11 SELF-CREATION IN CHICANA FEMINISM Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez One characteristic existentialist theme is the pursuit of authenticity in the face of a society that pressures its members, through social norms, to conform. Living authentically involves critical reflection about those norms, as well as making choices about how to live or act on the basis of that reflection. Authenticity requires not only that one lives autonomously—that is, in a way that is ‘guided by one’s own, non-constrained reasons and motives’ (Varga and Guignon 2020)—but also in accordance with reasons and motives that are reflective of one’s personal vision, or self-understanding. When a person acts authentically, they both express who they are and actively constitute themselves. In this way, one engages in a process of self-creation. The theme of encountering and resisting powerful social norms plays out in distinctive ways in the real lives of Chicana women. Some of the social norms they encounter arise in the form of widespread stereotypes and stigmas that denigrate them and their communities on the basis of their race, ethnicity, and gender. These prejudices can generate pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture, to disidentify with their heritage and community, and to internalize attitudes about the inferiority of the social groups to which they belong. In this context, authenticity involves scrutinizing those attitudes and choosing not to be defined by them. Our aim in this chapter is to show that in their resistance against racism and sexism, Chicana feminists have made distinctive contributions to existential thinking about what authenticity means and what is required for living authentically. We understand existentialism in a broad sense, as a philosophical inquiry that attends closely to lived experience. This inquiry takes place in a variety of creative and aesthetic modalities. It often recognizes that issues of power and domination are constitutive of existential reality. According to Kathryn Sophia Belle (Gines 2017: 89), ‘Existentialism examines the idea of existence—the human condition, being, power, agency, freedom, fear, angst, despair, choice, responsibility, subjectivity/inter-subjectivity, authenticity, and so forth.’1 Chicana and Latina feminists have produced significant work that fits this description, particularly in their discussions of identity and the nature of the self. Authenticity has a pronounced history as a political concept (Berman 2009). This is especially true for Chicana feminists who have organized and mobilized to have their voices, experiences, and desires recognized in the face of intersecting systems of oppression. Differing from so-called ‘neutral’ ethno-racial designators like ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Mexican American,’ to be Chicana involves a process of questioning one’s socialization to dominant norms and coming 129 DOI: 10.4324/9781003247791-14 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez to political consciousness as a member of an historically marginalized and disenfranchised group.2 As a result, the activism and theory of Chicana feminists is deeply attentive to the complex intermeshing of heterosexism, racism, classism, and colonialism in ways that emphasize resistant agency. This chapter explores Chicana practices of self-creation and resistance, as we trace the contributions that Chicana feminists make to existentialist descriptions of the pursuit of authenticity. First, we show that the reflection involved in self-creation requires a practice of taking critical inventory—critically reflecting on the ways in which one’s lineage, the way one grew up, and the traditions and self-understandings that one has been taught may or may not be valuable for who one is and who one would like to become. Next, we turn to Chicana and Latina feminist philosophical accounts of the self as multiplicitous to show how authentic self-creation requires embracing experiences of the self as ambiguous, in-between, and contradictory. We also underscore that for Chicana feminists, self-creation is a communal and intergenerational endeavor. In the final section, we illustrate these ideas through the examples of Chicana storytelling and practices of (re)parenting. Taking Critical Inventory In order to grapple with their experiences and carve out spaces for themselves in the face of oppressive social norms, Chicana feminists engage in a practice that we call ‘taking critical inventory.’ Taking critical inventory in this context means engaging in a critical and reflexive practice that locates our personal experiences in the wider matrixes of power and oppression that produce us and our collectivities. Anzaldúa offers an autobiographical illustration of this practice. Describing her struggles against oppressive social norms from a very young age, she recalls Terca. Even as a child I would not obey. I was ‘lazy.’ Instead of ironing my younger brothers’ shirts or cleaning cupboards, I would pass many hours studying, reading, painting, writing. Every bit of self-faith I’d painstakingly gathered took a beating daily. Nothing in my culture approved of me. Había agarrado malos pasos. Something was ‘wrong’ with me. Estaba más allá de la tradición. (Anzaldúa 1987: 16)3 Here, Anzaldúa grapples with the intense social pressure in the form of judgments of her character and pressure to abandon her genuine interests—e.g. painting, writing, etc.—in order to comply with traditional gender roles—e.g. doing housework. This social pressure results from cultural norms. Anzaldúa (1987: 16) explains, ‘Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture.’ Because cultural norms are so pervasive and fundamental to our ways of thinking and behaving, Anzaldúa finds that she must reject the cultures that betray her—that disapprove of her and erode her ‘self-faith.’ This includes not only the various dimensions of the Chicano culture in which she was raised, but also the dominant, white culture. In so doing, she undergoes a journey of self-creation. Anzaldúa (1987: 82) offers the following description of the process of taking critical inventory that is a key passage for our investigation of Chicana feminist contributions to authenticity Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage 130 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo? Pero es difícil differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been part of. Luego bota lo que no vale, los desmientos, los descuentos, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraízado, de la gente antigua.4 In this passage, we learn that taking critical inventory involves reflectively sorting through one’s ‘baggage’—the collection of beliefs, attitudes, habits, narratives, lessons, assumptions, traditions, and feelings that are the basis of one’s way of living—the reservoir of knowledges one draws upon in moving through the world. Part of the process of sortingthrough involves discerning the origins of each item. Many of our ways of thinking are simply passed on to us from previous generations or internalized from the cultures that surround us. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, we find that our ways of thinking are produced within racist and sexist systems of domination. They are distortions that fail to reflect the true interests and subjective experiences of Chicana women. Taking critical inventory involves the choice to reject these ways of thinking that undermine one’s flourishing.5 It also involves the search within one’s inner world for the inherited wisdom that better serves one on her journey. The process of taking critical inventory has been central to the journey that we, the authors of this chapter, have had in claiming our identities as both Chicanas and feminists. For Emma, coming to consciousness as a Chicana was no easy journey. It was through rich traditions of storytelling that she came to have what she now thinks of as her ‘Chicana feminist awakening.’ This awakening and reclamation required that Emma grapple with their contradictory lineages and multiple identities—as a mixed white and second-generation Mexican-American who lacks fluency in Spanish, as a gordita (fat person) who never quite fit mainstream expectations of femininity, and as a queer person who grew up in a conservative religious household and rural, working-class community. Indeed, to be a Chicana feminist is to claim a political identity that actively reckons with the world as someone who must constantly navigate between multiple cultural worlds and identities as well as everyday experiences of racism, heterosexism, class exploitation, and other forms of oppression. For Lori, the practice of taking critical inventory became urgent when she learned that she would become a mother. The weight of the responsibility of helping to shape her child’s identity and transmitting culture moved her to reflect on her own childhood as the period that equipped her, for better or worse, with a particular set of tools for navigating the world. The meanings of childhood memories press onto us—shaping our self-understanding. Like the turn of a kaleidoscope, they present themselves in new ways as we enter new stages of life. In one of Lori’s memories, flies are buzzing, a hanging sheet separates the bedroom from the living area. She sees her grandmother’s heavy body shuffling in a long floral dress across the cement floor. Nearly blind, Lita (abuelita) makes coffee, her white braids hanging down the sides of her head. Large hands and earlobes. Sad, falsetto voice full of love, speaking unknown words. It was because she wanted to speak to her grandmother that Lori dedicated the next decades of her life to learning Spanish. Her daughter, in contrast, would be raised speaking Spanish—she would never be severed from her heritage or deprived of relationships with her family because of a language barrier. We share our narratives to provide concrete examples of the practice of taking critical inventory, and to demonstrate its importance for our own self-understanding and self-creation. In the next sections of this chapter, we describe Chicana feminist philosophies of the self to 131 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez demonstrate how Chicana feminists engage in storytelling and liberatory (re)parenting as key to their practices of self-creation. As modes of taking critical self-inventory, this work involves engaging ancestral wisdom for more authentic, healing ways of being. We argue that through storytelling and liberatory (re)parenting Chicana feminists confront the alienation and inauthenticity that they experience within oppressive cultures. Multiplicitous Roots: Chicana Feminist Conceptions of the Self & Community At the outset, it is important to emphasize that for Chicana feminists, self-creation does not involve a wholesale rejection of one’s culture. Instead, it involves an active, reflective affirmation of one’s roots. Importantly, we do not have control over our heritage. It is part of the given set of conditions and lived realities that one finds oneself in, with facts that persist independently of what one decides or wants. At the same time, the meanings one draws from one’s lineage are not wholly fixed or determined. Critical inheritance is thus an active process over which we exercise some agency. It is critical because it involves acts of self-reflection and creative re-interpretation of the myths, lessons, and memories that make up our understanding of who and what we are. We sift, dig, examine, reject, project, try to forget, live up to, play down, and even create the meanings of our history and the legacy of which we are a part. However, in order to investigate the practices of self-creation that Chicana feminists engage in, more needs to be said about the nature of the self that can be created in this way. With respect to her journey of self-creation, Anzaldúa (1987: 16) writes: ‘I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.’ This quotation suggests that Anzaldúa believes there is an authentic self—one’s ‘own intrinsic nature’—that transcends externally imposed identity categories. In apparent tension with this view is the suggestion that the self is fashioned out of various elements that are a part of one’s heritage. Is the self unburied or is it created? Is the self something that exists beyond culture, or is it made up out of elements from one’s culture? How can these apparently disparate views of the self be reconciled?6 Anzaldúa’s views on the nature of the self are widely influential for Latina feminist philosophies.7 Yet one of the most distinctive aspects of her notion of the self has resonated more broadly within feminist philosophy: the idea of the self as ‘multiplicitous.’ The idea of the multiplicitous self poses a challenge to traditional, Western philosophical views of the self as unitary, atomistic, or universal that are often insufficient for making sense of the lived experiences of historically marginalized and oppressed people. Instead, by taking seriously the wide diversity and heterogeneity of cultural and social worlds, multiplicitous accounts of the self emphasize the plurality of the self at existential, metaphysical, and ontological levels. Drawing on the work of Anzaldúa, Mariana Ortega has further theorized the existential and phenomenological aspects of the multiplicitous self. As Ortega (2014: 176) explains, ‘A multiplicitous self is a self capable of occupying multiple positionalities in terms of gender, race, sex, sexual orientation, physical ability, class, and so on, and thus capable of occupying a liminal space or a space of in-betweeness.’ For Anzaldúa, it is the existential condition of Mexican Americans at the crossroad of multiple cultures, and as part of a group that is subject to marginalization and cultural imperialism, that gives rise to this distinctive experience of multiplicity. Anzaldúa (1987: 62) writes, ‘Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands… On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos’ incessant clamoring so that we forget our language.’ She also explains that in their very preservation of their cultural identity, Chicanos are forced 132 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism into an existential state of ambiguity and liminality as multiplicitous selves. As Anzaldúa (1987: 63) elaborates, Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity— we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. Anzaldúa (1987: 79) explains that in the face of this experience of finding oneself straddling cultures without fitting neatly within any, the Chicana learns to cope By developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity…. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. This acceptance of contradiction, in-betweeness and ambiguity is essential for the affirmation of a self that is multiplicitous. By calling for the creation of a self and culture which transcends the strict boundaries of existing identity categories, Anzaldúa points to the possibility of a more authentic, though multiplicitous, self. Chicana feminist conceptions of the self insist on the centrality of relationality for struggles for authenticity and demonstrate that in addition to being pursued individually, authenticity must also be pursued at the level of intergenerational communal relations. For this reason, Chicana feminist pursuits of authenticity go beyond the level of the individual in order to center selves-in-community. That is to say, Chicana feminist quests for authenticity are not merely about being an introspective or self-actualized individual but are deeply interwoven with the communities they are part of and that form them. One is never a solitary self: she is also a friend, a tia (aunt), a sister, a teacher, a mother, a vecina (neighbor), and/or an ancestor. Hence, self-creation is guided by concerns of not only who one would like to be—the cares, beliefs, values, and traditions that one wishes to be guided by—but also what one wishes to pass along to others. Self-creation is thus a communal and intergenerational practice. As with Chicana feminist accounts of the self, Chicana feminist accounts of community are multiplicitous and intersectionally complex. We suggest that there are at least four kinds of collectivities that Chicana feminist pursuits of authenticity in communal relations must navigate: cultural heritage, lineage, kin networks, and cross-cultural coalitions. By ‘cultural heritage’ we mean the traditions, sensibilities, languages and norms that we inherit at the level of culture. For Chicana feminists this means existing in and traveling between multiple cultural worlds simultaneously: white, Mexican-American, working