Como Te Ven, Te Tratan: A Critical Race Analysis of Chicana Eyebrows and “Masked” Resistance

• In Event: A Critical Look Into History: Implementing Our Cultural Intuition in Educational Research

Abstract

Media’s persistent and pervasive representation of American Chicana promotes her as one-dimensional, inconsequential, and unacquainted with Eurocentric standards of beauty. Like wrinkles that line the traces of lived experience, our eyebrows impart a story of struggle and fortitude, sculpted by the nuanced intersections of our perceived race, gender, and age that characterize our daily social interactions as young Latina women living in Los Angeles. In this study, we seek to transcend and expose media’s far-reaching mis-education about working-class Chicanas, and explore how the shape of our eyebrows and the deep-rooted attitude of our face function as a form of resistance, protection, and resilience against sexism, racism, and ageism in the community and in schools.
To centralize the multidimensional identities of Latinas and address the intersectionality of racism, classism, sexism and other forms of oppression, we will use Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit) as our theoretical grounding (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). We will also be using Critical Media Literacy to centralize the powerful nature of media as an educational institution and to inform a critical reading of mediated representations of Chicanas in our data source: television and film media. Additionally, our methodology is informed by Dolores Delgado Bernal’s Chicana Feminist Epistemology, allowing us to incorporate our own personal narratives in a novelistic form and contribute to the production of a CRT counternarrative.
The study’s preliminary historical findings show that “style politics” (Ramirez, 2002) represented in the form of makeup, and what we specifically term “eyebrow style politics,” find their roots in the 1920s flapper era. In this project we will share our historical findings of the Chicana look/aesthetic and present a working timeline of Chicana eyebrows as politics of style from the 1920’s to the 1990’s.
We argue that the mis-representation of Chicanas fails to acknowledge the sociopolitical circumstances that characterize daily experiences in working-class communities of Los Angeles. Additionally, the use of style—particularly the use of cosmetics—fails to be acknowledged as transformational resistance and non-verbal speech against felt offences against one’s race, class, gender, and age. Furthermore, the paper posits that media mis-education plays an undeniable role in the formation of deficit views of Chicanas in education; thus negatively affecting their educational potentialities and opportunities. This study will contribute to the field of CRT, Chicana/o, Gender/Women’s studies, and Critical Media Literacy by critically analyzing the iconic and most visible element of Chicana facial self-expression and representation in the educational institution of film and television media and its implications for Chicana educational opportunities.

Authors

• Maria C. Olivares Pasillas, University of California - Los Angeles

• Iris Lucero, University of California - Los Angeles