Abstract

Chicana feminisms as an area of study was first brought to light in 1977 with the publication of Martha Cotera’s book Chicana Feminisms. In this short monograph, the seeds that had accumulated from many years of actions and writings by Chicanas in various fields are presented and theorized upon by Cotera. In her incisive analysis she lays out the experiential basis (or sitios) for developing new discourses (or lenguas) that encapsulate the feminisms developing on the ground as Chicanas articulated their oppression at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. This powerful new theory was later termed “intersectionality” by legal scholar Kimberleé Crenshaw (1991).