class, Hispanaphone, queer, etc. We understand lineage to encompass our families and ancestors—of birth and of choice—who care for and love us; collectivities that stretch across generations and who have helped us arrive in this moment and place. Chicana feminists are also adept at forging their own kin networks. These kin may be chosen families, chosen ancestors of thought and action, and our compañerxs (good friends) who help us feel at home when we are far from it. Cross-cultural coalitions are also of central importance for Chicana feminists who seek to be in solidarity with other Women of Color.8 In order to navigate these complex communal weavings, Chicana feminist accounts of community attend to the rejection of oppressive aspects of all cultures (including marginalized cultures) while also embracing our own cultural roots and homeplaces. 133 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez Storytelling and Liberatory (Re)Parenting as Chicana Feminist Practices of Self-Creation Insofar as identities are socially produced, resisting oppression involves reclaiming and transforming social relations and the meanings of group identities. In this section we describe the ways in which Chicana feminists challenge oppressive norms, creating authentic possibilities for both themselves and other Chicanas through practices of taking critical inventory, such as storytelling and liberatory approaches to (re)parenting, that are communally and intergenerationally oriented. Storytelling Storytelling is a communal practice of taking critical inventory. Our ways of understanding ourselves and the world are shaped by foundational myths—narratives which are handed down to us which help us to grapple with where we fit into the family, the nation, history, the cosmos. Chicana feminists have resisted their existential circumstances of oppression by rewriting the stories that have undergirded oppressive ways of seeing the world in a communal practice of critical inventory. One way to frame the importance of storytelling is to think of it, as Susy Zepeda has describes it, as a process of ‘root work.’ Root work is connected to healing the intergenerational trauma, or susto, of colonization. Zepeda (2020: 225) describes this susto that results from on-going histories of colonization as a form of both ‘soul loss/soul sickness’ and ‘disconnection’ that is evidenced in racist and colonial attitudes, habits, and practices embedded within our cultures. As a practice of confronting the disconnection and inauthenticity generated by the susto of colonization, Zepeda (2020: 238) explains that root work ‘signal[s] the excavando for nondominant narratives.’ Connecting with ancestral wisdom and indigenous epistemologies, Zepeda traces a pathway to healing through root work that is accountable to elders, ancestors, our present communities and future generations as well as to the land. In this way, we connect this idea of root work to the practice of taking critical inventory. As we’ve noted, critical inventory is a key aspect of self-creation for Chicana feminists. Zepeda’s account of root work shows that taking critical inventory occurs not only at the individual level of one’s self but also at the communal level of the self-in-community. Chicana feminists engaging in practices of critical self-inventory not only take stock of who they are and wish to become, but also critically examine how we are shaped by our communities and what we wish those communities to become in order for our authentic selves to flourish. As a communal form of critical inventory, engaging in root work as a Chicana involves a critical ‘looking back,’ tracing one’s roots through acts of ‘deep decolonial remembering’ (Zepeda 2020: 238n1) that can reconnect us to our ancestors and ancestral practices and knowledge. Importantly, root work prioritizes practices of interconnectedness with human and morethan-human others as well as with the land. In this way, root work facilitates the healing of intergenerational trauma of colonization by enabling one to engage in an intentional and selfreflective process of re-rooting. Importantly, storytelling serves to guide this root work. We suggest that Chicana feminists engage in a practice of taking critical inventory through storytelling that reimagines cultural myths, legends, and historical figures for future generations in order to repair the harms of racial, sexual, and gendered forms of oppression prevalent in dominant culture. This approach to storytelling is evidenced in Anzaldúa’s children’s books. Though Anzaldúa is perhaps better known for her theoretical texts and poetry, we argue that her children’s 134 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism books engage in a reworking of dominant norms that can be understood as a communal pursuit of authenticity that functions to pass on both important cultural traditions and stories while also extending an invitation to future generations to participate in authentic self- and community-creation. For example, in Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la Llorona, Anzaldúa retells the story of La Llorona for a new generation of Chicanx children. To understand the significance of Anzaldúa’s choice to offer a retelling of La Llorona’s story, it is important to contextualize the story within Chicana culture. For Chicanas, La Llorona is a multilayered and complex figure with contested origins and her story is the subject of myriad retellings, reinterpretations and re-appropriations. Many who study the legend and its legacy locate La Llorona’s mythology in a 500-year-old