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Cover image: Mi Matria by Nansi Guevara. Used with permission.

Cover artist biography: Nansi Guevara is a designer, artist, and teacher based in Brownsville, Texas. Originally from Laredo, Texas, she holds a bachelor’s in fine arts in design from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in education from Harvard University. She is currently focused on design, education, and community public art to create spaces of resistance and affirmation, and economies of community cultural wealth and support. She is an illustrator and a textile/rasquache-based public artist. She has been living and working in Brownsville, Texas for the past six years. Her work in Brownsville has focused on border narrative change, supporting Spanish speaking mercadito vendors and activists, and arts education. Nansi worked under the first NEA “our town” grant that Brownsville received, archiving woman activist stories locally through large-scale, rasquache fabric art pieces. In 2017 she cofounded Las Imaginistas and was awarded an Artplace National Grant for the project, Taller de Permiso, and a Blade of Grass Fellowship for Hacemos la Ciudad. In 2020 she received the Changing Border Narratives Grant from Nalac and the Ford Foundation for her narrative change animation, The Magic Yali. She is currently working under an Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental grant in conjunction with the New York foundations for the Arts to co-curate an exhibition, Nuestra Delta Magica. Nuestra Delta Magica will be a three-month-long exhibit that will investigate untold South Texas history of land settlement and colonization as a precedent to current environmental neocolonialism.

Mi Matria: The coat of arms of the Mexican flag comes from a traditional Aztec story,that tells of an Eagle found devouring a serpent on top of a cactus which signaled to the Mexicas where they would found their city of Tenochtitlan, present day Mexico City and the capital of Mexico. The Mexican Flag is culturally synonymous to the idea of patriotism,an illusionary unity of the entire country, often also under the disguise of mestizaje. In the book, Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, Bonfil Batalla states that in Mexico, two civilizations exist, they are not fused, but rather, in constant clash. Batalla speaks of these two civilizations as Mexico Imaginario, made up of those who impose Westernization, and Mexico Profundo, those who are rooted in Mesoamerican ways of life and resist. In Mexico, the coexisting realities of femicides and the mother as the revered leader in matriarchal family structures are a direct result of the tension and violence of the Mexico imaginario and the Mexico profundo. The mother as the matriarchal leader is an embodiment of Mexico Profundo

My nationality and identity is tied to my mother. My country of origin is my mother’s womb. My mother was born in an ejido in Mexico close to the border. I come from three generations of women who made a living for their family through street vending. They have shown me that I reside in the Mexico Profundo. Mexico Profundo is also made up of descendants of campesinos, people who refuse to let go of their values and customs. I am a part of the Mexico Profundo that continues to resist, that rejects white supremacy, patriarchy, and classism binationally. I am a part of a Mexico Profundo that stays true to itself, that centers community and family, and the mother as the matriarch.

In South Texas, Latinxs experience a racist state that denies us any protection; a violent border wall; and border militarization, lack of healthcare access, and resources. I refuse to be patriotic to either flag or either nationality, when it fails to protect its most vulnerable. Border people rely on their community and family structure for safety, care, and survival. Women protect us, and matriarchal structures defend us.

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

In this Issue

Table of Contents

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Editors’ Note

Kimberly M. Jew, Wanda S. Pillow, Darius Bost

pp. xi-xiii

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902523

restricted access

Audre Lorde, Labor Theorist: Rethinking Integrity within Late Capitalism

Kristina Popiel

pp. 1-25

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902524

restricted access

“Metabolize Hate or Die of It”: Lorde, Labor, and Affect Theory

Molly Benitez

pp. 26-52

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902525

restricted access

Domestic Touchpoints Between British and Chinese Women’s Art

Virginia Yiqing Yang, Adrienne Evans

pp. 53-69

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902526

restricted access

Gadji Feminism(s) in Serbia: Racial Privilege and “Intersectional” Solidarity in an Eastern European Semiperiphery

Ivana Pražić, Ana Vilenica

pp. 70-97

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902527

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Specter(s) of Care: A Symposium on Midwifery, Relationality, and Reproductive Justice To-Come

Rodante van der Waal

pp. 98-123

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902528

open access

Introduction to “Privatizing the State: Reproductive Rights, Affirmative Action, and the Problem of Democracy”

Zillah Eisenstein

pp. 124-153

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fro.2023.a902529

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Additional Information
ISSN	1536-0334
Print ISSN	0160-9009
Launched on MUSE	2023-07-20
Open Access	No

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