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4 / After Words: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and the Evolution of Chicano/a Cultural Politics Ignacio García, a participant-turned-historian of the Chicano movement , argues in an often-cited essay from 1996 that the field of Chicano/a studies must decide whether to continue its descent into irrelevance, or to recover its activist roots by reaffirming the principles of the 1969 “Plan de Santa Barbara.” His is a typical movement elegy, with sincere mourning over the lost “militancy” of the 1960s and 1970s, juxtaposed alongside frustration with a perceived “growing conservatism and narcissistic attitude ” among students and faculty in the 1980s and after.1 García blames a number of forces for this decline, but notable among them is what the author calls a “lesbian-feminism” among “gender nationalists” who “find the lurking ‘macho’ in every Chicano scholarly work,” and who “have even gone as far as promoting the idea that homosexuality is an integral part of Chicano culture.”2 In an essay that has moments of insight into the challenges of institutionalization, this turn is strangely conspiratorial. Things only get stranger in the footnotes. García calls out the Claremont Colleges, Berkeley, UCLA, and other universities as “hotbeds of feminist discourse.” He accuses Chicana feminists of reducing the Chicano/a family to “single females, or single-parent families led by females” with “very little vibrancy . . . beyond the mother-daughter relationship .”3 For an essay premised on the need for unity, García spends a surprising amount of time fighting needless generational wars and worrying over the families that women make for themselves. As Lorena Oropeza notes, García’s take on feminism is a minority opinion.4 More common, though, and ultimately more worthy of scrutiny, is García’s after words / 171 understanding of the relationship between feminism and cultural nationalism . His anger at women—lesbians especially—for destroying the Chicano movement is predicated on a belief that feminism and nationalism were at odds with each other during the Chicano movement, and that in some crucial sense feminism won the day. Chicana feminists have also at times subscribed to this conflict narrative, though they of course feel very differently about the outcome. Norma Alarcón, for example, tells a similar story in her essay “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman.” Commenting on the evolution of progressive Chicano/a politics, Alarcón says that “in the 1980s, a more visible Chicana feminist intervention has given new life to a stalled Chicano movement.”5 Implicit in Alarcón’s remark is the notion that the relatively high profile of writers and activists such as Sandra Cisneros, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Dolores Huerta, Cherríe Moraga, and Alarcón herself is somehow a thing apart from the movement politics of the 1960s and its panoply of male leaders, including César Chávez, Corky Gonzales, Reies López Tijerina, and José Angel Gutiérrez. But as widespread as it is, this agonistic narrative does not do justice to the ways in which nationalism and feminism informed each other during the 1960s and 1970s. Chicana feminists were deeply influenced by the nationalist ideologies that guided the Chicano movement. Chicanismo, a spirit of cultural pride and unity that was central to nationalism, did many things for the women who identified with it: it allowed them to feel comfortable in their own skin, despite dominant social codes that marked their racialized bodies as inferior; it gave them a basis for pride in cultural practices often marked as deviant, and in doing so helped them see through the ideology of white superiority; it allowed them to connect with their family as more than a daughter, wife, granddaughter, sister, or niece; and it gave them opportunities to be involved in the public sphere as speakers, writers, organizers, and artists.6 Perhaps because we have a historical template for thinking about the impact of nationalism on feminism, and perhaps also because we are quick to look elsewhere for the origins of women’s activism, the influence of cultural nationalism on Chicana politics is widely appreciated by those of us who study such things. Far less recognized, but crucial in every way, was the influence of feminism on cultural nationalism. Chicana feminism has been understood by friend and foe alike as a postscript to the Chicano movement, a delayed response to the presumed failures of a male-oriented and male-driven Chicano nationalism. This narrative is one we need to revise, though...

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