V. Airbrushing the History of Feminism:
‘Race’ and Ethnicity
Miriam GLUCKSMANN
In the now received history of feminism, a much repeated criticism is that second
wave feminists did not pay any attention to race or class. For a good decade
now, countless student essays rehearse what has almost become a mantra, that
feminist theory divided into the three ‘strands’ of liberal, socialist/Marxist, and
radical/separatist, and that the young white middle-class feminists who peopled
the 1970s and early 1980s women’s liberation movement in the USA and UK
ignored and excluded black, Asian, ethnic minority and migrant women. It was
only in the late 1980s and 1990s, the story goes, that a new focus on identity and
difference facilitated recognition of differences between women, including those
associated with race and ethnicity. Post-structuralism and postmodernism are
presented as contemporaneous and often as linked with this recognition, since
both developments emphasize heterogeneity in contrast to the presumed earlier
monolithic homogeneity. A trawl of introductory texts (e.g. Beasley, 1999;
Freedman, 2001; Tong, 1992) undertaken for this article confirms the prevalence
of this received interpretation.
Of course, history is always written from the standpoint of the present. At a
distance of 30 years, it is entirely understandable that the emergence of ideas over
a half or even a whole decade can no longer be appreciated and instead become
assimilitated into a static position or strand of thought. The view of successive, if
not progressive, ‘waves’ is now being effectively challenged (Hemmings, 2005).
A metaphor of multiple skeins and twisting threads may be more appropriate. In
writing the history of thought, each new generation is prone to stress its difference (‘advance’) from the one immediately preceding it, while relying on it for
information about the one before. Reconstructing the past is hence a continuing
dialectic of erasure and recuperation, and it is to recuperation and recovery that I
now turn.
Feminism & Psychology © 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
http://fap.sagepub.com, Vol. 18(3): 405–409; 0959-3535
DOI: 10.1177/0959353508092096
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I want to suggest that this received history distorts the reality of the women’s
movement in the 1970s, its involvement and support for anti-colonial struggles
across the world and its concern for the unequal and subordinate position of
migrant women in Britain. The relative absence of working-class and migrant
women from the movement was considered a problem at the time. Even if such
politics was not always reflected in feminist theoretical texts of patriarchy or
re/production, it was evident in the pamphlets and conference proceedings of the
time, and in many publications and research monographs, including ethnographies.
This contention relies on personal knowledge gained as a participant in the
British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) from its early days. And as the
author of a workplace ethnography that centred on migrant and minority ethnic
women (Women on the Line published under the pseudonym of Ruth Cavendish
[1982]) I have a vested interest in correcting misconceptions! Although published
in 1982, this ‘research’ was conducted in 1978–9 as an attempt to understand why
and how the women’s movement failed to involve migrant and working-class
women by engaging with their experiences. The analysis of cross-cutting divisions between and among women of different ethnic groups, women and men,
and people at different positions in the employment hierarchy could easily be
rewritten in terms of intersectionality. By the time I went to work in the factory,
I had already taught women’s studies in three universities, and my surviving
course notes include sessions on the situation of Afro-Caribbean and Asian
women in Britain (their diverse histories and cultures, the specific circumstances
of their migration as well as their position in Britain vis-à-vis white women and
black or Asian men); the history of slavery and women’s resistance to it; maids
and madams in South Africa; the continuing impact of colonialism on family
structure and gender relations. The important point is not my teaching but that
source material and a growing literature were available to me (and others) to draw
on, and that the content resonated with ongoing debates. My experience was not
unique and I mention it only as an example.
Indeed, many of the young women who formed the WLM, especially those on
the Left, were already familiar with questions of race and colonialism from their
prior support for anti-imperialist struggles. The Vietnam movement preceded the
WLM, and we knew about the crucial role of women in the National Liberation
Front. Similarly the importance of women fighters to the liberation struggles of
Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau and to resistance against US-backed
military dictatorships in South and central America were well publicized. We
were familiar with Fanon’s (1965) comments on the revolutionary potential of the
veil in the Algerian fight for independence, and with Angela Davis’s (1971) essay
on the forms of slave women’s resistance to their masters and mistresses. In 1967,
Stokely Carmichael had appeared at the Politics of Liberation conference in
London and dismayed many women by his vicious sexism that undermined an
otherwise sympathetic support for the US Black Power movement. In this way,
the emergence of the WLM occurred within, and was coloured by, a context
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where questions of racial domination and opposition to colonialism were central
to the political agenda. At the same time, cultural and political/material issues
were not counter-posed to each other. A political liberationist perspective was
inextricably linked to understandings of cultural difference and appreciation of
the burgeoning black feminist literature of the time (e.g. Merle Collins, Paule
Marshall, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor and Jamaica Kincaid as well as the better
known Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, and
see Evans, 1983).
Many of the early campaigns touched on the situation of black and Asian
women in Britain. The long running Grunwick strike for union recognition for
Asian women workers is probably the best-known example. But I have a clear
memory of campaigns around immigration issues, notably where British-born
women had gone to India, had children and returned with them to the UK only to
be subjected to intrusive physical examination and racist allegations that the
children were not theirs and denied entry. The Women’s Movement (WM)
demand for ‘Free abortion and contraception on demand’ was altered to the
‘Right to control our own bodies’ in the light of evidence that black women were
being forcibly sterilized and in opposition to the use of the injectible contraceptive Depo-Provera on migrant women in the UK and in developing countries. A
collection of writings from the WLM 1969–72 includes two pieces on black
women (Wandor, 1972), Amrit Wilson’s widely read book Finding a Voice,
about Asian women in Britain appeared in 1978, and in the same year the
Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) was formed.
(This was also the period of IRA bombings in Ireland and the British mainland
and Irish feminists in Britain began to organize on their own account). Ethnic
minority women engaged in self-organization from that time, culminating in the
sustained critique of white feminism and fleshing out of the contours of black
feminism in the early 1980s. Hazel Carby’s essay ‘White Woman Listen!’ (1982)
and the Feminist Review special issue ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist
Perspectives’ (1984) had a major impact on the course of the WLM. The
trenchant critiques of feminist theory’s preoccupation with production and reproduction, and implicit universalizing of the western nuclear family structure,
female dependency and male power were powerful and well targeted, uncovering
an unrecognized racism within the movement.
Many other examples could be adduced to show that race and ethnicity were
issues for feminism many years before our contemporary texts would acknowledge them. The black critiques of white feminism also preceded the shift to identity politics and post-structuralism by a good few years, and were not simply the
outcome of the espousal of ‘difference’ as a theoretical construct (e.g. hooks,
1981; Hull et al., 1982; Lorde, 1984). The black critique was influential and
effective and my argument is not about that. The charge that the women’s movement ignored or excluded minority ethnic women hit many targets, and responses
to it were an integral part of the history of the time.
So my argument is not with the black critique but rather with the later selec-
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tive history, and feminism’s silencing of its own past. The vehicle for doing this
is the continuing use of categories (the ‘strands of feminist thought’) that become
more reified the more they are reproduced, and the equation of ‘difference’ with
diversity and heterogeneity. But why the airbrushing out of race and ethnicity
from 1970s and early 1980s British feminism? Possible reasons include the shift
to identity politics and the ‘academicization’ of feminism from the late 1980s and
1990s.The politics of the time had been to transcend given identities inherited
from histories, social or individual, in the belief that we were working towards a
more inclusive and transformative future of greater but not uniform equality. The
focus was on what you were aiming at, the political goals you were pursuing
rather than your origins and where you came from. Naïve and utopian as this now
sounds, it echoed the wider international politics of the time. Another reason for
the erasure is that histories of feminist thought concentrate overwhelmingly for
their historical sources on feminist theory and ignore almost completely the
campaigns and practice and political activities of the women’s movement. While
the latter were concerned with class and race, and with the lives of working-class
and migrant women, the former centred on more abstract theorizing of the relation between capitalism and patriarchy, and how this affected social institutions
and people. In so doing, it tended to universalize what was specific to white western experience, especially American and western European.
In the WLM theory and practice co-existed, even if not always happily or in
agreement! Histories of feminism would be truer to the past if they accorded
attention to practice as well as theory. I have relied on my own memory and
experience in making the case, but there are good archives with collections
documenting the campaigns and political activities of feminism in the 1970s and
1980s. To recuperate the past from its current silencing may require different
kinds of research and exploration.
REFERENCES
Beasley, C. (1999) What is Feminism? London: Sage.
Carby, H. (1982) ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of
Sisterhood’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (ed.) The Empire Strikes
Back, pp. 212–35. London: Hutchinson.
Cavendish, R. (1982) Women on the Line. London: Routledge.
Davis, A.Y. (1971) ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’,
Black Scholar 3: 2–15.
Evans, M. (ed.) (1983) Black Women Writers: Arguments and Interviews. London: Pluto
Press.
Fanon, F. (1965) ‘The Veil’, in Studies in a Dying Colonialism. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
Feminist Review (1984) Special issue 17: ‘Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist
Perspectives’.
Freedman, J. (2001) Feminism. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Special Feature: GLUCKSMANN: Airbrushing the History of Feminism
409
Hemmings, C. (2005) ‘Telling Feminist Stories’, Feminist Theory 6(2): 115–39.
hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Hull, G., Scott, P.B. and Smith, B. (1982) All the Women are White, All the Blacks are
Men, but Some of Us are Brave. New York: Feminist Press.
