Feminisms
by
Latina feminism offers an intersectional approach to understanding and combating the relations of domination and subordination that structurally disenfranchise Latina/o communities, broadly conceived. Like the Latinas who developed its primary conceptualizations, theories, and practices, Latina feminism has been shaped as much by experiences of colonization and U.S. imperialism and of diaspora and border-crossing, as it has been by day-to-day lived experiences of heterosexism, racism, and classism in the United States. Indeed, contemporary Latina feminists—from academics to community organizers— have charted a genealogy of praxis that reaches beyond national borders and deep into history, recuperating a set of feminist practices that articulate the complex intersections of identity and subjectivity. Figures like La Malinche / Malintzin Tenepal (Hernán Cortés’s translator in the Conquest of Mexico) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (a seventeenth-century Mexican nun and author of “Hombres necios,” a poem that exposes the contradictions of colonial patriarchy) offer key articulations in this feminist genealogy, as do the writings of women like Sara Estela Ramírez (a Mexican revolutionary feminist, who organized on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border) and Puerto Rican anarchist feminist Luisa Capetillo (an advocate of gender and class equality who worked as a labor organizer in Puerto...
This essay may be found on page 64 of the printed volume.