history with Indigenous roots. The most common version of the story goes something like this: La Llorona was an Indigenous woman who drowned her children in a fit of ‘crazed anger’ against her Spanish lover’s betrayal. Overtaken by grief when she realizes what she has done, she takes her own life. As a divine punishment, she is condemned to an eternal search for their souls. It is because of her llantos (mournful cries) that she acquired the name La Llorona. These tales of La Llorona are often used to reinforce heteronormative gender roles by reducing her to a bad mother and una loca (a crazy woman). Indeed, this traditional version of her story is often retold to young children as a scary and cautionary tale. Those who misbehave, disobey their elders, wander after dark, or otherwise don’t conform face the threat of having to confront, and perhaps be taken away by, a monstrously ghostly and vengeful La Llorona as a form of retributive punishment. However, this version of the story does not grapple with how La Llorona’s story calls for remembering and working-through collective experiences of trauma perpetrated through sexualized, racialized and gendered forms of colonial violence whose impacts Chicanas still grapple with today. Reclaiming and re-rooting the story of La Llorona through counter-storytelling, Anzaldúa enacts a form of critical inventory that speaks back to centuries-old histories of colonial, racial and hetero-patriarchal oppression. In several places across her corpus of work, Anzaldúa writes about La Llorona with a special feeling of kinship. From Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y La Llorona to her unpublished ‘Llorona book’ manuscripts, the story of La Llorona provides an opening for Anzaldúa to think through issues of systemic oppression and empowerment. Anzaldúa conceives of La Llorona as a figure through which we learn important lessons about feminist and decolonial resistance. Anzaldúa’s retelling of La Llorona’s story provides children an alternative version of the story that offers lessons for combatting the harms of racial, sexual and gendered forms of oppression prevalent in dominant culture and to participate in the process of intergenerational healing. For example, curanderismo is a prominent theme in Prietita and the Ghost Woman. Curanderismo is a traditional medicine practice common in Mexican and Chicanx cultures. Rather than viewing the body as separate from the mind, or spirituality as separate from medicinal science, curanderas see spirituality, emotional states and the body as deeply interconnected in the healing process. In Anzaldúa’s retelling, it is significant that Prietita’s encounter with La Llorona is facilitated through her learning of curanderismo. In an author’s note, Anzaldúa (1995) explains her motivations for writing her own retelling of La Llorona’s story, All the children were afraid of La Llorona—I was afraid too, but even at that age I wondered if there was another side to her. As I grew older and studied the roots of my Chicana/Mexicana culture,...I discovered, like Prietita, that things are not always what they seem to be. In this story I want to convey my respect for las curanderas, the traditional healers of my people. They know many things about healing that Western doctors are 135 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez just beginning to learn. And I want to encourage children to look beneath the surface of what things seem to be in order to discover the truths that may be hidden. Through this critical self-inventory it is clear that for Anzaldúa the storytelling practice found in her children’s books engage in a reworking of dominant norms through root work that we suggest can be best understood as a communal pursuit of authenticity which functions both to pass on important cultural traditions and stories while also extending an invitation to future generations to participate in authentic self- and community creation. Enacting root work in her storytelling, Anzaldúa transforms La Llorona into someone who heals rather than harms. In so doing, she offers a concrete practice for healing the intergenerational trauma of colonization for future generations of Chicanxs. Another example of storytelling is found in the work of Chicana feminists like Norma Alarcón and Pat Mora, whose writings on the legendary story of La Malinche challenge sexist-colonialist views that make up dominant cultural and historical versions of her story. Historically, Malintzin (as she was known in her own time) was a Nahua woman who served as a translator to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés. Because Malintzin was a central figure of the Conquest, she is an important cultural and historical figure for Mexican-descended people. Malintzin’s legendary status takes on different meanings throughout different periods of Mexico’s history and in the diaspora of Mexican-descended peoples. As a result, cultural and historical understandings of her life are contested and often contradictory. Those of us who have grown up with the story of La Malinche likely know her in a negative light; she is widely regarded as the ‘Mexican Eve’ who betrayed her people to the colonizers. Indeed, even today to be called a ‘malinchista’ is tantamount to being called a traitor or a sellout. Because of her role as a translator to the Spanish conquistadors as well as the child that she bore by Spanish colonizer Hernán Cortéz, Malintzin became an archetype representing not only the betrayal of Indigenous people to the colonizer but also the mother of the Mexican people. According to