Lorde, A. (1984) ‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly’, in Sister Outsider, pp. 66–71. Freedom,
CA: Crossing Press.
Tong, R. (1992) Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction. London: Routledge.
Wandor, M. (ed.) (1972) The Body Politic: Women’s Liberation in Briatin 1969–1972.
London: Stage 1.
Wilson, A. (1978) Finding a Voice. Asian Women in Britain. London: Virago.
Miriam GLUCKSMANN is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex,
UK. She has longstanding interests in feminism and gender and has published
widely, including several books on women’s work and employment. A second
edition of Women on the Line is forthcoming from Routledge in 2008 under her
own name. She was active in the British Women’s Movement from 1970, taught
Women’s Studies courses from then, and was co-author of the Red Collective’s
The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism (1978[1973]). She recently completed a
three-year programme of research on ‘Transformations of Work: New Frontiers,
Shifting Boundaries, Changing Temporalities’ as an Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) Professorial Fellow.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park,
Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. [email: glucm@essex.ac.uk]
V I V E N C I A S : Re p o r t s f r o m t h e fi e ld
A Z T L Á N AS A PALIMPSEST: FROM
CHIC ANO N ATIONALISM TOWARD
TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM I N
ANZA LD ÚA’S B O R D E R L A N D S
B r e n da Wa t t s
Southwest Missouri State University Springfield, MO
A b s t ra c t
Although it has long been one of the founding concepts of Chicano identity, explored as
myth, history and as a cultural utopia to be achieved in works by many Chicano
writers, the idea of Aztlán presented by Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales in ‘‘El plan
espiritual de Aztlán’’ is not the same as when presented by later Chicano writers, most
notably Gloria Anzaldúa. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a key work
of Chicana feminism, borderlands theory, queer theory and transnational feminism,
Anzaldúa articulates a politics of Aztlán. Using Daniel Cooper Alarcón’s concept of
Aztlán as a metaphorical palimpsest, I argue that earlier Chicano movement views of
Aztlán resurface in Borderlands, reasserting foundational concepts of Chicano
nationalism at the same time that Anzaldúa rewrites them in her own feminist critique
and reworking of the Chicano Movement to create a space for a transnational feminist
practice. Although explicitly denying the utility of latinidad as a unifying concept for
achieving political and social change, Anzaldúa does argue for a new mestiza
consciousness that opens up the nationalist theories of Chicano identity to the space of
the transnational.
Ke y wo rds
Aztlán; Chicano; transnational; feminism; latinidad; Anzaldúa
Latino Studies 2004, 2, (304–321) c 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/04 $30.00
www.palgrave-journals.com/lst
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The idea of Aztlán – the reputed home of the Aztecs before they founded
Tenochtitlán – has long been one of the founding concepts of Chicano identity,
explored as myth, as history, and as utopian goal in works by many Chicano
writers. Its importance to the Chicano Movement and the literary growth that
the movement produced can be seen in many foundational documents,
beginning with ‘‘El plan espiritual de Aztlán’’ (Gonzales, 1969). Nevertheless,
the idea of Aztlán presented in these early texts is not the same Aztlán presented
in works by later writers, most notably Gloria Anzaldúa, in her seminal 1987
work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Although she describes
notions of latinidad as not enough in and of themselves to overcome racism,
sexism and homophobia (87), in Borderlands, Anzaldúa expands on a purely
nationalistic construction of Chicana identity, to encompass a larger representation of its relevance for all Latinos’ identities. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa
theorizes Aztlán as a new geographical, spiritual and intellectual homeland for
border crossers of all races and ethnicities, while still perpetuating its mythic
status as a location of Chicano identity.
Daniel Cooper Alarcón (1997) calls the legend of Aztlán, ‘‘[p]erhaps the most
enduring legacy of the Chicano movement’’(10). Cooper Alarcón asserts that
like history itself, the idea of Aztlán is a metaphorical palimpsest in constant
process of change and revision (3). In describing it as a metaphorical palimpsest,
Cooper Alarcón traces its appearances in different texts from Mesoamerican
and colonial histories of Mexico to key texts of the US Chicano Movement,
noting the political and cultural importance of each revision, each modifying the
mythic idea of Aztlán without obliterating its earlier significance.
Aztlán first appears in Aztec mythology as the ancient home of the Aztec
nation to the north of Tenochtitlán (Cooper Alarcón, 1997, 5). It is mentioned
in the Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firme, first
published in 1581, written by the Spanish missionary Diego Durán (25).
Similarly, John Chávez’s The Lost Land, a history of the southwestern United
States, describes how a practice of referring to the area that is now the US
Southwest as Aztlán developed during the 16th century (Chávez, 1991, 8).
Portraying the Southwest as an Edenic place of immense wealth, populated by
mythical inhabitants, came to an end in the 17th century, as later explorers
rejected the idea of Aztlán when reality failed to live up to the myths.
The idea of Aztlán all but disappeared as a political and cultural concept until
its rediscovery by Chicano Movement activists. Cooper Alarcón (1997) traces
its re-emergence to a specific event, the Chicano National Liberation Youth
Conference in Denver in 1969, where Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales presented ‘‘El
plan espiritual de Aztlán’’ (22). Its revolutionary nature is quickly apparent in
its opening paragraph, which states: ‘‘In the spirit of a new people that is
conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal ‘gringo’
invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the
northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land
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of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun,
declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our
inevitable destiny’’ (Plan 1). The document goes on to identify Aztlán as both
‘‘the northern land’’ of the Chicanos and as the independent nation that inhabits
it. Gonzales states: ‘‘Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the
fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not
recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent’’ (1). In this manner,
Chicanos are imagined as both the rightful inheritors of a pre-Columbian
indigenous past and as cultural brothers to all Latinos. The foreign Europeans
he describes are the Anglo majority of the United States, whom he condemns for
their oppression and exploitation of and racism against the Chicano people. In
his presentation, Gonzales highlights the key role of nationalism in the struggle
for achieving the goals set forth in the plan, which states unambiguously that
‘‘Nationalism as the key to organization transcends all religious, political, class
and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism is the common denominator
that all members of La Raza can agree upon’’ (2). ‘‘El plan espiritual de Aztlán’’
unites the Chicano people by imagining them as ‘‘a nation autonomous and free
– culturally, socially, economically, and politically’’ (3). Although the idea of
Aztlán is inherently transnational in nature in originating in the mythic Aztec
homeland that predates both Mexican and US territorial claims to what is now
the US Southwest, the centrality of cultural nationalism to the Chicano
Movement is insisted upon in ‘‘El plan espiritual de Aztlán,’’ downplaying the
transnational origins of the idea of Aztlán.
Ignacio M. Garcı́a (1997) specifies the importance of Gonzales’ epochmaking speech, which turned Aztlán into an organizing metaphor for Chicano
Movement activists, allowing them to unite heterogeneous elements under one
political and social ethos of self-identity and community empowerment, while
advocating racial solidarity, social, and political change for Mexican-Americans
(Garcı́a, 1997, 3). Chicanos rewrote Aztlán as their spiritual and geographical
home. It became the founding myth of chicanismo, which Garcı́a defines as ‘‘the
collective defensive and offensive mechanism that the Mexican American
community uses to combat racism, discrimination, poverty, and segregation,
and to define itself politically and historically’’ (4). According to Garcı́a, by
urging the young activists to retake Aztlán, Gonzales fought a history of cultural
stereotypes of Mexican Americans as violent, passive underachievers, whose
lack of success in achieving the ‘‘American Dream’’ could be traced to
fundamental flaws in their historical and cultural make-up. Gonzales replaced
those negative images with images of a proud Aztec past, present success and
hope for the future.
Cooper Alarcón (1997) agrees with Garcı́a about the importance of ‘‘El plan
espiritual de Aztlán’’ in reformulating the idea of Aztlán for the US Chicano
Movement, and about the centrality of Aztlán as an organizing metaphor for
movement activists. However, he also stresses the changing relationship of the
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Chicano community to the idea of Aztlán. According to Cooper Alarcón, while
the idea of Aztlán has been used to legitimate Chicano political identity,
functioning as a powerful unifying symbol, it has also been criticized as being
ahistorical, monolithic, and unresponsive in its emphasis on collective
experience over individual differences (5). He lists the ways in which the idea
of Aztlán has ‘‘been used to obscure and elide:’’
(1) the disturbing tendency to focus only on the relationship between Chicano
communities and the dominant Anglo culture, at the expense of any
discussion of the complex, diverse character of Chicanos and their relationship with other ethnic groups; (2) the tendency to focus on the Southwest,
minimizing the attention paid to Chicanos who live in other geographic
regions; (3) competing claims to the Southwest – which Aztlán is often
intended to be synonymous with – by Native Americans, Asian Americans,
and African Americans; (4) the ongoing dialect between Chicano and
Mexican culture(s) and the effects on these culture(s) of continued Mexican
emigration to the United States; and, as the work of Norma Alarcón suggests,
(5) the complex inter-relationship of subjectivity, agency, and privilege. (8–9)
Although Cooper Alarcón (1997) only hints at it in mentioning the work of
Norma Alarcón, one of the key failings of early Chicano views on Aztlán and of
the early Chicano movement itself was its denial of the equal importance of
women within the revolution. Deborah L. Madsen (2000) explains that during
the height of the Chicano movement, ‘‘The gendered voice of the Chicana was
marginalized as issues of racial discrimination took precedence over those of
gender’’ (17). Alma M. Garcı́a (1997) describes how, as the Chicano Movement
failed to take gender oppression into account, this lack of attention to Chicanas
and their needs ‘‘gave rise to a parallel movement of ideological opposition’’ –
Chicana feminism (3). She describes this as a further development of chicanismo
itself, enlarging its ideals to include a focus on gender as well as race oppression
(3). As described by Garcı́a, these Chicana activists did not reject the idea of
Aztlán, but rather expanded it to include a feminist focus. Madsen describes the
importance of these writers in developing a new Chicana feminism that worked
to bridge the gap between feminism and the Chicano Movement. She cites
Anzaldúa as one of several Chicana writers who were equally disenfranchised
by the patriarchal and homophobic Chicano movement and the often racist and
predominantly Anglo-American women’s movement of the same era (19).
Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, along with the
groundbreaking 1981 anthology which she co-edited with Cherrie Moraga,
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, became the
founding texts of a new Chicana feminism, a feminism which reaches out to the
Chicano community, remaking the Movement as it seeks to include those female
and queer voices silenced in its discourse (Anzaldúa and Moraga, 1981).
Alarcón (1998) describes how this new Chicana feminism has reinvigorated the
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Chicano Movement (372). This conceptual development applied also to other
ethnic and progressive communities in the United States that sought to achieve
many of the aims of the original Chicano Movement through a process of
dialogue and coalition-building. Garcı́a describes this shared struggle, which
focused on ‘‘the multiple sources of oppression generated by race, gender and
social class’’ (4). Through the work of Chicanas and other feminist women of
color, the Chicano Movement could thus be re-envisioned as part of a larger
struggle for civil rights and economic and social justice in the United States, one
that included the civil rights struggle of African Americans, the feminist
movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Garcı́a concludes: ‘‘Thus, a
Chicana feminist movement represented a struggle that was both nationalist and
feminist. Ultimately, the inherent constraints and cross-pressures facing Chicana
feminists within the Chicano movement led to the broader development of
Chicana feminist thought’’ (4). As Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo
Moallem make clear in their introduction to Between Woman and Nation
(Alarcón et al., 1999), ‘‘Women are both of and not of the nation’’ (12) and as
such are both policed and limited by a nationalist discourse that seeks to
incorporate them in their role as mothers while simultaneously denying them
recognition as citizens, and are also resistant to that discourse. Cynthia Enloe
(1989) argues that the tendency of nationalist ideologies to ignore women’s
needs and experiences makes women more likely to organize politically at other
than the national level, which can be clearly seen in the development of Chicana
feminism as described by Garcı́a. Enloe states that paying attention to gender
would profoundly change politics on the local, national, and international levels
by revealing how those levels are connected in women’s experiences: ‘‘If more
nation-states grew out of feminist nationalists’ ideas and experiences,
community identities within the international political system might be
tempered by cross-national identities’’ (64). While Enloe describes crossnational identities, I believe her idea corresponds to what other scholars prefer
to call the transnational. By reaching out to the possibility of dialogue and
coalition with other feminists, both inside and outside the United States,
Chicana feminists opened up the cultural nationalist focus of the Chicano
Movement to create an increasingly transnational ideology of identity. These
feminists re-imagined Aztlán, exchanging its isolationism and sexism for a new,
broader interpretation of a Chicano homeland. In The Aztec Palimpsest,
Cooper Alarcón calls for a new use of Aztlán as a metaphorical palimpsest in
order to counteract the ahistorical and homogenizing tendencies of the use of
the myth of Aztlán in Chicano Movement discourse of the 1960s and 1970s.
In doing so, I argue, he is calling for nothing other than the acceptance of
new definitions of Aztlán, such as that already developed by Anzaldúa in
Borderlands.
Laura Elisa Pérez (1999) describes the continued importance of Aztlán to
both Chicana and Chicano cultural practices, while at the same time
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recognizing the differences between them: ‘‘Constructed through the willful acts
of a collective Chicana/o imagination, Aztlán exists as an invisible nation within
the engulfing ‘imagined community’ of dominant US discourse’’ (19). Pérez
refers to Benedict Anderson’s (1991) view of the nation as an imagined
community, created by the readers of the same texts. She affirms that although
Anderson’s definition refers to nation-states, his description of the construction
of those nation-states as imagined communities could also refer to the creation
of Aztlán (40). Describing the importance of the term nation in reference to the
idea of Aztlán, she says:
While the struggles continue, the collective power claimed by the Native
American, the Chicana/o, the African American, and the Queer defining
themselves as nothing less than nations has produced the real effects of
greater cultural and physical survival of these oppressed and ‘minoritized’
groups, while transforming the nation into a more democratic one. These
alternately imagined and lived nations have transformed our understanding
and experience of what the nation means. (41)
Although their ideas of Aztlán are clearly different, the seed of that difference
can be seen in both the original Chicano Movement theorizations of Aztlán and
in Anzaldúa’s rewritings of them.
In what ways does the idea of Aztlán presented in Borderlands/La Frontera
differ from the definitions of Aztlán put forth by the early Chicano Movement
activists who authored El plan espiritual de Aztlán? Employing Cooper
Alarcón’s concept of Aztlán as a palimpsest, an historical and cultural text in
the process of continual revision, I read Aztlán in Anzaldúa’s book as a
refashioning of the Chicano homeland that differs from Chicano Movement
depictions of Aztlán in addressing many of the very issues that Cooper Alarcón
enumerates as being ignored by earlier activists, without totally rewriting their
nationalist focus. Specifically, Anzaldúa rewrites the Chicano Movement idea of
Aztlán in her formulation of a feminist transnational mestiza politics, focusing
on ongoing issues of Mexican immigration, race, gender and culture throughout
the United States. What is different in Borderlands is precisely that Anzaldúa
envisions women and homosexuals of both sexes as constituents of her
imagined community, in contrast to traditional nationalist discourses, which
deliberately leave them ‘‘unimagined.’’
The first chapter of Borderlands, ‘‘The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México,’’
refers to the US Southwest not only as Aztlán, but also as el otro México, the
other Mexico. Anzaldúa begins the chapter with a song lyric from Los Tigres del
Norte that explains how the US Southwest is the other Mexico:
El otro México que acá hemos construido
el espacio es lo que ha sido
territorio nacional.
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Este el esfuerzo de todos nuestros hermanos
y latinoamericanos que han sabido
progresar. (Anzaldúa, 1987, 1)
The lyric establishes the US Southwest as the other Mexico by referring to its
construction by Latin American laborers, and then to how it formed part of the
national territory of Mexico before 1848. Thus, Anzaldúa includes Latinos as
well as Chicanos in her history of Aztlán. After briefly mentioning how
Chicanos have seen the US Southwest, Aztlán, as their true homeland, Anzaldúa
describes how the physical border between the US and Mexico divides the
‘‘Borderlands’’ and its people. She describes the border as a:
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire (2–3).
Anzaldúa describes the steel curtain dividing Tijuana from San Diego, and the
entire physical and political border between the United States and Mexico, as a
wound that divides a people and culture that are essentially Mexican. According
to Anzaldúa, in addition to creating divisions between people of the same
culture, the border is an artificial construct that mars nature. She chronicles how
the earth, the sea, and the wind cross the chain link fence at will:
But the skin of the earth is seamless.
The sea cannot be fenced.
el mar does not stop at borders.
To show the white man what she thought of his
arrogance,
Yemaya blew that wire fence down (3).
Describing the image of the border as a wound, she depicts the steel fence posts
ripping her flesh, splitting her apart. Spacing in the poem visually evokes the
artificial space imposed by the border fence, as words which should only have one
space between them, such as ‘‘me raja me raja’’ are further separated. She concludes:
This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
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and is.
And will be again (3).
In the separation in the line ‘‘And will be again,’’ Anzaldúa evokes the time
between the present and the future when her vision is realized. She concludes the
poem in Spanish, crossing linguistic and cultural borders as easily as she
describes Mexican kids in Border Field Park crossing the chain link fence in
order to retrieve their soccer ball in previous verses (2). Describing herself as a
bridge between the dominant Anglo culture in the United States and the world
of the wetback, the illegal immigrant, she nevertheless concludes by describing
herself as culturally Mexican. This does not mean that she embraces a Mexican
political identity, but rather a cultural one. The poem closes with a hopeful
image of connections being made across the border. However, the lines ‘‘This
land was Mexican once,/ was Indian always/ and is./ And will be again,’’
perhaps more clearly than any other, encapsulate her politics of Aztlán. The US
Southwest is described not only as having Mexican and indigenous history and
cultural traditions, but as being essentially Indian both now and in the future.
The vision of the US Southwest as Aztlán, both the ancestral homeland of the
Aztecs and the cultural and geographical home of all Chicanos is repeated in the
concluding paragraphs of the narrative first part of Borderlands, recalling the
discourse of early Chicano nationalists. Anzaldúa describes how she and her
family members labored in the field together, remembering ‘‘the four of us kids
getting off the school bus, changing into our work clothes, walking into the field
with Papı́ and Mamı́, all six of us bending to the ground’’ (91). These images
reveal the idea of Aztlán to be a palimpsest, a document continually erased and
being remade in a process that blurs but does not completely destroy or cover up
earlier notions of Aztlán; thus Anzaldúa’s theorization of Aztlán as an imagined
political and cultural space reveals early Chicano Movement ideas of Aztlán as a
clear part of its foundation. Repeated images of herself and her family members
planting and harvesting crops and her conclusion that ‘‘Yes, the Chicano and the
Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land,’’ (91) echo and
reinforce this key statement in ‘‘El plan espiritual de Aztlán:’’ ‘‘Aztlán belongs to
those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops’’ (Plan 1).
