretical interventions.

An analysis of the notion of "home" in connection to the notions of belonging and location in light of the experience of multiplicitous selves.

A revised version of this chapter appears in Ortega,  In-between, Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self.

In this essay I am continuing a conversation started by Cristina Beltran about erasures within Latino unity, by introducing a discussion about the importance of fractures within and between communities that fall within the pan-Latino/a ethnicity. By fractures I mean the differences that result from specific (yet shared) experiences, and histories of US-based people of Latin American descent.  They can be a way to begin the process of de-erasing and re-incorporating that cultural history. The essay also seeks to engage with and apply Linda Martín Alcoff’s critique of universal humanism by emphasizing the importance of fractures among Latinos.  In order to further the discussion, I will use an issue of Latina magazine articulating Latina pride, which shall serve as an illustration to the problem of a venue (the magazine) trying to construct Latinidad by erasing fractures, the very elements that have the potential of infusing the “pan” aspect of pan-Latino with meaning.

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of feminist fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation.

In 1891 the Cuban intellectual José Martí made public his ideas about the identity of post-colonial Spanish America in a text that appeared in Mexico City under the title of "Nuestra América" ["Our America"]. This text has had many interpretations, some of them dealing with the beginning of a new way to understand the political realities of the region. José David Saldívar, for example, mentions that in Foucault's sense, "Martí stands between two ways of thinking: the last representative of a nineteenth-century romantic idealism and the first forerunner of a Latin American socialist ideology of continental solidarity" (The Dialectics 7). But, among all the possible interpretations that a text of this magnitude can have, there is space to think about it also as an attempt to develop a new understanding of identity after the introduction of Darwinian ideas in the region.

In their recent texts, Neil Roberts (Freedom as Marronage) and Mariana Ortega (In-Between) each approach themes of resistance to oppression as fundamentally about a kind of movement. Roberts emphasizes flight in his text, while Ortega wrestles with a desire for belonging and the need to cultivate that belonging through what she terms ‘hometactics.’ This paper will explore what I take to be a productive tension between the emphasis on flight and home, and will argue that the tension is indeed productive in the best sense. For home and the sense of belonging are ultimately enhanced through moments of distance and discomfort.