the Mexican philosopher Octavio Paz (1985), Mexicans are fated to battle with their identity as children of La Malinche, an identity marred by the painful legacy of colonization. Chicana feminist recuperations of Malintzin’s story are important because of how her story has shaped Mexican and Mexican-descended women’s identities, historically and still today. Alarcón (1983: 183) contends, Because the myth…pervades not only male thought but ours too as it seeps into our own consciousness in the cradle through their eyes as well as our mothers’ who are entrusted with the transmission of culture, we may come to believe that indeed our very sexuality condemns us to enslavement. An enslavement which is subsequently manifested in selfhatred. All we see is hatred of women… Resisting this hatred of women and hatred of self, Mora revisits the meaning of a number of founding myths in her book Agua Santa Holy Water. In the poem ‘Malinche’s Tips,’ Mora envisions a Malinche who tells her own story. The poem situates the vilified Malinche within the lineage of the Biblical Eve and colonial-era Mexican philosopher and proto-feminist Catholic nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—women who were also punished for what they knew or desired to know. Malinche instructs readers in Tip Two to ‘write your own rumors or hire your own historians’ (Mora 2007: 65), and in Tip Three to ‘re-view folklore typology and then re-read hisstory’ (Mora 2007: 66). Recognizing 136 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism that past renderings influence the present, Mora calls for Chicanas to creatively rewrite their own histories to come to terms with their own identities. Indeed, this process must be creative, must draw from non-traditional sources and enlist the imaginative faculties, because of the need, as Tip Six indicates, to ‘beware of historians citing only themselves’ (Mora 2007: 68), or failing to include the voices of women and other marginalized people, in all of their human complexity. By crafting Malinche’s own speculative testimony and acknowledging her agency, Mora transforms our perceptions of her, thereby inviting us to transform our perception of ourselves. What is at stake, then, in the critical revisions and deconstruction of Malintzin’s story is not just the possibility of locating agency for Malintzin herself, but for all Mexicanas and Chicanas whose subjectivities are entangled with her legend. Through these practices of storytelling, we can trace the philosophical project of critical inheritance, from a recognition of the importance of history to one’s identity, to a creative rethinking and retelling of that history for the sake of liberation from oppressive norms in the pursuit of more authentic modes of self- and community-creation. Mothering and Intergenerational Healing Chicana feminist theorizing about self-creation is not limited to their academic scholarship or literary writings. It is also present as they grapple with questions about how to resist oppressive norms in community and intergenerationally in the mundane aspects of the everyday.9 Jessica M. Vasquez examines how Mexican American mothers act as mediators between their children and messages about race and gender that are transmitted outside of the home. Based on sixty-seven interviews with Mexican American families in California, Vasquez finds that mothers play a critical role in their children’s identity development because they engage in biography-based teaching to transfer bodies of knowledge to their children about who they are and about the way the world is. These lessons ‘resist the racializing images, tropes and discourses aimed at their children by mainstream society’ (Vasquez 2010: 24) by helping children overturn negative stereotypes for themselves. The first strategy employed by the mothers in Vasquez’s study involves what Vasquez (2010: 27) describes as ‘gendered encouragement.’ This strategy involves both emotional support and practical advice that Mexican American mothers provide their children that are sensitive to gender issues. One mother, Yolanda Segura, describes ways in which she challenges Eurocentric notions of beauty, explaining: I always told my girls, “Look at how beautiful you are. Your color….Be proud of who you are.” …I would see billboards and it would be [white] models. I would tell my girls, “I know no one that looks like that…this is the real world. This is what we look like.” (Vasquez 2010: 35) Meanwhile, Araceli Treviño raised her sons with the goal of dismantling traditional expectations associated with masculinity. She states, ‘I want them to know that it’s okay to own up to their feelings; it’s okay to cry and it’s okay to be sad’ (Vasquez 2010: 35). According to Vasquez’s research, mothers also resist and teach their children to resist racial norms by teaching them to take pride in their cultural traditions. Elena Vargas epresses the importance of cultural heritage, remarking: [I want] people [to] remember to keep speaking Spanish. To be proud of their culture and how it all started—that we were all Indians in the beginning in Mexico… how we 137 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez lived here in California, this was our place…. Just keep that tradition going and not forgetting where your roots come from. (Vasquez 2010: 34) By emphasizing history, Vargas invites her children to engage in root work in developing their own self-conceptions. Meanwhile, Segura explains that she actively transmitts knowledge about Mexican culture to her children: ‘I love being Mexican…. I love speaking Spanish. I