Abstract

Chicana history is a vibrant field of study with scholars from across the disciplines working to recover and reinterpret the histories of Mexican and Mexican American women in the United States. Chicana history was not always so popular. Initially, when Chicano history emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the wake of the Chicano movement, the Mexican American civil rights movement, scholars – most of them men – virtually ignored Mexican American women in general and issues of gender and sexuality in particular. When they did study women, they portrayed them primarily as producers (laborers) and reproducers (mothers) within the context of the household and family unit. In contrast, Chicana writers, activists, and feminists, both in and outside the academy, took up the task of recovering women’s untold histories and did so collectively and creatively. It is these women to whom we owe a great debt for laying the foundations for the study of Mexican American women.