Anzaldúa’s repeated agricultural imagery thus reinforces a traditional politics of
Aztlán, asserting her right to the land she has worked. Chicano nationalism is
revealed as the roots of Anzaldúa’s feminist transnational politics.
However, Anzaldúa differs from early Chicano Movement discourse in fully
historicizing Aztlán, presenting it as in no way monolithic or ahistorical.
Instead, she focuses on the region as being inhabited by a variety of peoples over
time: the Indians who walked across the Bering Straits, descendants of the
Cochise people, the Aztecs, their descendants, Spanish conquistadors, accompanied by Indians and mestizos, and finally Anglos who arrived in the area in
the 1800s (Anzaldúa, 1987, 4–6). She describes current inhabitants of Aztlán
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above all as mestizos, inheritors of indigenous, Anglo, and Mexican cultures
and of the conflicts between them.
Critics have cited the singular importance of Borderlands in creating a new
paradigm for understanding Chicana identity. Marı́a de los Angeles Torres
(1998) credits Anzaldúa with forcing ‘‘a reexamination of the prevailing rigid
categories of ethnicity and gender that had emerged from the 1960s’’ (177),
while Chela Sandoval (1998) characterizes her new mestiza consciousness as
being far more influential than any other type of Chicana feminism developed in
the late 20th century (352), calling it ‘‘the contemporary imaginary that is
reforming disciplinary canons’’ (353). She describes its singular importance as a
type of differential criticism, which became the overriding strategy of US third
world feminism (361) in its struggle to ‘‘equaliz[e] power on behalf of the
colonized, the nation-, class-, race-, gender-, and sexually subordinated’’ (362).
I believe that as a contemporary imaginary, Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory
exemplifies a transnational politics that reforms both literary and political
space, arguing for a theoretical and political hybridity, or mestizaje, that blends
elements from indigenous, Chicano, and Anglo cultures to create a new
borderlands subjectivity. Anzaldúa (1987) describes the origins of a new mestizo
race in the Conquest, and the subsequent decimation of the Indian populations
along with the creation of a ‘‘new hybrid race’’ of both Indian and European
descent (5). She acknowledges the influence of Mexican philosopher José
Vasconcelos’ (1966) view of la raza cósmica in her own theory of mestiza
consciousness. She celebrates Vasconcelos thus:
Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity
that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity. At the
confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly
‘crossing over,’ the mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being,
provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene
pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination,
an ‘alien’ consciousness is presently in the making – a new mestiza
consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the
Borderlands (77).
Anzaldúa paraphrases Vasconcelos in her own elaboration of her theory of
mestiza consciousness, rewriting and expanding upon his notion of a cosmic
race. Like Vasconcelos’, her view of mestizaje is universal in referring to all racial
mixtures in the Americas, and thus becomes an inclusive theory of ethnicity and
identity that could easily support the notion of a broader Latino political and
cultural subject. Nevertheless, it again reveals Chicano nationalist roots.
Anzaldúa’s positive reading of Vasconcelos is incomplete in failing to address
the unfortunate Eurocentric, racist, and classist foundations that underlie his
conceptualization of mestizaje, but her failure to do so is hardly unique. Instead,
it is another example of a continuing legacy of earlier Chicano Movement texts in
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Anzaldúa’s work. Luis A. Marentes (2000) describes the centrality of race to all of
Vasconcelos’ writing, even before what he calls his later ‘‘utterly offensive racist
and anti-Semitic ravings’’ (60), which followed his failed presidential campaign of
1928 (14). In these later works, Vasconcelos ‘‘concocted international conspiracies linking Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, Bolsheviks, and Wall Street
bankers in an effort to rule the world, and expressed his admiration for the fascist
regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain and Benito Mussolini in Italy’’ (Marentes,
2000, 15). Marentes summarizes the tendency of Vasconcelos’ readers to divide
his works into an early revolutionary period of progressive ideals and a later
period of increasing bigotry and paranoia, explaining that ‘‘many of those who
are quick to condemn the later conservative Vasconcelos still celebrate his notion
of a cosmic race as a pluralistic and all-inclusive understanding of Latin American
race and culture’’ (103). He traces similar appropriations of Vasconcelos’ racist
theorizations by indigenista proponents in Mexico, who embraced Vasconcelos’
notion of a cosmic race destined to outlast and outshine the Anglo race,
exemplified by the United States (60).
This positive spin on Vasconcelos was continued in the 1960s and 1970s
Chicano Movement, with the slogan that Vasconcelos composed in 1921 as the
motto for the National University of Mexico, ‘‘Por mi raza hablará el espı́ritu
appearing on the covers of the journal Aztlán and accompanying publications of
the Plan de Santa Barbara,’’ a document developed as a result of a movement
conference in 1969 that called for the creation of Chicano Studies programs in
universities (Marentes, 2000, 61). When Anzaldúa begins her essay on what she
terms a new mestiza consciousness, she chooses the words ‘‘Por la mujer de mi
raza/hablará el espı́ritu’’ (77), paraphrasing Vasconcelos’ famous slogan,
rephrasing it to emphasize the essentiality of gender to her argument. Like the
Chicano Movement writers who preceded her, she borrows his terminology and
positive view of mestizaje while ignoring the racist foundations of his
conceptualization of a cosmic race. These are clearly seen in La raza cósmica,
as Vasconcelos discusses what he terms ‘‘inferior races’’ and the eventual
perfection of the species through their disappearance. He states: ‘‘Los tipos
bajos de la especie serán absorbidos por el tipo superior. De esta suerte podrı́a
redimirse, por ejemplo, el negro, y poco a poco, por extinción voluntaria, las
estirpes más feas irán cediendo el paso a las más hermosas’’ (52). Although he
insists that the final result of this racial mixture will not be ‘‘precisamente el
blanco’’ (52), he clearly privileges the Spanish side of the mestizo’s multicultural
heritage, describing the Conquest in positive terms as the work of ‘‘grandes
capitanes’’ all equal before the crown (26). Vasconcelos insists upon the
importance of reclaiming and privileging this Spanish heritage, language, and
culture, concluding that ‘‘Nosotros no seremos grandes mientras el español de la
América no se sienta tan español como los hijos de España’’ (23). As expressed
succinctly by Marentes, Vasconcelos’ writing ‘‘reveals a very Eurocentric
conception of such a cosmic race, where the European races are the sole
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possessors of science and history. Racial mixture functions almost exclusively as
an aesthetic addition to a Latin and Catholic racial and cultural tradition, which
overdetermines such a mixture by creating the necessary historical conditions for
its appearance’’ (60). Can an antiracist theory of mestizaje based conceptually on
racist underpinnings function for antiracist ends, or will it only reaffirm and fall
victim to the racist foundation of its origins? One answer is seen in the success of
the Plan of Santa Barbara, which was often published accompanied by
Vasconcelos’ famous slogan. Mario Barrera (1988) credits the plan with the
institution of many Chicano Studies programs in the southwest and Midwest, and
the consolidation of various Chicano student organizations under the umbrella of
MECHA (43). Another answer is seen in the success of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work
and its profound influence on feminism, Chicano scholarship and border studies.
An analysis of Anzaldúa’s development of what she terms her own reading of
Vasconcelos’ idea of mestizaje in Borderlands reveals the significant differences
between his concept of la raza cósmica and her new mestiza consciousness.
Although Anzaldúa bases her theory of mestizaje on Vasconcelos’ work, her
formulations differ from his in privileging a conscious psychological and spiritual
blending of cultures within each individual, a process that can occur in one
generation, rather than the centuries-long selective breeding project that
Vasconcelos advocates. She describes her own political, cultural, and spiritual
mestizaje as an inner struggle between the various cultures that made her: ‘‘Being
tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a
state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed:
which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to?’’ (78).
Anzaldúa’s description of the inner turmoil of the mestiza differs clearly from
Vasconcelos’ belief in the clear superiority and homogenizing influence of Spanish
culture and Catholicism that he claims as cultural inheritance for the members of
his cosmic race. Instead of privileging one culture over others, she describes how
Chicanas receive multiple and opposing messages as commonly held beliefs of
Anglo, Mexican, and indigenous cultures conflict, attacking each other. Anzaldúa
insists that the work of the new mestiza is first to examine her own beliefs and
multicultural history, deciding what to keep and what to abandon:
‘‘She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces
that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo que no vale,
los desmientos, los desencuentros, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio,
hondo y enraı́zado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with
all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that
rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new
symbols, she shapes new myths’’ (1987, 82).
This is also the process that Anzaldúa uses in appropriating Vasconcelos’
work for her own ends, abandoning the racist elements of his theory of
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mestizaje while using his concept of a utopian spiritual process that would result
in the creation of a new mestizo race to develop her own idea of a new mestiza
consciousness.
