HERstory: Decolonizing Scholarship Through Chicana Activists' Testimonios

• In Event: Re-Creating and Reimagining Spaces for Indigenous Feminisms: Case Studies From Five Cultural Contexts

Abstract

Historically, women of color have been displaced to the peripheries of dominant epistemologies and the production of legitimate knowledge. This displacement has served to strengthen the epistemic oppression that has excluded women of color perspectives from academic sites of knowledge production. My research seeks to challenge this epistemic oppression by documenting the stories of Chicana activists in the 1960’s in the Midwest to provide previously unknown autobiographical accounts of important Chicana activists. This is significant because the existing literature on Chicano/a history has been geographically limited and androcentric that has excluded the experiences and voices of Chicana Midwesterners (Cardenas, 2004; Soldatenko, 2009). In addition, Chicanas were also excluded from the Women’s Rights movement. The feminists in the Women’s Rights Movement theorized their experiences and organized merely around gender consequently, discounting the analysis of race. The dual exclusion of Chicanas situated their experiences, history and knowledge as less credible within these mainstream movements. Hence, utilizing Indigenous feminist methodologies allows for Chicana experiences to be analyzed more deeply by expressly addressing the intersection of the social formation of race and gender, the historicity of colonization and its thereby affect and positions this research endeavor as an important site of resistance to epistemological oppression. It is my belief that Indigenous feminist methodologies may aid in the production and development of epistemologies that both transcend and exceed those offered by androcentric Chicano history and western feminism.
The Indigenous feminist theoretical framework that I will be drawing from is Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of La Facultad. This theory informs us that disempowered groups posses a certain kind of knowledge that liberates and empowers others. The term La Facultad means having an intuitive form of knowledge that includes, but goes beyond, logical thought and empirical analysis. As she explains it is most often developed by those who have been disempowered and “pushed out of the tribe for being different” (Keating, 2000). This intuitive form of knowledge and exclusion that Chicanas have been experiencing can challenge dominant epistemologies by the method of testimonios. Chicana feminists’ scholars have come to defined testimonios as a method that demonstrates power in narratives. According to Elenes (2000), “testimonios problematize the universal individualistic subject that is endemic in Western canon and ideology…these embodied narratives explain the world through the vantage point of the oppressed and thus are the product of situated knowledge...” (p. 115). Testimonios allow for Chicanas’ voices to become the center of research that become a “map of consciousness” for people who have been constructed by patriarchal and colonialist relations of domination and subordination” (Saavedra, 2011). By employing an Indigenous feminist framework permits for Chicanas’ experiences to be situated in a historical, political, social, geographical and economic context that can illustrate how Chicanas in the Midwest experience the Chicano Movement. In doing so, these testimonios will fill the gaps of the 1960’s androcentric Chicano history and also challenge U.S. dominant feminisms. Most importantly, it can decolonize scholarship by decentering the historical preference of the male gender perspective and the construction of western thought.

Author

• Julia Gutierrez, Arizona State University - Tempe