Understanding Unrecognized Latina Leadership

• In Event: Baila Conmigo: Mentoring Latinas as School Leaders

Abstract

This presentation highlights findings from the "Understanding Unrecognized Chicana Leadership: Adversity, Resilience, Healing, and Liberation" research and dissertation. The study documented unrecognized leadership in the Chicana family and community. Specifically, the study explored how Chicanas define leadership, describe their pathway to leadership, identify the conditions that nurture their leadership, and recognize the obstacles that impede it. It also examined the cultural elements that help sustain individual and collective resiliency and discussed how leadership manifests and is recognized in the Chicana community. In addition, it explored how Chicanas work toward their liberation to be present, deliberate, and direct as well as to lead in their own lives. Finally, the study examined the Chicanas' experiences of the environments that cultivate awareness and critical consciousness, the conditions that support the emergence and development of leadership, and how these experiences intersect with culture, oppression, healing, and liberation.
The study examined how systematic oppression, in the forms of racism, classism, and sexism (Espino et al., 2012; Niemann, 2002), and heterosexism (Anzaldúa, 1987), has undeniably been an issue for Chicanas. Additionally, oppression and settler-colonialism underpin the historical and political contexts that set the backdrop in today's area known as the Southwest (Acuña, 1981; Hayes-Bautista, 1980).

Author

• Blanca Tavera, San Jose State University