Through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction of a personal and
cultural history and mythos, Anzaldúa is able to move forward from
ambivalence to achieve what she terms the new mestiza consciousness. Anzaldúa
describes the working of this new consciousness in utopian terms, heralding the
willingness to embrace contradictions and working toward synthesis as an
answer to the problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia. According to
Anzaldúa: ‘‘A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and
collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in
our best hopes, bring us the end of rape, of violence, of war’’ (80). The new
mestiza is ‘‘cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling
all three cultures and their value systems’’ (78). The borderlands culture in which
Anzaldúa was raised is neither coterminous with the larger Anglo culture of the
United States nor with the dominant Mexican culture across the border. It is a
hybrid culture, blending elements from both and combining them with
indigenous beliefs and traditions specific to the ‘‘Borderlands.’’ The elements
of this new border culture include language traditions (59), musical genres and
typical foods (61) and a shared history of struggle as a people (63). Anzaldúa
begins this history with the speeches and marches of César Chávez, followed by
the publication of I Am Joaquı́n and the formation of Texas’s La Raza Unida
party to signal the emergence of Chicano self-recognition as a people (63).
By describing the border zone as a geographical region with its own history
and mestizo culture that is neither Mexico nor the United States, Anzaldúa
crosses the political borders of nations, revealing them to be historical and
political constructs that work to divide social identities. Anzaldúa’s new mestiza
consciousness leads to a politics of mestizaje as well, as she calls for an end to
racial prejudices, sexism, and homophobia. She insists:
‘‘The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano,
immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian – our
psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same peopley
Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in
our heads’’ (87).
After this first step of resolving the inner struggle, the new mestiza then works to
change society through a process of coalition building with like-minded people of
all races and genders, regardless of class or national origin. While the inner struggle
is one of rewriting history and myths, the external one is teaching and sharing these
new foundations for a shared cultural experience. Again, Anzaldúa’s project differs
radically from Vasconcelos’, although both focus on a rewriting of history.
Vasconcelos begins his rewriting with a mythical Atlantean past predating
indigenous American civilizations (20) and then establishes the importance of a
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worldwide historical struggle between ‘‘los dos tipos humanos más fuertes y más
disı́miles: el español y el inglés’’ (21). Tracing the struggle through European
history and through the colonization of the New World and what he describes as
its eventual unforeseen domination by Anglo Saxons (31), he concludes with
what he sees to be their fatal flaw: their failure to mix with people of other races
and their actual extermination of indigenous peoples (32). In contrast with what
he sees as the United States’ racist mission of domination, he proposes Latin
America as a site of a divine mission: The creation of a new race that will replace
all others, thus ending the cultural and political hegemony of the United States
and the white race (33). In contrast, Anzaldúa does not describe physical
mestizaje as an end in itself, nor does she seek to end political, ethnic and cultural
differences in the Americas through her new mestiza consciousness. Instead, she
calls for a recognition and celebration of these differences within a larger US
society composed of people of all races and a subsequent change in US–Mexico
relations. She begins her revision of history with the first migration of people
across the Bering Straits, noting that ‘‘The oldest evidence of humankind in the US
– the Chicanos’ ancient Indian ancestors – was found in Texas and has been dated
to 35,000 B.C.’’ (1987, 4). She quickly follows this by identifying the first sign of
civilization in the Americas as the ‘‘20,000-year-old campsites of the Indians who
migrated through, or permanently occupied, the Southwest, Aztlán – land of the
herons, land of whiteness, the Edenic place of origin of the Azteca’’ (4).
While Vasconcelos describes history itself as the creation, rise and fall of
different races as each comes into power and eventually falls into decadence
(20), Anzaldúa explains history’s importance as a powerful weapon in the
struggle for political and social change within the United States: ‘‘The whites in
power want us people of color to barricade ourselves behind our separate tribal
walls so they can pick us off one at a time with their hidden weapons; so they
can whitewash and distort history. Ignorance splits people, creates prejudices. A
misinformed people is a subjugated people’’ (1987, 86). While Vasconcelos
writes American history focusing on the struggle for dominance between Anglo
Saxons to the north and the descendents of Spain and Portugal to the south (21),
Anzaldúa’s rewriting of history is at once more personal and more specific,
centered in the Rı́o Grande valley in which she grew up. She traces its history
from its mythic past and present as part of Aztlán, through its exploration and
settling by ‘‘Spanish, Indian and mestizo ancestors’’ (1987, 5) beginning in the
16th century, illegal Anglo migration into Texas in the 1800s (6), and the loss of
almost half of Mexico’s national territory, including Texas, in the US–Mexican
War (7). She then traces her own family history in the Rı́o Grande Valley,
describing the effects of racism, drought, agribusiness, and economic crisis on
the inhabitants of the valley that she calls ‘‘this borderland between the Nueces
and the Rı́o Grande’’ (90). She summarizes the valley’s history after the
Conquest by stating: ‘‘This land has survived possession and ill-use by five
countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the US, the Confederacy, and
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the US again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings,
rapes, pillage’’ (90). While Vasconcelos describes the ancient indigenous
Atlantean civilization of the Americas as the end of that race, because ‘‘En la
Historia no hay retornos, porque toda ella es transformación y novedad.
Ninguna raza vuelve; cada una plantea su misión, la cumple y se va’’ (30),
Anzaldúa insists on the essential Indian nature of her homeland, concluding the
prose section of Borderlands by repeating the lines ‘‘This land was Mexican
once/ was Indian always/ and is./ And will be again’’ (1987, 91). In her
insistence on a specifically indigenous border cultural identity that outlasts what
she depicts as transitory political claims to her homeland, Anzaldúa most
forcefully develops a politics of Aztlán.
I see Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness as an example of a feminist
transnational political subjectivity and practice. Her transnational politics are
clearly seen as she discusses economics and migration in the ‘‘Borderlands.’’ Her
feminism becomes clear in her special attention to the ways in which Mexican
indigenous women who are poor and cross the political and cultural borders
between Mexico and the United States are exploited by Anglo, Chicano, and
indigenous cultures, as well as by the economic forces of transnational capital.
Alarcón notes that many Chicana writers ‘‘explore their racial and sexual
experience in poetry, narrative, essay, testimony, and autobiography through the
evocation of indigenous figures’’ (375) in which ‘‘the Chicana position,
previously ‘empty’ of meanings, emerges as one who has to ‘make sense’ of it
all from the bottom through the recodification of the native woman’’ (376) thus
conjoining historical representations of the native woman (la virgen de
Guadalupe, la Malinche, la Llorona) with the present-day speaking Chicana
subject (376). In Borderlands, Anzaldúa describes how patriarchal Mexican and
Chicano cultures have subverted each figure: ‘‘Guadalupe to make us docile and
enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to
make us long-suffering people. This obscuring has encouraged the virgen/puta
(whore) dichotomy’’ (31). She works to break down this dichotomy, insisting on
a positive vision of female sexuality, seeing la virgen de Guadalupe as ‘‘the
symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity that Chicanosmexicanos, people of mixed race, people who have Indian blood, people who
cross cultures, by necessity possess’’ (30), la Malinche as having been betrayed
by her culture rather than as being her culture’s betrayer (22), and la Llorona as
both a representation of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl (35) and also as an abject
and rejected combination of the other two figures (30). She re-envisions each as
a powerful mother of Chicano culture through her rewriting of ancient Aztec
myths and her valorization of a spiritual and historical tradition based on
indigenous beliefs rather than any institutionalized religion (37). Anzaldúa
contrasts current and past abuses of power within the borderlands with a
utopian vision of hope for the region and for its people, based on the myth of
the US Southwest as Aztlán. The difference between Anzaldúa’s theorization of
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Aztlán and the early formulations of Chicano movement activists is evident in
her new mestiza consciousness, addressed not only to Chicanos but to all
Latinos, American Indians, Blacks, Asians, and even Anglos. Although still
nationalistic, Anzaldúa’s politics of Aztlán is also a politics of consensus-building
and community formation beyond the boundaries of ethnicity and geographical
location. In addition, where ‘‘El plan’’ calls for the unquestioning preservation of
‘‘cultural values of life, family, and home’’ (3), Anzaldúa examines the abuses
and discrimination within these cultural values, calling her own culture to
account for its misogyny and homophobia. Anzaldúa is particularly scornful of
the way in which her culture has silenced and abused its women by requiring that
they accept and accord with rigid gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality
and motherhood. She requests a dialogue between Chicanos and Chicanas as
well as a new vision of masculinity and a new men’s movement to end sexism
(Anzaldúa, 1987, 84). In addition, Anzaldúa insists that Chicanos acknowledge
and accept the contributions made to Chicano culture by gays and lesbians (85),
whom she calls the ‘‘supreme crossers of cultures,’’ on account of their strong
bonds with homosexuals throughout the world. She concludes: ‘‘The mestizo and
the queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a
purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven
together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls’’ (85).
Although she clearly goes beyond early Chicano Movement views of Aztlán in
her formation of a theory of mestiza consciousness, which addresses people
both inside and outside the Chicano community, in other ways Anzaldúa does
not stray far from the revolutionary ideals set forth in ‘‘El plan espiritual de
Aztlán.’’ Her project remains a revolutionary one addressed first to Chicanas
like herself, although admitting many others into the realm of its imagined
community. Second, her project builds on and upholds many Chicano
Movement ideals, including the defense and celebration of a unique Chicano
history and culture within the United States. Finally, Anzaldúa (1987) presents
herself as a revolutionary Chicana activist, addressing herself to ‘‘nosotros los
mexicanos-Chicanos,’’ encouraging all Chicanos to continue the struggle begun
in the Chicano Movement (63–64), to teach its history to new immigrant
arrivals to the United States, and to learn the histories of Latin America in order
to forge a new community (87). Although her ideas and goals are transnational,
they are grounded in an earlier Chicano cultural nationalist myth and metaphor
of Aztlán, an overarching metaphor that encompasses not only the border
region of the US Southwest, but also a spiritual utopian homeland to be
achieved when the goals of her new mestiza consciousness are met.
The idea of Aztlán theorized by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera
addresses many of the issues described by Cooper Alarcón (1997) as being
ignored in early Chicano Movement notions of Aztlán. First, Anzaldúa
separates her conceptual ‘‘Borderlands’’ from the physical border zone she
describes in South Texas (Anzaldúa, 1987, iii). This enlarges her theoretical
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construct of Aztlán far beyond the geographic limits of the US Southwest.
Second, by insisting on mestizaje as a basis for developing a new Chicana
culture and conceptual framework, Anzaldúa breaks out of the Anglo/
Chicano binary described by Cooper Alarcón to discuss the interrelated and
mutually conflicting elements of Native American, Mexican, and Anglo
culture. Third, she focuses on both the history of migration in the US
Southwest and on its continued effects on both Mexico and the United States.
Finally, by focusing on her own identity as a Chicana lesbian in building her
notion of Aztlán, she envisions both women and homosexuals as citizens of
her imagined community, thus deviating strongly from traditional nationalist
imaginings of the nation based on compulsory heterosexuality and the
traditional family structure. Nevertheless, because the idea of Aztlán, in the
words of Cooper Alarcón (1997), is a palimpsest, Anzaldúa’s new theory
inherits a nationalistic focus on the Chicano people and traditional Chicano
values based on the importance of the community over the individual and the
maintenance of or return to an idealized notion of an agrarian lifestyle.
Although she seeks coalition with Native Americans, Asian Americans and
African Americans and with new Latino immigrants to the United States, and
includes Latinos as well as Chicanos in her history of Aztlán, her
formulations never fully subsume Chicana identity in either a generalized
identity as people of color in the United States or as Latinas, insisting on the
specificity of Chicana identity.
In the fifth chapter of Borderlands, ‘‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue,’’ Anzaldúa
describes the evolution of Chicano Spanish in the border zone. She consistently
differentiates between Chicanas and Latin American women, a difference that
begins with language itself: ‘‘Their language was not outlawed in their
countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue;
generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school,
heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper’’ (58). In contrast with the
Latin American women whom Anzaldúa describes as growing up immersed in
Spanish, she describes Chicanas as speaking as many as eight different languages
(55). Calling language a homeland, she insists upon the validity of each one,
stating ‘‘I am my language’’ (59). In a later passage, she again stresses the
specificity of her Chicana identity, describing people who use other labels, such
as Spanish, Hispanic, Spanish-American, Mexican-American, Latin American,
and Latin as ‘‘copping out’’ – acculturating and thus denying the particularity of
their Chicano identity (62). Although Anzaldúa does state that the ‘‘Latinoist
movement is good’’ she also insists that it is not enough, focusing instead on the
historical and cultural specificity of Chicanos in her new inclusive theory of
Aztlán (86). Rather than attempt to subsume Chicana identity under the
umbrella of a larger shared Latino identity or political project, she seems to be
incorporating Latino identity into a new politics of Aztlán itself as the ‘‘broader
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communal ground’’ (87) shared by the constituents of her new imagined
community.
With Anzaldúa, the idea of Aztlán moves from Chicano nationalism toward
transnational feminism without losing its emphasis on the values placed on
home and the land so sacred to early Chicano movement activists, but enlarges
its own definition to address the issues of global migration, transnational capital
and shifting identities, insisting always on the fluidity and permeability of
categorizations and definitions. This Aztlán is not the same Aztlán presented by
Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’ Gonzales at the Chicano National Liberation Youth
Conference in 1969. Instead it is a vision of Aztlán for all the linguistic,
cultural and spiritual border-crossers that Anzaldúa addresses in her work. As a
metaphorical palimpsest (Cooper Alarcón, 1997), Aztlán will continue to
change and be redefined by succeeding generations of Chicano scholars, perhaps
never completely erasing its earlier definitions.
A u t ho r b i o g ra p hy
Dr. Brenda Watts is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Southwest Missouri State
University in Springfield, Missouri. Her research interests include Chicana
literature, Latin American autobiography, border theory, and the transnational.
Her dissertation, Historical Transgressions: The Creation of a Transnational
Female Political Subject in Works by Chicana Writers (2000) explores the
creation of a transnational female political subject in works by Gloria
Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Erlinda Gonzales-Berry.
Re fe r e n ce s
Alarcón, Norma. 1998. Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘‘The’’ Native Woman. In
Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo, pp. 371–382. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
First published in Cultural Studies 4(3) (October, 1990): 248–256.
Alarcón, Norma, Kaplan Caren, and Moallem Minoo. 1999. Introduction: Between
Woman and Nation to Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational
Feminisms, and the State, eds. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem,
pp. 1–16. Durham: Duke University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, Gloria and Cherrie Moraga, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.
Barrera, Mario. 1988. Beyond Aztlán: Ethnic Autonomy in Comparative Perspective. New
York: Praeger.
Chávez, John. 1991. The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest. Alburquerque:
University of New México Press.
A z t l á n a s a P a l i m p s e s t
B r e n d a Wa t t s
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Cooper Alarcón, Daniel. 1997. The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Enloe, Cynthia. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics. London: Pandora.
Garcı́a, Alma M. 1997. Introduction to Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical
Writings, ed. Alma M. Garcı́a, pp. 1–16. New York: Routledge.
Garcı́a, Ignacio M. 1997. Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican
Americans. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Gonzáles, Rodolfo ‘‘Corky’’. 1989. EL plan espiritual de Aztlán: In Aztlán Essays on the
Chicano Homeland, eds. Rudolf. A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelı́, pp. 1–5.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. First Presented at the Chicano National
Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, Colorado, 1969.
Madsen, Deborah L. 2000. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press.
Marentes, Luis A. 2000. José Vasconcelos and the Writing of the Mexican Revolution. New
York: Twayne Publishers.
Pérez, Laura Elisa. 1999. El desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics. In Between
Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, eds. Caren
Kaplan, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem, pp. 19–46. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Sandoval, Chela. 1998. Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the Canon. In
Living Chicana Theory, ed. Carla Trujillo, pp. 352–370. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.
Portions of this article were first published in 1995 under the title U.S. Third World
Feminism in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, eds.
Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin.
Torres, Marı́a de los Ángeles. 1998. Transnational Political and Cultural Identities:
Crossing Theoretical Borders. In Between Borders: U.S. Latinos, Latin Americans, and
the Paradox of Interdependence, eds. Frank Bonilla, Edwin Meléndez, Rebecca Morales
and Marı́a de los Ángeles Torres, pp. 169–182. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Vasconcelos, José. 1966. La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana. México:
Aguilar.
Latino Studies (2004) 2, 304–321. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600104
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Black Women's History, White Women's History: The Juncture
of Race and Class
Darlene Clark Hine
Journal of Women's History, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1992, pp. 125-133
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0223
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/363255/summary
Access provided by Claremont College (22 Oct 2018 15:17 GMT)
Internahonal Trends γν Women's History
and Feminism:
Black Women's History, White Women's History: The
Juncture of Race and Class
Darlene Clark Hine
The Black women's history project is weU underway and yet I am
troubled and concerned for reasons I shaU soon explain. But first the
good news. Little did I susped in 1979, when I wrote my first essay in Black
women's history entitled "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of
Sex," that within a decade there would exist over a dozen monographs and
anthologies, a sixteen-volume series of articles and other writings, and
scores of master theses and dissertations, not to mention a wide assortment
of special reclamation projeds including the Black Women in the Middle
West project, the Black Women's Oral History project of the Schlesinger
Library, and the Black Women Physidans project of the Women's Medical
CoUege Archives in Philadelphia. In addition SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of
the Black Woman is published twice a year, and centers at Spelman CoUege
in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Memphis State University in Memphis, Tennessee, concentrate on the Uves and experiences of Black and other women of
color. During the past decade sessions on Black women's history have
become almost commonplace at major historical conventions. Moreover,
historical journals with increasing frequency have begun to pubUsh artides
on Black women. Whereas I once lamented that the historical experiences
of Black women had been neglected, obscured, distorted, or relegated to
the back pages of our collective consdousness, such is not the case today.
Black women historians have enriched our theoretical discourse and
at the same time have reclaimed and made more visible the deeds of their
and our forebearers. Their analyses of the intersedions of race, class, and
gender, of womanist consciousness, and of the culture or art of dissimulation or dissemblance have chaUenged both Black and women's historians
in profound ways. Furthermore, their contmuing search for new and more
effective strategies to present, and metaphors to iUurninate, the new knowledge thus far created has inspired many to question and to review how we
teach and understand both the poUtics and poetics of difference. In subtle
and nuanced ways with neither fanfare nor dedaration, Black women
© 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall)
This article was first prepared for delivery at the breakfast meeting of the American
Historical Association Committee on Women Historians, December 29, 1991,
American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IU.