love the culture and the food. And so I’ve passed it on to my [four] girls… and so they consider themselves Mexican first…’ (Vasquez 2010: 34) Through gendered encouragement and cultural pride, these mothers push back against both assimilation and the internalization of oppressive attitudes associated with race and gender. In the process of shaping their children’s attitudes about race and gender, mothers also contribute to the healing of their own wounds of internalized oppression. Segura offers an example of her own practice of critical inheritance. She recalls her father ridiculing her decision to attend college, saying, ‘What do you need that for? … You don’t need that’ (Vasquez 2010: 29). Segura recognizes that her lack of support was partly rooted in her parents’ views about race and gender. She explains There was always the people out there that just made assumptions about your skin color and your country … that we weren’t smart enough. … Certainly some of those [assumptions] were internalized by my parents bringing us up because there was this sense of you had to be humble and … being a Mexican girl … that you had your place in life. (Vasquez 2010: 29) Not wishing to pass on the same harmful attitudes about race and gender to her own daughters, Segura subsequently adopted an approach to parenting that reflected the way she would have liked to be supported. She explains, ‘Because I had these strong male figures in my life that tried to push me down… I try to make [being a woman] as positive as possible. Not only being a woman but being a woman of color’ (Vasquez 2010: 29). Segura rejects the traditional gender expectations that held her back by cultivating in her daughters a new set of attitudes around what it means to be a woman of color. The process of intergenerational healing through parenting has been at the core of the work done by Leslie Arreola-Hillenbrand, founder of the organization Latinx Parenting. ArreolaHillenbrand has made it her mission to help bring an end to chancla culture. The organization’s website (LatinxParenting n.d.) explains: La Chancla is in reference to a sandal or flip-flop, and in Latinx culture, it is frequently referenced as having been used by our immigrant or Latina mothers to get children to change behavior by either threatening or actively using it to physically hurt us as children. Arreola-Hillenbrand (2021) contends that although corporal punishment, shame, and fear are strategies of chancla culture that are often associated with Latinx parents, they are not inherent to Latinx culture. Rather, they are oppressive strategies that were taken up by Latinx peoples in the process of the colonization of the Americas and which ultimately function to further the oppression of Latinx 138 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism peoples. She offers Latinx culturally rooted resources to support Latinx parents’ efforts to explore the ideas of intergenerational trauma and non-violence. A key aspect of the Latinx Parenting paradigm is reparenting, a process in which parents reflect on the ways in which their childhood experiences have influenced their own ways of parenting. Arreola-Hillenbrand (2021) explains her approach to guiding participants through the process of reparenting: The main thing…is to remember and…to really think about ourselves as still having this inner child, this inner niña, as I call her, that still has needs and still gets activated and still emerges every now and then, especially when we are feeling threatened or when we’re feeling unsafe… The second part of it is to develop this relationship with our inner parents who can be that safe space and actually communicate with our inner child: ‘I got you. I’m here for you. I’m not going to let you just flounder the way that other adults may have as you were growing up.’ And so sometimes it’s really difficult again, because we don’t have the blueprint to know how to be a parent…So we really want to tune in to our guidance, our future abuelita, our future grandmother self, think of ourselves as already having all of those tools that we need to be able to have that safety and to have that ability to reconnect to ourselves. So I think about my grandmother self, my future abuelita self as wise. I think of her as loving. I think of her as protective. I think of her as being able to hold all of my experiences. And so I feel like I’m constantly moving towards this version of myself that I have access to so long as I have the intention to reconnect with her. Reparenting involves both the practice of taking critical inventory in that it involves the labor of remembering—recalling the events, thoughts, and sensations of the childhood body—and acknowledging when one had been harmed. Reparenting also involves working to develop new narratives, rather than merely reacting to the present in ways that replicate the past. ‘At the root of everything,’ Arreola-Hillenbrand (2021) explains, Is that self-reflection… I think that after I’ve now made that commitment to own my story and to own my narrative, now I can think about what things do I do as a mother to my three children that align with my intention and not with my wounds. Through liberatory parenting, Chicana mothers find simultaneous opportunities to create conditions for the autonomy of their children, rewrite their own narratives and challenge social norms of the broader cultures. Conclusion Our exploration of Chicana feminist writings and praxis shows that Chicana feminists have offered a distinctive account of self-creation as a liberatory practice that one engages in to affirm oneself in the face of oppressive cultural norms. Given this account, one might wonder whether all resistance to oppressive attitudes is a kind of existentialist self-creation. To clarify our position, it is helpful to return to the concept of authenticity. Authentic living involves reflectively making choices that are both autonomous and expressive of one’s self-identity. 