"It Matters That They're Queer and People of Color": Chicana/Latina Youth Intersectional Feminisms

• In Event: Cultivating Homeplace: Centering Feminized Knowledge in Educational Spaces With Girls of Color

Abstract

Women of Color (WoC) feminists have emphasized how feminist politics and praxis must pay close attention to the intersections of identities beyond gender (i.e. race, class, citizenship, language, ethnicity, etc.) (Crenshaw, 1990; Moraga & Anzaldua, 1984). For WoC feminists, intersectionality has been a practice that allows us to understand, connect, and forge coalitions that work toward collective liberation. What has been less discussed, however, is the role of young people in intersectional feminsit practices and what they can teach us about creating a more socially just society. This paper looks at how Chicana/Latina youth foster an understanding of intersectionality through reflections on their own identities and sociopolitical subjectivities, as well as their engagement in critical discussions about sociopolitical injustices across oppressed communities. Through their participation in a community-based ethnic studies course in a im/migrant housing complex, the young women in this study take up critical discussions alongside each other around issues of anti-blackness, homophobia, gun violence, and immigrant rights.

As a guiding framework and pedagogical approach to this study, the author of this paper draws on Chicana/Latina feminisms (Anzaldua, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Perez, 1999), as part Women of Color feminist praxis, to demonstrate how spaces for taking up intersectionality with youth unfold in community based pasces for teaching and learning. Chicana feminist perspectives of education (Delgado Bernal, 2006; Elenes, 2010; Yosso , 2005; Saavedra, 2011) center altnerative sites for knowledge production such as the home, community spaces, the border/lands as well as highlight the practices for teaching and learning that exist within Chicanx/Latinx families and communities. This framework provides theoretical and pedagogical tools for better understanding the knowledge, identities, and sociopolitical subjectivities of Chicana/Latina youth and how ethnic studies courses in an im/migrant housing community can become spaces for intersectional feminist praxis.

This paper draws on data from a three year community based research project in an im/migrant housing community. Through the analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes as well as Chicana/Latina feminist methods such as platicas (dialgoues) (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) and testimonios (sociopolitical narratives) (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, Flores Carmona, 2017), the author demonstrates how Chicana/Latina youth work through their own tensions around intersectionality, strive towards a better understanding of oppression for other communities, as well as advocate and push for socialjustice projects that are important to them and their im/migrant community. This work adds to the scholarship around girls of color, their knowledge, and the power they hold to create better futures and work towards the liberation of all people.

Author

• Monica Gonzalez Ybarra, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign