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Blackwell, Maylei. ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), $24.95, 312 pp. ISBN: 978-0-292-72690-1 (paper).
A political cartoon from an unpublished 1971 issue of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, a short-lived Chicana feminist newspaper, shows two men dressed in Brown Beret gear ogling a woman while telling her, ". . . You might get to be movimiento [movement] princess" (75). The cartoon's caption reads "The 'Heavies' of Aztlán recruiting bodies for the movimiento." The struggle against the blatant sexism captured in the cartoon is just one of many dilemmas navigated by the Mexican American women activists featured in Maylei Blackwell's ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement.
Over a period of twenty years, Blackwell archived documents, collected stories, and conducted interviews of Chicanas involved in groups such as the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc (Daughters of Cuauhtémoc), one of the first Chicana or Latina feminist organizations in the United States. Through oral histories and examination of print materials, Blackwell weaves a narrative of how Chicana and Latina activists of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the civil rights movements that shifted the sociopolitical terrain of the United States, especially around race and gender. Blackwell documents how these groups made a tremendous impact on disseminating feminist knowledge among Mexican American women across the US Southwest, often referred to in the Chicano Movement as Aztlán.
Blackwell introduces the book with a familiar but necessary discussion of how "The Telling is Political" (1). This section of the book focuses on how the dominant discourse of civil rights movement history, including the Chicano Movement history, largely overlooks Chicana and Latina contributions. Through her historical scholarship, Blackwell seeks to redress this by demonstrating how various strands of Chicana feminist organizing took hold across many communities, especially in California and Texas, among other places.
In particular, Blackwell interrogates how the women she interviewed contended with the pervasive masculinist attitudes embedded in the Chicano Movement's dominant form of cultural nationalism. The women's stories chronicle how they vied for leadership positions in male-dominated Chicano organizations, where women were typically relegated to service positions to support the male leaders. In one poignant example, Blackwell describes how Anna Nieto Gómez, a former student leader at Movimiento Estudiantil...