126
Journal of Women's History
Fall
historians have put into motion a quiet inteUectual transformation. A
passage from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has
resonance. He writes,
... during revolutions scientists see new and different things when
looking with famiUar instruments in places they have looked before.
It is rather as if the professional community has been suddenly
transported to another planet where famiUar objeds are seen in a
different Ught and are joined by unfamiUar ones as weU___In so far
as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do,
we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding
to a dUferent world.1
Since Black women entered the scholarly record, Black and white women's
historians have been responding to a dUferent inteUectual world. Where
this transformation, or indeed its precise contours, wiU lead us remains yet
to be discovered. I am neither sanguine nor naive about the significance or
impact of Black women's history. ActuaUy I have reason for disquiet.
The reasons for my disquiet are varied but the two solutions are 1. that
we all begin to do crossover history, and 2. that we look at class. AUow me
to explain. In my survey courses I usually divide modern African-American history into four broad overlapping and interconnected themes in
order to clarify the major political and economic developments, to explain
the rise of competing ideologies, and to delineate the roles of representative
individuals. The four broad themes are: the Civil War and Emancipation,
the Great Migrations, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Changing Status
of Black Women.
The first three themes have and continue to command the attention of
the vast majority of African-American historians of the post-slavery
period. The fourth theme has been problematic. Explorations into the
status of Black women over time, however, fosters the need to do inter-
sectional analysis because for the most part this particular group of Americans has always occupied the bottom rung of any racial, sexual, and class
hierarchy: as slaves they cost less than male counterparts; as free workers
they were undervalued and negatively stereotyped. Thus few scholars
deemed this segment of the population worthy of inteUectual inquiry.
What lessons could the lives and experiences of shadow women possibly
convey about the relations between men and women or Blacks and whites
in this society that were not already known and documented? Also, on a
more superfidal level, even some Black women scholars desired to eschew
what they labeled the victimization of Black women and instead chose to
focus on positive, creative contributions of super-achieving or transcen-
1992
International Trends: D. C. Hiñe
127
dent Black women as a means to empower themselves, their students, and
their communities.
The scholars of Black women's history have wrought well. We now
know that Black women played essential roles in ensuring the survival of
Black people under slavery and of Black communities in freedom. We
know that oppressed people are able to develop, as the Ufe and writings of
the antebellum free Black woman, Maria Stewart, revealed, a political
agenda for Black liberation that pivoted on the emancipation and heightened consdousness of Black women. Even slave women such as Harriet
Tubman and Harriet Jacobs resisted the imposition of beUefs that held them
to be Uttle more than mindless mules of labor and sex objects. They too
devised simple and complex strategies to chaUenge white and Black patriarchal domination. Slave women such as Sojourner Truth performed labor
across the sexual divide and proved the Ue of feminine weakness. And as
Melton McLaurin documents in Celia, A Slave, slave women fought and
died in defense of their sexual beings.2
We now know that Black women's angle of vision enabled them
collectively and individuaUy to fashion a world view, to assemble an
arsenal of womanist strategies ranging from the culture of dissemblance
and a deep spirituaUsm to the adoption of middle-class values and aspirations designed to shatter demeaning stereotypes of their humanity and of
their sexuaUties. We know that the process of reimagining themselves was
a serious, unrelenting battle that continues to this day. Through the myriad
voluntary associations and club activities in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries Black women created and sustained innumerable
churches, hospitals, schools, clinics, day care centers, neighborhood
improvement projects, and protest organizations. Black women working
in tandem with Black men founded migration clubs and relocated themselves and their families in western towns and northern dties. They too
labored to create and sustain the separate paraUel institutional infrastructures that made Black survival possible in the age of Jim Crow. And
throughout these survival struggles they played instrumental roles—
although too often unheralded—in laying the groundwork for the modern
rights revolution.
Given these accompUshments, why the disquiet? Here is one site of
my disquiet. Too Uttle attention has been devoted to the real working-class
status of Black women. The paucity of sustained analysis on the over-
whelming poverty of the vast majority of Black women has helped to foster
erroneous impressions in the larger sodety of the mythical, heroic, tran-
scendent Black woman able to do the impossible, to make a way out of no
way. Accordingly, actual poor Black women, espedally those on weUare
and single heads of households, are not only inadequately understood but
128
Journal of Women's History
Fall
are increasingly vilified in contemporary media coverage. They are
depicted as one of the causes of our national economic woes and ironicaUy
are held responsible by some for the growing economic, political, and
social impotence of working-poor Black men. Discussions of radal and
sexual oppression without intense grounding in the complexities and
realities of class exploitation and inequalities has led to misplaced emphases. And such skewed perceptions of the reaUty of Black women's Uves
leaves room for aU kinds of poUtical and inteUectual mischief. Black women
historians need to readjust some of their attention to relating the history of
Black women to the tremendous concentration of power, wealth, information, and social resources that remain in the hands of a fiercely intransigent
and rrdUtantly reactionary white male eUte. In short, U we truly intend on
doing intersectional analyses, then dass must occupy as much attention as
race and sex.
This of course brings me to the second major source of my disquiet.
Black women historians must begin to research and write histories of white
women. Why? Because we need to know more about them. Also, we need
to break down intellectual and professional boundaries; and finally, we
need continuaUy to refine and to make even more sophisticated our meth-
odologies of intersectional analysis. Some Black women historians such as
NeU Painter and WUma King have already completed editing projects of
papers of southern white women. Recently I wrote an introduction to the
new edition of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin's autobiography, The Making of
a Southerner.3 Now I suspect that many already over-burdened and overextended Black women historians wül chaff at this exhortation to cross the
racial lines in their scholarship. I hear their questions. Won't writing about
white women undermine and/or impede progress on the Black women's
history project? There are so few of us doing this work as it is, why should
we düute our energies? WiU researching and writing about white women
enhance our understanding of the Uves and experiences of Black women,
of white men, of Black men? But perhaps more pointedly, wül Black women
historians achieve or receive authorial recognition within a stratified profession that has tended to categorize Black scholars as being in charge of
Black history? Do Black historians who venture into "crossover history"
risk more than they gain? I can offer no answers suffident to aUay these
qualms. I can only suggest that the efforts extended to study others
strengthen the understanding of that which is closest.
For the next few pages I wiU concentrate on the autobiography of an
aristocratic, southern white woman whose inteUectual journey made me
want to know more about her. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's carefully
construded, wincingly honest autobiography chronicles her own inteUectual transformation and conversion to the cause of racial equaUty and
1992
International Trends: D. C. Hiñe
129
social justice. Given the nature of her inteUectual and emotional heritage,
the circumstances of her early upbringing, and the depth of the southern
commitment to racial hierarchy and gender stratification, Lumpkin's rejection of the ideology of white supremacy and questioning of the status of
women was downright radical. Lumpkin's observations about the Uves of
white southern women antidpated by a generation the historical works of
Anne Firor Scott, Jean Friedman, Jacqueline David HaU, and Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese.
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin was born in Macon, Georgia, on December
22, 1897. She received her A.B. degree from a smaU coUege in Georgia,
proceeded to earn her masters degree at Columbia University, and in 1928
earned her dodorate in economics at the University of Wisconsin. She
taught economics and sociology at a number of women's coUeges, including Mount Holyoke and Smith CoUege. In addition to The Making of a
Southerner (1947) and The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (1974), Lumpkin
pubUshed with Dorothy Douglas Child Workers in America (1937) and The
South in Progress (1940).4
The first half of her book, The Making of a Southerner, lays out in graphic
detail what it meant to be southern, white, female, and privüeged in the
opening decades of the twentieth century. In the final sedions Lumpkin
recalls the process of her transformation into a Uberal democrat, fuUy aware
of the economic inequities, racial proscriptions, and sexual restrictions
suffered by those other southerners who were poor white, Black, and/or
female. To be sure, Lumpkin's voice is atypical but that is why her book is
so arresting. Lumpkin painstakingly unravels the old tapestry of myths,
distortions, and stereotypes that had blinded her to the existence of white
poverty and black oppression. Epiphanies abound. After years of study
and soul searching she exhibits a fuUy awakened racial consdousness and
is aware of the sodal construction of and intersections of race, gender, and
class: "What struck me now was the circumstantial convenience of a beUef
in inferiority to the existence of a slave institution and the perpetuation of
its aftermath."5
It is imperative to underscore the strategy Lumpkin employs in this
autobiography. First she recaptures an inteUectual world which she had
already rejected by the 1940s. Thus her treatment of slavery, of Reconstruc-
tion, and of redemption is essentiaUy the version of reaUty that conditioned
her chüdhood. They are tales told by her father. Such stories include
descriptions of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. She wrote:
This much is certain. To my people, as to me in my chüdhood, who
was reared in their history to those fateful months, no "two sides" to
what happened was conceivable. To them there was but one side,
130
JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY
FALL
made up of true Southerners engaged, they verily beUeved, in a
struggle for existence, for this is what "white supremacy" was to
them.6
Years of conditioning in the atmosphere of an ostensibly inviolate way
of southern Ufe affected young Lumpkin and her brothers and sisters,
though not as deeply perhaps as her parents would have wished. StiU she
recaUed:
It was inconceivable, however, that any change could be aUowed that
altered the very present fact of the relation of superior white to
inferior Negro. This we came to understand remained for us as it had
been for our fathers, the very cornerstone of the South.7
Yet it was inevitable that cracks would appear in the inteUectual edifice
so elaborately construded to subordinate Blacks and maintain white hegemony. For young Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin it began perhaps with a
chance observation as her father brutaUy beat the family cook for commit-
ting the dreaded offense of "impudence." The incident produced the first
tremors of doubt and misgivings:
Our Uttle Black cook, a woman smaU in stature though fuU grown,
was receiving a severe thrashing. I could see her writhing under the
blows of a descending stick wielded by the white master of the house.