139 Lori Gallegos and Emma Velez We can imagine ways of engaging in political resistance that are not the result of this kind of reflection, such as rebelling out of mere habit, resisting out of a mere disposition to oppose authority, or rejecting oppressive attitudes in response to social pressure. We think, however, that political resistance often does involve existentialist self-creation. Our discussions of storytelling and (re)parenting are concrete examples of the sorts of practices we have in mind. The central method for self-creation is that of taking critical inventory—reflecting critically on one’s inherited beliefs, attitudes and traditions in order to determine which should be rejected, and which should be preserved and passed on to others as part of one’s legacy. Notes 1 In an act of self-creation, Dr. Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn Gines) changed her name in 2017 to honor her maternal grandmother (Kathryn Bell). 2 As Chicana philosopher Jacqueline M. Martinez (2000: 34–35) explains, ‘The more strongly we recognize and engage our own questioning of those tacitly understood designators, the more we recognize a difference between who we are and what the dominant culture would encourage us to become…Now, the tacitly accepted designators of self and social world become understood as insufficient and therefore in need of a new struggle-based and nonneutral designator of self: Chicano or Chicana.’ 3 A part of the way in which Chicana feminists are enacting self-creation is through their crafting of language. We want to honor the choices that Chicana feminist authors are making by preserving the original quotes in the body of our text. At the same time, we want to make the ideas accessible to our non-bilingual readers, so we have included English-language translations in the endnotes. ‘Stubborn. Even as a child I would not obey. I was “lazy.” Instead of ironing my younger brothers’ shirts or cleaning cupboards, I would pass many hours studying, reading, painting, writing. Every bit of self-faith I’d painstakingly gathered took a beating daily. Nothing in my culture approved of me. I was going down the wrong path. Something was “wrong” with me. I had gone outside of tradition.’ 4 ‘Her first step is to take inventory. Stripping away, shelling, removing the chaff. Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back— which is the baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo? But it’s difficult differentiating between the inherited, the acquired, the imposed. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been part of. Then she does away with the nonsense, the negations, the denigrations, the oversimplification. She keeps the profound and deep-rooted discernment of the ancient ones.’ 5 Patricia Hill Collins describes Black women’s practice of ‘self-definition,’ which has striking parallels to the process of Chicana self-creation we describe here. For instance, Collins (2014: 100) writes, ‘For U.S. Black women, constructed knowledge of self emerges from the struggle to replace controlling images with self-defined knowledge deemed personally important, usually knowledge essential to Black women’s survival.’ 6 The various ways in which Chicana feminists work through this set of questions bear on the critique, raised by Lauren Bialystok (2014), that given that the notion of authenticity entails the existence of a ‘true self,’ ‘it requires positing an essentialist structure leading to metaphysical problems that current accounts of authenticity fail to solve’ (Varga and Guignon 2020). 7 For more on the multiplicitous self in Latina feminist philosophy see: María Lugones (2003); Mariana Ortega (2016); Jacqueline Martinez (2000); Andrea Pitts (2021); and Elena Flores Ruíz (2016). 8 As the members of the Santa Cruz Collective (2014: 24) explain, ‘“Women of color” as a formulation provides a fruitful yet complex space to map the construction of solidarities based on distinct experiences of movement (dislocation, exile, forced migration) next to forms of confinement and genocide (colonization, war, incarceration, and slavery).’ 9 A number of scholarly texts examine motherhood as a site of political resistance. See, for example: Cecilia Caballero et al. (2019); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (2016); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (1994); Cherrie Moraga (1997); Collins (2014); and Audre Lorde’s poems ‘Dear Toni,’ ‘Prologue,’ ‘School Note,’ ‘A Litany for Survival,’ and ‘Pathways: From Mother to Mother.’ 140 Self-Creation in Chicana Feminism References Alarcón, N. (1983) ‘Chicana’s feminist literature: A re-vision through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting flesh back on the object,’ in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color, New York, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 182–190. Anzaldúa, G. (1995) Prietita and the ghost woman/Prietita y la llorona, San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press. Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands/la frontera: The new Mestiza, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. Arreola-Hillenbrand, L. 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