I could see her face distorted with fear and agony and his with stern
rage.8
Here it is interesting to note that Lumpkin does not refer to "the white
master" as her father, perhaps reflecting unconsdous distancing or per-
haps she was simply being metaphorical. Nevertheless, having witnessed
this scene, Lumpkin became blindingly aware that she was white.
I began to be seU-conscious about the many signs and symbols of my
race position that had been battering against my consciousness since
virtual infancy.9
Lumpkin was too perceptive and too inteUigent to remain imprisoned
by fabrications designed to buttress the institutions of white supremacy
and the fantasies of the old order. The latter half of the autobiography is
largely a tale of personal reconstruction, of her remaking of herseU into a
southerner free from old biases and Ues. It is radicaUy different from the
first part. In the latter chapters Lumpkin finds her own voice. She rejects
the stories of her father and demonstrates the fruits of years of research
and scholarship. In The South in Progress Lumpkin explained:
I am mindful of how greatly we need to study our history. Southern
problems cannot be understood fuUy except in the Ught of an exten-
sive examination of our historical background___10
1992
International Trends: D. C. Hiñe
131
The problems explored in the last part include the desperate lives of
croppers and farm laborers, workers in miU viUages and cities, Black
peonage, the subjugation of women, the oppressive nature of southern
religion, and the hypocrisy of Northerners concerning the treatment of
African Americans.
But it was the world of the "lower class" whites that enthraUed her
just as it is the world of the working poor Black woman that enthraUs me.
Lumpkin comments on every aspect of their desperate lives from the
reUgious revivals to the inadequate schooling, the "immoral" liaisons, the
violence, and the alcohoUsm. I am concerned about the desperate lives of
Black women who cannot find jobs, secure education and training, obtain
adequate access to health care for themselves and their chüdren; who are
devastated by AIDS, drugs, and violence at every turn; and who are held
responsible for aU the UIs confronting everybody in this society—a society
that despairs of their very existence. Meanwhile, Lumpkin declared:
In the Sand Hüls for the first time in my experience I had been set
down to Uve day after day in dose companionship with deep poverty
suffered by whites, a poverty to which I had not hitherto been
imperceptibly hardened. ... I saw more than I otherwise would
have."
By the 1920s Lumpkin's search for a deeper understanding of the
South and its people unveUed the "rigors of Southern destitution" of the
white "lower classes." She concluded, after stints of working in the miUs
and factories where she observed more poverty and hopelessness, that "the
mass of whites in a purely economic sense also had their 'place/ in which
they too seemed meant to stay."12 The autobiography ends with a resounding condemnation of assumptions that working-class whites and Blacks
were kept separate because of "innate" and "inevitable" differences. Her
critique of the economic forces that consigned the majority of its people to
poverty led her to declare that "wage-earrdng whites and Negroes were,
functionaUy speaking, not so untike after aU."13
Why should a Black woman historian concentrate on the autobiogra-
phy of an upper-class white southern lady? The reasons are numerous.
First, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's book is as effective an examination of
what it takes to make one kind of white southerner as Benjamin Mays' Born
to Rebel, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Anne Moody's Coming of Age in
Mississippi, and Pauti Murray's Proud Shoes are descriptions of what went
into the making of Black southerners. In many guises these autobiographies reveal the layered depth of different perceptions and experiences
shaped by gender, race, and sodal status.
132
JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY
FALL
Second, Lumpkin's autobiography opens a window onto the past
attitudes and values that prevented eUte whites from seeing the harsh
reaUties and often demeaning Uves led by Blacks, poor whites, and many
women and their own roles in creating these Uves. Lumpkin was excep-
tional in many ways, but most especiaUy in her abiUty to see beyond form
and structure to essence. As is true of the autobiographical writings of
several other atypical white southern women including LilUan Smith and
Virginia Durr, Lumpkin has written a volume of Uluminating power. She
penetrates the contradictions, the myths, and ironies so deeply embedded
in southern culture—in its reUgion, its economy, its race relations, and its
gender conventions. Hers is the poignant testimony of a woman steeped
in traditions peculiar to her class and region who through education and
wiU removed the cataracts of racism, curing herself of the blindness that
hid pervasive and unrelenting white poverty and the grinding exploitation
of agricultural, factory, and mill workers.
ImpUdt in this discussion is the encouragement of white and Black
women historians to pay more attention to the historical experiences of
economicaUy distressed and exploited Black women. This is an appeal for
aU historians of women to also engage in more "crossover history." When
we are aU doing each other's history then we wiU register meaningful
progress in the war against radsm, sexism, and class oppression. All
barriers impeding our understanding of the past and interfering with our
present and future struggle against patriarchy must be destroyed.
Two points to reiterate. Lumpkin moved from discovery of class
exploitation to a deeper understanding of radsm. I have moved from race
and gender oppression to class exploitation. In short, I meet Lumpkin at
the juncture of class, race, and gender. Finally, let me assure you that I seek
no escape from this struggle to research, write, teach, and promote Black
women's history. I beUeve that at this particular historical conjuncture it is
imperative that some Black women historians treat white women as a
means to enrich understanding of African-American women. In any event
the time for cussing is past, now lef s get busy.
NOTES
1 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
1991).
2 Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, A Slave (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
3 Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1991).
1992
International Trends.· D. C. Hiñe
133
4 Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974); Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin and
Dorothy W Douglas, Child Workers in America (New York: International Publishers,
1937); idem, The South in Progress (New York: International PubUshers, 1940).
5 Lumpkin, Making of a Southerner, 228.
« Ibid., 87.
7 Ibid., 128.
» Ibid., 132.
» Ibid., 133.
ίο Ibid., 13.
" Ibid., 182.
'2 Ibid., 222.
« Ibid.
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
Nancy Fraser
To cite this version:
Nancy Fraser. Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History: An Introduction. FMSH-WP2012-17. 2012.
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Feminism, Capitalism, and the
Cunning of History
An Introduction
Nancy Fraser
N°17 | august 2012
An introduction to my forthcoming book, this essay
takes a broad, sweeping look at second-wave feminism, situating the movement’s unfolding in relation
to three moments in the history of capitalism. In the
irst moment, feminism posed a radical challenge to
the pervasive androcentrism of “state-organized capitalism�.
�.. In the second, the movement unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello call the “new spirit� of neoliberal capitalism.
In the third (present) moment, of capitalist crisis, feminists have the chance to reactivate the movement’s
emancipatory promise.
Working Papers Series
Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme - 190 avenue de France - 75013 Paris - France
http://www.msh-paris.fr - FMSH-WP-2012-17
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
2/14
Feminism, Capitalism, and the
Cunning of History
An Introduction
Nancy Fraser
August 2012
The author
Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics and at the New School for
Social Research in New York. Currently Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, she holds the
Chair «Rethinking social justice in a globalizing world» at the Collège d’études mondiales, Fondation Maison
des sciences de l’homme.
She has published two books in French: Qu’est-ce que la justice sociale? Reconnaissance et redistribution (La
Découverte 2005; 2nd edition 2011) and Le féminisme en mouvements. Des années 1960 au néolibéralisme (forthcoming from La Découverte in October 2012). Her English-language publications include Scales of Justice:
Reimagining Political Space for a Globalizing World (2008); Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates her
Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (2008); Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003) with
Axel Honneth; Justice Interruptus: Critical Relections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (1997); and Unruly Practices:
Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social heory (1989).
The text
his essay is the introduction to the forthcoming book under the direction of Nancy Fraser, entitled Le féminisme en mouvements : De l’insurrection des années 60 au néolibéralisme, to be published in French in October
2012 by La Découverte (Paris).
Citing this document
Nancy Fraser, Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History: An Introduction, FMSH-WP-2012-17,
august 2012.
© Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme - 2012
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http://www.msh-paris.fr - FMSH-WP-2012-17
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
3/14
Abstract
An introduction to my forthcoming book, this essay takes a broad, sweeping look at second-wave feminism, situating the movement’s unfolding in relation to three moments in the history of capitalism. In
the irst moment, feminism posed a radical challenge to the pervasive androcentrism of “state-organized
capitalism�. In the second, the movement unwittingly supplied a key ingredient of what Luc Boltanski
and Eve Chiapello call the “new spirit�� of neoliberal capitalism. In the third (present) moment, of capitalist crisis, feminists have the chance to reactivate the movement’s emancipatory promise.
Keywords
feminism, capitalism, neoliberalism
Le féminisme en mouvements : De l’insurrection des
années 60 au néolibéralisme. Une introduction
Résumé
Une introduction au livre à paraître sous la direction de l’auteur, cet essai ofre un large balayage de la
seconde vague du féminisme, et situe l’éclosion de ce mouvement en relation avec trois moments de l’histoire du capitalisme. Dans un premier moment, le féminisme pose un déi radical à l’androcentrisme du
« capitalisme stato-organisé ». Dans un second moment, le mouvement fournit à son insu un ingrédient
indispensable à ce que Luc Boltanski et Eve Chiapello appellent le « nouvel esprit du capitalisme ». ...
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